the mould of ages, and the Indian from the mountain roamed as wild as his fathers.

The Spaniards first crossed the lower Rio Grande in 1690, five years after La Salle's unhappy expedition. They discovered and took possession of the country to the Nueces, which no French adventurer is related to have seen, and into which, before the Mexican revolution, no adverse settler ever wandered. Having frustrated La Harpe's attempt in 1722, they continued, until the territory came into their undisputed possession by the treaty of 1819, the only rivals with the Indians for the sovereignty of the region quite to the Sabine. Bexar was founded by them in 1692. They formed a settlement at Nacogdoches, on the frontier of their claim, in the early part of the last century. Goliad dates its origin in 1716.

The Abbe Raynal, the highest French authority of the reign of Louis XVI., describes the country as a part of New Spain, and designates all the towns and rivers by Spanish names, except the bay of Metagorda, where La Salle landed. He says that the French formed no settlements upon the coast, west of the Mississippi.

The claim of Spain to the Sabine was then far from being groundless; that of France to the Rio Grande was entirely without foundation. There are two reasons, however, why the mountain and desert boundary should be considered, not in opposition to the rightful claims of France, but rather to those of Spain, as the proper line of separation between their possessions. The discovery of Texas was by the French, and they made two attempts to settle the country, one the earliest on record, which Jefferson forcibly terms "the cradle of Louisiana," and which, as Bancroft declares, "made the country still more surely a part of her territory, because the colony found there its grave."

This is also the most prominent natural boundary which the country presents. Rivers in all new countries are undesirable dividing lines, as settlements are often formed by the same parties on both banks indiscriminately. Of this the Nueces and Rio Grande are themselves examples. But the mountain and the barren plain are great natural obstacles, and broad and appropriate objects of separation.

Mr. Adams, speaking not as the advocate,

but as the historian, says of the claim of

It was a claim of Grande, when in an adjustment of

fact there never had been that claim with another, and much better authenticated claim of Spain." He stated that President Monroe, during whose administration the subject was most discussed, had no confidence in the claim to the Rio Grande. Mr. Benton, in his eloquent language says: "The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours, with all its fountains, springs and floods." And again: "The Rio del Norte is a Mexican river by position and possession." Now in view of historical testimony so unanswerable and authority so high as this, of what consequence is it, that the French officer who surrendered Louisiana to the United States in 1803, informed the agents of our government that that province extended to the Rio Grande, or that Mr. Jefferson and other eminent men at the same time declared, even in the strongest terms, their conviction that our newly acquired territory was bounded by that river? Of what consequence is it, that Mr. Clay, attacking in the house of representatives the treaty of

1819, declared the country to the Rio Grande to have been thrown away by that instrument, or that the executive who declared our title to fifty-four degrees forty minutes in Oregon to be clear and unquestionable, contended for the same extreme boundary? How can the claims put forth by Mr. Adams in his correspondence with the Spanish minister in 1819, when it was, as he declares, his duty to make the best case that he could for his own country, be opposed for a moment to his subsequent and opposite declaration which we have quoted? The claim of Texas to the left bank of that river, then, so far as it has been founded on the title of France, falls to the ground. It follows also that the president is mistaken, when, in his message of December, 1846, he says, that "the country which was ceded to Spain by the treaty of 1819, embraced all the country now claimed by the state of Texas, between the Nueces and the Rio Grande." It clearly embraced no part of this territory

whatever.

We shall now proceed to show that before the Mexican revolution the Nueces was the farthest western boundary that was ever as

signed to the Spanish province of Texas; for Spain erected the country from the Nueces to the Sabine into a province under this name in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and as it will be remembered, always maintained its exclusive possession, as well before as after the Sabine became her established boundary by the treaty of 1819.

Pinkerton wrote in 1802, and is the first English geographer of his time. His atlas marks the limits of Texas very distinctly. Its western boundary follows up the Nueces a short distance, until that river inclines to the west, and then leaving it strikes further east, crossing the San Antonio and Colorado..

Humboldt, the prince of geographers and travelers, spent several years in exploring Spanish America. He prepared in the royal school of Mines in Mexico, a map of that country, compiled from the best authorities in Europe and America, corrected from his own personal observation. In this map, published in Paris in 1808, the Nueces is described to be the western boundary of the province of Texas. Harrison, Black, Le Sage and Malte Brun, the most standard geographers since the day