In 1748 a
company of still wider horizon was formed in Virginia, George Washington's
father being a member of it. It was known as the Ohio Land Company and
derived its transmontane rights through George II from John Cabot, an
Italian under English commission, who may have set foot nearly two
centuries before somewhere on the coast of North America below Labrador,
and from a very expansive interpretation of a treaty with the Indians at
Lancaster, Pa., in 1744, the trans-Alleghany Indians protesting, however,
not less firmly than the French, that the lands purchased by the English
under that treaty extended no farther toward the sunset than the laurel
hills on the western edge of the Alleghanies.
News of this Virginia corporate enterprise was willingly carried, it is
surmised, by jealous Pennsylvanians and hostile French, till it reached
Montreal, and so it was that Celoron was despatched with his little
company to bury "Monuments of the Renewal of Possession" by France.
It was a significant and rather solemn, but most picturesque, processional
that this chevalier of St.
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