In all human probability, the whole country round the Great Lakes would still be British territory, and the mouth of the Mississippi still in the hands of some European power, had the folly of the separatists won the day and had the West been broken up into independent States.
Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.
These shortcomings were not special or peculiar to the frontiersmen of the Ohio valley at the close of the eighteenth century.

All our frontiersmen have betrayed a tendency towards them at times, though the exhibitions of this tendency have grown steadily less and less decided.
In Vermont, during the years between the close of the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, the state of affairs was very much what it was in Kentucky at the same time.

[Footnote: _Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography_, xi., No.

2, pp.

160-165, Letters of Levi Allen, Ethan Allen, and others, from 1787 to 1790.] In each territory there was acute friction with a neighboring State.