pendently decisive? The naval battle in Manila Bay is recognized by all as the decisive event leading to our possession of the Philippines. It gave us a foothold and brought on a train of events that called forth the desire to possess those islands. Much the same relation did the Lewis and Clark exploration bear to the subsequent events that furnished the basis of our claim to Oregon. Lewis and Clark's report on the Columbia region was necessary, along with that of Capt. Robert Gray, to lead John Jacob Astor to plan the occupation of that country with a system of trading posts. The capture of what had been Astor's post, where now is Astoria, led, as a sequel, to the act of restitution in fulfillment of the first article of the treaty of Ghent. In the treaty with Spain in 1819 the parallel of forty-two degrees was insisted upon by our secretary of state as the northern limit of the Spanish possessions from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. That boundary line left us in possession of the country of the Upper Missouri and of the Columbia. This possession was the result of the work of Lewis and Clark. Thus the Lewis and Clark expedition was not merely one of a series of events forming the basis of our claim to Oregon, but it was the event that carried the others in its train . From it emerged gradually the conscious desire to claim that territory. This pregnant relation to subsequent events can be claimed for the Lewis and Clark exploration rather than for Gray's prior discovery of the Columbia, as no trace of any influence on Jefferson in his promotion of the exploration can be ascribed to Gray's achievement.
Until the railway locomotive and the ocean steamship in the '30s gave promise of the virtual annihilation of distance for the future, our claim to Oregon could hardly have had in view the making of this region an integral part of the United States. Up to that time we looked upon
