Congress adjourned on June 9. The treaties were not reached, but the governor writes Nesmith that a test vote showed that the Senate was strongly in favor of them, and that they would all be confirmed next session.

During the session Governor Stevens introduced nineteen bills and resolutions, and offered four amendments. He spoke nine times, making five considerable speeches, including two on the war debt, one on the Pacific Railroad, one on the survey of the Columbia, and the defense of Nesmith. The following synopsis gives the matters which claimed his attention in Congress:—

The above summary gives but a faint idea of the amount of work and attention involved in the several matters enumerated. With characteristic thoroughness, the governor always paved the way for his measures by first obtaining the support and recommendation of the department to which each pertained, and was equally indefatigable in following them up before the committees. But nothing engrossed so much of his time and attention as the numerous claims for losses and services growing out of the Indian war, sent to him by his constituents, almost all poor men, all of which he presented and pressed with the greatest pains and assiduity.

So intent had he become upon all these important measures that, as he writes Nesmith, he determined to remain in Washington during the recess of Congress, and prepare for success the next session.

On July 21 Governor Stevens submitted an able and exhaustive memoir to Lewis Cass, Secretary of State, on the unjust and exorbitant exactions imposed upon Americans, who were then flocking to the newly discovered gold fields of New Caledonia,—now British Columbia,—on Fraser and Thompson rivers, having previously, on May 18 and June 29, informed him of this emigration, and the impositions placed upon it by Governor Douglass. The chief of these were, a license tax of five dollars a month for the privilege of mining, and the prohibition of all navigation and trading except by license from the Hudson Bay Company, and the requirement that all supplies must be purchased from that company. He showed that with forty thousand miners, nearly all of them American citizens, entering the gold fields, as was the estimate of the most intelligent gentlemen of the Pacific coast, the license tax would amount to $2,400,000 per annum; while the Hudson Bay Company, from the exclusive right of furnishing supplies, would reap the enormous harvest of $14,000,000 per annum. Moreover, as the bulk of these supplies could not be furnished from the present resources of that company, they would have to be drawn by it from California, Oregon, and Washington, so that in fact those States were compelled to make that company their factor for the sale of their products, and allow it all the profits from the sale of their own products to their own citizens.

The governor declared that this state of things could not be submitted to by American citizens unless imposed by positive and imperative law, and that the exactions in question had been imposed without any legal authority which should be respected by the citizens or government of the United States.

He held that, the British government having passed no law levying a mining tax, Governor Douglass, as governor of Vancouver Island, was not given authority by his commission or instructions to impose such tax; that he was governor of Vancouver Island only, and his political jurisdiction did not extend to the mainland, where, in fact, he had always declined to exercise authority over the Indians as governor, while he had dealt with them as chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company.

That the company, a mere Indian trading company, had no authority under its charter to set up a monopoly of selling supplies to white men, whether American citizens or British subjects, such monopoly, moreover, being expressly prohibited by British law.

And he concluded by asking, in behalf of the citizens of our whole Pacific coast, that the government would interpose with the British authorities for the removal of the restrictions, and would demand the repayment of all mining taxes collected, and of the value of all vessels and cargoes confiscated. In the last paragraph he takes pains to acknowledge the assistance of his friend, John L. Hays, Esq., in the investigation of the legal questions involved.