American proposals to annex Canada over the past 200 years have been a dime a dozen – or about seven US cents a dozen at present exchange rates. Canadian initiatives to offer the United States provincehood are considerably rarer. Yet in 1870, a visionary band of British North American lawmakers voted to purchase two integral parts of our neighbour’s domain. The annexation scheme, obviously hatched solemnly and without any silliness whatsoever, provoked a media firestorm.

Dateline: Victoria, the sleepy capital of the Colony of British Columbia. The picturesque port had become a boomtown during the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes, but those glory days had given way to a deep recession and the fate of the Pacific Coast colony was uncertain. In 1869, a group of Victoria businessmen even petitioned President Ulysses S. Grant to annex British Columbia to the United States.

Great Britain had different ideas. The Colonial Office had appointed a new governor, Sir Anthony Musgrave, with a mission to unite British Columbia with Canada. Musgrave quietly drafted a set of proposed terms of union and discussed them with his Ottawa counterpart, Governor General Sir John Young. The stage was set.

The colony’s Legislative Council opened debate on Musgrave’s proposed Confederation deal on March 9, 1870. Clause by clause, the councillors considered and endorsed Musgrave’s proposed terms, including a per capita subsidy, a formula for representation in the federal parliament, and a transcontinental railway.

So far, so good, until one councillor went off script. Amor de Cosmos (“The Lover of the Universe”), known to his mother as William Smith, was the eccentric founder of Victoria’s British Colonist newspaper and a representative for Victoria District. Originally from Nova Scotia and a loud advocate of Confederation, de Cosmos would eventually serve as British Columbia’s second premier.

On March 25, de Cosmos rose to add an item to the Terms. In his speech, he imagined a clean division of North America into three nations, each organized along a strict east-west axis. An admirer of the United States, de Cosmos did not oppose the Americans expanding in the south – their natural sphere of influence. He did, however, object to their 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia: Alaska, he believed, was a natural extension of Canada. Therefore, he moved that Canada buy Alaska from the United States as a condition of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation.

The representative for Cariboo, Dr. R.W.W. Carrall, eagerly seconded the motion. Carrall was a Woodstock, Ontario, boy and a fiercely proud Canadian: in 1879, as one of British Columbia’s senators, he would introduce the bill that made Dominion Day (now Canada Day) a statutory holiday. Endorsing de Cosmos’ modest proposal, Carrall asserted that if Americans hoped that “hemming in” British Columbia with Alaska would drive Canada to accept American annexation, they woefully underestimated the strength of Canadian patriotism. “It is not necessary for Canadians to get up and show their loyalty daily,” observed Carrall, “they are ready and able to occupy their position of IMPERIUM IN IMPERIO,” a Canadian empire within the British one.

But Alaska alone would not satisfy these Canadian imperialists. John Robson, member for New Westminster and another future British Columbia premier, suggested a friendly amendment to add the State of Maine to the legislature’s shopping list. Mainers themselves clamoured to become Canadians, claimed Robson, and much of Canada’s trade already passed through the state’s ice-free harbour at Portland. Robson even noted that Great Britain had been “cheated” out of Maine, a reference to the so-called Aroostook War of 1839, an ultimately bloodless conflict over timber rights along the disputed Maine-New Brunswick border. Adding Maine on the Atlantic coast and Alaska on the Pacific would round out the Dominion’s borders nicely, while demonstrating the superiority of Canada’s “liberal and enlightened constitution” over the “very defective” institutions of the United States.

Robson’s speech referred to real and longstanding irritants, but the politicians were also having fun. The member for Lillooet, Thomas Basil Humphreys, predicted that the initiative would land the Legislative Council in the pages of Punch, the popular British satirical magazine, and the legislative clerk recorded “(Laughter)” several times in his transcript of the proceedings. Although they passed the resolution while deliberating as a Committee of the Whole, the earnest lawmakers struck the Alaska and Maine demand later that same day when they approved the proposed Terms of Union in regular session. A dead letter before the Terms were transmitted to Ottawa, the resolution nevertheless caused a stir in the United States.

By March 28, news of British Columbia’s designs on Alaska and Maine had reached California by telegram and the American press did not know quite what to make of it. San Francisco’s largest newspaper, the Daily Alta California, interpreted the resolution as a veiled plea for American annexation, because the legislature’s demands for both a railway and the purchase of American territory seemed so impractical. “The British Columbians can have both the railroad and national unity with Alaska by annexation to the United States,” promised the Alta’s editor, “and they will not get either in our time by any other means.”

As word spread eastward, more American papers tried to parse the resolution. Most took it as a joke. The New York Times scolded BC’s legislators for “growing sharp and satirical at the expense of their neighbors,” but allowed that “as an effort of humor on the part of men in the higher latitudes it is not so bad.” In some cases, Americans’ own sectional and partisan rivalries loomed larger than any worries about Canadian expansionism. The Idaho World, edited by a Missouri-raised Democrat, hoped that Canada would take the rest of the Republican-voting northeast as well. “We think the United States could afford to pay [Canada] a few millions to accept the New England States as a present, as we would be getting rid of an intolerable nuisance.”

The most interesting American commentary was in the “Maine stream” media – the Pine Tree State’s own papers. “To annex or to be annexed? That seems to be the question,” mused the Daily Kennebec Journal in Augusta, the state capital. The Journal conceded that union with Canada might be in the state’s interest, provided free trade with the United States was maintained. Otherwise, the paper predicted, an impoverished Canada would seek statehood of its own accord. The Portland Daily Press had more fun with the proposition. It warned that an occupying Canada would inherit a bevy of petty local disputes and could count on a steady stream of vain Maine millionaires seeking baronetcies from Queen Victoria.

In the 1870s, before the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, news from British Columbia typically reached eastern Canada through the United States, so by the time Canadian papers reported on the Alaska-Maine resolution, the American response had become part of the story. When the Toronto Globe commented – on April 1, appropriately if coincidentally – it noted the “agitation” of the American press but also praised the resolution as a “good natured, but not altogether pointless” response to “the filibustering propensities” of American politicians. On the substance of the resolution, the paper’s editor believed, as Robson did, that nature would eventually give Maine to Canada, but felt that Uncle Sam should keep frozen, unproductive Alaska: “We like real estate,” allowed the Globe, which supported Canadian westward expansion, “but then we like some soil on it.”

Thus fizzled the project of bringing Alaska and Maine into Confederation, but the incident is not just an amusing anecdote. The Daily Alta California may have correctly predicted that British Columbia would never enjoy “national unity” with Alaska, but it was wrong about a Canadian transcontinental railway, and about British North Americans’ purported willingness to join the United States. Canadians might not have felt the need, as Dr. Carrall noted, to shout their patriotism daily, but when necessity called, their legislators showed that they could push back against American annexationism in creative and satirical ways.