Brooks: Diplomacy and the Borderlands


1819 is indicated by the fact that she made no effort to negotiate
such a limit directly with Spain, as she did with Russia for the
northern line of the jointly occupied area. Her interests were not,
to be sure, so direct in the southern part of the Oregon territory,
where fur was scarce, as they were in the Alaska line. But theoret-
ically she would have been as much entitled to make such a treaty
with Spain as the United States was to make that of 1824 with
Russia concerning the northern limit of the jointly occupied area.
 Thus the United States had a good title to Oregon, which for
some time she did not execute. But when in the 1830's westward
migration began, the missionaries and pioneers going southwest
found themselves obliged to become foreigners on foreign soil and
under a religion that many of them did not like to accept. Their
eyes then naturally turned northwest. Miss Ellen Semple, in a
book emphasizing the influence of geographic conditions, con-
ceded the importance of this political factor when she wrote:
 At the time when American trappers and traders found their way to the
Pacific, California was a foreign possession. This fact, reinforced by the
length and diffculty of the journey thither, sueaed to discourage the immi-
gration of families, especially after the rebellion of Texas under American
leadership had rendered citizens of the United States undesirable tenants of
Mexican soiL ... Oregon was as remote as California, and like it was barred
by two thousand miles of plains, mountains, and desert; but it was claimed
on solid grounds by the United States. Henee in this direction Ameriesas
turned when the uneasy spirit of migration began to stir along the Missouri
and Mississippi frontier."
 The great trek moved westward along a path of empire secured
by the Adams-Onis Treaty, and, partly by coincidence, the Oregon
trail skirted closely the line of that agreement. Almost all the
pioneers settled south of the Columbia in territory President Mon-
roe would once have been willing to relinquish, but which Adams
insisted on holding. The growth of their numbers forced the diplo-
mats of the 1840's to recognize existing conditions of settlement."
That region, together with an area north of the Columbia, which
was still disputed, was definitely confirmed to the United States
in 1846. But the line of 1819 did not lose its importance even then,
and it remains to separate the present states of California and
Oregon.
 In diplomacy the Adams-Onis Treaty revealed the growing in-
fluence of the United States. The country was still taking advan-