experiences of the war fresh in mind, the new Secretary of War,
Calhoun, urged upon the Government the necessity of taking resolute
measures to hold this territory. Laws excluding foreigners from the
Indian trade were passed; forts were established at strategic points
like Chicago, Prairie du Chien, and Green Bay; and in 1820, Governor
Cass, of the Michigan Territory, was sent on an expedition through the
Wisconsin forests into Minnesota, to assert American claims wherever
British influence was still felt.

Still farther west lay an almost unknown region of imperial dimensions.
Save where venturesome pioneers had pushed up the Arkansas and the
Missouri, and where the Spaniards maintained their feeble hold in the
Southwest, no white men inhabited the great prairies which swept
westward to the foothills of the Rockies. Only nomadic Indian tribes and
occasional traders followed the buffalo trails across this wide expanse.
Between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific was the region which Lewis
and Clark had penetrated. Along the valley of the northern branch of the
Columbia River, the Hudson's Bay Company had planted their trading
posts. Farther to the south lay Spanish California and the ill-defined
region to the eastward over which _presidios_ maintained a shadowy
jurisdiction.

On October 20, 1818, Benjamin Rush and Albert Gallatin, ministers to
England and France respectively, concluded a convention with Great
Britain which left the fate of the Oregon country in suspense for a
period of ten years. To the British claims of prior discovery by Cook
and Mackenzie and of prior occupation by the Hudson's Bay Company, the
American commissioners opposed the claims based on the voyage of Captain
Gray in 1792 and on the founding of Astoria by John Jacob Astor in 1811.
It was finally agreed that the northern boundary of the United States
should run from the Lake of the Woods to the Stony Mountains, along the
forty-ninth parallel, and that the disputed country beyond the mountains
should be occupied jointly for a period of ten years. An agreement was
also reached regarding the Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries.

On another frontier conditions existed to which Congress could not
remain indifferent. East Florida was still a thorn in the side of
Georgia and Alabama. The province had become a rendezvous for pirates,
filibusters, renegade Indians, and runaway negroes. Creek warriors who
would not submit to the loss of their lands ha