ich some
five thousand miles of the area in dispute were assigned to Great
Britain and seven thousand to the United States. The award was not
popular on either side, and the public seized eagerly on stories of
concealed "Red Line" maps, stories of Yankee smartness or of British
trickery. Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had exhibited in the
Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the
American claim. Later it appeared that the British Government also had
found a map equally damaging to its own claims. The nice question of
ethics involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that
would tell against itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest
when it was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one
which the original negotiators had used or marked.*

* See "The Path, of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The
Chronicles of America").

The boundary from the St. Lawrence westward through the Great Lakes and
thence to the Lake of the Woods had been laid down in the Treaty of
1783 in the usual vague terms, but it was determined in a series of
negotiations from 1794 to 1842 with less friction and heat than the
eastern line had caused. From the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies a new
line, the forty-ninth parallel, was agreed upon in 1818. Then, as the
Pacific Ocean was neared, the difficulties once more increased. There
were no treaties between the two countries to limit claims beyond the
Rockies. Discovery and settlement, and the rights inherited from or
admitted by the Spaniards to the south and by the Russians to the north,
were the grounds put forward. British and Canadian fur traders had been
the pioneers in overland discovery, but early in the forties thousands
of American settlers poured into the Columbia Valley and strengthened
the practical case for their country. "Fifty-four forty or fight"--in
other words, the calm proposal to claim the whole coast between Mexico
and Alaska--became the popular cry in the United States; but in face
of the firm attitude of Great Britain and impending hostilities with
Mexico, more moderate counsels ruled. Great Britain held out for the
Columbia River as the dividing line, and the United States for the
forty-ninth parallel throughout. Finally, in 1846, the latter contention
was accepted, with a modification to leave Vancouver Island wholly
British territory. A postscript to this settlement was added in 1872,
when the G