150, vol.ii., March, 1788.

Report of Secretary Knox.] their officers, military and civil, still kept possession, administering the government of the scattered French hamlets, and preserving their old-time relations with the Indian tribes, whom they continued to treat as allies or feudatories.

To the south and west the Spaniards played the same part.

They scornfully refused to heed the boundary established to the southward by the treaty between England and the United States, alleging that the former had ceded what it did not possess.

They claimed the land as theirs by right of conquest.