sive race, where it lies between two
peoples, so that the aggressors have merely to cross it. It offers no
such shield as is afforded by a high mountain range. The Mississippi
served as a convenient line of demarkation between the Americans and the
Spaniards; but it offered no protection whatever to the Spaniards
against the Americans.

Importance of New Orleans.

Therefore the frontiersmen found nothing serious to bar their farther
march westward; the diminutive Spanish garrisons in the little creole
towns near the Missouri were far less capable of effective resistance
than were most of the Indian tribes whom the Americans were brushing out
of their path. Towards the South the situation was different. The
Floridas were shielded by the great Indian confederacies of the Creeks
and Choctaws, whose strength was as yet unbroken. What was much more
important, the mouth of the Mississippi was commanded by the important
seaport of New Orleans, which was accessible to fleets, which could
readily be garrisoned by water, and which was the capital of a region
that by backwoods standards passed for well settled. New Orleans by its
position was absolute master of the foreign, trade of the Mississippi
valley; and any power in command of the seas could easily keep it
strongly garrisoned. The vast region that was then known as Upper
Louisiana--the territory stretching from the Mississippi to the
Pacific--was owned by the Spaniards, but only in shadowy fashion, and
could not have been held by any European power against the sturdy
westward pressure of the rifle-bearing settlers. But New Orleans and its
neighborhood were held even by the Spaniards in good earnest; while a
stronger power, once in possession, could with difficulty have been
dislodged.

Desire of the Settlers for it.

It naturally followed that for the moment the attention of the
backwoodsmen was directed much more to New Orleans than to the
trans-Mississippi territory. A few wilderness lovers like Boone, a few
reckless adventurers of the type of Philip Nolan, were settling around
and beyond the creole towns of the North, or were endeavoring to found
small buccaneering colonies in dangerous proximity to the Spanish
commanderies in the Southwest. But the bulk of the Western settlers as
yet found all the vacant territory they wished east of the Mississippi.
What they needed at the moment was, not more wild land, but an outlet
for the products yielded by the land t