gether,—but the little tubs had learned from their mother.
"The territory between the Lakes and the Ohio shall be for ever set apart as an Indian territory," said England at the opening of the peace negotiations. "The United States shall remove her armed vessels from the lakes and give England the right of navigating the Mississippi."
Clay, Gallatin, Adams packed up their grips preparatory to starting home, when England bethought herself and came to better terms.
The next year America passed a law excluding foreigners from our trade, and the British fur traders reluctantly crossed the border. But they held Oregon by "Joint Occupation."
"All posts captured by either power shall be restored," said the treaty. "There shall be joint occupancy of the Oregon Country for ten years."
"A great mistake! a great mistake!" cried out Thomas Hart Benton, a young lawyer who had settled in St. Louis. "In ten years that little nest egg of 'Joint Occupation' will hatch out a lively fighting chicken."
Benton was a Western man to the core,—he felt a responsibility for all that sunset country. And why should he not? Missouri and Oregon touched borders on the summit of the Rockies. Were they not next-door neighbours, hobnobbing over the fence as it were? Every day at Governor Clark's at St. Louis, he and Benton discussed that Oregon "Joint Occupancy" clause.
"As if two nations ever peacefully occupied the same territory! I tell you it is a physical impossibility," exclaimed Benton, jamming down his wine-glass with a crash.
The War of 1812,—how Astor hated it! "But for that war," he used to say, "I should have been the richest man that ever lived." As it was, the British fur companies came in and gained a foothold from which they were not ousted until American ox-teams crossed the plains and American frontiersmen took the country. A million a year England trapped from Oregon waters.
