But it continued to be very much on the mind of many American colonists. The land to the north of the Ohio remained largely wilderness. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 ceded the land to Virginia and by the 1770s early settlers were following Daniel Boone into what would later become the state of Kentucky. To its south lay territory claimed by Virginia, stretching to the Mississippi. The Ohio River was also an important boundary. However it was described, the Ohio River became the primary means to venture west for the early European settlers, allowing them to float through largely roadless forests from Williamsport or Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, and then on down to New Orleans and the land of the ten-dollar bank note known as “le Dixie.” He was painted a few years later in 1788 by Mather Brown. In the negotiations to end the Revolution, John Adams insisted that the Ohio territory must belong to the new nation. Thomas Jefferson echoed their sentiments, calling the Ohio “the most beautiful river on earth” in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, even though he had never seen it. When French explorer La Salle first saw the Ohio in 1669, he described it as La Belle Rivière, " the Beautiful River. The Seneca Indians called it the Ohi:yo’ (pronounced oh-hee-yoh), literally the “Good River.” There was still not a single legal permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory when the U.S.
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