The Canadian West and the American Northwest offer a valuable setting for considering issues of borders and borderlands. The regions contain certain similarities, and during the first half of the nineteenth century they were even grouped together as a distinct political and economic unit, called the "Oregon Country" by Americans and the "Columbia Department" of the Hudson's Bay Company by the British.

The essays in this volume -- which grew out of a conference commemorating the Oregon Treaty of 1846 -- view the boundary between Canada and the United States as a dividing line and also...