of this river was a pressing one, and the secretaries of war, to
whose department the management of the tribes belonged, made many
plans and recommendations for their civilization, improvement, and
assimilation. But the advance of the frontier broke down the efforts
to preserve and incorporate these primitive people in the dominant
American society. [Footnote: Am. State Paps., Indian, II., 275, 542,
et passim; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, VII., 89, 90, 92; Richardson,
Messages and Papers, II., 234, et seq.]

Across the Mississippi, settlement of the whites had, in the course
of this decade, pushed up the Missouri well towards the western
boundary of the state, and, as the map of the settlement shows, had
made advances towards the interior in parts of Arkansas as well. But
these were only narrow wedges of civilization thrust into the Indian
country, the field of operations of the fur-traders. Successors to
the French traders who had followed the rivers and lakes of Canada
far towards the interior, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the
Northwest Company under British charters had carried their
operations from the Great Lakes to the Pacific long before Americans
entered the west. As early as 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reached the
Pacific from the Great Lakes by way of Canada. [Footnote: Mackenzie,
Travels.] The year before, an English ship under Vancouver explored
the northwestern coast in the hope of finding a passage by sea to
the north and east. He missed the mouth of the Columbia, which in
the following month was entered by an American, Captain Gray, who
ascended the river twenty miles. The expedition of Lewis and Clark,
1804-1806, made the first crossing of the continent from territory
of the United States, and strengthened the claims of that country to
the region of the Columbia. [Footnote: Cf. Charming, Jeffersonian
System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap vii.]