The Discovery by Americans 245 
purchase”). Whatever claim, therefore, Spain had to the Oregon 
territory in 1800, prior to her cession to France, in virtue either 
of discovery and settlement, on the one hand, or by cession from 
France as part of the ancient Louisiana, on the other, vested in 
the United States by the Louisiana purchase. That Spain, there- 
fore, was the real and sole sovereign owner of the whole of Ore- 
gon territory as against Great Britain there can be no doubt, 
and the United States succeeded to all the rights which Spain 
ever had—first, by the cession from France in 1803 and, second, 
by virtue of the Florida treaty and cession from Spain in 1819. 
Americans the first actual Discoverers of Oregon. 
Whatever may be said as to discovery, tenancy, occupation, 
exploration and settlement of that vast region of the mighty 
west lying north of the forty-second parallel, or whatever may 
be the character of those claims on the part of any country, the 
glory of the actual discovery, of the real scientific exploration 
and actual settlement, belongs to America, to the United States ; 
and on that high, unimpeachable title, irrespective of all others, 
has our country ever stood and can forever stand in its claim to 
the territory of Oregon. 
The first real assertion of sovereignty in all that vast region 
occurred when, on May 11, 1792, Captain Gray, of Boston, an 
American citizen and navigator, a naval officer during the revo- 
lutionary war, master of the merchant ship Columbia, discoy- 
ered and entered the great river of the west. He ascended 
its waters a distance of twenty-five miles from its mouth, re- 
maining there nine days, and named it “‘ Columbia ” in honor of 
his ship, planted the American flag on its shores and took pos- 
session of the country in the name of the United States. Inde- 
fatigable were the efforts of Great Britain to wrest this honor 
from the United States, and in support of this effort all manner 
of claims were from time to time set up. 
Suspicion had been entertained for many years, perhaps a 
century prior to 1792, in the minds of Spanish and English 
navigators that a large river emptied somewhere into the waters 
of the Pacific, and the English navigators Mears and Vancouver 
had been instructed by their respective governments to make 
every effort to discover it. They spent months in the years 1791 
and 1792 in this effort, but without result. “ Mears,” says one 
historian, ‘“ failed to find the mouth of the supposed river when 
