the Cherokees, and Ohio Indians about Pitsburg, the only countries
thereabouts that we can extend our settlements to; which are so
inconvenient to navigation, that nothing can be brought from them
across the mountains, at least none of those gross commodities, which
are the staple of North America; and they are as inconvenient to have
any thing carried from them, nigh two thousand miles, down the river
Ohio, and then by the Missisippi. For that reason those countries,
which we look upon to be the most convenient, are the most
inconvenient to us of any, although they join upon our present
settlements. It is for these reasons, that the first settlements we
make beyond the mountains, that is, beyond those we are now possessed
of, should be upon the Missisippi, as we have said, convenient to the
navigation of that river; and in time those new settlements may come
to join to our present plantations; and we may by that means reap the
benefit of all those inland parts of North America, by means of the
navigation of the Missisippi, which will be secured by this post at
the Forks. If that is not done, we cannot see how any of those inland
parts of America, and the territories of the Ohio, which were the
great objects of the present war, can ever be of any use to Britain,
as the inhabitants of all those countries can otherwise have little or
no correspondence with it.

IV. This famous river, the Missisippi, is navigable upwards of two
thousand miles, to the falls of St. Anthony in latitude 45 deg., the only
fall we know in it, which is 16 degrees of latitude above its mouth;
and even above that fall, our author tells us, there is thirty fathom
of water in the river, with a proportionate breadth. About one
thousand miles from its mouth it receives the river Ohio, which is
navigable one thousand miles farther, some say one thousand five
hundred, nigh to its source, not far from Lake Ontario in New York; in