the vague claim it gave to the coast
line of Oregon on the Pacific: all these circumstances inspired
far-sighted persons in the United States at the beginning of the
nineteenth century with a wish to secure for their Government and
commerce a share in the fur trade and in these wonderful new lands of
the Pacific watershed. American ships (whaling ships) had already
become accustomed to sail round Cape Horn and to visit the Oregon and
Alaskan coasts. The American Government therefore, immediately after
the Louisiana purchase, dispatched an American expedition under
Captains Meriwether Lewis and Jonathan Clarke to travel up the
Missouri River and so across the mountains to the coast of Oregon, a
wonderful expedition, which they carried out with great success in two
years (1804-6), reaching the lower Columbia River and following it
down to the sea.

Consequently, with all this in the air, it is not very surprising that
the far-sighted John Jacob Astor, a wealthy German merchant of New
York, should have conceived the idea of founding a great American
fur-trading company and of establishing it at the mouth of the
Columbia River.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century he had entered into
arrangements with an Anglo-Canadian Company (the Mackinaw), which
worked the southernmost part of Canada, to fuse its enterprise with
his, and thus founded the _South-west Company_, the name of which (at
any rate in current speech) was afterwards changed into the Pacific
Fur-trading Company. After attempting in vain to come to a working
arrangement with the great North-west Company, he decided to act quite
independently and to establish the headquarters of his new concern at
the mouth of the Columbia River. Accordingly, the expedition was sent
out in duplicate to the mouth of the Columbia River, one-half going a
six-months' voyage round Cape Horn in a sailing ship, the _Tonquin_,
and the other marching overland or canoeing on lakes and rivers in
eighteen months from Montreal via the Mississippi and Missouri. These
two parties together founded "Astoria", at the mouth of the Columbia.
But most of Astor's employees were British subjects derived from men
of the North-west and Mackinaw Companies; and when, in 1812, war
broke out between the United States and Great Britain, a British war
vessel came up the Pacific coast to Astoria and promptly turned it
into "Fort George". Forthwith the North-west Company bought up the
derelict property of