Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/116

 104 LESTER BURRELL SHIPPEE tent to go slow and let the British government disclose its claims. On one point alone, beyond an absolute surrender of its title claim, was the United States insistent ; the question of respective titles should not be submitted to commissioners, al- though this expedient was to be used with certain of the other issues. Nor was the arbitration of a third power, especially if that be the Czar of Russia, to be considered as a means of de- termining the rights of the two parties. Castlereagh wished, however, to settle the whole question of boundary from the Lake-of -the- Woods to "the utmost contiguous extent of the two territories," a sentiment shared by the American gov- ernment, if a suitable adjustment could be reached. But when the envoys from the United States suggested that a reason- able division would be effected by continuing the line of 49 for the whole extent from the Lake-of-the- Woods to the Pa- cific, they found the British plenipotentiaries unwilling to take so decisive a step. As a counter proposal the latter sug- gested an agreement that the region west of the Rockies, be- tween 45 and 49 N. L., should be free and open to both parties, neither of which should exercise as against the other any territorial jurisdiction. At the outset, then, in the controversy as to the extent of the possessions of each, we find essentially the same issue which proved to be the stumbling block to the very end of the nego- tiations in 1846; while the United States admitted, for the greater part of the time, some sort of valid claim on the part of Great Britain to some portion of the Oregon Territory, the British government insisted that the real question was the weight of the respective claims south of the forty-ninth paral- lel. The disputed area from the point of view of the United States was the whole Oregon Territory ; from the British angle it was that portion which lay between 45 N. L., or the Colum- bia River in later negotiations when a better knowledge of the country had been obtained, and 49 N. L. For Great Britain the disputed area lay south of 49, for the United States it was north of that line.