Scott. The British Government disinterested itself in the struggle. The Foreign Office had honestly endeavoured to avert the war, but had been unable to dissuade the Mexican Government from attacking the American forces on the Rio Grande. Public opinion in Great Britain was very anti-American; and if the Mexicans had made a good fight the British Government might possibly have made some sort of armed intervention. Aberdeen's last message to Mexico (he retired from the post of Secretary of State at the end of June, 1846) was to tell the Mexican Government that Great Britain was not going to engage in a war in which she had no personal quarrel. The Mexican nation and Government had been repeatedly warned in the most friendly and urgent manner of their danger," and "solely in consequence of their wilful contempt of that warning " had "plunged headlong down the precipice from which the British Government spared no efforts to save them." 1 Palmerston, who succeeded Aberdeen at the Foreign Office, wrote to Bankhead, British Minister at Mexico, that it would be very imprudent to break with the United States for the sake of a country which did nothing to defend itself. All that the Foreign Office could do was to propose "good offices" towards making a settlement between the belligerents, and this offer Polk, whom a London paper called "the Napoleon of the backwoods," refused to accept. The war was brought to an end after the capture of Mexico City by General Scott on September 14, 1847, and the signature of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. Mexico agreed to acknowledge the title of the United States to Texas, New Mexico and California. With the cession of the latter territory a dream— not a very serious dream really-of the British Foreign Office was shattered.

Alta California, or simply California as it is now always | called, was almost cut off from Mexico by desert country. It had a Mexican Governor, and a Commander-in-Chief with a few ragged soldiers. The population was very scanty: "Two thousand would probably have included every human being possessing an appreciable amount of Caucasian blood." Of these perhaps five hundred were from the United States, there were some British subjects, a few Frenchmen, "fewer Germans," and they all lived, as a rule,

1 Aberdeen to Bankhead on June 1, 1846, in J. H. Smith, The War with Mexico (1919), vol. II, p. 504, note 18. 2 Smith, op. cit., II, 306.

• Channing, op. cit., V, 563.

K

peaceably together, as far as they came into contact with each other in that large region. There was no national sentiment in California, and no annexationist question. The foreigners could not help seeing that the distant and revolution-ridden Mexican Government was not likely permanently to hold the vast empty territory which it could not use; and they not unnaturally fell to wondering whether California would not fall to one or other Power which could and would make good use of it. Great Britain had never acquiesced in the view of President Monroe that no further colonisation by a European State was possible. She had an agent, Forbes, at San Francisco, who was an active, intelligent man.

In 1844, Forbes received an appeal from some body of Californians, asking that the country should be taken under the protection of Great Britain. He replied correctly that he had no authority to enter into negotiation on such a question; he also reported the affair to the Foreign Office. Lord Aberdeen's answer

a decided negative. Great Britain, he said, would have nothing to do with any insurrectionary movement in California; at the same time the British Government did not wish California to enter into any other tie which might prove inimical to British interests.1

The British Admiral in the Pacific, Sir George Seymour, thought that war between Great Britain and the United States was possible, and asked for reinforcements. But when the Admiral asked the Foreign Office for information, he was told that there was no probability of war with the United States. Seymour seems to have shadowed the American Pacific Squadron, but no hostile incident occurred. It is said that Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, was rather "dazzled" by the prospect or possibility of getting California. President Polk was convinced that "Great Britain had her eye on that country and intended to possess it if she could." Anyhow, it is admitted that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, received the project with unaffected dislike. When the Peel Government fell and Palmerston became Foreign Secretary, at the end of June, 1846, the Mexican Government offered to sell California to Great Britain. This was obviously intended to embroil Great Britain with the United States. To accept the

1 Channing, V, 567. E. D. Adams, British Interests in Texas, 247. 2 J. H. Smith, The War with Mexico, II, 302.

8 Polk, Diary, I, 71.

J. H. Smith, op. cit., II, 302.

offer, which was made in December, 1847,1 after the United States had won the war, but before peace was concluded, would have been an unfriendly act of the British Government towards the United States. If Palmerston was tempted by the offer, he was not foolish enough to jump at once into a trap, and a few weeks later the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo settled everything.

Before this happened the United States had really got California. Lieutenant Frémont, of the United States Engineers, who was "exploring" with only thirty men in California, raised the American flag over his camp near Monterey in January, 1846. He went down later towards Sonoma, and co-operated with a party of twentyfive American settlers who seized Sonoma in June. Finally, Commodore Sloat, in command of the United States Pacific Squadron, landed and occupied Monterey on July 7. About ten days later Admiral Seymour anchored off Monterey with the British squadron. 'He viewed Sloat's proceedings with great calmness." 2 After a week's visit he sailed away. This was the end of Great Britain's interest in the Californian Question.

1 See J. H. Smith, op. cit., II, 303.

Channing, op. cit., V, 578. See also F. L. Paxson, History of the American Frontier (1924), chap. 40.

CHAPTER XII

OREGON

When Lord Ashburton was in Washington in 1842 he reported to Lord Aberdeen, with reference to the British-American claims to Oregon: "The public is at present busy with this subject, and little in a temper for any reasonable settlement." So nothing was done to settle the question then, but it could not be allowed to drag on for ever.

The State of Oregon, about twice as large as England, comprises the magnificent country of the Columbia River, the Cascade Mountains, and the Willamette Valley. But until 1846 Oregon meant far more than this: it meant practically all the western part of America north of the forty-second parallel, and south of the fifty-sixth, that is, between California and Alaska. Who were the first white people to arrive there, nobody could say. Spain had once had a good title to a great part of the Western Coast of America, but after 1821 Spain had lost all her possessions on the American mainland. The French dominion in Louisiana was never precisely defined; no one knew how far west of the Mississippi the French claimed to "own." They certainly had not occupied and settled a great deal of the country, but their fur-traders and trappers had gone far and wide. "It may well be that the territory which can fairly be regarded as tributory to the St. Louis fur market covered a much greater extent than has formerly been supposed." Whatever claim this fur-trading gave to the French passed to the United States by the Louisiana Purchase Treaty of 1803. But other people had been hunting and exploring all over Western America. The estuary of the Columbia River was first entered in May, 1792, by a Boston trading ship, the Columbia, under an American skipper, Robert Gray. He was followed very shortly by Captain Vancouver, of the British Navy, who got his first information from Gray, and 1 Lord Ashburton to Lord Aberdeen, June 29, 1842 (F.O. [5] America, 379). Channing, op. cit., V, 503.

who carefully explored the estuary. A little later explorers began to come into the Columbia valley from the land side.

The first man, however, to do anything really solid in the way of settling on the land was John Jacob Astor, a German of great capacity and integrity, who had emigrated to the United States in 1783, and had made a fortune in the fur trade. Finding that his operations were hindered by the Hudson's Bay Company, he determined to strike out on a new line, and equipped an expedition which founded Astoria, on the left bank near the mouth of the Columbia River, in 1811. The post was seized by the British in the War of 1812, but was restored by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. But there were other agencies besides the Astor firm, trading in the region of the Columbia River. Two rival British corporations, the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Company, had posts there. In 1821 the Hudson's Bay Company absorbed its rival and inherited all its rights.

The Governments of Great Britain and the United States took little account of the Far West when they made peace and delimited their frontier in 1783. No British or Americans had even been there. Their common frontier was defined only as far west as the Mississippi. By the end of the War of 1812-14, however, the question of the right of possession of the territory farther west had become pressing. The Treaty of Ghent provided a means of settling the farther frontier after discussions between American and British Commissioners. As a result of such discussions, the London Convention of 1818 had continued the common frontier westward from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains; but there the agreed line stopped. Westward of the Rockies the title to the dominion of the whole of Oregon, in its widest meaning, was still in suspense. The British and American Governments left the future to settle this. Meanwhile, by the Convention of 1818, the territory was open equally to the nationals of both Great Britain and the United States. This arrangement lasted until 1846; it was subject to denunciation by any one side after a year's notice had been served on the other. President Polk early made up his mind to serve this notice, thus ending the so-called "Joint Occupation."

Neither the Americans nor the British really expected to get the whole of Oregon, in the wide sense of the word. The Government of the United States, indeed, had since 1826 been making offers to