extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific. Those charters had
lapsed, and the only colony in 1750 of which the jurisdiction exercised
under the charter reached beyond the Appalachian mountains was
Pennsylvania. The Connecticut grant had long since been ignored; the
Pennsylvania limits included the strategic point where the Alleghany and
Monongahela rivers unite to form the Ohio. Near this point began the final
struggle between the English and the French colonies. The interior
boundaries between colonies in 1750 were matters of frequent dispute and
law-suits. Such questions were eventually brought to the decision of the
English Privy Council, or remained to vex the new national government
after the Revolution had begun.

[Sidenote: The frontiers.]

At this date, and indeed as late as the end of the Revolution, the
continental colonies were all maritime. Each of them had sea-ports
enjoying direct trade with Europe. The sea was the only national highway;
the sea-front was easily defensible. Between contiguous colonies there was
intercourse; but Nova Scotia, the last of the continental colonies to be
established, was looked upon as a sort of outlyer, and its history has
little connection with the history of the thirteen colonies farther south.
The western frontier was a source of apprehension and of danger. In
northern Maine, on the frontiers of New York, on the west and southwest,
lived tribes of Indians, often disaffected, and sometimes hostile. Behind
them lay the French, hereditary enemies of the colonists. The natural
tendency of the English was to push their frontier westward into the
Indian and French belt.


3. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION.