2 University of California Publications in History
adventurers who desired to aid the revolutionary movement could
be stopped. Further, and more significant, the settlement of con-
troversies with the United States would ease diplomatic tension,
and perhaps ward of the evil day when that Power might become
the open protagonist of the insurgent Spanish American provinces.
In that tension the most disturbing factor to the people of the
United States was the question of boundaries.
 The disposition of much of the territory was to be fixed by con-
 ditions of settlement which the diplomats were obliged to recog-
 nize. In other directions ambitions for occupation were still in the
 stage of mere projects, so that the negotiators could bargain on
 paper, sometimes with scant geographicalinformation. Inasmuch
 as the eastern part of the frontier was better known and settled,
 its role in the narrative is more obvious and offers less demonstra-
 tion of diplomatic skill than does the farsighted Oregon-California
 boundary delineation. Even in that, however, the diplomats de-
 pended for their interest in and their knowledge of the region on
 the men who had explored it and who coveted its wealth-men who
 were proving history to be the concrete experience of human life,
 and not merely political and diplomatic vicissitudes.
 Effective negotiations were long delayed. Onis, when he arrived
 in 1809, was not recognized as minister by the United States gov-
 ernment owing to civil war in Spain, and he could do no bargaining
 until his acknowledgment in December, 1815. Long before he was
 recognized, however, the basic points of contention had been voiced,
 not alone by Onis, but by his predecessors. These issues had their
 origin in the very nature of European colonial rivalry in the Amer-
 icas, and their development must be traced before one can intelli-
 gently view the work of Onis.
 Even in his time, Onis' country still dreamed of maintaining the
 colonial empire which had arisen with Pope Alexander's division
 of the colonial world between Spain and Portugal in 1493. From
 that date Spain claimed virtually all of the Americas. Actually,
 her holdings had been modified appreciably by the encroachments
 of competing nations in sections she herself had not occupied. "La
 Florida," once vaguely delineated as all the known region east of
 the Mississippi River, had been reduced, roughly, to the area south
 of the Thirty-first Parallel. As the result of disputes marked by
 the treaty of 1670, which recognized English claims as far south