In the early forties, however, so many Americans had arrived and settled in the neutral territory that it could be left neutral no longer. The United States government not only withdrew from the joint arrangement, but claimed the whole territory between California and Alaska for itself. This would have shut off the British colonies from all access to the Pacific Ocean, as absolutely as the French claims a century before would have shut off the Americans. To guard against emergencies, and if possible to find a peaceful way out of the difficulty, a ship of the British Navy, the _American_, in 1845 visited Vancouver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported to have exclaimed, “I would not give one of the bleakest knolls of all the bleak hills of Scotland for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric glories.” The captain’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, was Foreign Minister, but happily he did not throw away the future of British America because its glories at that time were “barbaric.” The trouble was ended in 1846 by a compromise. All the western territories north of the 49th degree of latitude (except, of course, Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and all south of that degree to the United States. It was the most charmingly simple way of creating a frontier that could be imagined: rule a straight line across the map from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific shore, a line 1,200 miles long without a break, and the thing is done. Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the Arctic Ocean the British power was represented by a great trading corporation. The Hudson’s Bay Company, as you will remember, had had its commercial monopoly extended to the Pacific shore as early as 1821, and it was no more anxious for the spread of settlement among the mountains and on the western islands than it had been on the prairie and in the woodland of the interior. The rising tide of white population would drive away the game and demoralize the native hunters. A little agriculture was indulged in, so that the Company’s forts should not go without fresh vegetables, and early in the nineteenth century a certain number of farmers were encouraged to take up land because the Company had contracted to feed the Russian fur traders up in Alaska. On Puget Sound, when the artist Kane reached the coast in 1847, a ranching company had about 6,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle. The wool found its way to England by the Company’s ships—the cattle were killed and salted for the Sandwich Islands and the Russian territory.