128 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



fusion, placing overlapping grants which necessitated al- 

 most endless trouble for other people, long after the 

 grantor and grantees had gone to that land where there 

 are no land title problems. 



It would be interesting, in this connection, to discuss 

 the question of how near Chicago came to being a part of 

 Connecticut. James I, in 1606, made the first grant to 

 Virginia which ran from the Atlantic, west and northwest 

 to the Pacific Ocean. No one knew the distance, but there 

 was no doubt but that the great ocean was somewhere in 

 that direction. Then came the Massachusetts grant of 

 1620, also running from sea to sea. On April 23, 1662, 

 Charles II, who had not long before been a fugitive in 

 France, granted to the Connecticut Company a charter 

 and land grant "in New England, in America, bounded 

 on the east by the Narragansett river, commonly called 

 Narragansett Bay, on the north by the Massachusetts 

 Plantation, on the south by the sea, and in longitude as 

 the line of the Massachusetts colony running from east to 

 west, that is to say, from the Narragansett Bay on the 

 east, to the South Sea on the west including all islands 

 thereunto adjoining." This of course was a good grant, 

 as far as Charles held title, but the claims of the Most 

 Christian King of France intervened in the Far West, 

 the settlement and rights of the Dutch on the Hudson cut 

 the grant in two in part, whilst the overlying grant made 

 in 1681 to William Penn by Charles II, afterwards also 

 cut Connecticut in two on the south, and in 1664, the Brit- 

 ish king gave to his "dearest brother, James the Duke of 

 York, his heirs and assigns" the territory which is now 

 principally occupied by the state of New York. James 

 had already acquired the previous grant made in 1635 to 

 the Earl of Sterling. The French did not discover the 

 Mississippi until May 17, 1763, so that the grant of Con- 

 necticut, by nearly a year antedates the French claims to 



