This was not a long time, and yet in it was much change. It has been only recently made clear how thoroughly British everything became. Mather, Ancrum, Stuart, McGillivray, McCurtin, in Mobile; Walker, Carson, McGrew, Sunflower, Lizard, Campbell, and McIntosh up the river, were well-known merchants or settlers, and some of these families or sites still survive. Attorney-General Edmund Rush Wegg had a home on Mobile Bay near Battle’s, and Governor Durnford, to whom when provincial surveyor we owe the first chart of the bay (1771), lived near Montrose. The machinery of government was fully developed. The governor, council and assembly sat at Pensacola, the capital, and Mobile delegates were leaders there in what Governor Chester calls the “cantankerous” lower house. Mobile was the largest town in the vast province of West Florida, which extended from the Mississippi to the Chattahoochee River, and had her own common law courts. A British custom-house was in full operation. We learn much from the military exploration of the Bigbee by Romans’s and Bartram’s botanical expedition, but most from the papers of General Haldimand, who was long in West Florida. They are preserved in the British Museum, and have been copied for the Canadian government. The collection is a mine for American history in the late sixties and early seventies. He pronounced Mobile that part of the province best fitted for development. The British established on the Mississippi two forts that were the origin of Natchez and Baton Rouge, and also the one where the Iberville River (Bayou Manchac) left the Mississippi to take off its surplus waters to Lake Pontchartrain and the Sound. Thence the communication with Mobile was covered by a chain of islands, of which Dauphine is the easternmost. This Bayou Lake Sound passage the British endeavored to clear out and utilize, it being shorter than the ascent from the river mouth, which also they had a treaty right to use. In this way Mobile became a depot and starting-point for expeditions up the Mississippi River to the Illinois and other parts of the great West. Major Loftus started thence on his disastrous attempt to take possession, and the famous Major Robert Farmer successfully ascended from Mobile, and in conjunction with a force from the east occupied Fort Chartres. Locally the most important feature of British times was the Choctaw congress of 1765, which began for this part of America the process of “extinguishing the Indian title.” The French had acted as if the natives were subjects of their king and all territory was French. The English theory was that the savages were under a protectorate, but, while they could not treat with other nations, their lands remained their own until bought by the Crown. This is the modern doctrine of civilized nations as to all savage countries, and the United States have regularly acted on it.