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    • Main contributor: David Heffernan
    The disputed Oregon Territory

    The Oregon Treaty was a diplomatic agreement signed between the governments of the United States of America and Britain on the 15th of June 1846. It was designed to fix where the border lay between the United States and British Canada, which at the time was still a directly ruled British set of colonies. It concerned the border from the western end of the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean. The border further east around places like Michigan, Vermont and New York State had been decided on at the end of previous conflicts like the American Revolutionary War. It is important to remember that the 1846 agreement did not relate primarily to the modern-day state of Oregon. Instead it was called the Oregon Treaty as the vast region around the north-western United States in places like North Dakota, Montana and Washington State was known for much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the Oregon Territory. The Treaty agreed that the border would lie along the 49th Line of Latitude North of the Equator. The finalizing of where the border was facilitated the westwards expansion of European and Americans settlers into places like Saskatchewan, Montana and Washington in decades to come, leading to considerable western migration to these places.[1]

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    Oregon Treaty chronology of eventsOregon Treaty chronology of events

    The border between the United States and Canada seems like a fairly easy thing to have been decided upon if we look at a modern map. There’s largely a straight line running from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean going along by the 49th Parallel, albeit one confused slightly by the Great Lakes. However, this border was actually decided upon over a long period of time. Firstly, prior to 1763 and the end of the Seven Years’ War, before which the French controlled what is now western Canada around Quebec and Ontario, there were constant clashes between the British, who ruled the Thirteen Colonies that would later make up the United States, and the French, especially over regions like Michigan and Ohio. A lot of these disputes were temporarily solved when the British took over Canada at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763.[2]

    George Vancouver

    Then the issue reignited after the American Revolutionary War began in 1775. The fighting had effectively ended after the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. One of the key issues under dispute at the peace talks in Paris between 1781 and the eventual signing of the treaty there in 1783 that brought the war to an end was where the border between the new United States of America and British Canada would lie. A border westwards towards the Great Lakes was decided upon, as the land further to the west was still largely uninhabited by anybody other that the Native Americans, First Nations people and the odd band of fur traders. The War of 1812 between the British and Americans extended the border agreements further west, but even so there remained disagreements well into the nineteenth century.[3]

    The main issue was really about the border along the Oregon Territory and what later became the province of British Columbia, basically the Pacific coastal regions of modern-day Canada and the United States. The Oregon Territory at the time effectively covered Montana, Oregon, Washington State and a few pockets of land in Idaho and Wyoming. These were unincorporated territories (i.e. they were not states of the federal union) and they had experienced virtually zero Euro-American settler colonialism. Instead, those settlers who were heading out west in the US at this time were going to places like the Republic of Texas, Alabama, where a cotton boom and land rush were occurring, or the Great Lakes region where cities like Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul were really starting to take off in Illinois and Minnesota.[4]

    President James Polk

    Nevertheless, ever since George Vancouver and other explorers had charted the Pacific coast of North America for the British in the 1790s and Lewis and Clark’s expedition had crossed the continental United States to the Oregon Territory in the mid-1800s, there was an awareness that a border dispute existed here. Sooner or later, be it in the 1820s, 1840s, 1860s or 1880s, Euro-American settlers would come to these regions seeking land, and they would want to know which country they were living in. Hence, in the mid-1840s, the issue of the Oregon border became a political topic in Washington D.C., especially during the 1844 US Presidential Election when the eventual winner, James Polk, presented himself as an ambitious American expansionist.[5]

    After Polk won the election diplomatic discussions began. There was already an agreement that the 49th Parallel should form the border, but there were nuances around the waterways to be resolved, especially so since there are numerous islands around the coastal regions between modern-day Seattle and Vancouver. Some particularly jingoistic American foreign policy hawks even wanted the border extended as far north as the Russian settlements in Alaska and to basically seize British Columbia on the basis that the British had no real colonial settlements here at all yet.[6]

    In the end common sense won out. The new President, James Polk, agreed to conclude with the British that the 49th Parallel would be set firmly as the border between British Canada and the United States. The Russian position in Alaska was reluctantly accepted, although the US found their own way of solving that two decades later through the Alaska Purchase. The Oregon Treaty, which primarily concerned Washington and Montana, was signed on the 15th of June 1846. Some minor disputes continued to arise in the 1850s, most notably the bizarre Pig War over the shooting of a pig that had wandered across the border on San Juan Island and which led to the stationing of troops there for fifteen years thereafter. However, for the most part the Oregon Treaty settled the major boundary disputes between the United States and what would start to become an increasingly independent Canada from 1867 onwards.[7]

    Extent of migration and demographic impact of the Oregon TreatyExtent of migration and demographic impact of the Oregon Treaty

    Early settlers in Montana, c. 1870

    When the Oregon Treaty was signed in 1846, the United States was just after entering into the Mexican-American War. Through this it acquired a vast stretch of territory running from New Mexico and Colorado west to California and Oregon itself. Then gold was discovered in California in 1848. Thus, while a huge westwards migration of people into the American West began in the late 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, these people were heading overwhelmingly for places like California, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Colorado. The lands that had been decided upon by the Oregon Treaty were not attractive prospects for new settlers from the East Coast and from Europe.[8]

    It was only in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, after the thirst for land by millions of Europeans arriving to the US from countries like Ireland, Italy, Germany and the Russian Empire continued unabated, that large waves of settlers arrived into the lands which had been secured via the Oregon Treaty. We can get a sense of this by looking at Montana and Washington State alone. In 1870 the US federal census recorded just over 20,500 people living in Montana. That figure had nearly doubled to over 39,000 by 1880. In 1889 Montana became a state, hardly surprising when we consider that its population was now nearing 130,000 people, and by 1900 there were nearly a quarter of a million people here.[9]

    Seattle around 1880

    In Washington State a similar story was seen. Around 1,200 western settlers lived her in 1850. This grew to over 11,000 in 1860. A slow creeping growth occurred down to 1870 when 23,000 people lived here. Then it really took off. 75,000 people were recorded here in the census of 1880, then 357,000 in 1890, 518,000 in 1900 and over 1.1 million souls by 1910. The Klondike Gold Rush further north in British Columbia and the Yukon Territory certainly added to this in the late 1890s and early 1900s, but what mattered most was just the sheer thirst for land. As states like California, Texas, Colorado and Oregon filled up with new settlers between the 1850s and 1870s, new settlers looked to the lands that had been guaranteed to the US under the terms of the Oregon Treaty of 1846 to go and live in. So, if a person has an ancestor who moved out to Seattle, Montana or Wyoming in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, they were in a certain way the beneficiaries of the Oregon Treaty, a political document which explains the genealogical landscape of the northwest of the United States to an extent 180 years later.[10]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Oregon TreatyExplore more about the Oregon Treaty

    References

    1. ↑ Henry Commager, ‘England and Oregon Treaty of 1846’, in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (March, 1927), pp. 18–38.
    2. ↑ Stephen Conway, ‘Britain and the Impact of the American War, 1775–1783’, in War in History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July, 1995), pp. 127–150.
    3. ↑ https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/major-events/war-of-1812-overview/
    4. ↑ Brian Page and Richard Walker, ‘From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-Industrial Revolution in the American Midwest’, in Economic Geography, Vol. 67, No. 4 (October, 1991), pp. 281–315.
    5. ↑ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/oregon-territory
    6. ↑ https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/oregon-treaty
    7. ↑ R. L. Schuyler, ‘Polk and the Oregon Compromise of 1846’, in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (September, 1911), pp. 443–461.
    8. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goldrush-california/
    9. ↑ https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1900/bulletins/demographic/33-population-mt.pdf
    10. ↑ https://www2.census.gov/library/visualizations/2000/dec/2000-resident-population/washington.pdf


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    APA citation (7th Ed.)

    David Heffernan. (2025, October 29). *Oregon Treaty*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Oregon_Treaty