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Updated: June 4, 2025
The English minister thereupon presented a treaty extending the 49th parallel across Oregon from the Rocky Mountains to the coast, and drawing a line down the strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific. Polk and the Senate accepted this boundary, and the treaty was proclaimed on August 5, 1846. Two years later, August 14, 1848, Oregon was made a territory.
All the way from the Strait of Juan de Fuca up to Olympia, a hopeful town situated at the head of one of the farthest-reaching of the fingers of the Sound, we are so completely inland and surrounded by mountains that it is hard to realize that we are sailing on a branch of the salt sea. We are constantly reminded of Lake Tahoe.
To resume our description of the coast, the southern shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca is described by Vancouver as being composed of sandy cliffs of moderate height, falling perpendicularly into the sea, from the top of which the land takes a further gentle ascent, where it is entirely covered with trees, chiefly of the pine tribe, until the forest reaches a range of high craggy mountains which seem to rise from, the woodland in a very abrupt manner, with a few scattered trees on their sterile sides, and their tops covered with snow.
He concluded that it was the mouth of some great river, or possibly the Straits of Fuca, which might have been erroneously marked on his chart. Meares, in 1788, gave the name of Cape Disappointment to the northern point, owing to his not being able to make the entrance of the river, and the mouth he called Deception Bay, and asserted that there was no such river as the St.
In the Baltic, too, Cook had heard about the strait of Juan de Fuca, which was supposed to lead through the continent to the Atlantic. At this time all England was agog with demands that the Hudson's Bay Company should find a North-West Passage or surrender its charter.
One of the reasons for this late exploration of the north-west of North America was a geographical myth started by a Spanish voyager named Juan de Fuca as early as 1592.
The most interesting of these and the most difficult to leave was the Puget Sound region, famous the world over for the wonderful forests of gigantic trees about its shores. It is an arm and many-fingered hand of the sea, reaching southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca about a hundred miles into the heart of one of the noblest coniferous forests on the face of the globe.
Upon reaching the Strait of Fuca, Vancouver expressed the opinion that there was no river between the fortieth and forty-eighth degrees of north latitude, "only brooks insufficient for our vessels to navigate." Shortly after this time, Vancouver met Captain Gray with his ship Columbia.
A fort on the Race Rocks, where there is a lighthouse, and which are some 2 miles or so from the coast, would, if supplied with heavy guns capable of long range, command the whole of the San Juan de Fuca Straits, the distance from Race Rock to the American shore not exceeding 8 miles.
There were even ingenious fellows with the letters of the Royal Society behind their names, who affected to think that the great Athabasca Lake, which Hearne had found, when he tramped inland from the Arctic and Coppermine River, was a strait leading to the Pacific. Athabasca Lake might be the imaginary strait of the Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca.
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