The Pacific Coast's First International Boundary Delineation, 1816-1819
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10320600 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip C Brooks (0000-0003-1220-9349, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1934 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 62-79 |
| Publication date | 1934-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Pacific Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0030-8684 • E-ISSN: 1533-8584 |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3633458 |
| OpenAlex | W2330672645 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
While historians of the Pacific Coast have evidently dismissed the California-Oregon boundary as simply a line arbitrarily drawn along a convenient parallel of latitude, an important episode of diplomatic and frontier rivalry has gone unnoticed. It is one which effectively illustrates the early significance of the Northwest in United States diplomacy, the defensive policy of Spain toward that region on the eve of Mexican independence, and the foresight of our ablest secretary of state. That the study of this point has formed a, salient feature of the investigation of one of our major diplomatic agreements, the Adams-Onis treaty of I819,' is a further indication of its significance. In addition to making obsolete the common designation of that document as the Florida treaty, this study shows that Adams' use of the Oregon region as a bargaining point was the final stake on which the success of the whole negotiation was pegged; that the agreement gave us our first treaty title to a transcontinental domain and included the first specific delineations of territory west of the Rockies by any nation; that Luis de Onis, the Spanish minister, yielded to the United States the coastal claims of Spain in order to hold Texas, and to conclude a treaty at all costs; that President Monroe was willing to draw the line along the Willamette and Columbia rivers, while if Adams had known it he could have obtained the forty-first instead of the forty-second parallel; and that
Boundary (topology · Geography · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Geology · Mathematics · Oceanography
| Highly cited | No |
|---|