Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/396

 364 The North- West frontier, and Oregon. [i783-i8i8 were permanent and could not be revoked, the treaty was permanent and could not be abrogated by a declaration of war. Lord Bathurst denied this. He knew of no exception to the rule that every treaty is abrogated by war between the parties. Whatever in the Treaty of Ghent was described as a right, e.g. the right to catch fish on the Banks of New- foundland, was, like the acknowledgement of independence, irrevocable. But whatever was described as a liberty, e.g. the liberty to dry and cure fish on certain unsettled shores, was a concession granted by the treaty and perished with the treaty. While negotiations dragged on, the fishing seasons of 1816 and 1817 came and went; and during each of them American fishermen were warned, seized, or driven from the forbidden waters by British ships of war. Matters had now come to such a pass that something must be done; and accordingly, in 1818, the American Minister proposed the immediate negotiation of a treaty for the settlement of the fisheries' dispute and other grievances of long standing. Among these were the northern boundary from the Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean ; and the respective claims of the two Powers to the Oregon country, which lay between the Rocky Mountains and the sea. The treaty of 1783 had defined the extreme north-western boundary of the United States as a line running due west from the most north- westerly point of the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi river, then supposed to rise in British America. To draw such a line was im- possible ; and by 1794 this fact had been so well established that the treaty then made with Great Britain promised a joint survey of the upper Mississippi, and the determination, if necessary, of a new line from the Lake of the Woods. But the survey was not made ; and when, in 1803, Rufus King concluded a convention, it was stipulated that the boundary should be the shortest line from the Lake of the Woods to the river. But the convention was never ratified, and the boundary was still unsettled when Louisiana was purchased ; when the possessions of the United States in the North- West were expanded to the Rocky Mountains; and when the Mississippi, as a boundary, disappeared. The next treaty was negotiated in 1806 ; and the 49th parallel of north latitude was accepted as the boundary from the Lake of the Woods westward "as far as the respective territories of the parties extend on that quarter/ 1 This treaty Jefferson refused to send to the Senate ; so the boundary was still undetermined when the peace commissioners met at Ghent, and left the question where they found it. Beyond the mountains lay the Oregon country, to which both Great Britain and the United States laid claim. The discovery and naming of the Columbia river by Captain Gray (1792); the exploration of the Columbia and its tributaries by Lewis and Clark (1804-6); the erection near the mouth of the river of the fur-trading port of Astoria (1812) such were the grounds for the pretensions of the United States