The Great Company / Being a History of the Honourable Company of Merchants-Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay

by Beckles Willson

Red River Cart.

The Treaty of 1783.

At the close of the Revolution the chief aim of the American negotiators, as is evinced throughout their correspondence, was to obtain a recognition of the right of their country to the western territory as far as the St. Lawrence on the north, and the Mississippi on the west. When the British Government acceded to this proposition it was regarded by the Americans as an important concession, and their plenipotentiaries proceeded upon that concession as the principle on which their boundary towards Canada, after it had struck the St. Lawrence, was to be defined. They brought the line from Nova Scotia to the St. Lawrence, and then followed up the main stream of the river to what they believed to be its principal source, and what was supposed to approach the nearest to the source of the Mississippi. In fanciful conformity to this intention, the second article of the treaty of 1783, after having carried the line to Lake Superior, stipulates that it shall be continued onwards through the middle of certain water communications to the north-west point of the Lake of the Woods, and thence due west to the Mississippi. The fact, however, is that the waters of the Lake of the Woods feed streams which fall into Hudson's Bay, but have no communication with any waters which fall into Lake Superior. It is also a fact that a line drawn due west from the Lake of the Woods would never reach the Mississippi, which lies far to the south of such a line.

But there was a reason for such egregious blundering. The country had never been surveyed by men of science. Its physical features had been derived from the vague and inaccurate accounts of ignorant traders and bushrangers, which had formed the basis for the current maps. These laid down a large river running from the Lake of the Woods and falling into Lake Superior. If there had been such a river in existence, there can be no doubt, from the body of waters contained in the Lake of the Woods, that it would have been a much larger stream than any of the feeders of Lake Superior. It was therefore most natural that the negotiators should suppose the Lake of the Woods to be the main source of the St. Lawrence. At the same time this must have appeared to them the point at which the waters of the St. Lawrence approached the nearest to the source of the Mississippi, because in the maps of the bushrangers the Mississippi is laid down as rising four or five degrees of latitude farther north than it does in fact, and as coming within a short distance of the Lake of the Woods on the west.

As the negotiators in Paris in 1783 reposed the greatest confidence in these crude productions of the cartographer, is it surprising that the second article of the treaty should be full of inconsistencies? On any other supposition the intention of the negotiators would be fatuous and incomprehensible.

Examination of American claims.

This brings us to the whole point involved in the American contention, which deprived Great Britain and the Company of a vast territory to which the United States possessed no shadow of right. Where the limits of a country have never been ascertained the conquest of the contiguous and encroaching territory may be justly considered as establishing the bounds originally claimed by the victorious nation; and this was the case with regard to Canada and the territory of the Company. But where between two powers there have been no defined limits, and no conquests have determined the claims of either, the pretensions of both might be fairly adjusted by laying down as a rule that "the priority of right should be considered as vested in each, to the respective countries, which each have either principally or exclusively frequented."

The Spaniards west of the Mississippi never extended their establishments nearly so far north as latitude 42, while the Hudson's Bay limits were long frequented by the English. On what ground, therefore, could the Americans, the successors merely to the rights derived from the Spaniards, claim all the country of the Sioux, the Mandans and many other tribes on the upper branches of the Missouri?

Nevertheless the States, after their purchase of Louisiana, continued to put in claims for a more northerly and westerly boundary, with what ultimate result we shall see. It is only pertinent to remark here, that nothing could be more absurd than the idea that Spain ever contemplated the cession of any territory on the Pacific Ocean, under the name of Louisiana.

The interior river waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin had attracted the attention of the Company even before the American trappers had reached them, and traders remained there in unmolested possession long after the Russians had left the country. The feeble frontier guard could do nothing but protest, and ultimately when the trappers had nearly exhausted the outlying districts and desired to penetrate into the centre of the State, the American Government admitted them under an agreement with the Hudson's Bay Company, whereby a tax of fifty cents was to be paid for each beaver skin.