How Europeans claimed the world

Finders keepers in the Arctic?

The Doctrine of Discovery is still alive in the modern world.The Lewis and Clark expedition marked and branded trees and rocks in the Pacific Northwest to prove the American presence and claim to the region. It also left a document at Ft. Clatsop, at the mouth of the Columbia River, in March 1806, and gave copies to Indians to deliver to whites who might arrive later to prove the U.S. claim to the Northwest. As the document stated, it was posted and circulated so that "through the medium of some civilized person . . . it may be made known to the informed world" that Lewis and Clark had secured land rights all the way to the Pacific Ocean on behalf of the U.S. government.

A decade later, as the U.S. and England argued about dueling discovery claims to the Pacific Northwest, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James Monroe ordered American officials back to the Columbia "to reassert the title of the United States." In August 1818, Capt. James Biddle performed a textbook discovery ritual: In the presence of Chinook Indians on the north side of the Columbia River, he raised the U.S. flag, turned the soil with a shovel and nailed up a lead plate inscribed: "Taken possession of, in the name and on the behalf of the United States by Captain James Biddle." He repeated the performance on the south shore of the Columbia, with a wooden sign declaring American ownership of the region.