Louisiana, it will be thus seen, according to this authoritative document of the French crown, was the country watered by the Mississippi, and its tributary streams from the sea-shore to the Illinois: such was the limitation affixed to the province by the French themselves; and, by the same public instrument, all the rest of the French possessions were united under the government of New France. It is true that the Illinois was subsequently annexed to Louisiana by a royal decree in 1717, after Crozat had relinquished his charter, and the whole region was granted to Law's Mississippi Company; but the Illinois were still spoken of as the Illinois, and the district was not merged in Louisiana, though it was annexed to that province, to give the company access to Canada, in which the monopoly of the beaver-trade had been granted to them. It has been already observed, that the limits of the Hudson's Bay territories and French Canada were settled by the peace of Utrecht, in 1713: one great object of that treaty was to provide against the commercial disputes of the subjects of the two crowns, which had led to a series of conflicts on the shores of Hudson's Bay; it was in furtherance of this object that the fur-trade of Canada was now diverted from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, by this grant of the monopoly of the beaver-trade to the Compagnie d'Occident, and the annexation of the Illinois country to Louisiana.
Upon the surrender of Canada to the British arms, considerable discussion arose as to the respective limits of the provinces of Canada and Louisiana. The British Government insisted, as already stated, p. 150, on a line which would take in the river Ouabache, as far as its junction with the Ohio; and from thence along the Ohio to the Mississippi, the country to the south of the Ohio being at this time either British possessions, as part of Virginia, or occupied by Indian tribes. In the course of these negotiations, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who signed the surrender, published his own account of what passed between Sir J. Amherst and himself, of which he considered the English account to be incorrect. "On the officer showing me a map which he had in his hand, I told him the limits were not just, and verbally mentioned others, extending Louisiana on one side to the carrying-place of the Miamis, _which is the height of the lands whose rivers run in the Ouabache_; and on the other to _the head of the river of the Illinois_." [Annual Register, 1761, p. 268.] Even thus, then, all to the north of the Illinois was admitted to be Canada. However, the French Government, in its memorial of the 9th September, 1761, "agreed to cede Canada in the most ample manner, and to admit the line on which England rested her demand, as, without doubt, the most extensive bound which can be given to the cession." In accordance with this we find that, by the seventh article of the Treaty of Paris, the French possessions were declared to be thenceforth limited by the mid-channel of the Mississippi, from its source to the River Iberville.