CORRESPONDENCE OF 1822-1825. 143 



instead of trading with the Russian possessions in America. The Count 

 stated that the Eussian Company had represented this traffic as clan- 

 destine, by which means the savage islanders, in exchange for otter 

 skins, had been furnished with firearms and powder, with which they 

 had destroyed a Russian fort, with the loss of several lives. He ex- 

 pressly disclaimed, however, any disposition on the part of Russia to 

 abridge this traffic of the citizens of the United States, but proposed a 

 convention by which it should be carried on exclusively with the agents 

 ot the Russian American Company at Kadiak, a small island near the 

 l)romontory of Alaska, at least 700 miles distant from the other settle- 

 ment at Sitka. 



On the 4th of January, 1810, Mr. Daschkoff, charge d'affaires and 

 consul-general from Russia, renewed this proposal of a convention, and 

 requested as an alternative that the United States should, by a legis- 

 lative act, prohibit the trade of their citizens with the natives of the 

 northwest coast of America as nnlawful and irregular, and thereby 

 induce them to carry on the trade exclusively with the agents of the 

 Russian American Company. The answer of the Secretary of State, 

 dated the 5th of May, 1810, declines those proposals for reasons which 

 were then satisfactory to the Russian Government, or to which at 

 at least no reply on their part was made. Coj)ies of these papers and 

 of those containing the instructions of the minister of the United States 

 then at St. Petersburg, and the relation of his conferences witli the 

 chancellor of the empire, Count Romanzoff, on this subject are here- 

 with inclosed. By them it will be seen that the Russian Government 

 at that time explicitly declined the assertion of any boundary line upon 

 the northwest coast, and that the proposal of measures for confining the 

 trade of the citizens of the United States exclusively to the Russian 

 settlement at Kadiak and with the agents of the Russian American 

 Company had been made by Count Romanzoff under the impression 

 that they would be as advantageous to the interests of the United 

 States as to those of Russia. 



It is necessary now to say that this impression was erroneous ; that the 

 traffic of the citizens of the United States with the natives of the north- 

 west coast was neither clandestine, nor unlawful, nor irregular; that 

 it had been enjoyed many years before the Russian American Company 

 existed, and that it interfered with no lawfnl right or claim of Russia. 



This trade has been shared also by the English, French, and Portu- 

 guese. In the prosecution of it the English settlement of ISTootka Sound 

 was made, which occasioned the differences between Great Britain and 

 Spain in 1789 and 1790, ten years before the Russian American Com- 

 jjauy was first chartered. 



It was in the prosecution of this trade that the American settlement 

 at the mouth of the Columbia River was made in 1811, which was taken 

 bv the British during the late war, and formally restored to them on 

 the 6th of October, 1818. By the treaty of the 22d of February, 1810, 

 with Spain, the United States acquired all the rights of Spain north of 

 latitude 42°; and by the third article of the convention between the 

 United States and Great Britain of the 20th of October, 1818, it was 

 agreed that any country that might be claimed by either party on the 

 northwest coast of America, westward of the Stony Mountains, should, 

 together with its harbors, bays, and creeks, and the navigation of all 

 rivers within the same, be free and open for the term of ten years from 

 that date to the vessels, citizens, and subjects of the two powers, with- 

 out xirejudice to the claims of either party or of any other State. 



You are authorized to propose an article of the same import for a 



