Another writer[[13]] describes some of these early transactions. “The settlers of the district of the Columbia River,” says he, “who were under the jurisdiction of North Carolina, gave the name of Miro to the district they had formed; this as evidence of their partiality for the Spanish government. The promise of protection the inhabitants received from Gardoquoi was so modified by Miro that the scheme, though prosecuted for a time with vigor, finally failed from inability of the secessionists to comply with the conditions of recognition. Yet another center of sedition was located in the valley of the Mississippi. A company composed of Alexander Moultrie, Isaac Huger, Major William Snipes, Colonel Washington and other distinguished South Carolinians was formed at Charleston in 1789, which purchased from the state of Georgia fifty-two thousand nine hundred square miles of territory, extending from the Yazoo to the banks of the Mississippi near Natchez, the Choctaws, Chicasaws and Spain each claiming a portion of this territory. The ulterior designs of the company in the purchase and settlement of the country were carefully concealed for some time.”
The arch conspirator Wilkinson did his best to assume a position of importance with this little body of malcontents, and freely promised Miro that he would unite all this population under the flag of Spain. He naïvely stirred up the Indian savages of the Mississippi valley to renew their attacks on the Western frontier, in order that the Western settlers might the more quickly realize the inefficiency of the government at Washington to afford them the protection they needed. Meantime also it was quite possible that Great Britain might make an invasion of Louisiana, by way of the water trail from Canada to the Mississippi valley. Assuredly the times were troublous, and fortunate indeed was it that the government at Washington still lived, that good fortune favored the minds and hands in control.
It was not the wisdom of the government, not the ability of the political leaders that solved these perplexing problems. Presently they went far toward solving themselves, as do most American problems to-day. By this time all the mountain roads and water trails were becoming more defined and more frequented; the fighting white men were slowly beating off their savage foes.
Then at last came the time when the frontier, held fast by many braided trails, looked back across the mountains, and resolved to pin fast its allegiance then and forever to the government that had been left behind, the government of Americans under principles established and fully proved on the American soil. The threads that bound fast the new settlements with the old, the threads that grew and strengthened into indissoluble bonds, which in spite of the fears of those who dreaded the accession of any more large territory, held firm the whole wide realm of the West to the mother colonies on the East, were simply the natural and artificial trails, later to be blended into a vast network, intermingling and inextricable, weaving and making permanent the web of a common and unsectionalized civilization.
Such was the still pure Anglo-Saxon civilization, changed, purified and strengthened by some generations of tenure of the American soil, at the time when it reached the great central highway, the mighty Mississippi, there to pause for a time, facing new problems attendant upon the next great journey onward and outward in the pathway of the sun.
| [10] | Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge, Tenn. |
| [11] | N. P. Langford. |
| [12] | Alexander Hynds. |
| [13] | N. P. Langford. |