international aspect, until the whole of the Mississippi Valley should be controlled by a single power.

Besides these important reasons for imperial withdrawal from the West, we must remember that the general colonial problem was becoming acute in 1768, and engaged most of the time that the politicians could spare from place-hunting, foxhunting, and gaming. Further, it is doubtful whether any proper regulations of the fur trade could have been enforced, except under conditions of autocratic government, isolation, and monopoly, such as the Hudson's Bay Company enjoyed.

The Report of the Board of Trade and Plantations, dated ✓7 March 1768 (pp. 62-73), was the outcome of these ideas and considerations. The policy it recommends was adopted by the Grafton ministry. Colonial governors were instructed by the Crown to enforce it, and the promoters of Western colonies remained unsatisfied. Even the Vandalia Company, skilfully promoted by Franklin, and by such stockholders as Lord Camden, Lord Hertford, Earl Temple, and the Walpoles, never obtained its coveted grant. Not improbably its defeat was due in part to the influence of Virginians like George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry, who had rival plans regarding the twenty million acres on the Western waters, for which the Vandalia Company proposed to pay the modest sum of ten thousand pounds.

The Report of 1768 was a well-thought-out document, on the basis of mercantilism. But there was a fundamental weakness in the policy that it defined. It proposed to divert the westward movement to the North, East, and South; yet it dismantled the only possible machinery for such diversion, the Indian service, instead of strengthening it. The Lords of Trade naïvely assumed that if westward expansion were not encouraged, it would languish. What they really accomplished by the policy of 1768 was to clear the ring for a knock-down drag-out fight between Indians and backwoodsmen.

Things now went much harder with the Indians. The

frontiersmen were solving the Western problem in their own way. South of the Ohio river, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, lay the dark and bloody ground' of Kentucky, over which northern and southern Indians hunted and fought, but where none dared to dwell. At this point the boundary line of 1768 bent westward, in order to accommodate the Vandalia Company; but others than the Vandalia stockholders reaped the benefit. The long hunters', of whom Daniel Boone is the accepted type, had visited Kentucky every year since 1765, perhaps earlier, and had brought back tales of the enormous hardwood forests, clear streams, fertile river bottoms, blue-grass prairies, and enormous quantities of game. In 1769 a group of backwoodsmen settled on the Watauga headwaters, on land to which they had no title. Two young Virginians among them, John Sevier and James Robertson, organized their neighbours, in 1772, into a de facto state, the so-called Watauga government, and made their own treaty with the Cherokees. Settlers began to crowd the wilderness trail through the Appalachians. When the War of Independence broke out, the spear-head of the westward movement had passed the mountains; and the force behind it was irresistible.

At the same time, Governor Dunmore of Virginia, in collusion with various patriots who were soon to deprive him of his livelihood, was recklessly making grants of crown lands near or beyond the Johnson-Stuart line of 1768, to holders of land warrants issued to soldiers of the Seven Years' War. The North ministry endeavoured to check them by the additional Instructions of 3 February 1774 (p. 97).1 Threatening, as they did, to hamper both speculators and prospective settlers, these instructions caused much irritation in Virginia, and are alluded to as a grievance both in Jefferson's' Summary

1 See p. 86 for the abuses to which this system was liable. It worked particularly badly in Kentucky, where the surveys crossed each other in hopeless tangles, and litigation over titles continued well into the nineteenth century.

View' and the Declaration of Independence (p. 158). Eleven years later similar principles were adopted by Congress (p. 209). The last and most important act of British Western policy before the war was the Quebec Act of 1774 (p. 103). Coming out as it did contemporaneously with the Coercive Acts, this law was believed by the patriots to be an attack on American liberty. They took particular exception to the religious clauses and to the great extension of the southern boundary of Quebec. The Act was primarily intended to correct mistakes in the Proclamation of 1763 and to secure the loyalty of French Canadians against French intrigues. But it did impair the practical interests of several colonies, by annexing to Quebec the North-west, including that part for which Virginia was then fighting the Shawnee Indians. It shut out the Philadelphia fur-traders from the Ohio country, to the profit of the Scots fur-traders of Montreal. Governor Carleton, by proclamation, put the Board of Trade's Plan of 1764 into effect throughout greater Quebec, and created an efficient Indian Department. The Scots traders then formed a sort of peltry trust for the Great Lakes region. By this means the Empire retained both the trade and the allegiance of the Indians as far south as the Ohio river, well into the nineteenth century.

During the War of Independence the international aspect of the Western problem again became prominent.1 Spain let it be known that she would join the Franco-American Alliance of 1778 at the price of the Floridas and the country between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Appalachians. Congress refused to pay the price, but Spain entered the war as an ally of France, and captured the British posts in the Floridas and on the lower Mississippi. She hoped to obtain her object in the peace negotiations. The American commissioners stood out for the Mississippi boundary, and obtained it so far as

1 P. C. Phillips, The West in the Diplomacy of the American Revolution (University of Illinois, 1912).

England was concerned; Spain, however, recovered the Floridas and was able to close the Mississippi to Western commerce. Curiously enough, there were influential Americans who hoped she would keep it closed (p. 219). In the North-west the United States demanded everything west and south of the old boundary of Quebec. Although a handful of Virginia frontiersmen had captured the British posts in the Illinois country, the British Government might well have insisted on Quebec retaining its Ohio boundary of 1774. France encouraged it to do so, hoping thereby to obtain compensation for Spain. But Lord Shelburne's ministry accepted the present American-Canadian boundary as a compromise.

American independence meant, among other things, that the same western problems which formerly vexed Whitehall now had to be faced by Congress. As regards the Indians, little was accomplished before 1790; but as regards the opening up, disposal, and government of the Indians' former hunting grounds, Congress showed foresight and statesmanship.

The western land problem1 had, in the first place, an important bearing on the Federal Government. There was not an inch of the West between the Great Lakes and the Ohio that was not claimed by one or more of seven out of the Thirteen States, by virtue of their colonial charters. The Articles of Confederation (p. 178), to go into effect, had to be ratified by every State. It seemed unjust to the states with definite western boundaries, that they should have no part and share in the western domain which would be won with their aid. Maryland withheld her ratification, pending prevision for a federal territory. The New York legislature broke the deadlock, early in 1780, by promising to cede its western land claims to the United States; and Congress urged the others to do likewise. On 10 October 1780 Congress I Channing, United States, iii, chapter xvii.

adopted a resolution announcing a western policy radically different from the colonial policy of any European power (p. 204). Maryland was then induced to ratify the Articles of Confederation. In 1784 Virginia, with a superb gesture, ceded to the United States her excellent claims to the country north of the Ohio; and the lesser claimants soon followed.

In 1784, then, Congress assumed responsibility for an immense domain, the North-west Territory; and by the Articles of Confederation (p. 183) it acquired the same jurisdiction over Indian relations that the British Government had claimed. Like that government, Congress was hampered by Indian hostility, frontier lawlessness, local interference, and lack of money.

Congress feebly attempted to regulate the fur trade. It obtained land cessions from the Iroquois and the North-west Indians, who in alliance with Britain had waged a terrible and relentless war against the backwoods settlements; but most of these treaties it was unable to enforce. New forts were built on the Ohio, and in 1787 a detachment of the United States army moved down the right bank, burning the cabins of frontiersmen who had staked out claims there by 'tomahawk right'; but it was not strong enough to prevent repeated Indian forays into Kentucky and Virginia. In the transmontane region south of the Ohio, where de facto state governments had been set up by the pioneers, and where no land claims had been made over to the Confederacy, the period 1785-8 was one of bitter race warfare. The westward movement had obtained such a start that even the stronger federal government of 1789 could do little more than give the Indians a breathing-space, pending their final removal or extinction.

In respect of the national domain north of the Ohio, the Congress of the Confederation did much to solve the land and local government problems. It was besieged by the same conflicting interests as its English predecessor. Veterans