ad put an end to the general war of Europe,
had left undefined the boundaries between the British and French
possessions in America. Immense regions were still claimed by both
nations, and each was now eager to forestall the other by getting
possession of them, and strengthening its claim by occupancy.

The most desirable of these regions lay west of the Alleghany
Mountains, extending from the lakes to the Ohio, and embracing the
valley of that river and its tributary streams. The French claimed all
this country quite to the Alleghany Mountains by the right of
discovery. In 1673, Padre Marquette, with his companion, Joliet, of
Quebec, both subjects of the crown of France, had passed down the
Mississippi in a canoe quite to the Arkansas, thereby, according to an
alleged maxim in the law of nations, establishing the right of their
sovereign, not merely to the river so discovered and its adjacent
lands, but to all the country drained by its tributary streams, of
which the Ohio was one; a claim, the ramifications of which might be
spread, like the meshes of a web, over half the continent.

To this illimitable claim the English opposed a right derived, at
second hand, from a traditionary Indian conquest. A treaty, they said,
had been made at Lancaster, in 1744, between commissioners from
Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, and the Iroquois, or Six Nations,
whereby the latter, for four hundred pounds, gave up all right and
title to the land west of the Alleghany Mountains, even to the
Mississippi, which land, _according to their traditions_, had been
conquered by their forefathers. It is undoubtedly true that such a
treaty was made, and such a pretended transfer of title did take
place, under the influence of spirituous liquors; but it is equally
true that the Indians in question did not, at the time, possess an
acre of the land conveyed; and that the tribes actually in possession
scoffed at their pretensions, and claimed the country as their own
from time immemorial.

Such were the shadowy foundations of claims which the two nations were
determined to maintain to the uttermost, and which ripened into a
series of wars, ending in a loss to England of a great part of her
American possessions, and to France of the whole.

As yet in the region in question there was not a single white
settlement. Mixed Iroquois tribes of Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingoes,
had migrated into it early in the century from the French settlements
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