bour at the mouth of the Columbia, where he lost the ship Peacock ^ in 1841, but very favourably upon the harbours in Puget Sound. We now know that Wilkes argued against giving up any part of the territory west of the Rockies and between the parallels of 42° and 54° 40'. He insisted on the advisability of excluding the British entirely. His reasons were that to divide the territory on the line of the forty-ninth parallel would leave Fraser River wholly outside our boundary; it would cut off the middle and eastern sections of the country below the forty-ninth parallel from their natural source of supplies of timber; and it would lead to commercial and boundary disputes without number.2 It is not clear that this report influenced Webster greatly, though it probably stimulated the zeal of some of those politicians who not long afterward began to clamour for "Fifty-Four-Forty." However that may be, the spring of 1843 saw the rise of a remarkable agitation in favour of the American occupation of "the whole of Oregon." Behind the movement was resentment over the defeat of Linn's bill, and resentment also against Secretary Webster who, it was rumoured, was willing to concede the Columbia boundary to Great Britain if she
1 Later, he had some thought of going to London as special commissioner to settle the question, and he had in mind, as one plan, the so-called "tri-partite "idea, namely: an arrangement to be entered into by the U. S. conjunction with Britain and Mexico by which he should secure Northern California from Mexico.
2 See Wilkes's report as reprinted in Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, v. XII, pp. 269-299.
