homeseekers. Some of the colonies made honest attempts to compel
the removal of settlers from the reserved lands beyond their
borders, and Pennsylvania went so far as to decree the death
penalty for all who should refuse to remove. But the law was
never enforced.


The news of the cession of the eastern bank of the Mississippi to
the English brought consternation to the two or three thousand
French people living in the settlements of the Kaskaskia,
Illinois, and Wabash regions. The transfer of the western bank to
Spain did not become known promptly, and for months the habitants
supposed that by taking up their abode on the opposite side of
the stream they would continue under their own flag. Many of them
crossed the Mississippi to find new abodes even after it was
announced that the land had passed to Spain.

>From first to last these settlements on the Mississippi, the
Wabash, and the Illinois had remained, in French hands, mere
sprawling villages. The largest of them, Kaskaskia, may have
contained in its most flourishing days two thousand people, many
of them voyageurs, coureurs-de-bois, converted Indians, and
transients of one sort or another. In 1765 there were not above
seventy permanent families. Few of the towns, indeed, attained a
population of more than two or three hundred. All French colonial
enterprise had been based on the assumption that settlers would
be few. The trader preferred it so, because settlements meant
restrictions upon his traffic. The Jesuit was of the same mind,
because such settlements broke up his mission field. The
Government at Paris forbade the emigration of the one class of