The Ghost River Caledonia in the Oregon Negotiation of 1818

Abstract

IN the closing days of a negotiation in London in i8i8 a strange offer was made to the British government by representatives of the American government. It was made confidentially. It was rejected by the British government. It was lost from public sight for one hundred and thirty years thereafter until it was exhumed from the private papers of one of the American negotiators. The offer was to partition the Pacific Northwest by a line that would leave the whole of Puget Sound, Admiralty Inlet, and the Georgian Strait, together with all the territory that is drained by them, on the British North American side of the boundary. The conference at which the offer was made had been called for the purpose of effecting a general settlement of Anglo-American controversies. It was a peace conference in a sense intended to quiet issues that had led to the War of I8I2 or that had grown out of the war and that had not been settled by the Treaty of Ghent. Its agenda included the items of commercial relations, especially the commerce between the United States and the British West Indies; the North Atlantic fisheries; impressment; compensation for slaves carried off by British troops at the end of the war in contravention of the peace treaty; and two territorial problems in the West-the boundary from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and a conflict of claims in the Pacific Northwest. The conflict of claims in the Pacific Northwest was one of the newer and less urgent problems of the conference. It was a problem that the war had brought to crystallization. Before the war the United States and England had been rivals in exploration and trade in this distant area, but they had not recognized to each other that they were rivals as to territory. The war had, however, brought this rivalry into the open. Early in the fighting a British war vessel was sent to seize Astoria. Its captain, on arrival, finding the post and its contents in the possession of the British North West Company through a purchase from Astor's partners, had nevertheless made a formal seizure by staging a flag-lowering ceremony. After the war the American government had demanded that, in accordance with the Treaty of Ghent, the flag be restored. The demand had been agreed to by the British government, with