In His Name. Harriet Earheart Munroe Is the Public Demanding Impossibilities? Henry S. Baker, Ph. D. Laws of Human Growth. State Supt. John Ogden, LL. D. Maple Path, The. (Poem.) Ida A. Ahlborn Manual Training for the Schools of Boston. Samuel B. Capen Mathematics, Rise of, in United States. Prof. Florian Cajori Mediaeval England as seen in her Ballads. Michigan Course of Study, Revision of. Midsummer Night's Dream, A Study of. Memory Training in Public Schools. Walter Vaughan Supt. Stuart MacKibbin, M. A. 538, 601 406 221 65 Morality of Thackery's Art. Charles Woodbridge Hutson Mr. Woodbury's "Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson." F. A. Comstock Nature Study in our Schools. Supt. D. B. Russell New Normal School Building at Bridgewater. Prin. Albert G. Boyden Night Wind, The. (Poem.) G. T. Johnson Notes on Principles of Education. M. MacVicar, LL. D. Notes on the University of Oxford. Arthur Inkersley, B. A. Real and Sham Observation by Children. Henry L. Clapp Schoolmaster, The, and University Reform. Ethelbert D. Warfield, LL. D. 455 558 Some Pros and Contras on University Extension. Pres. Chas. W. Super State Education, Purposes and Needs. Pres. W. M. Beardshear Support of Secondary and Higher Education by the State. Rev. A. D. Teachers' Aid to Self-Help. Rev. William M. Thayer Teaching, Training, Instructing, Educating. Z. Richards Three Centuries of European Learning in Japan. William C. Kitchen Typewriting, Present Educational Aspect of. Frank H. Palmer Vocation Versus Culture, or the Two Aspects of Education. William Where Holland found "Mr. Bird " (in Arthur Bonnicastle) Why Teachers should go Beyond Text-Books. S. T. Frost 96 108 73 354 77 EDUCATION, DEVOTED TO THE SCIENCE, ART, PHILOSOPHY, AND LITERATURE OF EDUCATION. VOL. XII. SEPTEMBER, 1891. No. I. EIGHTY-EIGHT YEARS RUNNING A BOUNDARY. A STUDY IN HISTORY. 66 BY WILLIAM BARROWS, D. D., AUTHOR OF OREGON," THE UNITED STATES OF YESTERDAY AND OF TOMORROW," ETC. HE surrender of Cornwallis and the treaty of 1783 conceded the nationality of the American Republic. It was with diplomatic struggle that we secured the Great Lakes for its northern and the Mississippi for its western boundary. The English, French and Spanish commissioners would limit the young nation to the watershed of the Alleghanies. Oswald had much English positiveness and almost presumptiveness in this direction, and was aided by the French and Spanish counsellors, whose governments had much territory thinly peopled and but poorly defined lying on the west and south of the coming Republic. But in colonial times the dominion of the thirteen colonies was supposed to extend back from the Atlantic seaboard as far as Great Britain had a just claim, as against France and Spain. When, therefore they assumed and gained independence they presumed that the change affected government only and not boundaries, and that which was theirs formerly, became, by independence their own in sovereignty. The three powers which raised a doubt by their commissioners, had reason to inquire unto what this new nation might grow, whose prospects were so august and prophetic, opening so indefinitely into the wild unknown. A European Great Britain, or Spain or France even could be quietly and obscurely bestowed in the untrodden and unmeasured latitudes and longitudes that lay off somewhere to the west of the new-born nation. The records are explicit, but we cannot stop to cite them, of the grave conferences among the tripartite commissioners, how they might limit the area to be assigned to their young rival. Nor had this been a silent question in their cabinets in Europe during the eight years of struggle, when points of aid and neutrality and recognition pressed on them. Hence the struggle for limitation of territory in the treaty. Oswald for the English, and Vergennes and Rayneval for the French, and Aranda for Spain, would run the line along the watershed that divides the flow between the Atlantic on the one side and the St. Lawrence and Mississippi on the other. But Jay and Franklin were inflexible, and for a time the issue still lay between the pen of the diplomat and the resumed sword of Cornwallis. Jay said: "We shall be content with no boundary short of the Mississippi."1 But the first struggle ended peacefully, and as between England and her disobedient and successful colonies the line was to run up the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes through a smaller chain to the Lake of the Woods. Of course the boundary must be marked for the house lot for the new nation's building, by courses and distances, as the engineers say. At first this would seem to be a simple process; and yet it was eighty-eight years before the United States and Great Britain completed the line of demarkation. For in 1783, American geography was yet in the haze of its morning twilight. Geographers had not even then escaped from the delusion of Columbus in which he dared his great achievement and died, that America was an archipelago lying between Europe and Asia. The best navigators of the age were still exploring for an inland passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1766-'8, Captain Jonathan Carver, a soldier of the frontier in the French war, had pursued this chimera in the regions of the Upper Superior and the country of the Sioux. He there discovered a river, which was said to bear the name of Oregon, and that flowed into the Pacific. He recommended to the English to open, through it, the long-sought route for commerce to China and the East Indies.2 California was for a long time regarded as one of the Islands of the American Archipelago, and "on the early 1 Bancroft, x: 579. ver. Travels throughout the Interior Parts of North America, 1766-1768, by Jonathan Car1813. Spanish maps the Mississippi is not distinguishable from other affluents of the Gulf," says Parkman, in his "Discovery of the Great West." On Morse's map of the United States, quarto, 1822, a river is laid down as rising west of Salt Lake and emptying into the Pacific near San Francisco, with the legend: "Supposed river between the Buena Ventura and the Bay of San Francisco, which will probably be the communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific." And what is more surprising in the ignorance of American geography is this remark by Monette, published in 1846: "To the disappointment of the commercial world this route [the Straits of Anian], still remains as much unknown as it was two hundred years ago: and such it will remain until it is opened by the way of the Oregon River or the Bay of Califor nia." 1 66 And a gross darkness must at the same time have prevailed in Europe over American geography. For when General Kniphausen was bringing over his Hessians, the English mercenaries, to fight our fathers, he was bewildered with the notion that America was but an island in a cluster lying between Europe and Asia. In the tedium of the long voyage, with head winds, heavy fogs and dark nights, and alarmed and half-mutinous soldiers, he approached the captain with deference and the suggestion that in the heavy weather and dark nights they might unwittingly have sailed by America! After the treaty of peace was signed, fixing the St. Croix as our initial eastern boundary, it became a grave question, and matter for a second conference what river was the true St. Croix. When the head of the Mississippi and the Lake of the Woods were made boundary points on the northwest, their supposed relative positions to each other were more than a hundred miles out of the way. From the northwestern point of the Lake of the Woods the line was to run "due west" to the Mississippi. But the head of the Mississippi was a hundred miles and more to the south. In 1770, only thirteen years before, Archbishop Lorenzana had published at the city of Mexico, his history of New Spain, and in it he says: "It is doubtful if the country of New Spain does not border on Tartary and Greenland-by the way of California on the former, and by New Mexico on the latter." 1 Monette's History of the Mississippi Valley, I: 123. Spain "claimed under the name of Florida the whole seacoast as far as Newfoundland, and even to the remotest north. Canada was a part of Florida."- Bancroft's U. S., I., 67. Great Britain and the United States, being weary of the war, and in a wilderness continent, where land seemed superfluous, were willing to make boundary points by assumption, and set hypothetic metes and bounds on a liberal guess, and in lands that neither party had seen, or cared much for. One case will illustrate the perplexity and tediousness and possible irritations in running this line. It was stipulated that from the common bound on the St. Lawrence, on the forty-fifth degree of latitude, the line should take the middle of the river and of the lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron, to the foot of the Neebish Rapids or Sault at the outlet of Lake Superior. In doing this the commissioners found it necessary to agree upon, name and map out about one hundred and eighty islands on the immediate right and left of the dividing line between the two nations. They were about seven and a half years in marking this section of the boundary. One hundred and fifty years before, St. Lusson, with his fifteen white men, Joliet and Perrot being of them, and fourteen Indian tribes, had raised over the Neebish Rapids and the Sault St. Marie, the banner of Louis XIV. Louis XIV. was then thirty-three years of age, and in the twenty-ninth year of his reign, the rising star in Europe, and of exceeding brilliancy. In that magic name St. Lusson took possession, with much ceremony, of the Great Lakes and all the countries they drained, and all lands discovered, or to be discovered, between the North Sea, and the West Sea, and the South Sea. Then Great Britain was inferior and anxious in the new world and the United States were unborn. Now, as Great Britain and the United States pass along with their joint commissioners and corps of engineers, dividing the country between them, only some saintly names of places indicate that the French had ever been there. That brilliant reflection of the Court of Versailles was as flitting at the Sault as the flowers and fragrance of that fourteenth of leafy June, 1671, when they there proclaimed "The Grand Monarch." Under eight treaties and fifteen specifications, this line between the United States and British America was agreed to. The work of eighty-eight years was completed in 1872, by the arbitration of the emperor of Germany, |