The Indian Wars, 1784-1787 191 



power that it would be possible to secure for the 

 Westerners what they wished. In all human prob 

 ability, the whole country round the Great Lakes 

 would still be British territory, and the mouth of 

 the Mississippi still in the hands of some European 

 power, had the folly of the separatists won the day 

 and had the West been broken up into independent 

 States. 



These shortcomings were not special or peculiar 

 to the frontiersmen of the Ohio Valley at the close 

 of the eighteenth century. All our frontiersmen 

 have betrayed a tendency toward them at times, 

 though the exhibitions of this tendency have grown 

 steadily less and less decided. In Vermont, during 

 the years between the close of the Revolution and 

 the adoption of the Constitution, the state of affairs 

 was very much what it was in Kentucky at the same 

 time. 1 In each territory there was acute friction 

 with a neighboring State. In each there was a 

 small knot of men who wished the community to 

 keep out of the new American nation, and to enter 

 into some sort of alliance with a European nation, 

 England in one case, Spain in the other. In each 

 there was a considerable but fluctuating separatist 

 party, desirous that the territory should become an 

 independent nation on its own account. In each 

 case the separatist movements failed, and the final 

 triumph lay with the men of broadly national ideas, 



1 "Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography," XI, 

 No. 2, pp. 160-165, Letters of Levi Allen, Ethan Allen, and 

 others, from 1787 to 1790. 



