Mississippi Company
In late 1794, the Georgia General Assembly passed a bill allowing a portion of the lands west of the Oconee River, the same land which Clarke's followers had recently occupied, to be distributed among veterans of the Revolution and various Indian conflicts. A supplementary act (the Yazoo Act) attached to the bill provided for the sale of of western land to four private land speculation firms: the Georgia Company, the Georgia-Mississippi Company, the Upper Mississippi Company, and the new Tennessee Company, persuaded the Georgia state assembly to sell more than . As many of the firms' members included many political insiders, the whole enterprise was scandalous and came to be known as the Yazoo Land Fraud.