314 ROBERT CARLTON CLARK
trates for themselves ; the second in 1841 by the election of a larger body of officers; the third in 1843 with the placing of the government on a more definite constitutional basis. It was not, however, until 1844 that the British and Canadian citizens, resident in the Willamette Valley were brought into the union. By this fourth step a government embracing all the inhabitants and comprising all the territory south of the Columbia River was established. It was not, however, until the next year and by means of a special agreement with the Hudson's Bay Company officials and by forming a new consti- tution that the region north of the Columbia and its residents were brought into the bounds of the infant state. The story of this last movement will be related here.
At the time of the organization in 1843 of the Provisional Government for Oregon Territory by the settlers of the Wil- lamette Valley, most of whom were of American extraction, no attempt was made to give a definite northern boundary to the territory over which its jurisdiction was to extend. Oregon territory was to include all the region south of the northern boundary of the United States. The obvious intention was to avoid giving offense to the Hudson's Bay Company which had extensive land-holdings around Vancouver and elsewhere along the north bank of the Columbia River. The following year, 1844, after an understanding had been reached with the French- Canadian and other British subjects by means of which they were brought into the Provisional Government, a new legisla- tive committee meeting in June passed a law definitely fixing the Columbia River as the northernmost limit of the territory. Though a second session of the same body meeting in Decem- ber of the same year, after new men had arrived from across the Rockies with a report of the political campaign in the United States and the Democratic party's championship of the claim to Oregon with its slogan "Fifty-four, forty or fight," passed another act making the northern boundary line the parallel of fifty-four degrees and forty minutes north latitude, no attempt was then made to organize the region north of the
