g the
French inhabitants.

The great prairies, level or rolling, stretched from north to south,
separated by broad belts of high timber. Here and there copses of
woodland lay like islands in the sunny seas of tall, waving grass. Where
the rivers ran, their alluvial bottoms were densely covered with trees
and underbrush, and were often overflowed in the spring freshets.
Sometimes the prairies were long, narrow strips of meadow land; again
they were so broad as to be a day's journey across, and to the American,
bred in a wooded country where the largest openings were the beaver
meadows and the clearings of the frontier settlers, the stretches of
grass land seemed limitless. They abounded in game. The buffalo crossed
and recrossed them, wandering to and fro in long files, beating narrow
trails that they followed year in and year out; while bear, elk, and
deer dwelt in the groves around the borders.[11]

There were perhaps some four thousand inhabitants in these French
villages, divided almost equally between those in the Illinois and those
along the Wabash.[12]

The country came into the possession of the British--not of the colonial
English or Americans--at the close of Pontiac's war, the aftermath of
the struggle which decided against the French the ownership of America.
It was held as a new British province, not as an extension of any of the
old colonies; and finally in 1774, by the famous Quebec Act, it was
rendered an appanage of Canada, governed from the latter. It is a
curious fact that England immediately adopted towards her own colonists
the policy of the very nationality she had ousted. From the date of the
triumphant peace won by Wolfe's victory, the British government became
the most active foe of the spread of the English race in America. This
position Britain maintained for many years after the failure of her
attempt to bar her colonists out of the Ohio valley. It was the position
she occupied when at Ghent in 1814 her commissioners tried to hem in the
natural progress of her colonists' children by the erection of a great
"neutral belt" of Indian territory, guaranteed by the British king. It
was the role which her statesmen endeavored to make her play when at a
later date they strove to keep Oregon a waste rather than see it peopled
by Americans.

In the northwest she succeeded to the French policy as well as the
French position. She wished the land to remain a wilderness, the home of
the trapper and the