Geographical knowledge was creeping on, but the wording of the Article shows that it was still uncertain whether the North-Westernmost point of the Lake of the Woods was North or South of the 49th parallel. This doubt was finally cleared up by the Commissioners who, as already stated, reported in October, 1826, and who fixed the point in question in 49° 23′ 55″ North; thus, when Lord Ashburton negotiated the 1842 Treaty, it was only left for him, adopting the point which the Commissioners had fixed, to lay down in the Second Article that the boundary line ran ‘thence, according to existing treaties, due South to its intersection with the 49th parallel of North latitude, and along that parallel to the Rocky Mountains’. The 49th parallel runs through the Lake of the Woods, but the anterior provision that the boundary line should be carried to the North-Westernmost point of the lake, coupled with the fact that that point had been already determined, necessitated an unnatural and inconvenient diversion of the frontier line first to the North-West and then due South again, thereby including in American territory a small corner of land which should clearly have been assigned to Canada. For this result Lord Ashburton has been blamed, as he was blamed in the matter of the Maine boundary, but in either case his hands were tied by previous negotiations and the wording of existing treaties. A fair review of the whole subject leads to the conclusion that the Treaty of Washington in 1842 was a not inadequate compromise of the almost insuperable difficulties which the wording of the original Treaty of 1783 had left outstanding. [Sidenote: Later boundary questions.] In tracing the evolution of the boundary between Canada and the United States we have now reached the point where the 1783 Treaty ceased to operate, and have seen that the negotiations connected with the interpretation of the Treaty resulted in the line of demarcation being carried far beyond that point, viz., the head of the Mississippi, up to the range of the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile the Pacific Coast had begun to attract attention, and a new crop of international questions had come into existence. [Sidenote: The Oregon boundary dispute.]