By the close of the 18th century, Ohio was also completely filled up by the settlements of the white men, while the natives, who had sold their birthright, slowly retreated before them into the present states of Illinois and Indiana. But yet again the same programme was gone through. The whites, to whom so much room had already been given, clamored for more; again their Government listened to their demands. The level lands, watered by sluggish streams, between the Ohio and the Wabash, were bought as those of Ohio had been, and received, as if in irony of the unlucky Indians who had taken refuge there, the name of Indiana. In a similar manner was formed the State of Illinois, the Sack, Fox, and other more northerly tribes ceding their territories as readily as their southern neighbors had done.
Now and then some pioneer penetrated into the southern districts of Michigan, where, as we know, the French had long since established outposts, and in which were now situated Detroit and Mahimillimac, the two chief seats of the Canadian fur-trade. In 1803, the purchase by the Americans of five millions of acres between Lakes Michigan and Huron brought the emigrants from the States face to face with those from Canada. There were no more unoccupied districts to be bought in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes; and it will be in company with the scientific explorers of modern times that we shall renew our acquaintance with the border lands between the American Republic and Canada.
Returning in the wake of emigration to the South, we find the cession of French territory to the Americans in 1763 resulting in the influx, into the districts between Georgia and the Mississippi, of a vast number of adventurers from the old states and the new. The general name of Louisiana, given by the first comers to the whole of the valley of the Mississippi, became restricted to the small state between the Father of Waters and the then Spanish Texas, while the new and important American settlements on the east of the great river were called Mississippi in its honor. A little later, the tract between the new state of Mississippi and Georgia was settled under the title of Alabama, and of all the eastern districts between the St. Lawrence and the sea there remained but Florida—still, in spite of a temporary change of ownership between 1763 and 1801, in the hands of the Spanish—to be acquired by the ambitious American Government. That its possession was eagerly coveted will be readily understood, and after a long series of negotiations, combined with the occasional use of force, it was annexed to the great republic in 1821.
As a matter of course, the Mississippi was not long allowed to present any barrier either to emigration or exploration, and the taking possession of the districts on the east was but a preliminary step toward the acquisition of the vast tracts stretching away to the Pacific on the west.
After a long and somewhat stormy series of negotiations, Texas, first visited by La Salle in his vain quest for the mouth of the Mississippi, and afterward colonized by the Spanish from Mexico, was ceded to the all-powerful American republic, and, being rapidly settled by enterprising emigrants from the East, it soon in its turn formed the starting-point for new expeditions westward. First California, and then Arizona and New Mexico, became the property of the United States, while the intervening districts between the first state on the Pacific seaboard to become the property of the American republic and the Mississippi were gradually filled up by an ever-increasing tide of emigration from the East and from the South, from the North and from the West. Step by step, little by little, the red men receded before the march of the whites, making every now and then a deeply pathetic, but ever futile attempt to stem the advance of their insidious destroyers. What was originally a vast population of some millions of aborigines—ranking among them, to quote the words of their great historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, “every phase of primitive humanity, from the reptile-eating cave-dweller of the Great Basin to the Aztec and Maya-Quiché civilization of the southern table-land ... vanished at the touch of European civilization, and their unwritten history, reaching back for thousands of ages, ended.... Their strange destinies fulfilled, in an instant they disappeared, and all we have of them besides their material relics is the glance caught in their hasty flight, which gives us a few customs and traditions, and a little mythological history.”
Simultaneously with the advance of the Americans westward, the districts now collectively known as British America were being rapidly opened up by enterprising explorers of various nationalities; but, to avoid any further break in the continuity of our narrative, we will reserve our account of the Hudson’s Bay and other companies who took part in the great work in the North for a future chapter. We will follow first the fortunes of the earliest heroes sent forth by the United States Government to survey the regions west of the Mississippi, which, when purchased, were as little known as the heart of Africa before the journeys of Livingstone, Butler, Speke, Grant, Baker, Stanley, and others.
THE UPPER MISSOURI.