Essay by Alexandra L. Montgomery, University of Pennsylvania
Department of History
Survey of Bone, or St. Croix Island, 1797
Used by the British Secretary Ward Chapman of the St. Croix Commission (1796-1798) to help settle the dispute over the Northeast boundary of the United States. This ill-defined boundary, based on an inaccurate map, was laid out in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Maine Historical Society
The European history of the borderland region between what is today the American state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick was, prior to about 1800, one largely of failure and confusion. For example, in 1604, Passamaquoddy Bay was the site of one of the first French overwintering settlements in the Americas under an expedition led by Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons and Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Québec. They named the island they camped on that first winter “St. Croix,” either as a reflection of the cross-shaped conjunction of the rivers around it or as a reflection on the party’s hopes of using the site as a base for converting the local population. The French quickly abandoned the island, however, after a disastrous winter that left nearly half the colonists dead.
A few years later, an English settlement was established at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Known as the Popham or Sagadahock Colony, it barely lasted a year, from 1607-1608. The region was also impacted by the 1621 grant given by the Scottish Crown to William Alexander, First Earl of Stirling. This grant, of a new colony to be named Nova Scotia—the first time the name was used to refer to the region—covered all the land northeast of Passamaquoddy Bay, from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and used Champlain’s Saint Croix River as a western boundary. Yet Alexander’s attempt to actually make good on his grant by transporting settlers was an immediate and complete failure. These seventeenth-century efforts to bring the region into the European world each collapsed so quickly and immediately that the Wabanaki inhabitants of the region could be forgiven for barely considering them. And yet, their ghostly skeletons formed the structure by which Euroamericans understood the entire region. Indeed, as documents in the Barclay collection reveal, they were ultimately the basis on which the modern US-Canada border was determined.