Some were worn with wounds and sickness; all were poor and unpaid; and Congress had no means to pay them.

Many among them felt that they had small chance to repair their broken fortunes if they returned to the homes they had abandoned seven weary years before, when the guns of the minute-men first called them to battle.
The Ohio Company.
These heroes of the blue and buff turned their eyes westward to the fertile lands lying beyond the mountains.

They petitioned Congress to mark out a territory, in what is now the State of Ohio, as the seat of a distinct colony, in time to become one of the confederated States; and they asked that their bounty lands should be set off for them in this territory.

Two hundred and eighty-five officers of the Continental line joined in this petition; one hundred and fifty-five, over half, were from Massachusetts, the State which had furnished more troops than any other to the Revolutionary armies.

The remainder were from Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Maryland.
The signers of this petition desired to change the paper obligations of Congress, which they held, into fertile wild lands which they should themselves subdue by their labor; and out of these wild lands they proposed to make a new State.