The Northwest under three flags Author:Charles Moore Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ENGLISH IN THE OHIO COUNTRY The daring enterprise of the French trader and the devoted heroism of the French missionary in their discovery of... more » the Northwest have been' related. Up the rapids of the St. Lawrence, through the chain of the vast inland seas, and down the rushing waters of the Mississippi swept the tide of French discovery. With the exception of a strip of land lying along the Atlantic and extending scarcely a hundred miles back into the wilderness, the continent of North America at the middle of the eighteenth century belonged to his most Christian majesty by the well-recognized right of discovery and occupation. In the court of nations it mattered nothing that the soil was in the actual possession not of Frenchmen but of Indians, and that the foot of white man had never trod more than the smallest fraction of the country over which France claimed dominion. While recognizing the policy of conciliating the Indians, France, nevertheless, claimed the exclusive right to acquire from them, and to dispose of, the land which they occupied, and to make laws for the government of the country. In the year 1498, more than a third of a century before Jacques Cartier's little vessel ploughed her way up the broad St. Lawrence, the Cabots discovered the continent of North America, and sailed south as far as Virginia.Acting under their charter1 to discover countries then unknown to Christian people, and to take possession of them in the name of the King of England, these bold adventurers laid the foundations of the English title to the Atlantic coast.' It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, that France and England followed up their discoveries, and began to perfect their respective titles by actual occupation of the regions discovere...« less