full of details concerning the companies; and they did possess considerable importance at certain times in the settlement of the West, both because they in places stimulated that settlement, and because in other places they retarded it, inasmuch as they kept out actual settlers, who could not pre-empt land which had been purchased at low rates from some legislative body by the speculators.  The companies were sometimes formed by men who wished themselves to lead emigrants into the longed-for region, but more often they were purely speculative in character, and those who founded them wished only to dispose of them at an advantage to third parties.  Their history is inextricably mixed with the history of the intrigues with and against the Spaniards and British in the West.  The men who organized them wished to make money.  Their object was to obtain title to or possession of the lands, and it was quite a secondary matter with them whether their title came from the United States, England, or Spain.  They were willing to form colonies on Spanish or British territory, and they were even willing to work for the dismemberment of the Western Territory from the Union, if by so doing they could increase the value of the lands which they sought to acquire.  American adventurers had been in correspondence with Lord Dorchester, the Governor General of Canada, looking to the possibility of securing British aid for those desirous of embarking in great land speculations in the West.  These men proposed to try to get the Westerners to join with the British in an attack upon Louisiana, or even to conduct this attack themselves in the British interests, believing that with New Orleans in British hands the entire province would be thrown open to trade with the outside world and to settlement; with the result that the lands would increase enormously in value, and the speculators and organizers of the companies, and of the movements generally, grow rich in consequence. [Footnote:  Canadian Archives, Dorchester to Sydney, June 7, 1789; Grenville to Dorchester, May 6, 1790; Dorchester to Beckwith, June 17, 1790; Dorchester to Grenville, Sept. 25, 1790.  See Brown’s “Political Beginnings,” 187.] They assured the British agents that the Western country would speedily separate from the eastern States, and would have to put itself under the protection of some foreign state.  Dorchester considered these plans of sufficient weight to warrant inquiry by his agents, but nothing ever came of them.

    The Yazoo Land Companies.

Much the most famous, or, it would be more correct to say, infamous, of these companies were those organized in connection with the Yazoo lands. [Footnote:  The best and most thorough account of these is to be found in Charles H. Haskin’s “The Yazoo Land Companies.”] The country in what is now northern Mississippi and Alabama possessed, from its great fertility, peculiar fascinations in the eyes of the adventurous land speculators.  It was unoccupied