There were, by 1785, a hundred thousand people in what we know as West Virginia and Kentucky. The first comers had fallen upon the very best lands and appropriated them. There is no doubt that all the fertile "bottoms" along the southern shore of the Ohio River had been "staked out" and more or less "improved" by this time. Washington alone, through his agents Crawford and Freeman, had secured not less than sixty thousand acres on the Ohio and Little and Great Kanawha before this time. Other far-sighted, enterprising men, like Patrick Henry, had secured other tracts of land. It must be remembered, too, that this was a day of no roads; lands lying away from the immediate river valleys could be reached and improved only with the greatest difficulty. It is therefore no wonder that the southern shore of the Ohio was crowded at this time with a swarm of pioneers whose uncouth faces and unkempt appearance suggested plainly the labor they had endured to reach and hold the river--their goal. They looked across to the fertile bottoms on the Indian Side and the splendid stretches of land in the valleys of the Muskingum, Hocking, Scioto, and Miami Rivers. They and their children had conquered that land; under a score of fierce leaders they had flung themselves upon the upper Muskingum and driven the Delawares away to the Lakes, or upon the Scioto and sent the Shawanese scurrying up the Sandusky or Maumee. Yet there on the trees on the other side were nailed proclamations from the commanding officer at Fort Pitt warning them against settling on those lands. Little wonder they defied the proclamation. In less than two months after Colonel Harmar had received the instructions to drive off all settlers from these lands of the United States, he sent a force under Ensign Armstrong down the river from Pittsburg. His report was most alarming;[38] he affirmed that there were three hundred families at the falls of the Hocking and an equal number on the Muskingum; on the Miami and Scioto Rivers the number of "intruders" was placed at fifteen hundred. "From Wheeling to that place [Miami]," he wrote, "there is scarcely one bottom on the river but has one or more families living thereon." These settlers "were equal to self-government," writes William Henry Smith, "and, if undisturbed, would soon have laid the foundations of a State on the Ohio."[39] Indeed, a call was issued by these pioneers March 12, 1785, for an election of members to a convention for the framing of a constitution for the government of a new state; elections were to be held at the mouths of the Miami, Scioto, and Muskingum Rivers and one at the house of Jonas Menzons in the present Belmont County, Ohio. The advertisement of these elections was signed by John Emerson and its final paragraph denied the right of Colonel Harmar to dispossess the settlers on the Indian Side, in the following terms: