In determining the boundaries of this purchase, Spain and Great Britain were concerned no less than the United States and France. The Mississippi River from the thirty-first parallel to its source was the eastern bound, and the gulf of Mexico to the north of the Sabine River the southern without question. The thirty-first parallel from the Mississippi to the Appalachicola, and down that stream to the gulf, was claimed by the United States, France, and England as the south-east boundary. To this, however, Spain dissented, asserting Iberville and lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to be the true line between Louisiana and west Florida. But she was finally overruled. On the south-west the line ran along the Sabine River to the thirty-first parallel; thence due north to Red River, and along that stream to the one hundredth degree of longitude west from Greenwich; thence north to the Arkansas, and up that river to the mountains, following them to the forty-second parallel of latitude. Thus far the western limits were fixed after much disagreement; and when the United States would continue the boundary line along the forty-second parallel to the Pacific Ocean, Spain made but slight objection, and finally in the treaty of 1819 gave her consent.

The northern limits of what should be United States territory affected only that country and Great Britain, and the line of partition was finally made the fortyninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Pacific. Thus by the most momentous event of Jefferson's administration the possession of the great valley of the Mississippi fell to the United States. Out of the southern portion of the newly acquired domain was formed the territory of Orleans, while the remainder continued to be called the territory of Louisiana."

11 Between the years 1803 and 1819 there was some ground for controversy, but since the latter date none whatever, except as to the northern line.' Ridpath's U. S., 379, note; in American State Papers see topics Treaty of Paris, 1763; Definite Treaty between Great Britain and the U. S., 1783; Text of the Louisiana Cession, 1803; Boundary Conventions between the U. S. and Great Britain, 1818 and 1846; Treaty of Washington, 1819.

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By the treaty of Washington of the 22d of February 1819, east and west Florida were ceded by Spain to the United States; in consideration for which the latter power relinquished all claim to Texas, and promised to pay her own citizens a sum not to exceed five millions of dollars damages done them by Spanish vessels. The Sabine River at the same time was made the eastern boundary of Mexico.

For many years in several particulars that portion of the partition line between Canada and the United States extending from the Atlantic to Lake Huron. had been in dispute. At the treaty of Ghent, in 1814, it was decided to refer the matter to three commissioners, but it was not until the Webster-Ashburton treaty of the 9th of August 1842 that the question was finally settled, that portion of the treaty of October 1818 fixing the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods westward as the dividing line being confirmed.12

12 It appears, in their ignorance of western geography, statesmen of that day supposed the forty-ninth parallel crossed the Mississippi somewhere, and it was to this point only, Bouchette affirms, that partition should have been carried. 'But it was afterwards found,' he says, Brit. Dom., i. 8-9, 'that such a line would never strike the river, as its highest waters did not extend beyond lat. 47° 36′ north, whilst the point of the Lake of the Woods, whence the line was to depart, stood in lat. 49° 20' north, and therefore 104 geographical miles farther north than the source of the Mississippi. The fourth article of the treaty of London in 1794 provided for the amicable adjustment of this anomaly, but its intentions were never carried into effect; and the subject came under the consideration of Lord Holland and the late Lord Auckland, on one side, and Mr Monroe and Mr Pickering on the other, during the negotiations of 1806. The British negotiators contended that the nearest line from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi was the boundary, according to the true intent of the treaty of 1783; the Americans insisted that the line was to run due west, and, since it could never intersect the Mississippi, that it must run due west across the whole continent.' As I shall have occasion to discuss this matter at length in another place, I will let it rest for the present.

CHAPTER XIII.

FOREST LIFE AND FUR-HUNTING.

NORTHERN AND WESTERN FUR TERRITORY-PHYSICAL FEATURES-HAI ITATS OF FUR-BEARING ANIMALS-VOYAGEURS-COUREURS DES BOIS-ANGLOAMERICAN TRAPPER-HIS CHARACTERISTICS COMPARED WITH THOSE OF THE FRENCH CANADIAN-BOATING-BRIGADES - RUNNING RAPIDS

TRAVEL-DRESS-FOOD-CACHING.

PICTURE in your mind a sweep of country three thousand by two thousand miles in extent, stretching from ocean to ocean across the continent's broadest part, from Labrador to Alaska, and on the Pacific from the Arctic Ocean to the river Umpqua; picture this expanse bright with lakes and linking streams, basined by intersecting ridges between which are spread open plains and feathery forests, warm valleys and frozen hills, fertile prairies, marshes, dry scraggy undulations, and thirsty deserts in quick succession; picture it a primeval wilderness, thickly inhabited by wild beasts and thinly peopled by wild men, but with civilization's latest invention brought to their border and kept for their present curse and final extinction in small palisaded squares fifty or three hundred miles apart by white men who ever and forever urged the wild man against the wild beast for the benefit of the mighty and the cunning-imagine such a scene, and you have before you the domain and doings of the Honorable Hudson's Bay Company as it was fifty years ago.

For clearer conception, place yourself upon the continental apex near the great National Park and between the springs of the Columbia, the Colorado,

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the Athabasca, the Saskatchewan, and the Missouri rivers. The waters of the first flow westward, those of the second southward, of the third northward, of the fourth north-eastward, and of the fifth south-eastward. From where you stand, the continent slopes in every direction. British America slopes northward from the United States border to the Frozen Ocean; the United States slopes southward from the British American border to the Californian and Mexican gulfs; from the great Rocky Mountain water-shed the continent slopes eastward to the Atlantic and westward to the Pacific.

By four main mountain systems and a latitudinal divide of low table-land are formed the four hydrographical basins of North America, whence into the northern, western, and eastern occans and the southern gulfs is discharged one third of all the fresh water that stands or flows. These four ranges, which cut the continent into longitudinal strips, are all parallel to the ocean shore line, to which they lie nearest. Between the Appalachian system of the east and the Rocky Mountains of the west is the central plain of the continent, which sweeps from the gulf of Mexico through the valley of the Mississippi round by the St Lawrence to Nelson River. Beyond the 49th parallel divide, which, as from the east it approaches the Rocky Mountains, is at once a physical as well as political partition line, and on to the Frozen Ocean lies a broken level of transfixed billows seemingly limitless, and in its cold winter dress as silent as a petrified sea. Westward of the Stony Mountains, and until the Cascade and Snowy ranges are reached, is a sandy basin, desert toward the south but at the north fertile. Last of all, crossing the Cascade-Nevada ridge we come upon the warm garden-valleys of the Pacific, the Willamette of Oregon, and the Sacramento and San Joaquin of California, protected on their west by the Coast Range. Of lesser altitude than either the Snowy or the Rocky ranges, the Coast Mountains for

the most part rise from the very verge of the ocean; and though broken in places, and sometimes separated from the sea by a low level surface twenty-five or fifty miles in width, they form a continuous chain from the Californian Gulf to Bering Strait. At San Fran cisco Bay they open to the Californian valley drainage, on the Oregon coast to that of the Columbia; on reaching the 48th parallel the range breaks in an archipelago, twelve hundred islands here guarding the shore for seven hundred miles, and then strikes the mainland again at mounts Fairweather and Elias. South of California all the ranges of western North America combine in a series of more or less elevated mountains and plateaux. The Chepewyan Mountains, by which name the northern extremity of the Rocky Mountains is known, form the water-shed between the Mackenzie and the Yukon. On the east side of the main continental ridge are lesser parallel ridges which subside into plain as the rivers are reached; on the western side mountain and plain are more distinctly marked. In Oregon there are the Blue Mountains; as a divide between Oregon and California we have the Siskiyou Mountains, where the Coast, Cascade, and Nevada ranges meet, with snow-capped Mount Shasta as their sentinel; in Alaska there is the Alaskan chain, extending from the Alaskan peninsula beyond the Yukon River. The interior of British Columbia is a mountainous plateau.

British America was the fur-hunter's paradise. Cold enough to require of nature thick coverings for her animal creations; fertile enough to furnish food for those animals; rugged enough in soil and climate to require of native man constant displays of energy; sterile and forbidding enough to keep out settlers so long as better land might be had nearer civilization, it offered precisely the field, of all the world, a fur corporation might choose for a century or two of exclusive dominion.

Starting from the rugged shores of Labrador, we