HISTORY OF TEXAN BOUNDARIES. 



335 



and thence, on the same parallel, to the St. Mary's. France, it 

 will be remembered, had always claimed dominion in Louisiana to 

 the Rio Bravo del Norte, or Rio Grande ; by virtue : — 



1st. Of the discovery of the Mississippi from near its source to 

 the ocean. 



2d. Of the possession taken, and establishment made by La 

 Salle, at the bay of Saint Bernard, west of the river Trinity and 

 Colorado, by authority of Louis XIV. in 1635 — notwithstanding 

 the subsequent destruction of the colony. 



3d. Of the charter of Louis XIV. to Crozat in 1712. 



4th. Of the historical authority of Du Pratz, Champigny and 

 the Count de Vergennes. 



5th. Of the authority of De Lisle's map, and of the map publish- 

 ed in 1762, by Don Thomas Lopez, Geographer to the king of 

 Spain, as well as of various other maps, atlases, and geographical 

 authorities. 



By an article of the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October, 

 1800, Spain retroceded Louisiana to France, but this treaty was 

 not promulgated until the beginning of 1802. The paragraph of 

 cession is as follows : " His Catholic majesty engages to retrocede 

 to the French republic, six months after the full and entire execu- 

 tion of the conditions and stipulations above recited, relative to his 

 royal highness the Duke of Parma, the colony and province of 

 Louisiana, with the same extent that it already has in the hands of 

 Spain, and that it had when France possessed it, and, such as it 

 should be, after the treaties passed subsequently between Spain and 

 other powers." In 1803, Bonaparte, the first consul of the French 

 republic, ceded Louisiana to the United States, as fully, and in the 

 same manner, as it had been retroceded to France by Spain, under 

 the treaty of San Ildefonso ; and, by virtue of this grant, Messrs. 

 Madison, Monroe, Adams, Clay, Van Buren, Jackson, and Polk, 

 contended that the original limit of the new state had been the 

 Rio Grande. However, by the third article of our treaty with 

 Spain, in 1819, all our pretensions to extend the territory of Lou- 

 isiana towards Mexico on the Rio Grande, were abandoned by 

 adopting the river Sabine as our boundary in that quarter. 



The Mexican authorities upon this subject are either silent or 

 doubtful. No light is to be gathered from the geographical re- 

 searches of Humboldt, whose elucidations of New Spain are in 

 many respects the fullest and most satisfactory. In the year 1835, 

 Stephen Austin published a map of Texas, representing the Nueces 

 as the western confine, — and in 1836, General Almonte the former 



