202 
Indiana University 
Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick was the beginning of an era 
of expansion and consolidation. The greatest event in the 
first session of the Dominion Parliament, which was opened 
at Ottawa November 7, 1867, was the movement started by 
Hon. William McDougall for annexing the Northwest over 
which the Hudson Bay Company had so long been a sovereign 
power in disguise. The imperial government was asked to 
transfer to the Dominion government the jurisdiction over 
all those vast territories. It was urged that their annexation 
to Canada would forestall an attempt to annex them to the 
United States. It was seen that the increasing American 
growth on the frontier and on the western coast of America, 
and the acquisition of new ports on the Pacific, must be met 
by the colonization of western Canada and British Columbia 
and by the opening of roads across the continent. 
This Canadian movement met with some opposition in the 
United States, especially in Minnesota, where the proposi- 
tion that England should transfer to the Dominion (by an 
order in council) all the territory between Minnesota and 
Alaska, which had been “settled largely from the United 
States”, was regarded as an “unwarranted interference with 
the principles of self-government” which could “not be re- 
garded with indifference by the people of the United States”. 
In December, 1867, and again in January, 1868, Senator 
Ramsey, who had had an active part in the development of 
Minnesota, offered to the Senate a resolution directing the 
committee on foreign relations to inquire into the expediency 
of negotiating with the Dominion a treaty of reciprocity^® 
with a clause providing that Canada with the consent of Great 
Britain should cede to the United States the districts of North 
America west of 90° longitude, on condition that the United 
States pay $6,000,000 to the Hudson Bay Company, assume 
the public debt of British Columbia to the amount of $2,000,- 
000 to aid in the construction of a northern Pacific railway 
from Lake Superior to Puget Sound, and agree to organize 
the region into not less than three territories with the laws 
and rights of Montana as far as they could be made appli- 
cable.'"’^ A few weeks later (on March 6) the Minnesota legis- 
The resolution provided for a duty of only five per cent ad valorem on the 
exclusive products and manufactures of each country, the assimilation of excise duties 
by concurrent legislation, the navigation of the St. Lawrence, freedom of the Atlantic 
coast fisheries, and a common system of laws regulating copyrights, patents, and postage. 
59 Senate Miscellaneous Documents, No. 4, 40-2, Vol. I, December 9, 1867 ; also, Senate 
Miscellaneous Documents, No. 22, 40-2, January 31, 1868. 
