ity, entered upon
the waters of the Mississippi and learned of its western affluent; that
Marquette not only received the Indians of the Illinois region in his
post on the shores of Lake Superior, but traversed the length of the
Mississippi almost to its mouth, and returning revealed the site of
Chicago; that La Salle was inspired with the vision of a huge interior
empire reaching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. Before the close of
the seventeenth century, Perrot's influence was supreme in the Upper
Mississippi, while D'Iberville was laying the foundations of Louisiana
toward the mouth of the river. Nor is it without significance that while
the Verendryes were advancing toward the northwest (where they
discovered the Big Horn Mountains and revealed the natural boundaries of
the Valley) the Mallet brothers were ascending the Platte, crossing the
Colorado plains to Santa Fe and so revealing the natural boundaries
toward the southwest.

To the English the great Valley was a land beyond the Alleghanies.
Spotswood, the far-sighted Governor of Virginia, predecessor of frontier
builders, grasped the situation when he proposed western settlements to
prevent the French from becoming a great people at the back of the
colonies. He realized the importance of the Mississippi Valley as the
field for expansion, and the necessity to the English empire of
dominating it, if England would remain the great power of the New World.

In the war that followed between France and England, we now see what
the men of the time could not have realized: that the main issue was
neither the possession of the fisheries nor the approaches to the St.
Lawrence on the one hemisphere, nor the possession of India on the
other, but the mastery of the interior basin of North America.

How little the nations realized the true meaning of the final victory of
England is shown in the fact that Spain reluctantly received from France
the cession of the lands beyond the Mississippi, accepting it as a means
of preventing the infringement of her colonial monopoly in Spanish
America rather than as a field for imperial expansion.

But we know now that when George Washington came as a stripling to the
camp of the French at the edge of the great Valley and demanded the
relinquishment of the French posts in the name of Virginia, he was
demanding in the name of the English speaking people the right to occupy
and rule the real center of American resources and power. When