Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/329

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Oregon Historians and Sources
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ives. British government documents in London are yet to be exploited; Joseph Schafer has obtained Hudson's Bay Company data from that source. Monopoly claims of Spain in the North Pacific, which that nation undertook to enforce against Great Britain at Nootka in 1788, and which were assigned to the United States in the Florida treaty of 1819, suggest that there may be untouched records of exploration by the Spanish at Madrid, which were not available to the United States for the boundary negotiations of 1818-46 with Great Britain. We read that erection of a Spanish fort at Nootka in 1789 was such an affront to French claims as to precipitate the French Revolution. This was subsequent to the voyage of La Perouse in 1786-88, the narrative of which was published in 1797, and reminds us of unexplored history.

Pioneer records make up an extensive department of undigested materials. Diaries, narratives and letters are numerous. We have narratives by Jedediah S. Smith, Hall J. Kelley, Nathaniel J. Wyeth, Samuel Parker, Jason Lee, George Gary, Alvin F. Waller, P. J. de Smet, F. N. Blanchet, Ezra Fisher, Osborne Russell, Joel Palmer, Medorem Crawford, Thomas J. Farnham, J. C. Fremont, William H. Gray, Dr. Elijah White, Johnson and Winter, Lee and Frost, George H. Atkinson, Preston W. Gillette, Samuel A. Clarke, Peter H. Burnett, Jesse Applegate, James W. Nesmith, Theodore T. Geer, J. Q . Thornton, George H. Williams, John Minto, Stephen Staats, Ralph C. Geer, F. A. Chenoweth, Robert Shortess, and many others. In short, the problem presented by the materials comes from their abundance, and not from their scarcity, presenting necessities of industrious reading and difficulties of reference. The files of "The Oregonian" are replete with these materials, and, also, the publications of the Oregon Pioneer Association and the Oregon Historical Society.

More interesting as time progresses, becomes the British side of the Oregon boundary dispute, which began with the discovery of the Columbia River in 1792 and ended