With these episodes of national rivalry, and consequent diplomacy and war, were intimately concerned the French fur-trade outposts of Detroit, Mackinac, Vincennes, and St. Louis, links in the forted chain which bound Canada and Louisiana, and by means of which it was sought to form a barrier against the Westward growth of the English colonies; also the Spanish stations of San Francisco, Monterey, Los Angeles, and Santa Fé, which were at once political vantage points and mission seats, for the spread of Spanish power and civilization from Mexico, among the brown barbarians of the North. St. Louis experienced both French and Spanish régimes, while Mackinac, Detroit, and Vincennes were much affected by the period of English occupancy.
As settlement grew upon the Atlantic coast, the English frontier was inevitably pushed farther and farther from tidewater. The hunter followed his game westward; so the forest trader, seeking the ever-receding camps of the aborigines, and, in due course, the raiser of cattle, horses, and swine who needed fresh pastures for his herds as tillage steadily encroached upon the wild lands of the border. At first timorously occupying the valleys and foothills of the eastern slopes, hunter, trader, and grazier, each in his turn, cautiously followed buffalo traces and Indian war-paths over the crest of the great range, and hailed with glee waters descending into the mysterious West. Not less formidable than the barriers reared by nature were those interposed by the savage, who with dismay saw his hunting grounds fast dwindling under the sway of the land-grabbing English; and by the jealous machinations of the military agents and fur traders of New France, who brooked no rivalry in their commercial exploitation of the forest.
When New France fell, the English crown strictly forbade further settlement in the back country. This order was issued upon the representations of London merchants interested, as had been the merchant adventurers of France, in preserving the forest for the Indians and the fur trade; the ministry were not unmindful also that the bold and liberty-loving frontiersmen who crossed the mountains might come to consider English political control as unessential to their being.
This policy was, however, diametrically opposed to the policy of the border. The fertile fields of the West were far from the observation of London officials, the spirit of unrest and the desire for gain laughed at royal proclamations, and the trans-Alleghany movement but gathered force. By the opening of the Revolution, Kentucky and Tennessee were practically staked out; by its close, Americans were sole white masters of the West to the east of the Mississippi, save for a brief holding by the British of Detroit, Mackinac, and other upper lake posts, as security for treaty obligations as yet unfulfilled.
It had been the custom of England to grant lands for military service; the American colonies had likewise liberally rewarded their defenders in the Indian wars; Revolutionary soldiers were now given free access to the broad acres of the West, the direct result of this policy being the settlements of Marietta and Cleveland.
Water courses have ever been of the highest importance in determining the lines of continental settlement. The river St. Lawrence and the great lakes offered to the people of New France a continual invitation to explore the regions whence they flowed. It was not long before the French found that the sources of south-and west-flowing waters were not far from the banks of the eastering waterways upon which they dwelt. By ascending short tributaries, and carrying their light craft along practicable paths, or portages, first used by the Indians, they could re-launch into strange and devious paths which led to all parts of the continental interior—the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Assiniboine, and their multifarious affluents and connections. Thus easily did New France spread along the St. Lawrence and the lakes, over into the Ohio and the Mississippi, and down their gliding channels to New Orleans and the sea.
In crossing the Alleghanies, the English sought the Ohio and its tributaries—the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Kanawha, the Big Sandy. The Ohio was long the chief gateway to the West. Upon this royal path into the wilderness, the Ohio Company sent Christopher Gist to prospect and report; for its possession, France and England came to final blows through the action at Fort Necessity of Major Washington, than whom no man knew the Ohio better; it was an approach to Kentucky more inviting than Boone's Wilderness Road, through Cumberland Gap; Clark's flotilla came swooping down the great river to conquer Kaskaskia and Vincennes; and, the Revolution ended, Rufus Putnam and his fellow veterans from New England claimed their military land grants along this continental highway, at Marietta. Cincinnati, also, was an outpost deliberately planted upon the great pathway to the West, although otherwise differing in genesis. It was by the Great Lakes, that other principal approach to the West, that Moses Cleaveland founded the settlement of Revolutionary soldiers who were redeeming their land warrants in New Connecticut, or the Western Reserve—an incident closely connecting Ohio with colonial history.
Early in the Western experiences of the new nation, came Indian wars. These resulted in treaties where under the defeated tribesmen were either forbidden to enter defined areas of settlement, or were confined within specific reservations. This necessitated the construction of rude but effective frontier forts, which not infrequently proved the nuclei of hamlets that grew into considerable towns. Sometimes these forts were essential to the direct protection of the white settlers, who, upon occasion of alarm, flew to cover within the log palisades, which were stout enough to resist a barbaric foe unpossessed of artillery; such was Fort Washington, which in time became Cincinnati.
The forest trade was long the chief and only commercial interest in the West, and at certain points garrisoned forts were necessary to serve the traders as depôts and as havens of refuge; this was the part played by Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, St. Paul, Vincennes, and St. Louis. In the case of Des Moines, the fort was established for the protection of a group of reservation Indians who might otherwise have fallen victims to a superior savage foe.
Agricultural settlers rapidly took up lands. Battle against it as he would,—and the early history of the border is a piteous tale of man's inhumanity to man,—the dispossessed savage found this army of occupation impregnable. As the frontier moved to the westward of the Mississippi, it was accompanied by the Indians and the fur trade. Territories were erected by Congress out of the lands of the ousted Iroquois and Algonkins, and these political divisions were soon admitted to the Union as states; mines were exploited, forests were depleted, miscellaneous industries were created, and these new interests not only profoundly affected the old towns, but gave rise to a new order of cities.