considering whether a sea trade between China and a British port on
the North Pacific coast could not be arranged so as to develop a
profitable market among the mandarins and grandees of the Celestial
Empire for a good proportion of the North-west Company's skins.

[Illustration: Map of Part of the Coast Region of BRITISH COLUMBIA]

Peter Pond, already referred to on p. 278, is said to have expressed
his intention (in 1788) of going to treat with the Empress Catherine
II for a Russian occupation of the Alaskan and Columbian coasts. For
this reason, or the mere desire to have a proportion of this
fur-producing country, the Emperor Paul, in 1799, created a Russian
Chartered Company to occupy the Alaska and north Columbian coasts.
Great Britain offered no objection--in spite of having acquired some
rights here by an agreement with Spain--and that is why, when you look
at the map of the vast Canadian Dominion, you find with surprise that
it has been robbed (one might almost say) of at least half of its
legitimate Pacific seaboard. The Russian Company was allowed to claim
the north Columbian coast between Alaska proper and Queen Charlotte
Islands.

In 1867 the Russian Government sold all Alaska and the north Columbian
coast to the United States, partly to annoy Great Britain, whom it had
not forgiven for the Crimean War.

You will have noticed that quite a number of United States citizens
(mostly born British subjects in New England) had taken part in the
north-west fur trade immediately after the British conquest of Canada
disposed of French monopolies. There were Jonathan Carver and Peter
Pond, for example; and a much more worthy person than the last
named--Daniel W. Harmon, a New Englander, who entered the service of
the North-west Company in 1800, and followed in Mackenzie's footsteps
to the upper Fraser River and the vicinity of the Skeena. Simon Fraser
also, whose tracing of the Fraser River from its upper waters to the
Pacific coast we shall presently deal with, was a native of Vermont,
though his father came from Scotland. The furs which began to
penetrate into the United States by way of Detroit and Niagara, the
rising scale of luxury in dress in the towns of the eastern seaboard
of the United States, the voyages of American whalers up the west
coast of North America (including the discovery of the Columbia River
in 1792 by Captain Robert Gray), the purchase of Louisiana from the
Emperor Napoleon in 1804--with