In the month of July, 1765, M. de St. Ange, who was at that time the French commandant in the Illinois, evacuated Fort Chartres, and retired, with a company of twenty men, to St. Louis, a settlement which had been founded early in 1764, on the western bank of the Mississippi. A detachment of English troops then took possession of the evacuated fort, and Captain Sterling, the British commandant in the Illinois country, established his headquarters at that place. Of the French population, while some took the oath of fidelity and obedience to the government of Great Britain, and continued to occupy their ancient possessions in and about the villages of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Prairie du Rocher, others removed to the territories on the western side of the river Mississippi, where the authority of France was still in force, although the country had been ceded to Spain.

*

Fort Chartres, which was rebuilt in 1756, was in shape an irregular quadrangle, with four bastions. The sides of the exterior polygon were about four hundred and ninety feet in extent. The walls, which were of stone and plastered over, were two feet two inches thick, and fifteen feet high, with loopholes at regular distances, and two portholes for cannon in each face, and two in the flanks of each bastion. There were two sallyports; and within the wall was a banquette, raised three feet, for the men to stand upon, when they fired through the loopholes. The buildings within the fort were the commandant's and the commissary's houses, the magazine of stores, the guardhouse, and two lines of barracks. Within the gorge of one of the bastions, was a prison with four dungeons. In the gorges of the other three bastions, were the powder-magazine, the bakehouse, and some smaller buildings. The commandant's house was ninety-six feet long and thirty feet deep, containing a diningroom, a parlor, a bedchamber, a kitchen, five closets for servants, and a cellar. The commissary's house was built in a line with this edifice, and its proportions and distribution of apartments were the same. Opposite these, were the storehouse and guardhouse, each ninety feet long by twenty-four feet deep. The former contained two large storerooms, with vaulted cellars under the whole, a large room, a

* Hall.

bedchamber, and a closet for the keeper. The guardhouse contained soldiers' and officers' guardrooms, a chapel, a bedchamber, and a closet for the chaplain, and an artillery storeroom. The lines of the barracks, two in number, were never completely finished. They consisted of two rooms in each line for officers, and three for soldiers. The rooms were twentytwo feet square, with passages between them. All the buildings were of solid masonry. The ruins of this fort may still be seen, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, about twenty-five miles above the mouth of the river Kaskaskia, in the state of Illinois. *

* In the writings of James Hall, who visited the site of Fort Chartres about the year 1832, there is an interesting account of these ruins. "Although," says Hall, "the spot was familiar to my companion, it was with some difficulty that we found the ruins, which are now covered and surrounded with a young but vigorous and gigantic growth of forest trees, and with a dense undergrowth of bushes and vines, through which we forced our way with considerable labor. Even the crumbling pile itself is thus overgrown; the tall trees rearing their stems from piles of stones, and the vines creeping over the tottering walls. The buildings were all razed to the ground, but the lines of the foundations could be easily traced. A large vaulted powdermagazine remained in good preservation. The exterior wall, the most inter esting vestige, as it gave the general outline of the whole, was thrown down in some places; but in many retained something like its original hight and form; and it was curious to see, in the gloom of a wild forest, these remnants of the architecture of a past age. One angle of the fort, and an entire bastion, had been undermined and swept entirely away by the river, which, having expended its force in this direction, was again retiring, and a narrow belt of young timber had grown up between the water's edge and the ruins."

CHAPTER X.

ENGLISH COLONIAL POLICY.—DUNMORE'S WAR.

THE government of Great Britain having nominally extended its dominion over the vast territories lying northwest of the river Ohio, the British commandants in those regions exercised their authority, without departing in any material manner from the policy which had been pursued by their French predecessors. In 1765, the total number of French families within the limits of the northwestern territory (comprising the settlements about Detroit, those near the river Wabash, and the colony in the neighborhood of Fort Chartres), did not probably exceed six hundred. Of these families, about eighty or ninety resided at Post Vincennes; about fourteen were settled at Fort Ouiatenon, on the river Wabash; and at the Twightwee village, which was situated near the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Mary rivers, there were nine or ten French houses.* These three small colonies were, at that time, the only white settlements in all the large territory which now lies within the boundaries of the State of Indiana. At Detroit, and in the neighborhood of that place, there were about three hundred and fifty French families. The remainder of the French population resided at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Prairie du Rocher, and in the vicinity of those villages.

adopted by Great Britain, offered to the English ducements to advance their

The colonial policy which was immediately after the treaty of colonists in North America no settlements into the regions on the western side of the Aegheny mountains. By a proclamation of the 7th of October, 1763, the king forbade all his subjects "from making any purch. ses or settlements whate , or taking possession of any of the lands, beyond the sours of any of the rers which fall in' the Atlantic ocean from the west or northwest;" and, at gation of the English Board of Trade and Plantations,

th.

the

government took measures to confine the English

*Croghan's Journal

settleme ts in America "to such a distance from the sea coast, as it those settlements should lie within the reach of the trace and commerce of Great Britain."* In pursuing this policy, the government rejected the propositions of various individuals, who proposed to establish English colonies in the west.

In 1769, the commander-in-chief of the king's forces in North America wrote as follows to the Earl of Hillsborough, who presided over the Colonial Department: "As to increasing the settlements [northwest of the river Ohio] to respectable provinces, and to colonization in general terms in the remote countries, I conceive it altogether inconsistent with sound policy. I do not apprehend the inhabitants could have any commodities to barter for manufactures, except skins and furs, which will naturally decrease as the country increases in people, and the deserts are cultivated; so that, in the course of a few years, necessity would force them to provide manufactures of some kind for themselves, and when all connection upheld by commerce with the mother country shall cease, it may be expected that an independency in their government will soon follow. The laying open of new tracts of fertile country in moderate climates might lessen the present supply of the commodities of America; for it is the passion of every man to be a landholder, and the people have a natural disposition to rove in search of good land, however distant." Similar to these opinions were those of the royal governor of Georgia, who, in a letter to the British Lords of Trade, wrote as follows:"This matter, my lords granting large bodies of land, in the back pats of any opis majesty's northern colonies, appears to me in a very serious and alarming light; and I humbly conceive, may be attended with the greatest and worst of consequences; for, my lords, if a vast territory be granted to any set of gentlemen ho really mean to people it, and actually u so, it must draw d carry out a great, num per

of people from Great Britain, and I apprehend they rill on become a kind of separate and independent people, who

for themselves; that they will soon have manufactur

* Report o^

Council.

up

eir

own; and in process of time, they will become formidable enough to oppose his majesty's authority."

In the course of the year 1770, several persons from Virginia and other British provinces, explored and marked nearly all the valuable lands "not only on the Red Stone and other waters of the Monongahela, but along the Ohio as low as the Little Kanawha."*

On the 20th of October, 1770, GEORGE WASHINGTON, Dr. Craik, Captain Crawford, Joseph Nicholson, Robert Bell, William Harrison, Charles Morgan, and Daniel Rendon, embarked, at Pittsburg, in a pirogue and descended the river Ohio to the mouth of the Kanawha. They ascended the latter stream about fourteen miles; killed five buffaloes on the 2d of November; marked some large tracts of land above the mouth of the Kanawha; and then returned to Pittsburg. At this time the village of Pittsburg was composed of about twenty log houses, inhabited by Indian traders; and the garrison of Fort Pitt consisted of two companies of royal Irish, commanded by Captain Edmonson.

A proclamation of General Gage, which appeared in 1772, was the first official act of the British government that disturbed the quiet of the French settlements on the river Wabash, after the peace of 1763. That proclamation was in the words following:

"By his Excellency, Thomas Gage, lieutenant-general of the king's armies, colonel of the 22d regiment, general commanding in chief all the forces of his majesty in North America, etc., etc., etc.

"Whereas, many persons, contrary to the positive orders of the king upon the subject, have undertaken to make settlements beyond the boundaries fixed by the treaties made with the Indian nations, which boundaries ought to serve as a barrier between the whites and the said nations; and a great number of persons have established themselves, particularly on the river Ouabache, where they lead a wandering life, without government, and without laws, interrupting the free course of trade, destroying the game, and causing infinite disturbance in

*Washington's Journal, of 1770.