LITMIR.BIZ

V. THE WINNING OF THE WEST

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1. Westward, Ho!

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      The English colonists in America occupied only the narrow strip of country between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic Ocean. The interior was inhabited by the Indians, and claimed by the French, the Spanish and the British, but neither possession nor legal title carried weight with the stream of pioneers that was making a path into the "wilderness," crying its slogan—"Westward, Ho!" as it moved toward the setting sun. The first objective of the pioneers was the Ohio Valley; the second was the valley of the Mississippi; the third was the Great Plains; the fourth was the Pacific slope, with its golden sands. Each one of these objectives developed itself out of the previous conquest.

      The settlers who made their way across the mountains into the valley of the Ohio, found themselves in a land of plenty. The game was abundant; the soil was excellent, and soon they were in a position to offer their surplus products for sale. These products could not be successfully transported across the mountains, but they could be floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi—a natural roadway to the sea. But beside the Indians, who claimed all of the land for their own, there were the Spaniards at New Orleans, doing everything in their power to prevent the American Colonists from building up a successful river commerce.

      The frontiersmen were able to push back the Indians. The Spanish garrisons presented a more serious obstacle. New Orleans was a well fortified post that could be provisioned from the sea. Behind it, therefore, lay the whole power of the Spanish fleet. The right of navigation was finally obtained in the Treaty of 1795. Still friction continued with the Spanish authorities and serious trouble was averted only by the transfer of Louisiana, first to the French (1800) and then by them to the United States (1803). Napoleon had agreed, when he secured this territory from the Spaniards, not to turn it over to the United States. A pressing need of funds, however, led him to strike an easy bargain with the American government which was negotiating for the control of the mouth of the Mississippi. Napoleon insisted that the United States take, not only the mouth of the river, but also the territory to the West which he saw would be useless without this outlet. After some hesitation, Jefferson and his advisers accepted the offer and the Louisiana Purchase was consummated.

      The Louisiana Purchase gave the young American nation what it needed—a place in the sun. The colonists had taken land for their early requirements from the Indians who inhabited the coastal plain. They had enslaved the Negroes and thus had secured an ample supply of cheap labor. Now, the pressure of population, and the restless, pioneer spirit of those early days, led out into the West.

      Until 1830 immigration was not a large factor in the increase of the colonial population, but the birth-rate was prodigious. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, Franklin estimated that the average family had eight children. There were sections of the country where the population doubled, by natural increase, once in 23 years. Indeed, the entire population of the United States was increasing at a phenomenal rate. The census of 1800 showed 5,308,483 persons in the country. Twenty years later the population was 9,638,453—an increase of 81 per cent. By 1840 the population was reported as 17,069,453—an increase of 77 per cent over 1820, and of 221 per cent over 1800.

      The small farmers and tradesmen of the North were settling up the Northwest Territory. The plantation owners of the South, operating on a large scale, and with the wasteful methods that inevitably accompany slavery, were clamoring for new land to replace the tracts that had been exhausted by constant recropping with no attempt at fertilization.

      Cotton had been enthroned in the South since the invention of the cotton gin in 1792. With the resumption of European trade relations in 1815 the demand for cotton and for cotton lands increased enormously. There was one, and only one logical way to meet this demand—through the possession of the Southwest.

2. The Southwest

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      The pioneers had already broken into the Southwest in large numbers. While Spain still held the Mississippi, there were eager groups of settlers pressing against the frontier which the Spanish guarded so jealously against all comers. The Louisiana Purchase met the momentary demand, but beyond the Louisiana Purchase, and between the settlers and the rich lands of Texas lay the Mexican boundary. The tide of migration into this new field hurled itself against the Mexican border in the same way that an earlier generation had rolled against the frontier of Louisiana.

      The attitude of these early settlers is described with sympathetic accuracy by Theodore Roosevelt. "Louisiana was added to the United States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands. … Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nominal, and the Indian the real master; and with a more immediate longing they fiercely coveted the Creole provinces at the mouth of the river."[27] This fierce coveting could have

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