Ascending the Columbia River to the junction of its two main branches, and each of these branches in turn to its source, a point is reached to the north well toward the fifty-fifth degree of latitude, and another point to the south not far from the forty-first degree. Lines drawn through these two points directly west to the Pacific Ocean would divide the Pacific Coast of North America approximately into three great historic divisions. Previous to the year 1792, the coast north of the fifty-fifth degree had been explored and in some sort settled by Russia, and the sovereignty of Russia over it recognized; the part south of the forty-first degree had been explored and settled by Spain, and the sovereignty of it had been conceded to Spain; the middle part of the coast having been explored by both Spain and Britain, but settled by neither, the sovereignty of this was yet in abeyance. If the lines supposed to be drawn from the utmost north and south sources of the Columbia to the Pacific now be extended eastward to the crest of the Rocky Mountains, the territory included between these two lines, the Pacific Ocean and the crest-line of the Rocky Mountains, will embrace the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, with a considerable part of the states of California, Wyoming, and Montana, together with the greater part of British Columbia. It is the settlement of the question of sovereignty over the region thus roughly defined that is the subject of this paper. During almost the whole period when its sovereignty was in question this region was commonly known in this country and in Europe as Oregon, the Oregon Country, or the Oregon Territory, and the question of its sovereignty as the Oregon Question. The country took its name from a legendary name of the river that defines it, a name given the river even before it had been seen by any white man. For many years previous to 1792 the existence of such a river in this region had been conjectured by explorers along the coast from signs they had observed in an indentation in the coast line, and by explorers in the interior from reports of such a river that reached them through native tribes supposed to dwell near its sources. It is to Jonathan Carver, a native of Connecticut, that we owe, as it is still thought, the name Oregon. In his journal of travels in the regions of the Upper Mississippi he speaks of four great rivers, flowing in as many directions, which took their rise, as he had heard from native tribes, somewhere in the mountains to the west. One of these was, as Carver writes in his journal, "the river Oregon, or the River of the West, which falls into the Pacific Ocean." Already, in Carver's day, and before the time of his travels, maps had appeared with a river marked in the region of what is now the Columbia, which bore the name, among others, of the River of the West, or the Great River of the West. Whether Carver thought of this river as the river of his tradition cannot now be