George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[42] a part of it; but Virginia bounded its ancient

chap. II.} 1749.

dominion only by Lake Erie. To secure Ohio for the English world, Lawrence Washington of Virginia, Augustus Washington, and their associates, proposed a colony beyond the Alleghanies. ‘The country west of the great mountains is the centre of the British dominions,’ wrote Halifax and his colleagues, who were inflamed with the hope of recovering it by having a large tract settled; and the favor of Henry Pelham, with the renewed instance of the Board of Trade,¹ obtained in March, 1749, the king's instructions to the governor of Virginia, to grant to John Hanbury and his associates in Maryland and Virginia five hundred thousand acres of land between the Monongahela and the Kenawha, or on the northern margin of the Ohio. The company were to pay no quit-rent for ten years, within seven years to colonize at least one hundred families, to select immediately two-fifths of their territory, and at their own cost to build and garrison a fort. Thomas Lee, president of the Council of Virginia, and Robert Dinwiddie, a native of Scotland, surveyor-general for the southern colonies, were among the shareholders.

Aware of these designs, France anticipated England. Immediately, in 1749, La Galissioniere, whose patriotic mind revolved great designs of empire, and questioned futurity for the results of French power, population, and commerce in America,² sent De Celoron de Bienville, with three hundred men, to trace and occupy the valley of the Ohio,³ and that of the