w really come
to an end. The next year Great Britain acknowledged the independence
of the United States, and gave up the whole West to them, as France
had given it up to her before. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia claimed each the country lying westward
of them, but the other states denied this claim. The West was finally
declared the property of the whole Union, and in 1784 the first
ordinance was passed by Congress for its government. It was not until
1787 that the great ordinance was passed which gave the future empire
of the world to the West on terms of freedom to all men: "There shall
be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory
otherwise than in the punishment of crime."

This made the West free forever, but no law of Congress could make it
safe without the consent of the savage nations which had again changed
masters by the treaty of foreign powers. The war between England and
America was over, but the war between white men and red men raged
more fiercely after our peace with Great Britain than before. The
backwoodsmen took this peace for a sign that they might now cross the
river from New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to settle in the Ohio
country; and they were soon there by hundreds. It is true that the
United States had made treaties with the United Tribes for certain
tracts beyond the Ohio River, but the Indians declared that they had
been tricked into these treaties. It is true that Congress meant to deal
fairly by them so far as to drive the hard bargains with them for their
lands which the white men had always driven with the Indians; but the
backwoodsmen waited for nothing, and the old story of surprises and
slaughters, of captivities and tortures, went on, with the difference
that the war parties now need not cross the Ohio to take scalps and
prisoners, and the vengeance of the pioneers had not so far to follow
them in their return to the woods.

The first white settlers in Ohio were largely the kind of half-savages
who had butchered the Christians at Gnadenhiitten. They built their
cabins and cleared their fields on lands so shamelessly stolen that in
1785 a force of United States troops was sent to drive them out of their
holdings. They seemed to go, but in reality they staid, and wherever the
backwoodsman planted his foot west of the Ohio, he never turned his face
eastward again.

He was unlawfully there, but from the Indian's point of vie