248 John H. Mitchell— Oregon 
tury followed in their footsteps and braved the innumerable 
dangers and hardships of the far west, have never been, nor can 
they be, fully depicted by either pen or tongue. To them are 
the people of America greatly indebted, for they have hewn out 
with willing hands, borne on stalwart shoulders, and set with 
stability in its everlasting resting place, the foundation stone of 
one of the grandest pillars upon which in part rests today the 
superb superstructure of American development and American 
civilization. How strangely pathetic is the history and how 
peculiar are the vicissitudes surrounding the lives of some men! 
Captain Meriwether Lewis, after passing through all the untold 
hardships and perils of that memorable expedition, returned to 
serve a brief time as governor of the northwestern territory, and 
then to find a lonely grave in the forests of Tennessee, either as 
a felo de se or as the victim of the hand of an assassin ; just which, 
history has never definitely determined. 
Not only by succession to every right which both France and 
Spain had to this territory, either in virtue of occupation or 
otherwise; not only by the right of sovereignty which attaches 
to the discoverer of a new country, nor yet by those rights which 
follow in the wake of scientific exploration, did the government 
of the United States rest its claim to the territory of Oregon; but 
added to all these is that other accumulated right, which is the 
result not merely of occupancy, but of actual settlement. The law 
of nations recognizes a wide distinction between those rights 
which attach to mere occupancy and those which attach to actual 
settlement. The natives of this territory in their wild, uncivilized 
state are mere occupants, mere tenants; they are not settlers. 
The Hudson bay trappers and traders, who invaded Oregon terri- 
tory in pursuit of peltries and furs, were mere occupants, similar 
in all respects in the light of the law in regard to territorial rights 
which result from such occupancy as those which attach to the 
Indians. They were not settlers within the legal signification 
of that term, nor did they attract to themselves those territorial 
or sovereign rights which the law accords to settlers. The in- 
terests of civilization, says the law of that civilization, cannot 
permit a great empire of wild country to remain as such for the 
use of wild men for a game life; no less could the law of that 
civilization permit this great foreign monopoly, the Hudson 
Bay company, to occupy such country for the sole purpose of 
accumulating and speculating on the spoils of the hunter, and 
