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APPENDIX.

CHAPTER I.

ILLINOIS.

Formation into a Territory-Officers-Formation of Legislative Districts

Territorial Legislation-Personal.

We learn from the History of the United States that the Illinois country was first explored by LaSalle, the French Missionaries and Indian traders, who formed the earliest settlement at Kaskaskia, in 1683; that the country was first owned by the French and was afterward ceded to Great Britain, when it became a part of the possessions of Virginia. The questions growing out of the ownership, by several States, of vast tracts of unoccupied land, were very difficult of solution, owing, in many instances, to rival claims based on the comprehensive, illdefined, and often conflicting grants made by different sovereigns of England to colonies and colonists in the new world; and the conviction in various quarters that all the territory acquired from Great Britain by the treaty of 1783, having been secured by the blood and the treasure of the whole people, should be held by all the States as common property. The data in possession of the European governments in relation to this continent were so vague that it was impossible to define their grants with anything like accuracy; and they seemed to think that the country was so expansive that there was scarcely any

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