Chase, "Preliminary Sketch of the History of Ohio" [to 1833], in Chase's Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwest Territory; Atwater, History of the State of Ohio, Natural and Civil [to 1837], Cincinnati, 1838; "Outline History of Ohio" in Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, I., 33-49; for a description of the soil and productions of Ohio in the Territorial days, see James, Ohio in 1788 [trans.]; Burnet, Notes on the Early Settlement of the North-West Territory, Cincinnati, 1847; Taylor, History of Ohio, [1650-1787], Cincinnati, 1854; Hildreth, Pioneer History, Cincinnati, 1848; Hinsdale, The Old Northwest, New York, 1888; Graham, "Legislation in the Northwest Territory," in Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. I.; D. W. Howe, Laws and Courts of Northwest and Indiana Territories, Indiana Historical Society Pamphlets; Ryan, "From Charter to Constitution," in Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. V.; Smucker, "Our First Court," in Magazine of Western History, vol. IX.; and “Our Territorial Statesmen," in the same periodical, vol. I.; Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, and The Conspiracy of Pontiac; Winsor, The Westward Movement; Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols.; Sloane, "When did Ohio become a State of the Union?" in Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. IX.; Perkins, "Fifty Years of Ohio," in North American Review, vol. XLVIII.

Charter grants to English colonies.

French

Laws of the Northwest Territory; Chase, The Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwest Territory, 2 vols.; Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2 vols.

2. COLONIAL CLAIMS TO THE WEST

When James I., king of England, chartered the London and Plymouth Companies in 1606, he and his officers knew little of the Atlantic seaboard of the new American continent, to say nothing of the unexplored and densely wooded country lying westward beyond the mountains. If they had known what a vast expanse the New World was, it is not at all likely that they would have been so generous in the bestowal of lands for colonization. In the case of the second charter of Virginia, for example, granted in 1609, the boundaries of the proposed colony were described as extending along the Atlantic south from the mouth of the Potomac for four hundred miles, "and thence extending from the seacoast of the precinct aforesaid up into the land throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest."1 These terms brought the unknown region northwest of the Ohio River within the domain of Virginia. But earlier charters marked out broad belts of territory reaching to the Pacific, which also included the Ohio country; and thus the grounds were being prepared for a conflict of claims among the English colonies, subsequently established, to the fertile tracts of the West.

But the conflict of claims to the land northwest of explorations. the Ohio River was not confined to the colonies of a single nation. France was largely concerned in it.

1 Bancroft, History of the United States, I., 99; King, Ohio, 31; Poore, Charters and Constitutions, II., 1897.

This came about through her acquisition of New France or Canada, which was successfully begun in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and through the exploration of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers by Frenchmen before the end of the same century. In 1682 LaSalle, without knowing the great scope of his proclamation, took possession of the western country drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries in the name of Louis XIV., king of France, and called it Louisiana in the king's honor.

French and

English

Thus through the explorations of the Jesuits, the Conflict of western lands granted by England to her American colonies came to be regarded by the French as belonging to claims. their domains, and they proceeded to fortify the country at various points and to make friends with the Indian tribes. By 1700, therefore, British pretensions to the West seemed all but destroyed, while France had apparently established her sovereignty over the whole section watered by the Mississippi and its branches and the lakes of the North.

3. INDIAN OCCUPANTS OF THE OHIO COUNTRY

the tribes.

By this time some French traders and bushrangers Location of were beginning to settle along the southern shore of Lake Erie and along the lower Sandusky and Maumee rivers. The rest of what is the present State of Ohio was largely occupied by a race of savages, the Algonquins, the chief tribes of which came sooner or later to have "tolerably definite locations." Of these tribes, the Ottawas, Wyandots, and Chippewas lived in the northern part of this region, and in the west, central, and eastern parts of it respectively. In the southern part were the Miamis, in the basin formed by the river

Conflicting

dian nations.

of the same name; the Shawnees in the central valley of the Scioto, and farther to the northeast the Delawares, between the upper tributaries of the Muskingum. Indeed, all of the nations or tribes named found it convenient to dwell in or near the inviting valleys of the chief water-courses of the Ohio territory, for they were hunters and fishers and did not till the soil. To this list of Ohio tribes should be added the murderous and marauding Mingoes, made up for the most part of fugitives and outlaws from the other nations, and living on the eastern frontier of this territory near the headwaters of the Ohio.1

These Indian tribes were not native to Ohio. They claims of In- had found their way to their present forest habitations from the surrounding wilds. It is said that they had first entered and occupied the Ohio country "under French protection and authority." But the English denied this, and so also did the ferocious Iroquois, or Five Nations, of the Lake Ontario region to the northeast-now central and western New York-who claimed to have conquered all this western country forty years before the appearance of the French.

Indian

cessions.

In 1701 the French established a settlement and fort alliances and at Detroit, and made the territory between Lake Erie and the Ohio subject to their new colony. This aroused the anger of the Iroquois and the English, and accordingly the former surrendered their territorial claims in the West to the latter in July of the same year, confirming this act by a second deed of cession in 1726.2 In the French and Indian War, soon to break out, the

Iroquois sided with the English; the Algonquins, excepting a few, with the French.

4. EARLY ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SETTLEMENTS

It is unnecessary to enter into the story of the French and Indian War, which involved the chief nations of Europe in a conflict lasting from 1754 to 1763. As early as September, 1714, Spotswood, the governor of Virginia, had seen the expediency of "securing the valley of the Ohio by a series of forts and settlements."1 But his plan had gone unheeded until 1748, when the Ohio Company of Virginia, formed for the purpose of colonizing the region beyond the Alleghenies, began its pioneer but transient work. Chartered by the English lords commissioners of trade in the following year, the association received a grant of 500,000 acres of land, and the company's surveyor, Gist, was sent down the Ohio on a prospecting tour in 1750. The company soon had two trading posts fortified; but before settlement and trade fairly began the outbreak of the French and Indian War arrested further progress, and the American Revolution following sealed the ruin of the association. The first Ohio Company was not invested with civil authority, and its lands were to be located mainly between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers, that is, south of the Ohio. Nevertheless its work is deserving of mention in our civil history. Gist was the first Englishman, so far as known, to explore southern Ohio; and his published reports helped to arouse interest in the back country on the part of the English

1 Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, I., 102.

The Ohio

Company of Virginia.