Editorial note — Chapter VII · ORIGIN OF THE PIONEER

The Pennsylvania historian might also have given us some word of that Col. George Morgan, some of whose descendants reside even now at Morganza, in Pennsylvania. Col. George Morgan had passed westward over the Alleghanies some years in advance of Daniel Boone’s first visit to Kentucky. Mr. James Morris Morgan, of Washington, D. C., in correspondence has this to say in regard to certain early voyagings of his ancestor, which were undertaken while the Quakers of Pennsylvania were still quietly dropping down from the hills of Pennsylvania into the eastern portions of Virginia and the Carolinas:

“Col. George Morgan embarked at the village of Kaskaskia, on the Kaskaskia River, for his voyage down the Mississippi on the 21st of November, 1766. Butler, in his history of Kentucky, gives the credit of being the first American citizen to descend the Mississippi to Col. Taylor, in 1769. Col. Morgan was the first American citizen to found a colony in the Territory of Louisiana. Under a grant of King Carlos IV, he built the city of New Madrid, March, 1789. The grant embraced some 15,000,000 acres of land. (Gayarré; ‘History of Louisiana.’) On June 20, 1788, Congress ordered the annulment of Col. Morgan’s Indian claim to a greater portion of the state of Illinois, ‘claiming the land bordering on the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to a determined station on the Mississippi that shall be sixty or eighty miles north from the mouth of the Illinois River, and extending from the Mississippi as far eastward as may.’ The treaty meeting held under the auspices of Sir William Johnson at Fort Stanwix, when the Indians deeded the territory of Indiana to George Morgan, his father-in-law John Boynton, and his partner Samuel Wharton, (Boynton, Wharton & Morgan) and several other minor traders whose goods had been despoiled, was held on November 3, 1768. The state of Virginia claimed the territory after the Revolutionary War, and bullied the national government into compliance with her claims, the United States accepting the property as a present from Virginia, immediately after deciding in her favor. (See Journal of Congress, 1784, Feb. 26.)”