Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/148

136 such discoveries had been made, and so many remained to be made, that it was thought expedient to adopt the apparently natural boundaries of the United States, namely, the Saint Lawrence and Great Lakes on the north, the Mississippi on the west, the Spanish possessions in Florida on the south, and the Atlantic Ocean on the east.

In 1779, three years after the declaration of independence, and four years before the treaty of peace, the American Congress recommended to the several states in the union to make liberal cessions of their respective claims for the common benefit of the union, including the state making the cession. Thus early did our government assert the principle that the lands not held by occupancy belonged to the people for their use. The people on their side were quite willing to assist the union, burdened as it was with the debt of the revolutionary war, and other claims. But the unsettled boundaries of the several states made it a matter of some difficulty to convey land to the government in definite measure, some of the older grants, like Massachusetts and Connecticut, extending "from sea to sea." Disputes had arisen between the colonies over their boundaries, as when the Dutch had established New Netherlands on the Hudson River, cutting in two the grant of Connecticut. It was not until 1733 that the boundary of New York (formerly New Netherlands), was settled, and Connecticut still claimed the lands west of New York. From Maine to Georgia there were boundaries to be settled.

New York was the first to respond to the suggestion of congress, in 1781, by ceding all her title to lands west of a line drawn north and south twenty miles west of Niagara River, without conditions. Virginia followed, and on March 1, 1784, conveyed her territory west of the Ohio River to the United States. Massachusetts, in 1785,