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The party, all told, consisted but of eleven persons Captain Robson, Sir Robert Davers, six soldiers, two sailors, and young Kerr. Apparently they did not think it necessary to take with them any colonists, or Indian scouts.
Washington thought that the only way to secure a glorious and lasting peace was to be prepared to carry on the war. If the British should see the colonists weak and unprepared, they would either conquer them or offer them an inglorious peace. He, therefore, fortified his forces at Newburgh on the Hudson, where they were joined by the French. The entire year 1782 was spent in camp.
In such a country the fate of the Spanish settlement was soon decided; the dryness of the climate during the greater part of the year, and the occasional hostile attacks of the wandering Indians, compelled the colonists to desert their half-finished buildings. The style, however, in which they were commenced shows the strong and liberal hand of Spain in the old time.
It thus came about that when the Colonists arrived there were two Traders' Houses, on the site of the City of Winnipeg of to-day, within a mile of one another, one representing a New World, and the other an Old World type of mercantile life. It was plain that on the Plains of Rupert's Land there would come a struggle for the possession of power, if not for very existence.
All considered themselves dependencies of the British Crown. All the colonists claimed the enjoyment of the privileges and rights of British-born subjects, and the benefit of the common law of England. The laws of all were required to be not repugnant to, but, as nearly as possible, in conformity with the laws of England.
Governor Tryon, the Governor of the State, made no secret of his British preferences; indeed, they were not preferences at all, but downright British acts. Having won the Battle of Long Island, Lord Howe thought the time favorable for acting in his capacity as a peacemaker, because he had come over with authority to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Colonists' quarrel.
In the first instance the partition of so vast an extent of territory among so small a number of colonists was necessarily effected in a crude and tentative fashion. The great colony was divided into capitaneas, or counties, each of which possessed a coast-line of 150 miles. A Governor was appointed to each capitanea.
The two important coast towns Antium and Tarracina were, after the model of Ostia, occupied with Roman full-burgesses and restricted to a communal independence confined within narrow limits, while the previous burgesses were deprived in great part of their landed property in favour of the Roman colonists and, so far as they retained it, likewise adopted into the full burgess-union.
But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two generations of American colonists had cleared their forests, fought the savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their purses, and lived, though as yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World.
America was not mere wild land to the early colonists: it was a country that had already been seen through the eyes of enthusiastic explorers and daring adventurers, whose airs were sweeter than Europe's, whose fruits were richer, where forest and game, and even the savage inhabitant, guaranteed a more exciting life, full of chance for the future.
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