416 Frank Carney 



backed their narrow seaboard holdings; and companies in England 

 were always devising new plans for exploiting the colonies. 



Even without the assistance of the mother country, the English 

 colonies eventually would have gained the trans-Appalachian 

 territory. Their compact arrangement on the seaboard, with the 

 protecting mountain barrier on the west, conserved their energy 

 without loss during the aggressive period of French trade expan- 

 sion in the interior, and gave momentum when the colonists 

 assumed the aggressive. The French military posts were too 

 far from their base, France, for they had not made a business of 

 developing colonies in America; there were no overpopulated 

 areas in New France. No barriers had imposed intensive growth 

 on the French settlements. Before the final struggle, the English 

 colonists were practically in possession of the Mohawk pass, and 

 were familiar with the breaks in the mountain barrier farther 

 south. 



CLAIM OF VIRGINIA 



King George, as soon as the Treaty of 1763, terminating the 

 French and Indian war, had been concluded, proclaimed this 

 territory "royal domain," and asserted that the colonies had no 

 more business in it ; that it was to be held for the Indians. The 

 British fur-trading companies were active; it was decidedly to 

 their interests to keep Canada and the Mississippi basin one 

 great game preserve, and the redmen as tenant trappers. The 

 zeal with which the colonies went into the French and Indian war 

 was partially selfish; they wanted more land. It was to be 

 expected that the king's disposal of the lands acquired from France 

 would cause disappointment in the colonies. This, they thought, 

 is not gratitude; it is selfishness. 



Population of Virginia. For more than a century before the 

 Revolution, Virginia was the most populous of the colonies.^ The 

 need for more territory was imperative. Even before the 

 French and Indian war, frontier settlements had been made in the 

 Shenandoah valley. As fast as the resistance of the Indians 

 could be overcome, the head streams of the Ohio's tributaries 

 were dotted with cabins. When the more attractive areas near 

 the major stream could be occupied, the wilderness of the western 



*■ A Century of Population Growth in the United States, p. 9, Washington, 1909. 



