1783. On July 11, 1796, a detachment from Wayne's army raised the stars and stripes above the stockade and village of Detroit, where the French and British colors had successively waved, and this act completed the tardy transfer of the Old Northwest to the United States. No doubt England had some reason to complain of the United States for the imperfect fulfilment of the treaty of 1783; but her retention of the posts, so calamitous in results to the growing Western settlements, was largely due to a lingering hope that the young republic would prove a failure, and to a determination to share the expected spoil. The fact is, neither England nor Spain regarded the Treaty of Paris as finally settling the destiny of the country west of the mountains.

It is not improbable that the War of 1812, for a time, revived English hopes of again recovering the Northwest. Tecumseh strove to erect his "dam" to resist "the mighty water ready to overflow his people." Hull's surrender placed all Michigan in British hands. General Proctor sought to compel the citizens of Detroit to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England; and although Harrison's successes on the Maumee and Perry's victory on Lake Erie forced Proctor to evacuate Detroit, a British garrison continued to hold Mackinaw to the close of the war. Only three of the thirtytwo years lying between 1783 and 1815 were years of war; but for one-half of the whole time the British flag was flying on the American side of the boundary line. In the largest sense, therefore, the destiny of the Northwest was not assured until the Treaty of Ghent.

The Iroquois called themselves the owners of the lands northwest of the Ohio; the Indians living on those lands they considered simply as occupants or tenants. It is obvious that the tenants valued them much more highly than the owners. The long wars that the Western Indians waged for Ohio tell the story of their affection for their homes. The same wars also tell at what fearful cost the American frontier was extended west of the Alleghany Mountains. From the defeat

of Braddock, in 1755, onward to Wayne's Treaty, in 1795, with a few short intermissions, that frontier was undergoing a constant baptism of fire and blood.

The original United States were bounded on the north by Great Britain, on the west and south by Spain, and on the east by the Ocean—the last named being the only neighbor with whom we never had any trouble. One of the most striking evidences of the value of this domain, and of its admirable position, is the remarkable growth of the United States. An area of eight hundred and twenty-seven thousand square miles has become an area of three million six hundred thousand. Parallel thirty-one degrees north and the Mississippi have given place, as boundaries, to the Gulf of Mexico, the Rio Grande, and the Pacific Ocean. Our marvellous territorial expansion and material development westward discourage prophecy; but, at this time, it does not seem probable that the territory wrested from England will soon, if ever, cease to be the most valuable part of our whole national domain, described by Mr. Gladstone as "a natural base for the greatest continuous empire ever established by man."

The man curious about "what might have been cannot help speculating on the course of history provided any one of the limitation-schemes proposed at Paris had prevailed. As he reflects on the facts of geography, on the strength and audacity of American civilization, on the weakness of Spanish America and of Spain herself, and on the feeble Canadian settlements in 1783, he may conclude that the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic Plain would have been reunited even if once separated; that the idea of separation, supported in some form by the three powers, was against Nature; that Spain, in particular, lost her only opportunity to control the Father of Waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that the great valley of the West was the predestined field of Anglo-Saxon institutions and life. There is undeniable force in this reasoning; perhaps it is al

together conclusive. At the same time, the proposed limitation might have turned American events into wholly different channels. What if the Confederacy had fallen to pieces? What if the Constitution of 1787 had never been framed or ratified? What if the United States had become dependent upon one of the European powers? In any one of these events, the world would never have seen that magnificent growth which has absorbed territories four times as great as that bounded by the treaty of 1783, and which furnishes the main argument for the conclusion, "It would have made little difference." The longer one considers the subject, the less will he be disposed to think that the delivery of the West by the trustee appointed in 1763 was a foregone conclusion; the more will he think the retention of the Northwest by Great Britain would have been a much more serious mischance than the gaining of the Southwest by Spain; and the more reason will he discover for congratulation that the logic of events gave us our proper boundaries at the close of the War of Independence, and did not leave us to succumb to untoward fate or to renew the struggle with two European powers instead of one in after years.1

Many difficult points arose in the course of the practical establishment of the long series of boundaries that the treaty of 1783 gave us on the North. The identity of the St. Croix River was settled in 1785, the line through Passamaquody Bay in 1817, and the line from the junction of the St. Lawrence and Parallel 45° to the head of Lake Huron in 1822, each by a joint commission. The line from the head of the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence, and the line from the head of Lake Huron to the Lake of the Woods, were determined in 1842. The line from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains - 49° northwas fixed in 1818. For a summary statement of the successive steps in settling our Northern boundary, see B. A. Hinsdale: How to Study and Teach History, chap. xx.