52 University of California Publications in History

 But these gains were erased by the peace commissioners at Ghent,
 as was an extravagant denial by our secretary of state of any Brit-
 ish claim on the North Coast. Monroe had written instructions that
 the post at the mouth of the River Columbia which commanded the River...
 ought to be comprised in the stipulation, should the possession have been
 wrested from us during the war. On no pretext can the British Government
 set up a claim to territory, south of the Northern Boundary of the United
 States. It is not believed that they have any claim whatever to Territory on the
 Paciic Ocean. You will however be careful, should a definition of the boundary
 be attempted, not to countenance in any manner or in any quarter a pretension
 in the British Government to Territory south of that line."

 Disregarding this vehement declaration, the treaty commission-
 ers simply provided for a mutual restoration of property seized
S during the war, and left the boundary problem unsettled. Astoria,
 having been taken as an act of war after its sale in 1813, now had to
 be returned to the United States. Monroe informed Anthony St.
 John Baker, the British charge, in 1815, that the mouth of the Co-
 lumbia would be reoccupied at once." But that step was not actually
 taken until 1818.
 Out of this territorial rivalry, left unsettled at Ghent, grew the
 first actual treaty delimitation by any claimants to the region west
 of the Mississippi; but even it did not extend as such to the Pa-
 cific. Four special commissioners who were appointed for the task
 agreed, in the Convention of October 20, 1818, that the boundary
 should run along the Forty-ninth Parallel to the Rocky Mountains.
 But west of that range they left the sovereignty indeterminate, in
 the famous joint-occupation agreement which allowed use of the
 region by citizens of both Powers."
 It is essential to note that, important as this truce was, it did not
 provide a delimitation of the area west of the Rockies on either the
 north or the south. The first step in such a definition came with the
 Adams-Onis Treaty signed a few weeks after news of the British
 convention reached Washington.
 A review of the rivalries of Spain, Russia, England, and the
 United States on the Pacific shows, then, that, although each Power
 had established claims by exploration and settlement, no specific
 delineation of spheres had taken place before 1819. The interna-
 tional conflicts over Louisiana had narrowed down to two princi-
 pals-the United States and Spain-but the southern and western