Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/227

Rh States to make restitution of Astoria in accordance with this article of the treaty, objected, on the ground that the place was already a British settlement when taken possession of by a British officer. And yet, in the course of the negotiations that followed, Great Britain yielded this point, and through her representative, Lord Castlereagh, "admitted, in the most ample extent, our right to be reinstated, and to be the party in possession while treating of the title.' Accordingly, October, 1818, the order first issued January 26 preceding, was executed, and Fort George was formally handed over to an American officer specially sent to the Columbia to receive it, and once more the American flag floated over this British settlement.

This act of restitution, under these circumstances, can hardly be regarded as less than a concession on the part of Great Britain, a concession the full significance of which appears only when the act of restitution is taken in connection with the convention of joint occupation entered into by the two governments that year, and with certain intimations made by the British Plenipotentiaries in the conferences which led up to that convention. It was in this convention that the boundary between the two countries west from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains on the forty-ninth parallel was agreed upon. In the preliminary conferences the representatives of Great Britain insisted that the boundary west of the Rocky Mountains should be settled at the same time with the boundary eastward; that the two should stand or fall together. In response to this wish, the American representatives proposed that the same line of the forty-ninth parallel be extended westward to the Pacific. This the representatives of Great Britain refused to accept, nor would they themselves propose a line; but they did intimate that the Columbia River itself was the most convenient boundary that could be adopted, and that they