The Spaniards at New Orleans, from the first settlement of the country west of the Alleghany Mountains, sought to attach it to the province of Louisiana. Knowing the powerful efficacy of gold, in producing such results, they dispensed it with a liberal hand, to such as made New Orleans their market. The attachment of the first settlers, to the free institutions of our country, baffled every attempt to detach them from it.
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Comment by R. G. T.––The Spanish conspiracy was, in the main, “baffled” by the prompt action of our general government. George Rogers Clark and several other leading Kentuckians were quite willing to be “detached,” for a consideration. The fact is, that at first the sense of national patriotism was weak, west of the Alleghanies; the eighteenth century had closed before efforts at separation from the East were commonly regarded as treason. The interests of the Western people apparently were centered in the south-flowing Mississippi; they seemed to have at the time little in common with the East. So long as Spain held the mouth of the river, many Western leaders thought it not improper that the West should ally itself with that power; when our government finally purchased the Spanish claim, the Western men had no further complaint. See Roosevelt’s treatment of the Spanish conspiracy, in his Winning of the West, III., ch. iii.––R. G. T.
Footnotes for Chapter 6
Mr. Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, represents this as happening at Grave creek, which empties into the Ohio from the south eastern, or Virginia side of this river, twelve miles below Wheeling. Those who lived near at the time and are supposed to have had the best opportunity of ascertaining the fact, say that it happened near the mouth of Captina, a creek sixteen miles below Wheeling, and on the Ohio side.
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Comment by R. G. T.––What is called the “Captina affair” happened April 27th, at Pipe Creek, emptying into the Ohio from the west, fourteen miles below Wheeling, and six above Captina Creek. Two friendly Shawnees were killed here by a party commanded by Michael Cresap, of Redstone, who at the time was in the neighborhood of Wheeling, surveying and clearing farms for new settlers. Cresap and his men, among whom was George Rogers Clark, then a young surveyor who had a claim at the mouth of Fish Creek, thereupon started out to destroy Chief Logan’s camp, at Baker’s Bottom, opposite the mouth of Yellow Creek, fifty-three miles up the Ohio, and forty miles west of Pittsburg by land; but as Logan was a well-known friend of the whites, they became ashamed of their project, and marched on across country to Fort Redstone. Meanwhile, as will be seen in due course, others were preparing to destroy Logan’s band, and on April 30th occurred that infamous massacre which Logan wrongly believed to be Cresap’s work.