218 THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 
strategic point between the mountains and the shores 
of the Pacific; their servants killed the fur-bearing 
animals; they cut and exported the timber; and, 
by means of its. wealth and organization, the Gom- 
pany monopolized the commerce and the resources 
substantially to the exclusion for a long time of the 
people of the United States. 
. But at length some settlements of Americans had 
been commenced in Oregon; and the attention of 
Congress was called to the usurpations of the Hud- 
son’s Bay Company by Mr. Benton, Mr. Linn, and the 
writer of these pages: in consequence of which steps 
were taken to put an end to the joint occupation of 
Oregon. In fact, the Company had now set up the 
most extravagant pretensions, exaggerating a mere li- 
cense to trade into a grant of proprietorship to the 
whole of the immense region south and west of Ru- 
pert’s Land, to the dissatisfaction of the people of 
Canada as well as of the United States. For it was 
the interest of the Company to retain the whole 
country occupied by them in the condition of a mere 
hunting-field, and quite uninhabited except by vassal 
Indians: while the Canadians desired that it should 
be opened to colonization, so as to add to the materi- 
al resources and political force of the Canadian Prov- 
inces.’ Parliamentary inquiry into the rights of the 
Company was instituted ; it was imperatively instruct- 
ed by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton [afterward Lord 
Lytton], Colonial Minister [whose dispatches show 
that he was not less eminent as a statesman than as 
a poet and a novelist], to desist from all general pre- 
