Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/178



168 ANDREW FISH

London to the advances so made, by June Pakenham pre- sented a draft treaty which was accepted by the Senate and by the President without the alteration of a word. The boundary was to be along the forty-ninth parallel, but it was provided that the whole of Vancouver Island should remain British ; in the words of the treaty the line should go "to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island, and southerly through the middle of the said channel and of Fuca's Straights, to the Pacific Ocean." This was substantial victory for Washington as the British claim had been the forty-ninth parallel until it meets the Co- lumbia River, and from thence the line of the river. The navigation of the river was important in view of the business of the fur company whose chief depot was at Fort Vancouver. Fifty- four- forty can hardly have been seriously meant, so that the only concession made by the United States was that with regard to Vancouver Island. With the treaty signed it really seemed as if the long wrangle was finally ended in mutual good will. Little was known by diplomats of the geography of the region, and if they knew there was more than one channel -that might be covered by the terms of the treaty, affecting vari- ously the sovereignty of some small island territories, there is no hint of it in that document. Moore suggests that the negotiators, anxious not to jeopardize again the much desired settlement, refrained from entering into controversy about what must have seemed to them a very small matter. What, after all, are a few pin-points on the map of the great Pacific Northwest? Yet the controversy over a few of those pin- points, and principally over one of them, is the excuse for the present writing-.

THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY AND VANCOUVER ISLAND.

The Hudson's Bay Company, or more properly, the Gover- nor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, is a corporation whose fortunes are interwoven