The Longest Boundary: How the US-Canadian Border's Line came to be where it is, 1763-1910 (Consolidated edition) (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

Before the Revolution

G.K. Chesterton drafted a famous overarching explanation of the curves in the ‘rolling English road’, but held that they really resulted from a long sequence of more mundane factors, each explaining the course of a given stretch:

The road turned first towards the left

Where Parker’s quarry made the cleft;

The path turned next towards the right

Because the mastiff used to bite,

Then left, because of Slippery Height,

And then again towards the right …1

Most historical constructs have evolved in this way, and the line of what is now the US-Canadian border is no exception. This now runs from coast to coast and then north from Portland Canal to the Arctic Ocean. But precise location of what would become its line began in the eighteenth century in the then wilderness between the colonies of New York and Quebec, and was completed only in 1910 among the mud flats of Passamaquoddy Bay.

* * * *

In 1763 George III provided, by Royal Proclamation, for the boundaries of his recent ‘extensive and valuable Acquisitions in America’. Those appointed for the settlements of French Canada, now the diminished province of Quebec, were, in part, to pass along the 45th parallel from the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, and thence ‘along the High Lands which divide the Rivers’ running into ‘the St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Sea’ – terms that would, over the next eight decades, often compel the attention of politicians, diplomats, and surveyors.

In mid-1766 Governor Moore of New York met Quebec’s Lieutenant-Governor near the northern end of Lake Champlain to locate the 45th parallel, to which end a New York Professor of Mathematics, Mr. Harper, and Quebec’s Deputy Surveyor, John Collins, took sights with their quadrants.2 In itself the episode was unremarkable: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were similarly establishing the boundary between Delaware and Maryland and much of the more famous Mason-Dixon Line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. But as things turned out, New York’s northern border on the 45th parallel would become part of the longest international boundary in the world, that between the United States and ‘British North America’.

Harper and Collins fixed on lines some eleven miles apart, but it was decided to adopt that of Collins, the more northerly, since his equipment was the better. Collins merely marked the border on Lake Champlain, the obvious route between Albany and Montreal. But the Privy Council also ordered the line to ‘be run out as far as each Province respectively extends’. So surveying was resumed in 1771. Workmen’s wages then totalled £51.15; alcohol-related expenditure came to £29.85 - one historian is unsurprised ‘that the line they surveyed was so far from straight!’. By September 1772 Collins and New York’s Valentine had reached the Connecticut River, 90 miles east of Lake Champlain. The local Abenakis were ‘much displeased’, saying that their Hunting Grounds were being encroached on, and they ‘pull’d down a [marker] Post that we erected’.3

When he set up the 1766 survey, Governor Moore thought he would have ‘no [land claims or] disputes to encounter’. But in the past, French power, and land grants, had extended well below 45º. So Moore was met by ‘several French gentlemen’ seeking confirmation of their pre-war claims. These encompassed the whole Lake and conflicted with grants already made by New York to ‘disbanded Soldiers’. The question was argued to and fro, and it left people in Quebec uneasy about any further tracing of the parallel and its confirmation as the border. 1773 was meant to see it traced westwards to the St. Lawrence; and though the Quebec Council was pressured into approving the work, it sought to restrict this to a mere geographical survey, reserving questions of ‘Jurisdiction’ and ‘Property’ to ‘His Majesty’s pleasure’. In forwarding this, the Lieutenant-Governor added the hope that the King would recognise that ‘were the present Boundaries confirmed’, the New Yorkers’ ‘superior Wealth … would probably put them in the full Possession’ of the valuable fur trade.4 In London, Lord Dartmouth was pleased by Quebec’s agreement to extend the survey to the St. Lawrence and sympathetic to its pleas for a relaxation of the 1763 Proclamation’s ‘narrow limits’.5 Further west, these limits would soon be relaxed by the 1774 Quebec Act, but this did not alter the New York border. Meanwhile New York produced another surveyor. By October 1773, he and Collins had run the line for some 50 miles west from Lake Champlain. Collins then offered to complete the survey himself for £100. He finished the work in 1774, and his line still stands, though, as we shall see in chapter 4, it does not trace the 45th parallel quite accurately.

* * * * *

More immediately important were the lands further west. British fears that French control there would pen them into a narrow coastal strip, French that British expansion inland would drive a wedge between Canada and Louisiana, had underlain two recent wars. In 1760 Canada had surrendered to British forces. But the land above Montreal, the pays d’en haut, was another matter. To European eyes, it was nearly empty. For though the First Nations did raise crops, they lived largely by hunting; and their populations never attained agricultural densities. Their overall numbers can only be guessed at. For 1763, the British Indian agent Sir William Johnson produced confessedly incomplete figures for Canada and much of the northern and middle American provinces. These give 11,980 ‘warriors’, suggesting a total population of 59,000; a French 1736 paper covering much the same area had given 15,873 ‘warriors’, suggesting one of some 79,400. In 1782 the British counted 11,403 Indians in the ‘Detroit’ district (extending south to the Ohio and west to the Wabash country).6 And in 1812 ‘a tolerably correct list of the Indian warriors on the frontier of the United States … from Sandusky on Lake Erie to the River Mississippi’ gave a total of 8,310 Warriors, with a further 1890 in Canada and an unspecified number at St. Regis (New York).7 By 1790, Kentucky already had a non-Indian population of 73,700, and by 1810 it was 406,500.

The Indian country’s status was anomalous. European states accepted that the First Nations owned the land until they alienated it but claimed for themselves an ultimate sovereignty. In their view – which ultimately prevailed -, this gave them the exclusive right to purchase land from the Indians within their domains, and the right to trade parts of America between themselves. The First Nations’ view was more complicated. They had no doubt that where they had not alienated it to Europeans, their various tribes owned the land, either outright or in vassalage to other Indian nations. They operated within an established ‘international system’, with alliances, dependencies, enmities, and diplomatic practices mostly stemming from the conflicts and migrations of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century.8 When occasion arose, notably after France’s 1760/3 surrenders to Britain and Britain’s 1783 cession to the United States, they could assert their independent sovereignty very clearly:

‘although you have conquered the French, you have not conquered us … These lakes, these woods and mountains … are our inheritance and we will part with them to none…’

‘You tell us that when you conquered the French they gave you this country. We tell you the French never conquered us neither did they purchase a foot of our territory…’

Similarly, American envoys were told in 1793 that the King of England ‘never did, nor never had a right, to give you our country’.9

Many Indians had, though, come to expect, even to some extent to depend on, European goods (like guns for hunting and pots for cooking), the repair services of European smiths, rum or brandy for periodic festivities, and, in the event of crop failure or other disaster, simple food relief: no ‘Indian nation’, one Wyandot chief had declared in 1759, ‘can live without being supported either by the English or by the French’. These needs were largely paid for by trading furs. But Indians also looked to what Europeans, and particularly European officials at a distance, regarded as ‘gifts’. To some extent these were seen as rent for the posts Europeans were ‘allowed’ to maintain in Indian territory. They were also viewed as a central feature of the mutual hospitality and present giving around which relationships were structured, a ‘covenant chain’ that both parties needed to keep in good repair. However Indians fairly readily adopted a suppliant position: in 1761 a Seneca chief begged Sir William Johnson to ‘consider their poverty and to allow … [their warriors] some ammunition to kill game’, while the Ojibwa at Michilimackinac declared that ‘We … [have] neither powder nor lead for hunting to support ourselves during the winter … If you have not compassion on us, our ruin must be inevitable.’10

The response might well be niggardly. But where the system was working well, First Nations were happy to see the relationship cast...