When it was announced that President Theodore Roosevelt was looking for a place with a cool climate to hold the peace negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War, Portland was among the communities that volunteered its services. A delegation of locals set out for Washington D.C. to tell federal officials they had several big hotels and plenty of international cables passing through the city for sending telegrams.

In keeping with the long-standing rivalry between Bangor and Portland, the Bangor Daily News couldn’t help taking a potshot at the southern city’s flagrant boosterism. Portland would be a great place for the overstressed negotiators because it was “a nice and quiet little city” where you could hear “the tinkle of little cowbells” in the public squares. “It has a restful and a ruminating air about the streets which would calm agonized nerves and reduce heart action amazingly.”

Bangor, on the other hand, was a bustling, noisy “city of business” where people got up early and worked late. Cows were kept in the suburbs.

Of course, those who recall their high school history know that Portsmouth, N.H. won the honors, and the result is known as the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed Sept. 5, 1905. The negotiators, however, actually stayed in the Hotel Wentworth, which is located next door in an island community,

New Castle, N.H. And the envoys conducted negotiations in Maine. One of the real reasons Portsmouth was picked over Portland was the existence nearby of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which as everybody now knows, is located in Maine on an island on the Kittery side of the Piscataqua River.

The debate over whether the shipyard is in New Hampshire or Maine was settled in recent years by the U.S. Supreme Court. It seems that back in 1905, however, the shipyard’s location was pretty well known – except apparently to Assistant Secretary of State Herbert H. D. Peirce. When he announced that the proceedings would be held in Portsmouth at the navy yard, the Portsmouth Herald dryly commented that he had made a slight error: No matter how powerful the government was, it couldn’t annex part of one state for another.

The confusion over the location of the shipyard spawned a debate over whether the treaty should be named after Portsmouth or Kittery. Some Mainers urged leaders to seize the day: “Governor Cobb of Maine wake up! My brothers and sisters of our dear old Pine Tree State come out! … Now is your golden opportunity to seize the lion’s share of the ‘dignity and honor’ that have been floating around at random during these months of solemn negotiations,” cried one letter-to-the-editor writer.

A BDN editorial joined the charge. Naming the treaty after Portsmouth would be in the same category as naming Breed’s Hill after Bunker Hill or “this big continent” after Amerigo Vespucci. The writer suggested a compromise: the Treaty of Piscataqua.

News coverage of the treaty negotiations dominated the BDN’s front page for more than a month. The newspaper relied mainly on wire stories except for the occasional local angle its staff was able to develop. For example, on Aug. 2, a story appeared reporting that Henry Reed Hatfield, a prominent lawyer from Philadelphia and a summer resident of Bar Harbor, had offered his cottage, Thingvalia, to Baron Komura, the Japanese peace negotiator, for his use either before or after the negotiations.

Toward the end of the negotiations, an actual power broker checked into the Bangor House. On Sept, 1, the paper reported that Bar Harbor summer resident Jacob H. Schiff, a prominent New York financier, had been in Bangor attending a memorial service for his father at the Beth Israel Synagogue on Center Street. Schiff, who had been instrumental in providing Japan with wartime loans, had written a letter to the Japanese negotiators warning that the United States, England and Germany would no longer be able to finance the country’s requirements if the war continued much longer.

The paper reported that Schiff had gone to Portsmouth to confer with the envoys. The BDN reporter was struck by the gravity with which Schiff refused comment when accosted on the street between the hotel and the synagogue: “….it made you feel as though you had a great deal to be thankful for for not being arrested.”

The Treaty of Portsmouth made Japan a world power and it was a major factor in the fall of the Czar and the rise of the Soviet state. The Japanese victory touched off nationalist revolutions throughout Asia, effectively ending European supremacy there. Besides World War I, the settlement was an important link in the chain of events leading to World War II, Korea, Vietnam and other Asian conflicts.

President Roosevelt won international recognition, orchestrating much of the negotiations himself from afar. In retrospect, some historians such as Samuel Eliot Morison, found fault. “Between 1941 and 1945 the United States paid heavily for the long-term results of Roosevelt’s meddling, for which, ironically, he won the Nobel Peace Prize,” Morison wrote in “The Oxford History of the American People.”

There was no such quibbling back then, however. “….President Roosevelt’s splendid courage and unrivalled tact did more toward accomplishing the result than all other agencies. … He has set an example for all subsequent rulers to follow,” the BDN said. If the treaty could not be named after Kittery or the Piscataqua River then maybe it should be named after Roosevelt, the paper suggested.

Wayne E. Reilly may be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.