From the Lakes to the Gulf redskins
rose for vengeance. Villages were wiped out, and murderous bands swept
far into Virginia and Pennsylvania, evading fortified posts in order to
fall with irresistible fury on unsuspecting traders and settlers.

In midsummer, 1782, news of the cessation of hostilities between Great
Britain and her former seaboard colonies reached the back country, and
the commandant at Detroit made an honest effort to stop all offensive
operations. A messenger failed, however, to reach a certain Captain
Caldwell, operating in the Ohio country, in time to prevent him from
attacking a Kentucky settlement and bringing on the deadly Battle
of Blue Licks, in which the Americans were defeated with a loss of
seventy-one men. George Rogers Clark forthwith led a retaliatory
expedition against the Miami towns, taking prisoners, recapturing
whites, and destroying British trading establishments; and with this
final flare-up the Revolution came to an end in the Northwest.

The soldier had won the back country for the new nation. Could the
diplomat hold it? As early as March 19, 1779,--just three weeks after
Clark's capture of Vincennes,--the Continental Congress formally laid
claim to the whole of the Northwest; and a few months later John Adams
was instructed to negotiate for peace on the understanding that the
country's northern and western boundaries were to be the line of the
Great Lakes and the Mississippi. When, in 1781, Franklin, Jefferson,
Jay, and Laurens were appointed to assist Adams in the negotiation, the
new Congress of the Confederation stated that the earlier instructions
on boundaries represented its "desires and expectations."

It might have been supposed that if Great Britain could be brought to
accept these terms there would be no further difficulty. But obstacles
arose from other directions. France had entered the war for her own
reasons, and looked with decidedly more satisfaction on the defeat of
Great Britain than on the prospect of a new and powerful nation in the
Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, she was in close alliance with Spain;
and Spain had no sympathy whatever with the American cause as such. At
all events, she did not want the United States for a neighbor on the
Mississippi.

The American commissioners were under instructions to make no peace
without consulting France. But when, in the spring of 1782, Jay came
upon the scene of the negotiations at Paris, he demurred. He had been