Great Lakes the size of the United Kingdom, while the surface area of the entire basin (the lakes and the land they drain) is about the size of the UK and France combined. Lake Michigan is the only one of the Great Lakes that is located entirely within the United States; the others form a water boundary between the United States and Canada. The lakes are divided among the jurisdictions of the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. Both Ontario and Michigan include in their boundaries portions of four
Colonial history of the United States in 1783, the region south of the Great Lakes formally became part of the United States. The Illinois country by 1752 had a French population of 2,500; it was located to the west of the "Ohio Country" and was concentrated around Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Sainte Genevieve. According to one scholar, "The Illinois Habitant was a gay soul; he seemed shockingly carefree to later, self-righteous Puritans from the American colonies." French claims to French Louisiana stretched thousands of miles from modern Louisiana north to the largely unexplored Midwest, and west to the Rocky Mountains. It was generally divided into Upper and