H.] PROOFS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 459 



the other. Now, united in the same power, they support each other. 

 The possessors of Louisiana might have contended, on the ground of con- 

 tiguity, for the adjacent territory on the Pacific Ocean, with the dis- 

 coveries of the coast and of its main rivers. The several discoveries of 

 the Spanish and American navigators might separately have been consid- 

 ered as so many steps in the progress of discovery, and giving only 

 imperfect claims to each party. All those various claims, from whatever 

 consideration derived, are now brought united against the pretensions of 

 any other nation. 



1st. The actual possession and populous settlements of the valley of 

 the Mississippi, including Louisiana, and now under one sovereignty, con- 

 stitute a strong claim to the westwardly extension of that province over 

 the contiguous vacant territory, and to the occupation and sovereignty of 

 the country as far as the Pacific Ocean. If some trading factories on the 

 shores of Hudson's Bay have been considered, by Great Britain, as giving 

 an exclusive right of occupancy as far as the Rocky Mountains ; if the 

 infant settlements on the more southern Atlantic shores justified a claim 

 thence to the South Seas, and which was actually enforced to the Missis- 

 sippi that of the millions already within reach of those seas cannot con- 

 sistently be resisted. For it will not be denied that the extent of 

 contiguous territory, to which an actual settlement gives a prior right, 

 must depend, in a considerable degree, on the magnitude and population 

 of that settlement, and on the facility with which the vacant adjacent land 

 may, within a short time, be occupied, settled, and cultivated, by such 

 population, as compared with the probability of its being thus occupied 

 and settled from any other quarter. 



It has been objected that, in the grant of Louisiana toCrozat, by Louis 

 XIV., that province is described as " the country drained by the wa- 

 ters emptying, directly or indirectly, into the Mississippi, excluding 

 thereby, by implication, the country drained by the waters emptying into 

 the Pacific. 



Crozat's grant was not for the whole of the province of Louisiana, as it 

 was afterwards extended by France herself, and as it is now held by the 

 United States. It was bounded, in that grant of 1712, by Carolina to the 

 east, by New Mexico to the west, and on the north by the Illinois, which 

 were then part of Canada. The most northerly branches of the Missis- 

 sippi embraced in the grant were the Ohio, at that time called Wabash 

 by the French, and the Missouri, the true course of which was not 

 known at that time, and the sources of which were not supposed to ex- 

 tend north of the 42d parallel of latitude. No territory on the west of 

 the Mississippi was intended to be included in the grant north of that par- 

 allel ; and as New Mexico, which bounded it on the west, was understood 

 to extend even farther north, it was impossible that any territory should 

 have been included west of the sources of the rivers emptying into the 

 Mississippi. 



All the territory north of the 42d parallel of latitude, claimed by France, 

 was included at that time, not in Louisiana, but in the government of New 

 France, as Canada was then called. And by referring to the most authen- 

 tic French maps, it will be seen that New France was made to extend 

 over the territory drained, or supposed to be drained, by rivers entering 

 into the South Seas. The claim to a westwardly extension to those seas, 

 was thus early asserted as part, not of Louisiana, but of New France. 



