Excerpt from The History of North America, the Pacific Slope and Alaska, Vol. 10 The history of this land concerns itself with three widely differing sections populated by antagonistic peoples. For to California the Spanish first came; English-speaking people settled the Oregon country; subjects of the Muscovite came to the land north of fifty-four-forty. The story of the beginnings of each of these sections is full of romance. Its interest puts that of modern novels to blush. Naught can take away from the glamour that tradition and history have thrown around those Spanish adventurers and devoted mis sion priests who first came to the isle of delight, as the Spaniard called California. Neither can aught dim the light of romance that surrounds the stalwart trappers and ex plorers who first brought to the banks of the lordly Oregon the message of Eastern civilization. Nor can Norse saga rival the tales of the Russian fur traders and their despotic masters whose deeds in the early days of Alaskan coloniza tion were as barbarous as they were brave. It is because of the vast treasure of romance which has been spread before the student that the sober truth of several histories is the bedfellow of fable, and the attractive probabilities of appealing episodes have in great measure clouded the clear judgment which it has always seemed to us should be the first qualification of a historian. For this reason the general reader, besides being confronted by the lack of a history in convenient form, found in those sec tional histories to which he had access such a large number of inaccuracies that his conception of the Slope and its peopling was, to say the least, incomplete. It was, then, to supply a positive need that the present volume was planned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.