At the close of the Revolution the chief aim of the American negotiators, as is evinced throughout their correspondence, was to obtain a recognition of the right of their country to the western territory as far as the St. Lawrence on the north, and the Mississippi on the west. When the British Government acceded to this proposition it was regarded by the Americans as an important concession, and their plenipotentiaries proceeded upon that concession as the principle on which their boundary towards Canada, after it had struck the St. Lawrence, was to be defined. They brought the line from Nova Scotia to the St. Lawrence, and then followed up the main stream of the river to what they believed to be its principal source, and what was supposed to approach the nearest to the source of the Mississippi. In fanciful conformity to this intention, the second article of the treaty of 1783, after having carried the line to Lake Superior, stipulates that it shall be continued onwards through the middle of certain water communications to the north-west point of the Lake of the Woods, and thence due west to the Mississippi. The fact, however, is that the waters of the Lake of the Woods feed streams which fall into Hudson's Bay, but have no communication with any waters which fall into Lake Superior. It is also a fact that a line drawn due west from the Lake of the Woods would never reach the Mississippi, which lies far to the south of such a line. But there was a reason for such egregious blundering. The country had never been surveyed by men of science. Its physical features had been derived from the vague and inaccurate accounts of ignorant traders and bushrangers, which had formed the basis for the current maps. These laid down a large river running from the Lake of the Woods and falling into Lake Superior. If there had been such a river in existence, there can be no doubt, from the body of waters contained in the Lake of the Woods, that it would have been a much larger stream than any of the feeders of Lake Superior. It was therefore most natural that the negotiators should suppose the Lake of the Woods to be the main source of the St. Lawrence. At the same time this must have appeared to them the point at which the waters of the St. Lawrence approached the nearest to the source of the Mississippi, because in the maps of the bushrangers the Mississippi is laid down as rising four or five degrees of latitude farther north than it does in fact, and as coming within a short distance of the Lake of the Woods on the west. As the negotiators in Paris in 1783 reposed the greatest confidence in these crude productions of the cartographer, is it surprising that the second article of the treaty should be full of inconsistencies? On any other supposition the intention of the negotiators would be fatuous and incomprehensible. [Sidenote: Examination of American claims.]