[Footnote:
Gardoqui MSS., Clark to Gardoqui, Falls of the Ohio, March 15, 1788.]
Nothing came of this proposal.
The Proposal of Wilkinson, Brown, and Innes.
Another proposal which likewise came to nothing, is noteworthy because
of the men who made it, and because of its peculiar nature. The
proposers were all Kentuckians. Among them were Wilkinson, one Benjamin
Sebastian, whom the Spaniards pensioned in the same manner they did
Wilkinson, John Brown, the Kentucky delegate in Congress, and Harry
Innes, the Attorney-General of Kentucky. All were more or less
identified both with the obscure separatist movements in that
commonwealth, and with the legitimate agitation for statehood into which
some of these movements insensibly merged. In the spring of 1789 they
proposed to Gardoqui to enter into an agreement somewhat similar to the
one he had made with Morgan. But they named as the spot where they
wished to settle the lands on the east bank of the Mississippi, in the
neighborhood of the Yazoo, and they urged as a reason for granting the
lands that they were part of the territory in dispute between Spain and
the United States, and that the new settlers would hold them under the
Spanish King, and would defend them against the Americans.
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