The Western territory in dispute between the two nations was known as the Oregon or Columbia territory, and it lay between the 42nd degree of North latitude and the Russian line in 54° 40′ North latitude. The Columbia river took its name from the fact that it had been entered in May, 1792, by an American ship from Boston named the _Columbia_, commanded by Captain Gray, who thus claimed to be the discoverer of the river. In 1805 Lewis and Clark, the first Americans to cross the continent, reached its head waters and followed the river down to the sea. In 1811 an American trading settlement was planted at Astoria near its mouth. This settlement was voluntarily surrendered to Great Britain in the war which followed shortly afterwards, but was restored, without prejudice, to the United States under the general restitution article of the Treaty of Ghent. The Third Article of the subsequent Treaty of October 20th, 1818, provided that ‘any country that may be claimed by either party on the North-West coast of America, Westward of the Stony Mountains, shall, together with its harbours, bays, and creeks and the navigation of all rivers within the same, be free and open for the term of 10 years’ to both Powers, without prejudice to the claims either of themselves or of foreign Powers; and this Article was, by a Convention of 6th of August, 1827, indefinitely prolonged--subject to one year’s notice on either side--all claims being, as before, reserved. This last Convention was concluded, as its terms specified, in order to prevent all hazard of misunderstanding and to give time for maturing measures for a more definite settlement. [Sidenote: The position in 1842.] On this basis matters stood in 1842, when the Ashburton Treaty was signed. There was joint occupation of the Oregon territory by British and American subjects, and freedom of trade for both. Lord Ashburton had been empowered to negotiate for a settlement of the North-Western as well as the North-Eastern frontier line; but the latter, which involved the question of the Maine--New Brunswick boundary, being the more pressing matter, it was thought well to allow the determination of the line West of the Rocky Mountains to stand over for the moment. As soon as Lord Ashburton’s Treaty had been signed at Washington in August, 1842, Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Secretary in Sir Robert Peel’s Ministry, made overtures to the United States with a view to an early settlement of the Oregon question. A long diplomatic controversy ensued, complicated by changes of government in the United States, and tending, as is constantly the case in such negotiations, to greater instead of less divergence of view. [Sidenote: The rival claims.]