ities of the great land companies are described in
Alvord's exhaustive work, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics."

Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much
misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from the
lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as
a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur
trade. We know now that the portion of this Proclamation relating to
western settlement was a wise provision designed to protect the settlers
on the frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed
with apprehension the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from
Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to
compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed
likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to make
impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian
Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed
what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to
this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had
never known to be repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the
Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to
the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and
shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended as a
final check to expansion. "A temporary expedient to quiet the minds of
the Indians," Washington called it, and then himself went out along the
Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying land.

It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and
that fort at the Forks of the Ohio; once a bone of contention between
France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of
another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia
claimed that the far western corner of her boundary ascended just far
enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did
nothing of the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the
Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent
and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior
motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated
that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the
boundary disputes. If it does not ver