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year, and still he could not get beyond the wall of breakers to see if anything was on the other side. He concluded that the River of the West was a fiction: “Disappointment continues to accompany us,” Meares wrote in his journal on July 6, 1788. “We can now safely assert that no such River exists.”
    Meares left a name: Cape Disappointment.
    George Vancouver returned in the spring of 1792, himself the captain now, with three Royal Navy ships under his command. A dour man of Dutch descent, still young at thirty-four, Vancouver was determined to find the River of the West or die in disgrace. His mission was to fill out the rest of the map of the north coast of the continent. There was still no such thing as Puget Sound on this map, no 250-mile-long island severed from the mainland of British Columbia, no Fraser River, no Mount Rainier, no Mount Baker, no Mount St. Helens, no Mount Hood, no Cascade Range. But there was a River of the West, labeled as such, a drawing based on optimism and little else, showing a waterway that began in the Midwest, drained out of Lake Superior and emptied into the Pacific. Of course, there were no Rocky Mountains.
    At the same time, some Boston merchants had sent off an American, Robert Gray, and loaded his 212-ton sloop with cheap trading goods. Eighteen months out of New England, in the spring, Gray met Vancouver off the Pacific shore. Cautiously they exchanged information, deleting a channel here and a landmark there, embellishing certain discoveries; but neither claimed to have seen the River of the West. Vancouver had unknowingly sailed past the Columbia’s mouth on April 27. “The sea,” he wrote, “had now changed from its natural to river-coloured water, the probable consequence of some streams falling into the bay. Not considering this opening worthy of more attention, I continued our pursuit to the northwest.”
    A few weeks later, on May 11, 1792, three hundred years after Columbus laid eyes on the New World, Gray’s ship, the Columbia Rediva , passed through the barricade of the sea and found, at north latitude 46 degrees and west longitude 122 degrees, The River. He noted it in his journal, adry, technical description, considering what he’d discovered. Gray seemed more fascinated by the Chinook natives just inside the mouth, stark naked, their noses perforated, their foreheads oddly flat. They seemed to have not a care in the world, but their secret—and the secret of this land hidden behind the bar—was now out. Upon meeting the Chinooks, the “Boston men,” as the natives called them, traded one nail for two salmon. This set a trading pattern, and soon Gray had picked up three hundred beaver skins for two nails per skin. The beaver-skin hat was all the rage among fashionable men of Europe and the fledgling states of America. Problem was, beaver was becoming scarce. Here in sponge-land, beavers were everywhere.
    Gray, on a mission of commerce before nationalism, only ventured fifteen miles upriver, far enough to gather more than three thousand sea otter pelts. These silky mammals, up to five feet in length and with the disposition of a toddler just after a long nap, were easily clubbed, smiling right up until the moment their skulls were smashed. In China, on the way back to Boston, Gray made a fortune on the otter furs, selling them to mandarin lords for about $100 apiece. From here on out, the Columbia would be on every nautical route that went anywhere near the North Pacific.
    Back at sea, Gray met Vancouver a second time and told him of his discovery. Vancouver acted as though he hadn’t heard him; he later claimed the Columbia as the property of Great Britain after his ship, the Chatham , commanded by Lieutenant William Broughton, sailed over the bar in the fall of 1792. Vancouver had spent the late spring in Puget Sound, which he discovered for Europeans, charted, and named. In the Columbia, the Chatham went a hundred miles upstream, within naming distance of