The Vanished Frontier 201

foundation,! as the boundary between Canada’ and the United States west of the Great Lakes, and in consequence it was believed that the north-west part of America would in all probability soon become British territory.

For the advancement of British interests in Canada, and particularly in the North-West, Mackenzie suggested that the British Government should encourage the opening up of communications by land between the two oceans. He says: “‘By opening this intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and forming regular establishments through the interior, and at both extremes, as well as along the coasts and islands, the entire command of the fur-trade of North America might be obtained, from latitude 48° north to the pole, except that portion of it which the Russians have in the Pacific. To this might be added the fishing in both seas, and the markets of the four quarters of the globe. Such would be the field for commercial enter- prise, and incalculable would be the produce of it, when supported by the operations of that credit and capital which Great Britain so pre-eminently possesses.

“Many political reasons, which it is not necessary here to enumerate, must present themselves to the mind of every man acquainted with the enlarged system and capacities of British commerce in support of the measure which I have

1The Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, provided for the appointment of commissaries to agree upon a boundary between British territory in the north held by the Hudson’s Bay Company under their charter and the French possessions to the south.

Greenhow in his History of California and Oregon, p. 282, states that nothing has been found calculated to sustain the belief that any line of separation was ever settled, or even proposed. And yet both the United States and Britain negotiated on the basis of such a belief.

In an unratified treaty of 1808 between the two countries the 49th parallel was named as the boundary as far west as the Rocky Mountains. That groundless “ belief” finally became an accomplished fact.