=258. Boundary Disputes.=—The boundaries of this immense and practically unoccupied area were in dispute to the north, northwest, and south. The British still kept garrisons at Detroit, Niagara, and other forts. In the region bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish claims conflicted with those of the Americans, and Spain denied the inhabitants of the new settlements beyond the Alleghanies any practical use of the lower Mississippi. A treaty with Spain in 1795 helped to mend these matters. [Illustration: BLOCKHOUSE AT MACKINAW, 1780.] =259. The West.=—The Westerners, who were thus deprived of the full use of their great waterway and whom Spanish agents endeavored to detach from the Union, were few in numbers. Kentucky and Tennessee were practically the only organized settlements; but a popular movement toward Ohio and the Northwest was beginning, and by the end of the century the Mississippi Territory had been formed in the region which Georgia claimed north of the Gulf. Most of the settlers in these outlying communities had moved westward from the frontier portions of the adjoining older states. Thus many of the immigrants to Tennessee came from North Carolina. Often they were of Scotch-Irish stock, deeply religious, hardy and frugal. They drove out the Indians, killed the wild beasts, cleared lands for their farms, and raised their large families in a rude independence. On the foundations they laid, great commonwealths have been erected which should not in their present wealth and power forget the bold adventurers who crossed the mountains in wagon trains or floated down the Ohio in large flat-bottomed boats.[103] =260. The Older Commonwealths.=—Within the original colonies state lines were much confused. Vermont did not formally succeed in throwing off New York’s claim and becoming a state until 1791. Connecticut still claimed a strip of land along the northern border of the Northwest Territory. Maine continued to constitute a district of Massachusetts. The population of all the states was chiefly of English descent and was, on the whole, homogeneous, although the amount of intercourse between state and state was still small. Virginia was the most populous of the states, Massachusetts ranking next. Each was typical of the region to which it belonged, the presence of slavery more or less retarding the South, and the comparative absence of it favoring New England.