clothed in the
simple language of the people, not in the sonorous rhetoric which
Webster learned in the schools.

PREPARATION FOR WESTERN SETTLEMENT

=The West and the American Revolution.=--The excessive attention devoted
by historians to the military operations along the coast has obscured
the role played by the frontier in the American Revolution. The action
of Great Britain in closing western land to easy settlement in 1763 was
more than an incident in precipitating the war for independence.
Americans on the frontier did not forget it; when Indians were employed
by England to defend that land, zeal for the patriot cause set the
interior aflame. It was the members of the western vanguard, like Daniel
Boone, John Sevier, and George Rogers Clark, who first understood the
value of the far-away country under the guns of the English forts, where
the Red Men still wielded the tomahawk and the scalping knife. It was
they who gave the East no rest until their vision was seen by the
leaders on the seaboard who directed the course of national policy. It
was one of their number, a seasoned Indian fighter, George Rogers Clark,
who with aid from Virginia seized Kaskaskia and Vincennes and secured
the whole Northwest to the union while the fate of Washington's army was
still hanging in the balance.

=Western Problems at the End of the Revolution.=--The treaty of peace,
signed with Great Britain in 1783, brought the definite cession of the
coveted territory west to the Mississippi River, but it left unsolved
many problems. In the first place, tribes of resentful Indians in the
Ohio region, even though British support was withdrawn at last, had to
be reckoned with; and it was not until after the establishment of the
federal Constitution that a well-equipped army could be provided to
guarantee peace on the border. In the second place, British garrisons
still occupied forts on Lake Erie pending the execution of the terms of
the treaty of 1783--terms which were not fulfilled until after the
ratification of the Jay treaty twelve years later. In the third place,
Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts had conflicting claims to the
land in the Northwest based on old English charters and Indian treaties.
It was only after a bitter contest that the states reached an agreement
to transfer their rights to the government of the United States,
Virginia executing her deed of cession on March 1, 1784. In the fourth
place, titles to lands b