had tried to describe it; and the absorbing French books of
Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small
circle. The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated
interest in the new country. The place-names of the upper Ohio
became household words, and enterprising publishers put out not
only translations of the French writers but compilations by
Englishmen designed, in true journalistic fashion, to meet the
demands of the hour for information.

These publications displayed amazing misconceptions of the lands
described. They neither estimated aright the number and strength
of the French settlements nor dispelled the idea that the western
country was of little value. Even the most brilliant Englishman
of the day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, an ardent defender of the treaty
of 1763, wrote that the large tracts of America added by the war
to the British dominions were "only the barren parts of the
continent, the refuse of the earlier adventurers, which the
French, who came last, had taken only as better than nothing." As
late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long Under-Secretary for the
Colonies, declared that Americans could not settle the western
territory "for ages," and that the region must be given up to
barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as unstable
as the Scythians and Tartars. But the shortsightedness of these
distant critics can be forgiven when one recalls that Franklin
himself, while conjuring up a splendid vision of the western
valleys teeming with a thriving population, supposed that the
dream would not be realized for "some centuries." None of these
observers dreamt that the territories transferred in 1763 would
have within seventy-five years a population almost equal to that
of Great Britain.