Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/390

 The governor, council and assembly sat at Pensacola, the capital, and Mobile delegates were leaders there in what Governor Chester calls the "cantankerous" lower house. Mobile was the largest town in the vast province of West Florida, which extended from the Mississippi to the Chattahoochee River, and had her own common law courts. A British custom-house was in full operation. We learn much from the military exploration of the Bigbee by Romans's and Bartram's botanical expedition, but most from the papers of General Haldimand, who was long in West Florida. They are preserved in the British Museum, and have been copied for the Canadian government. The collection is a mine for American history in the late sixties and early seventies. He pronounced Mobile that part of the province best fitted for development.

The British established on the Mississippi two forts that were the origin of Natchez and Baton Rouge, and also the one where the Iberville River (Bayou Manchac) left the Mississippi to take off its surplus waters to Lake Pontchartrain and the Sound. Thence the communication with Mobile was covered by a chain of islands, of which Dauphine is the