quered this colony and bestowed it upon his brother, the province of
New York became a stubborn fact, which could not be disregarded.
Massachusetts and Connecticut peaceably settled their boundary line with
New York, and laid no claims to land within the limits of that state;
but they still continued to claim what lay beyond it, as far as the
Mississippi River, where the Spanish dominion now began. The regions
claimed by Massachusetts have since become the southern halves of the
states of Michigan and Wisconsin. The region claimed by Connecticut was
a narrow strip running over the northern portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois; and we have seen how much trouble was occasioned
in Pennsylvania by this circumstance.

[Sidenote: Claims of New York.]

But New York laughed to scorn these claims of Connecticut. In the
seventeenth century all the Algonquin tribes between Lake Erie and the
Cumberland Mountains had become tributary to the Iroquois; and during
the hundred years' struggle between France and England for the supremacy
of this continent the Iroquois had put themselves under the protection
of England, which thenceforth always treated them as an appurtenance to
New York. For a hundred years before the Revolution, said New York, she
had borne the expense of protecting the Iroquois against the French, and
by various treaties she had become lawful suzerain over the Six Nations
and their lands and the lands of their Algonquin vassals. On such
grounds New York claimed pretty much everything north of the Ohio and
east of the Miami.

[Sidenote: Virginia's claims.]

But according to Virginia, it made little difference what Massachusetts
and Connecticut and New York thought about the matter, for every acre
of land, from the Ohio River up to Lake Superior, belonged to her. Was
not she the lordly "Old Dominion," out of which every one of the states
had been carved? Even Cape Cod and Cape Ann were said to be in "North
Virginia," until, in 1614, Captain John Smith invented the name "New
England." It was a fair presumption that any uncarved territory belonged
to Virginia; and it was further held that the original charter of 1609
used language which implicitly covered the northwestern territory,
though, as Thomas Paine showed, in a pamphlet entitled "Public Good,"
this was very doubtful. But besides all this, it was Virginia that had
actually conquered the disputed territory, and held every military post
in it exce