Across the Alleghenies

The Creoles under English rule suffered very little.  Their property and trading interests were left alone and their laws and customs were not changed.  Records were actually kept in both French and English.  The village priests retained their position of importance and authority in the villages as did the notaries.  Population did not increase much and bartering, hunting and trapping remained the basic means of commerce.  Music, dancing and holiday celebration were still the highlight of the frontier.

The Indians meanwhile, had been relatively successful in holding back the flood of settlers from the Allegheny passes and the Ohio River valley.  It was inevitable though, that the desire for land and population increases would create a desire for the once vacant lands as well as land speculation.  The appeal "over the mountains"  was an obsession with settlers.  The English King might see the land as a barren waste and a profitless wilderness, but the Scotch and the Huguenots joined thousands who saw the new west as anything but a wasteland.

The speculators went before the settlers.  Big business has engaged in western speculation from the time of LaSalle to recent history in Alaska.   Large tracts of land were "procured" by grant or purchase for the purpose of sale or colonization at a profit.  Washington, Franklin, and the Lees, along with other prominent Virginians were part of an enterprise which absorbed the Old Ohio Company.  Washington acquired some 33,000 acres, with waterfront on the Ohio of 16 miles, and 40 miles on the Great Kanawha River.  He made quite a profit from the new territory.

In 1773, a company of Sam Wharton, Benjamin Franklin, William Johnson and a London banker named Thomas Walpole, secured 2,500,000 acres between the Alleghenies and the Ohio, which became the colony of Vandalia.  This was in violation of the King's Proclamation of 1763, but was seen as giving a definite limit to the seaboard colonies.  With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the project was abandoned and the western territory would be settled by individual homesteaders, not speculation companies.

Next time...The Old Northwest in the Revolution
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On February 4, 1789, the new United States of America elects its first President.  George Washington, commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, is unanimously elected by all 69 presidential electors who cast their vote.  John Adams came in second with 34 votes.