Produced by Mark Hamann, Terry Gilliland and PG Distributed Proofreaders
1791-1807
This volume covers the period which opened with the checkered butfinally successful war waged by the United States Government against theNorthwestern Indians, and closed with the acquisition and exploration ofthe vast region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was during thisperiod that the West rose to real power in the Union. The boundaries ofthe old West were at last made certain, and the new West, the Far West,the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was added to thenational domain. The steady stream of incoming settlers broadened anddeepened year by year; Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states,Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi territories. The population in thenewly settled regions increased with a rapidity hitherto unexampled; andthis rapidity, alike in growth of population and in territorialexpansion, gave the West full weight in the national councils.
The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the north, and the innumerableobscure forays and reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in thesouth, so cowed the Indians, that they all, north and south alike, madepeace; the first peace the border had known for fifty years. At the sametime the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in fact the boundarieswhich the peace of 1783 had only given us in name. The execution ofthese treaties put an end in the north to the intrigues of the British,who had stirred the Indians to hostility against the Americans; and inthe south to the far more treacherous intrigues of the Spaniards, whoshowed astounding duplicity, and whose intrigues extended not only tothe Indians but also to the baser separatist leaders among theWesterners themselves.
The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true history is to be found, notin the doings of the diplomats who determined merely the terms uponwhich it was made, but in the western growth of the people of the UnitedStates from 1769 to 1803, which made it inevitable. The men who settledand peopled the western wilderness were the men who won Louisiana; forit was surrendered by France merely because it was impossible to hold itagainst the American advance. Jefferson, through his agents at Paris,asked only for New Orleans; but Napoleon thrust upon him the great West,because Napoleon saw, what the American statesmen and diplomats did notsee, but what the Westerners felt; for he saw that no European powercould hold the country beyond the Mississippi when the Americans hadmade good their foothold upon the hither bank.
It remained to explore the unknown land; and this task fell, not to merewild hunters, such as those who had first penetrated the woodedwilderness beyond the Alleghanies, but to officers of the regular army,who obeyed the orders of the National Government. Lewis, Clark, and Pikewere the pioneers in the exploration of the vast territory the UnitedStates had just gained.
The names of the Indian fighters, the treaty-makers, the wildernesswanderers, who took the lead in winning and exploring the West, arememorable. M