Colonial Land Claims.

While under British rule, the colonies of North America jealously guarded their paper claims to land north and west of the Ohio River. Of course the lands in question were already occupied by various tribes of American Indians, and until the Revolution the charter claims represented little more than the wishful thinking of would-be colonial developers, but the Revolutionary War and the waves of westward settlement launched by land-hungry pioneers forever changed the political economy of the Trans-Appalachian West. One of the new nation's earliest political battles was over whether the old Western land claims fell under state or federal control.

Virginia Cedes Western Lands.

On paper the United States was a huge country. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, Britain ignored the claims of its Indian allies and ceded all the land...