Missouri must be considered from a double point of view. As a French outpost, St. Louis had become the refuge of much of the French population of the whole Northwest Territory when that passed under English control, and for many years the city remained a foreign settlement. Scattered settlers began to occupy the river banks after or even during the Revolution. In the westward march of population down the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley small groups soon began to enter Missouri, until at the census of 1810, they amounted to 20,000 persons occupying a strip of land along the Mississippi with a small isolated settlement at the lead mines.
On the other hand, as a territory where slavery was permitted, Missouri naturally attracted emigrants from Virginia and North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. Within ten years after the Louisiana Purchase it was estimated that four-fifths of the people in Missouri were Americans and they were rapidly moving from the river back into the interior.
The Missouri River was naturally an avenue of access for these people. The interior of the State soon began to have the collective name of "Boone's Lick" because the Boones had made salt in that district in 1807. A real rush into this region began about 1817, and Kentucky showed its loyalty to its adopted son (who it will be remembered was a Pennsylvanian by birth) by contributing 90 per cent of the immigration. The State has been called the daughter of Kentucky and within limits this is not inappropriate. Tennessee, however, was strongly represented. The whole population was in general of the upland element originally from Virginia and North Carolina, largely Ulster Scotch in its more remote origin.
By 1830 the movement of population had reached the western border of the State. Until this time the settlement was purely British in character save for the now negligible remnant of French on the Mississippi. Missouri then began to get a part of the immigration of German Alpines which makes Saint Louis still one of the American cities with a most marked German tinge. At the same time some of the old American stock who objected to slavery and its influences were passing north and west of Missouri into Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. On the whole, however, at the close of this period Missouri remained a Nordic community mostly of Virginian stock going back eventually to Great Britain. Its population of well over a million was nine-tenths white and eight-tenths American-born, the Germans outnumbering the Irish two to one among the foreigners. Kentucky had been by far the largest contributor, Tennessee came next, followed by Virginia, while Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana together accounted for only about as many as Kentucky alone, that is, 100,000.
This Missouri population, with its Ulster Scotch tinge, played an important part in the settlement of the trans-Missouri West. It contributed a large percentage of the plainsmen and mountain men of later date, as well as of the cowboys on the cattle ranges, to say nothing of the gun-men and bad men of the frontier.
Florida missed the establishment of one of the earliest and what might have been one of the greatest of Nordic colonies in North America when Coligny's settlement of Huguenots was massacred by the Spanish on September 20, 1565. The latter made no effective use of the territory which was looked upon by the government of Mexico probably in about the same light as the Virgin Islands are now looked upon by the government in Washington. In 1763 Spain ceded Florida to England in return for Havana, which had been captured during the Seven Years' War.
A second Nordic invasion of Florida occurred at the time of the American Revolution when the English Loyalists from the Southern colonies sought refuge there to the number of more than 13,000. If these had remained as permanent settlers the State would have benefited immensely, but most of them left in 1784, when the Spaniards reoccupied the territory and abolished religious freedom. Some went to England and others to the West Indies or Nova Scotia. The development of the peninsula was thereby long delayed.
East and West Florida became part of the United States in 1819. A Florida colonization scheme, of little importance numerically, deserves mention in passing because it represented the first real establishment in American territory of the Mediterranean peoples who have formed such an important element in the immigration of the last half-century. This was a colony established by British promoters to which they brought 1,500 Greeks, Italians, and Minorcans about 1767. Sickness soon greatly reduced their numbers, but a few of the descendants of these people are in the State at the present time.