APPROACHES TO THE PACIFIC COAST 

 been accomplished, he was further authorized in 

 1774 to convey a party of soldiers and settlers for 

 the purpose of taking effective possession of the 

 Bay of San Francisco; with the result that a pre- 

 sidio was established there in 1776. The new land 

 route from the south, though difficult and unin- 

 viting, might have led to noteworthy results, but 

 owing, almost immediately, to the incompetent man- 

 agement of the Chevalier de Croix, comandante- 

 general of the frontier provinces, the Indians on 

 the Colorado revolted in 1781, killing some mem- 

 bers of an expedition then on its way to the new 

 settlements. With this incident the attempt to ap- 

 proach California from the south was effectively 

 blocked, and the prospect of any extensive coloni- 

 zation from Mexico and the south was at an end. 



Henceforward the problem of an approach to 

 California narrows down to the discovery of a 

 route across the continent. Owing to the elimina- 

 tion of the French from North America by the 

 treaty of Paris, the exploration of the continent 

 between 1763 and 1803 was conducted by the rival 

 traders of the Hudson Bay Company and the North- 

 west Company of Montreal. In 1769, Samuel Hearne 

 was sent out by the former, and before his return 

 in 1772 had reached the Arctic Ocean at the mouth 

 of the Coppermine River. The activities of the 

 Montreal company did not rise to importance until 

 after the American Revolution. In 1789, Alexander 

 Mackenzie explored to its mouth the river that 

 bears his name, and four years later completed the 

 first overland journey across the continent by reach- 

 ing the Pacific Ocean, opposite Queen Charlotte 

 Island, on the 22d of July, 1793. 



It was not Mackenzie's route, however, but the 

 more southerly one of Lewis and Clark that proved 

 to be the long-sought substitute for a northwest 

 passage. Following immediately upon the purchase 

 of Louisiana from Napoleon, Lewis and Clark, at 

 the orders of President Jefferson, made their jour- 

 ney overland, by way of the Missouri and Columbia 

 rivers, between 1804 and 1806. With the acquisi- 

 tion of Louisiana, the American frontiersman 

 promptly overran this vast new territory, and 

 passed unheeding the ill-defined boundaries of the 

 Mexican possessions. By the end of the third de- 

 cade of the nineteenth century the pioneer, in the 

 person of Jedediah Smith, had entered California. 



The contrast between the Spanish and English 

 methods of colonization is nowhere more apparent 

 than in the respective approaches of the Spaniard 

 and American to California. Not so much as a 



7 



