Its importance. Adams regarded this as a great diplomatic triumph.[1] No doubt it had a certain importance. In the negotiation with Britain the American commissioners were somewhat at a loss to produce satisfactory arguments in support of their claim to the coast to the northward of the Columbia, however easy it was to maintain a claim to the valley of the river itself. Gray had discovered the river, Lewis and Clark explored from its fountains to the sea, and Mr. Astor took possession at its mouth, holding the territory firmly until the war compelled him to retire. But all of this gave no direct claim to territory outside the Columbia basin and we were asking for a boundary along the forty-ninth parallel to the sea.
The new American argument. After the treaty with Spain Americans could insist, as they did, that since the first exploration of the coast line, well up beyond the fiftieth parallel, had been made by Spain, whose rights we now held, and since the Columbia River, discovered, explored, and first occupied by Americans, had some of its sources in these high latitudes also, we were not merely within our rights in demanding the forty-ninth parallel boundary, but the offer of that line might be looked upon as a very generous concession to Great Britain.
Settlement with Russia. The Russian claim, which was based originally on the discoveries of Vitus Bering and Tchirikoff, on the occupation of Alaska by Russian fur traders, and on a grant of trade and settlement
- ↑ Adams's Memoirs, IV, 275.
