sess.

to territory which France did not herself posBefore we proceed further we will show by historical testimony that France possessed no title at any time to the region west of the Nueces.

Discovery vests in a nation the title to uninhabited territory. Title thus acquired is however imperfect, and may be lost, unless within a reasonable time it is followed by occupation, or at least by an attempt at occupation. For it would be unjust and discouraging to enterprise if a nation, having discovered a new country which through feebleness or other cause it is unable to occupy, should have a right to forbid its settlement. Accordingly if any newly discovered country remains for many years unoccupied, the title may pass from the discoverers, and vest in a nation which shall have settled the country, cultivated the soil, and opened a new home for mankind.

Louisiana itself may be cited as an illustration of this law. In 1583, Hernando de Soto, a Spanish cavalier, searching through the trackless forests of the south for golden mines and the fountain of perpetual youth, first discovered the Mississippi near the mouth of the Ar

kansas; and a part of his adventurous band, after his death, descended that river to the gulf, and penetrated to the waters of Mexico. In that age of romantic visions, Spanish adventurers cared not to seek the valley so full of disaster to its discoverer, nor the river beneath whose waters he found his grave; and France, by her settlement one hundred years afterward, acquired a title to Louisiana which Spain could not successfully dispute.

By these principles let us examine the case before us. France contended that the Rio Grande formed the western boundary of her possessions, while Spain as strenuously insisted that her sovereignty extended east to the Sabine. Historical evidence seems to point out the proper boundary between the French and Spanish provinces to have been the range of mountains which forms the southern part of the great Rocky mountain chain, in which the Red, Arkansas and Colorado rivers have their rise and which forms the western wall of the Mississippi valley, together with the desert prairies east of the Nueces, and extending about two hundred miles from the termination of this range to the Gulf.

The claim of France rested chiefly on the expeditions of La Salle, the grant of Louis XIV. to Crozat, the map of De Lisle, and a few other maps and descriptions derived from these. They were all extremely indefinite, and nearly as inaccurate as were descriptions of Central Africa, before the explorations of Park, Denham, Clapperton, Caille and the Landers. Thus the map of De Lisle included in Louisiana all the country between New-York and Pennsylvania on the east, and the Rocky mountains on the west. The grant to Crozat covered this vast extent. It was about as valid, though not quite so extensive in its sweep as the bull by which Pope Alexander VI. granted to Spain all the heathen countries which she might discover west of the Azores, and to Portugal all Asia, Africa and the East Indies.

In the year 1682, La Salle descended the Mississippi from the Illinois river to its mouth. He claimed for France all the unknown region whose waters flow in that river to the ocean, and named it Louisiana after his sovereign. Three years after, at his solicitation, the French government equipped four vessels to seek the mouth of the Mississippi by sea, and he set out

upon a new expedition, to establish a great colony on the fertile shores watered by that river. Sailing, through ignorance of the coast, one hundred leagues westward of his destination, he was finally landed in the bay of Metagorda, and saw the ships sail away, leaving him with less than a hundred companions in that unknown land. The colony melted rapidly away by disease and dissension, and he himself, within a few months, leaving the arms of France in the forests of Texas, met death through private treachery in the land which he had discovered for his king. The settlement was then abandoned, and seven men who alone escaped its numerous disasters, wandered eastward to the Mississippi, and returned to Canada. "These distresses," says the Abbe Raynal, "soon made France lose sight of a region, that was then but little known."

In 1722, Bernard de la Harpe attempted to plant a French colony on nearly the same spot, which enterprize, as Bancroft informs us, “had no other result than to incense the natives against the French, and to stimulate the Spaniards to the occupation of the country by a fort."

These were the only efforts ever made by France to colonize Texas. "She was too feeble ever after," we are told, "to attempt extend-ing her settlements west of the Sabine." The act of taking possession of the Mississippi cannot be considered as giving to France a title to territory lying beyond a chain of mountains, in which were its most distant sources.

Spain made her first settlement east of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, about the year 1594, eighty years before a French subject ever saw the Mississippi, and held it in undisputed possession until the Mexican revolution. All geographers have laid down the mountains which divide the valley of the Mississippi from that of the Rio Grande as the eastern boundaof the Spanish province of New Mexico. Above the Passo del Norte, then, discovery and unmolested occupancy had given Spain a title to the region west of these mountains, which no nation ever seriously questioned.

ry

South of this point, the country east of the Rio Grande remained, until within a few years, almost an unbroken wilderness, where the forest dropped its fruit with its leaves to the ground, the undisturbed soil was black with