Question at one stroke. Instead the two governments agreed upon a clause which subjected the Oregon country to a "joint-occupation" for ten years by citizens and subjects of both nations. This meant simply that Americans and Englishmen had equal right to trade and settle in any part of the country, but that neither the one party nor the other could have absolute control over any part of it till the question of ownership, or of boundary, was settled.
Cession of Spanish rights to the United States. This treaty of joint occupation also professed to safeguard the rights of other nations. This was necessary, because at the time neither Spain nor Russia had formally yielded up their respective claims to territory in that region. But it so happened that J. Q. Adams at that moment was engaged in negotiating a treaty with Spain concerning Florida and he made use of his opportunity to gain an additional basis of title to the Columbia region. It had been proposed that Spain and the United States should agree on boundaries west of the Mississippi, defining the Louisiana purchase to the Rocky Mountains. In connection with that proposal, on October 31, 1818, only eleven days after the date of the treaty with Britain, Adams demanded that Spain agree to draw a boundary line also from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. This was done, the forty-second parallel being taken, and each of the two contracting nations agreeing to abandon to the other all claims and pretensions they had to territory north and south of that line respectively.
