CHAPTER IV. OUR ACQUIRED TERRITORY. COLONIZATION RESULTS OF THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR-THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE OON after our forefathers had planted their little colonies along the Atlantic Coast, their children ascended the Hudson, the Mohawk, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and other valleys, penetrated to the Ohio, and at length invaded "the dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky, and slowly moved westward along the region of the Great Lakes. A little later they began to occupy the rich prairies of the Mississippi Valley, and to-day their remote descendants have transformed the treeless plains of the central West, and the mountain valleys and gold-fields of the Pacific slope and of the Rocky Mountains into busy and prosperous communities. Long before the day of the Anglo-Saxon occupation, adventurers of other races had passed lightly over much of what is now the United States. Yet only in a few isolated spots had they left any enduring trace. Pressing closely upon the footsteps of the hunters and trappers, the Daniel Boones of the frontier, the American has always founded homes, established schools, and organized permanent industries. The favorable termination of the French and Indian wars, waged for more than two generations, gave the English colonists the great lakeregion and northwestern territory west of the Alleghanies, and put an end forever to the Frenchman's dream of empire in this quarter. The Louisiana purchase gave us a vast area in the South and West, while the Texas revolution and the war with Mexico, gave us New Mexico, Arizona, and California. What has long been called our great Western Empire may be roughly described as including the country lying from north to south between the Dominion of Canada and the Republic of Mexico; and from east to west (with boundaries less definitely fixed) between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. It is remarkable that when the great Corsican had exhausted his treasure in the desolation and destruction of homes in Europe to extend his empire, he was willing to dispose of his vast area of territory in North America to the United States. Seventy-five million francs at that time was a great boon to the French conqueror, and one million one hundred and seventy-two thousand square miles of the territory of North America was destined to be a still greater boon for the millions of free people who were to build prosperous homes in this then unexplored region. Meriwether Lewis The treasure exchanged for the land purchased the equipment and munitions of war that carried mourning and desolation to thousands of homes in Europe. The territory received in exchange for the treasure has produced untold millions of homes in our own country. President Jefferson and the Congress desired a more perfect knowledge of this vast country acquired by what was known as the "Louisiana Purchase" from the French government, and it was under government direction that the expedition of Lewis and Clark was projected. 1803, this expedition was organized at St. Louis to explore a route through the unknown wilderness to the Pacific Coast. The company was composed of nine young men from Kentucky, fourteen soldiers, two Canadian boatmen, an interpreter, a hunter, and a negro servant of Captain Clark's. In In the spring of 1804 the villagers of St. Louis assembled on the bank of the Mississippi River to bid adieu to the members of this first expedition. The history of that exploration is one of the most interesting ever written. Their first winter was spent with the Mandan Indians in what is now North Dakota. Towing their boats for two thousand miles up the Missouri River and leaving them in charge of a band of savages, the Shoshone Indians, they obtained from them horses for crossing the mountains to the head waters of the great Columbia, and there built other boats and floated down the "Hudson of the West" to its junction with the Pacific at a point where now stands the town of Astoria, and here they spent their second winter. In the following spring they commenced their toilsome return journey to the upper Columbia, where they again found their horses, safely cared for in the interval by the friendly Nez Percés Indians. They continued their return journey over the mountains to the head waters of the Yellowstone, passed down the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, and, after two years and four months absence, and after having been given up as lost, they were welcomed home again by the villagers of St. Louis. In that perilous journey they had met no less than eighty-five tribes of Indians, who had never seen white men before, and passed through a vast country of surpassing interest and inexhaustible natural resources. A few years later a party sent out by John Jacob Astor for the purpose of extending the fur trade also crossed the continent, passing over a por tion of the route followed by Lewis and Clark. After the discovery of gold in California, immigrant routes across the continent were established, but there still remained vast regions between these routes that were almost unknown at a much later date. This is illustrated by the fact that the extraordinary tract of country now known as Yellowstone HmClark Park, so full of natural wonders, was practically unknown until several years after the great war. The same may be said, as far as the general public is concerned, of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, although Lieutenant J. C. Ives, Corps of Topographical Engineers, made a most laborious exploration of the Colorado River in 1857-8 under the direction of the Office of Explorations and Surveys, Captain A. A. Humphreys in charge; and his reports and maps were of great interest and value. While the Lewis and Clark expedition was on its return journey, a second important exploration was working its way to the westward. This was under the command of Zebulon M. Pike, whose monument is the mountain which bears his name, looking out across the plains from the eastern edge of a world of mountains. Lieutenant Pike was, as so many of those have been who led the way into our western empire, a soldier. He was born in the army, and while yet a boy, was an ensign in his father's regiment. And as a soldier he died. He was killed while leading his regiment, the Fifteenth Infantry, in the assault at York, Canada, April, 1813. After the stir he made in the old time when the ground his mountain stands upon was not ours but belonged to Spain; after all the charming narrations that have been evolved out of his adventures, we marvel that he died at thirty-four, the colonel of the regiment he led. There were twenty-three men in this expedition, all told. They started from Bellefontaine, a location on the Missouri, fourteen miles north of the city of St. Louis-the same locality which had been the starting point of Lewis and Clark, and the first site of a military post west of the Mississippi-in July, 1806. There was then the beginning of a dispute about boundaries; the same that was ended by the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo after the war with Mexico, while all the scars were healed by the Gadsden purchase a little later. Pike's errand was not entirely one of exploration, and without question it was desired to know also how strong Spain was along the boundary she claimed as her northern limit, and which we disputed. His journal reads now like a romance. It is of starved, frozen, ragged men wandering through a region that is the favorite and cosy touristground of three generations later. His journey led him westward through what is now the State of Kansas, through millions of buffaloes, and into the foothills above what is now the city of Pueblo, Colorado. He first saw, far away, the mountain that bears his name, November 15, 1806, and it was in sight of his party through their wanderings for more than a month. He did not reach it, or name it himself, and was finally captured while in a stockade he had built on the Rio Grande, thinking it the Red River and that he was within our acknowledged territory. This captivity took him a long journey into Mexico. It was filled with incidents that read strange now, and show how little the Spaniard has changed to the present date, and, equally, how much we have changed ourselves. Pike was released in July, 1807, and was thanked by the government for his services. Long's expedition was also that of a soldier, and he, too, is commemorated by a lofty mountain which bears his name. His journey was made in 1819-20, with valuable results, but without either the suffering or the romance which fell to the share of Pike. In a following chapter I shall dwell more particularly upon the beautiful region first examined by these men- Colorado. Much of the region under consideration had been at a comparatively early date penetrated by a few men of the Latin races. French traders and missionaries in small parties had, from time to time, entered the present States of North and South Dakota, Montana and Idaho, before the tide of Anglo-Saxon immigration set in. They, however, made no systematic exploration. Their scattered soon rotted away. at colonization, and except sions, and French names for ities, all trace of their pres The Spaniard, Coronado, from the south early in the other Spanish fired alike by ligion and for desultory exthe territory Colorado and erected here arrastras side the cross, and colonized porare now New Arizona. But tion planted guished,and in even entirely GENERAL PIKE. trading-posts, built of logs, made no successful effort for a few picturesque miscertain streams and localence has disappeared. ascended the Gila River sixteenth century, and adventurers, the zeal for regold, made peditions into that is now Utah. They and there rude by side with to some extent tions of what Mexico and the civilizaby them lansome localities disappeared, either from inherent weakness or encroached upon by the fierce savages, who had become much more formidable by the acquisition of firearms and horses. Santa Fé, which was a Spanish colony fifty years before the landing at Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, remained a feeble village of adobe houses, until in recent years rebuilt by American energy and thrift. The Anglo-Saxon is preeminently the colonizing race. From the first day of his landing on the eastern shores of the continent he has pressed eagerly and steadily forward, his eyes fixed upon the western horizon, |