CHAPTER II.
THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763-1775.
The result of England's last great colonial struggle with France was to sever from the latter all her American dependencies, her colonists becoming the subjects of alien and rival powers.

England won Canada and the Ohio valley; while France ceded to her Spanish allies Louisiana, including therein all the territory vaguely bounded by the Mississippi and the Pacific.

As an offset to this gain Spain had herself lost to England both Floridas, as the coast regions between Georgia and Louisiana were then called.
Thus the thirteen colonies, at the outset of their struggle for independence, saw themselves surrounded north, south, and west, by lands where the rulers and the ruled were of different races, but where rulers and ruled alike were hostile to the new people that was destined in the end to master them all.
The present province of Quebec, then called Canada, was already, what she has to this day remained, a French state acknowledging the English king as her over-lord.

Her interests did not conflict with those of our people, nor touch them in any way, and she has had little to do with our national history, and nothing whatever to do with the history of the west.
In the peninsula of East Florida, in the land of the cypress, palmetto, and live oak, of open savannas, of sandy pine forests, and impenetrable, interminable morasses, a European civilization more ancient than any in the English colonies was mouldering in slow decay.

Its capital city was quaint St.Augustine, the old walled town that was founded by the Spaniards long years before the keel of the _Half-Moon_ furrowed the broad Hudson, or the ships of the Puritans sighted the New England coast.