ghanies, and everything beyond was in the hands of the French. In that most momentous war the genius of the elder Pitt won the region east of the Mississippi for men of English race, while the vast territory of Louisiana, beyond, passed under the control of Spain. During the Revolutionary War, in a series of romantic expeditions, the state of Virginia took military possession of a great part of the wilderness east of the Mississippi, founding towns in the Ohio and Cumberland valleys, and occupying with garrisons of her state militia the posts at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes. We have seen how, through the skill of our commissioners at Paris, this noble country was secured for the Americans in the treaty of 1783, in Conflicting spite of the reluctance of France and the western the hostility of Spain. Throughout territory the Revolutionary War the Americans claimed this territory as part of the United States; but when once it passed from under the control of Great Britain, into whose hands did it go? To whom did it belong? To this question there were various and conflicting answers. North Carolina, indeed, had already taken possession of what was afterward called Tennessee, and at the beginning of the war Virginia had annexed Kentucky. As to these points there could be little or no dispute. But with the territory north of the Ohio River it was very different. claims to Four states laid claim either to the whole or to parts of this territory, and these claims were not simply conflicting, but irreconcilable. Claims of setts and Con- The charters of Massachusetts and Connecticut were framed at a time when people had not got over the notion that this part of the continent was scarcely wider than Mexico, and accordingly those colonies had received the royal permission to extend from sea to sea. The existence of a foreign colony of Dutchmen in the neighbourhood was a trifle about which these documents did not trouble themselves; but when Charles II. conquered this colony and bestowed it upon his brother, the province of New York became a stubborn fact, which could not be disregarded. Massachusetts and Connecticut peaceably settled their boundary line with New York, and laid no claims to land within the limits of that state; but they still continued to claim what lay beyond it, as far as the Mississippi River, where the Spanish dominion now began. The regions claimed by Massachusetts have since become the southern halves of the states of Michigan and Wisconsin. The region claimed by Connecticut was a narrow strip running over the northern portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and we have seen how much trouble was occasioned in Pennsylvania by this circumstance. But New York laughed to scorn those claims of Connecticut. In the seventeenth century all the Algonquin tribes between Lake Claims of Erie and the Cumberland Mountains New York had become tributary to the Iroquois; and during the hundred years' struggle between France and England for the supremacy of this continent the Iroquois had put themselves under the protection of England, which thenceforth always treated them as an appurtenance to New York. For a hundred years before the Revolution, said New York, she had borne all expense of protecting the Iroquois against the French, and by various treaties she had become lawful suzerain over the Six Nations and their lands and the lands of their Algonquin vassals. On such grounds New York claimed pretty much everything north of the Ohio and east of the Miami. But, according to Virginia, it made little difference what Massachusetts and Connecticut and New York thought about the matter, for every acre of land, from the Ohio Virginia's River up to Lake Superior, belonged claims to her. Was not she the lordly "Old Dominion," out of which every one of the states had been carved? Even Cape Cod and Cape Ann were said to be in "North Virginia" until, in 1614, Captain John Smith invented the name "New England." It was a fair presumption |