Georgia and slowly back into the interior, at first along the lines of
river communication and then gradually filling up the spaces between
until the larger part of the available land east of the Alleghany
Mountains was settled. There the stream was checked as if dammed by the
mountain barrier, but the population was trickling through wherever it
could find an opening, slowly wearing channels, until finally, when the
obstacles were overcome, it broke through with a rush.

Twenty years before the Revolution the expanding population had reached
the mountains and was ready to go beyond. The difficulty of crossing the
mountains was not insuperable, but the French and Indian War, followed
by Pontiac's Conspiracy, made outlying frontier settlement dangerous if
not impossible. The arbitrary restriction of western settlement by the
Proclamation of 1763 did not stop the more adventurous but did hold back
the mass of the population until near the time of the Revolution, when
a few bands of settlers moved into Kentucky and Tennessee and rendered
important but inconspicuous service in the fighting. But so long as
the title to that territory was in doubt no considerable body of people
would move into it, and it was not until the Treaty of Peace in 1783
determined that the western country as far as the Mississippi River was
to belong to the United States that the dammed-up population broke over
the mountains in a veritable flood.

The western country and its people presented no easy problem to the
United States: how to hold those people when the pull was strong to draw
them from the Union; how to govern citizens so widely separated from the
older communities; and, of most immediate importance, how to hold the
land itself. It was, indeed, the question of the ownership of the land
beyond the mountains which delayed the ratification of the Articles of
Confederation. Some of the States, by right of their colonial charter
grants "from sea to sea," were claiming large parts of the western
region. Other States, whose boundaries were fixed, could put forward
no such claims; and, as they were therefore limited in their area
of expansion, they were fearful lest in the future they should be
overbalanced by those States which might obtain extensive property in
the West. It was maintained that the Proclamation of 1763 had changed
this western territory into "Crown lands," and as, by the Treaty of
Peace, the title had passed to the United States,