Captain Gray was sent out by the Boston merchants to buy furs from the Indians on the Pacific coast. He had no difficulty in getting all he wanted, for the savages were glad to sell them for very little. In one case a chief let the captain have two hundred sea-otter skins such as are used for ladies' sacks, and which were worth about eight thousand dollars, for an old iron chisel. After getting a valuable cargo of furs, Captain Gray sailed in the _Columbia_ for China, where he bought a quantity of tea. He then went to the south, round the Cape of Good Hope, and keeping on toward the west he reached Boston in the summer of 1790. He had been gone about three years, and he was the first man who carried the American flag clear round the globe. [Illustration: A SEA-OTTER.] [Footnote 1: Vancouver (Van-koo'ver): part of it is seen north of Portland, Or., paragraph 234.] [Footnote 2: He commanded the _Lady Washington_ at first, and afterward the _Columbia_.] [Footnote 3: Tiverton, Rhode Island.] 234. Captain Gray's second voyage to the Pacific coast; he enters a great river and names it the Columbia; the United States claims the Oregon country; we get Oregon in 1846.--Captain Gray did not stay long at Boston, for he sailed again that autumn in the _Columbia_ for the Pacific coast, to buy more furs. He stayed on that coast a long time. In the spring of 1792 he entered a great river and sailed up it a distance of nearly thirty miles. He seems to have been the first white man who had ever actually entered it. He named the vast stream the Columbia River, from the name of his vessel. It is the largest American river which empties into the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska.[4] [Illustration: CAPTAIN GRAY EXPLORING THE COLUMBIA RIVER, OREGON.] Captain Gray returned to Boston and gave an account of his voyage of exploration; this led Congress to claim the country through which the Columbia flows[5] as part of the United States. [Illustration: MOUNT HOOD, OREGON.] After Captain Gray had been dead for forty years we came into possession, in 1846, of the immense territory then called the Oregon Country. It was through what he had done that we got our first claim to that country which now forms the states of Oregon and Washington. [Illustration: Map showing the extent of the United States after we added the Oregon Country in 1846.] [Illustration: EMIGRANTS ON THEIR WAY TO OREGON FIFTY YEARS AGO.] [Footnote 4: The Yukon River in Alaska is larger than the Columbia.] [Footnote 5: The discovery and exploration of a river usually gives the right to a claim to the country watered by that river, on the part of the nation to which the discoverer or explorer belongs.]