adventurers so hardy that they could go two hundred leagues
at a stretch, or live six months in the wilderness, needing to carry
nothing save some corn-meal, and trusting for everything solely to their
own long rifles.

Spaniards Invite Americans to Become Colonists.

Next to secretly rousing the Indians, the Spaniards placed most reliance
on intriguing with the Westerners, in the effort to sunder them from the
seaboard Americans. They also at times thought to bar the American
advance by allowing the frontiersmen to come into their territory and
settle on condition of becoming Spanish subjects. They hoped to make of
these favored settlers a barrier against the rest of their kinsfolk. It
was a foolish hope. A wild and hardy race of rifle-bearing freemen, so
intolerant of restraint that they fretted under the slight bands which
held them to their brethren, were sure to throw off the lightest yoke
the Catholic King could lay upon them, when once they gathered strength.
Under no circumstances, even had they profited by Spanish aid against
their own people, would the Westerners have remained allied or subject
to the Spaniards longer than the immediate needs of the moment demanded.
At the bottom the Spaniards knew this, and their encouragement of
American immigration was fitful and faint-hearted.

Many Americans, however, were themselves eager to enter into some
arrangement of the kind; whether as individual settlers, or, more often,
as companies who wished to form little colonies. Their eagerness in this
matter caused much concern to many of the Federalists of the eastern
States, who commented with bitterness upon the light-hearted manner in
which these settlers forsook their native land, and not only forswore
their allegiance to it, but bound themselves to take up arms against it
in event of war. These critics failed to understand that the wilderness
dwellers of that day, to whom the National Government was little more
than a name, and the Union but a new idea, could not be expected to pay
much heed to the imaginary line dividing one waste space from another,
and that, after all, their patriotism was dormant, not dead. Moreover,
some of the Easterners were as blind as the Spaniards themselves to the
inevitable outcome of such settlements as those proposed, and were also
alarmed at the mere natural movement of the population, fearing lest it
might result in crippling the old States, and in laying the foundation
of a ne