In a letter to Col. Joseph Brant, dated "War Office, July 23, 1787," Gen. Knox explains that the Shawanese neglected to forward the original speech; and it appears by a letter from Captain Pipe of the Delawares, and the Half King of the Wyandots, dated June 3, 1787, that they finally forwarded the despatches to Fort Pitt, whence they reached the War Office on the 17th of July.

Such a communication could not fail to produce a profound sensation in Congress. That body was almost powerless by the weakness of the old system of confederation. The fighting population of the tribes apparently represented at the council near Detroit, was estimated at five thousand warriors; while the British still held the frontiers, and their agents ranged the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Ohio and the Mississippi. Under these circumstances, Congress wisely modified their policy; recognized the Indians as the rightful proprietors of the soil; and, on the 2d of July, appropriated twenty-six thousand dollars "solely to the purpose of extinguishing Indian claims to lands already ceded to the United States, by obtaining regular conveyances for the same, and for extending a purchase beyond the limits hitherto fixed by treaty." The clause in relation to limits, was a mere salvo to pride, as the treaties of Fort Harmar, negotiated on the 9th of January, 1788, by Governor St. Clair, with the Six Nations and the Ohio Indians, respectively, were only a reiteration of the boundary stipulations at Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh.

The jealousies between the New York and the Western tribes, soon interrupted the Indian confederacy, which Brant and Sir John Johnson had hoped to make an efficient agency of embarrassment to the United States, but long and bitter was the struggle, before the Western Indians acquiesced in

the surrender of the valley of the Ohio. It was not until the treaty of Greenville, August 3, 1795, that the terrors of savage warfare passed from the annals into the traditions of the frontiers but the campaigns of Wilkinson, Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne, are beyond our present design, and we pause at a period when, with the territorial organization, the idea of conquest had ceased to guide our Indian administration, and the more generous policy, of the recognition and purchase of an aboriginal right to the soil, which Washington was the first to urge, became the usage of his own and subsequent administrations of the General Government.

CHAPTER XXV.

COLONIAL CLAIMS TO WESTERN LANDS, AND THEIR CESSION TO THE UNITED STATES.

On the 5th of March, 1496, King Henry VII. of England granted to the Venitian adventurer, John Cabot and his three sons, Sebastian, Lewis, and Sanctius, a commission by which they had authority and leave to sail to all parts, countries and seas of the east, of the west, and of the north, and upon their own proper cost and charges, to seek out and discover countries of the heathen and infidels, unknown to all Christians; there to set up the king's banner; to occupy and possess, as his vassals and lieutenants, the countries they should find, on condition of paying him one-fifth of all the gains obtained by them. Under this commission, John Cabot and his son Sebastian, sailed from England in May, 1497, and in June came in sight of land, supposed to be a part of Newfoundland. Thence they sailed along the coast north and south, and returned without attempting a settlement, although they took possession of the country in behalf of the crown of England.

On

In 1534 the celebrated Jaques Cartier made several voyages along the northern coast of North America, sailed up the River St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and took possession of the country in the name of the King of France. the 17th of June, 1673, Father Marquette and M. Joliet reached the Mississippi by the channels of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, and descended as far as the Arkansas; while

on the 9th of April, 1683, M. de la Salle, the commandant of Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario, discovered the mouth of the Mississippi, and took formal possession of the country in the name of Louis XIV. of France.

Colonization gave significance to discovery. England chiefly occupied the Atlantic sea-board: Canada and Louisiana became colonies of France, and, before the treaty of 1763, France had so successfully asserted her dominion to the valley of the Ohio, that England proposed to limit her American colonies on the west by a line drawn from Lake Erie through French creek to its mouth, and thence direct to the nearest mountains of Virginia.

When, in 1763, after a struggle of various fortune, the title to the vast region of the Ohio, the Mississippi and St. Lawrence was yielded by France, the government of England proclaimed that all the land west and northwest of the sources of the Atlantic rivers was reserved under the sovereignty, protection and dominion of the King of Great Britain, for the use of the Indians, and the governors of the colonies were forbidden to make any grants of the lands thus reserved.

Such a disposition of the conquest from France was inconsistent with the pretensions of some of the colonies, whose early charters included in their limits the whole breadth of the continent-"from sea to sea.' The adjustment of these claims greatly embarrassed the country at the most critical period of our national history, and is so closely related to individual rights in the soil of Ohio, as to justify a detailed statement of their nature and extent.

In the year 1606, on the 10th of April, James I., King of England, on the application of a number of gentlemen, for a license to settle a colony in that part of America called

Virginia, not possessed by any Christian prince or people, between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of north latitude, granted them a charter. In order to facilitate the settlement of the country, and at the request of the adventurers, he divided it into two colonies. To the first colony, consisting of Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, Richard Hackluyt, Edward Maria Wingfield and their associates, called the London Company, he granted, "That they might begin their first plantation and habitation at any place on the said coast of Virginia or America, where they shall think fit and convenient, between the said four-and-thirty and oneand-forty degrees of the said latitude; and they shall have all lands, &c., from the said first seat of their plantation and habitation, by the space of fifty miles of English statute measure, all along the said coast of Virginia and America, towards the west and southwest, as the coast lieth, with all the islands within one hundred miles directly over and against the same sea-coast; and also all the lands, &c., from said place of their first plantation and habitation, for the space of fifty like English miles, all along the said coast of Virginia and America, towards the east and northeast, or towards the north as the coast lieth, with all the islands, within one hundred miles, directly over and against the said sea coast; and also all the lands, &c., from the same fifty miles every way on the sea coast, directly into the main land, by the space of one hundred like English miles, and that no other subjects should be allowed to settle on the back of them, towards the main land, without written license from the council of the colony."

To the second colony, consisting of Thomas Hanman, Raleigh Gilbert, William Parker, George Popham, and others, principally inhabitants of Plymouth, Bristol, and the eastern