At Wallula Junction we have supper. There is at this place a branch to Walla-Walla, thirty-one miles distant. On the side track there is an excursion train full of “Oregon pioneers” travelling towards St. Paul. They left Portland seventeen hours before us and had been detained by an obstruction. As a regular train we take precedence and arrived at Snake River about seven, a little way above its junction with the Columbia at Ainsworth. Snake River is one of the chief tributaries of the Columbia; it takes its rise five hundred miles to the south-east. It is as yet unbridged, and we cross to the opposite shore by a ferry; passengers, mails and baggage being transferred to the train, attached to which, for the first time, we find the Pullman. We have followed the valley of the River Columbia from Kalama to this point, generally on an easterly course, south of the 46th parallel, ascending its great current flowing westerly. It runs in a southerly course directly from 49° lat. to this place; and now we leave this magnificent river to see it no more on our journey. The railway has followed the south or Oregon bank of the Columbia from Portland. As a Canadian I could not but feel a deep interest in looking across on the opposite bank to Washington Territory. I reverted to the settlement by treaty of the Oregon question in 1846. Great Britain most justly claimed the whole territory north of the 42° parallel. The claims of the United States as set forth by them were only limited by Alaska. At that date the fact is undoubted that there was not a single citizen of the United States established north of the Columbia River. The country was occupied only by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Columbia was the thoroughfare of that Company to the Boat Encampment, already alluded to, at the extreme north of the Selkirk Range. This river would have made a good natural boundary line, and in itself would have been a compromise most favourable to the United States. It would have given them Astoria and all the discoveries of Lewis and Clark, but the treaty of 1846 was simply a capitulation even more inglorious than the Ashburton Treaty of four years earlier date, and will so live in history. Six degrees of latitude by three degrees of longitude of British Territory were deliberately abandoned by the Imperial diplomatists, and what is more remarkable the settlement was so ill-defined as, some years afterwards, to cause the San Juan difficulty, which raised great trouble and much ill-feeling.