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What if there was an earlier solution of the Oregon boundary dispute?

In 1818, in a last-ditch effort to avoid joint occupation, Gallatin and Rush offered the British the Gulf of Georgia and the territory that it drained. This would have awarded "all the territory draining west from the Cascade divide and north from the Columbia River divide into the gulf" and the entirety of the Puget Sound along with the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca to the United Kingdom.[1]

This offer, unofficial and confidential, was evidently rejected by the British out of hand; it was not mentioned by the British plenipotentiaries in their report submitted to the Foreign Office. Neither side regarded the harbors in the Gulf of Georgia is being of very great importance compared to the question of who would control the valley of the Columbia south of the 49th parallel.

As Merk notes, "Ultimately some of these harbors did become major ports. They developed into entrepots of a world-wide commerce. They became so largely because railroads gave them overland connection with a continental interior. But in 1818 railroads were a development still in the future. No one dreamed of the impact they would make on modern life."[2]

POD: British accept Gallatin-Rush offer in 1818. What impact would that have had on Canada and the USA?
(Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, etc. would be part of Canada)


[1]Merk, Frederick (1950), "The Ghost River Caledonia in the Oregon Negotiation of 1818", The American Historical Review, 50 (3): 530–551
[2]Frederick Merk's *The Oregon Question: Essays in Anglo-American Diplomacy and Politics* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1967). pp. 59-60.

Edit: Updated [1] re borders
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