A vivid tableau of the American conquest of the Pacific Coast "With Broughton's expedition, the Americans and the British had posted competing claims to a vast expanse of the Pacific Northwest. The area in contention would encompass all of present Oregon and Washington and parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and British Columbia. Robert Gray, the dour Yankee trader, and William Broughton, the obscure British naval officer, nonentities both, sailed away from the misty coasts of the Columbia in 1792, never to return. They had no way of knowing, of course, how it would all end. But the breathtaking effrontery of their claims set in motion events of fateful consequence, touching off a half-century of trade and diplomatic rivalry, a flood of Euroamerican settlement, and the displacement and virtual destruction of the immemorial inhabitants of what the contestants would come to call the Oregon Country." -from THE TIDE OF EMPIRE