Chapter 1

I pray thee, shepherd, if that love or gold,
Can in this desert place buy entertainment,
Bring us where we may rest ourselves and feed.
--As you like it.

Much was said and written, at the time, concerning the policy of
adding the vast regions of Louisiana, to the already immense and but
half-tenanted territories of the United States. As the warmth of
controversy however subsided, and party considerations gave place to
more liberal views, the wisdom of the measure began to be generally
conceded. It soon became apparent to the meanest capacity, that, while
nature had placed a barrier of desert to the extension of our
population in the west, the measure had made us the masters of a belt
of fertile country, which, in the revolutions of the day, might have
become the property of a rival nation. It gave us the sole command of
the great thoroughfare of the interior, and placed the countless
tribes of savages, who lay along our borders, entirely within our
control; it reconciled conflicting rights, and quieted national
distrusts; it opened a thousand avenues to the inland trade, and to
the waters of the Pacific; and, if ever time or necessity shall
require a peaceful division of this vast empire, it assures us of a
neighbour that will possess our language, our religion, our
institutions, and it is also to be hoped, our sense of political
justice.

Although the purchase was made in 1803, the spring of the succeeding
year was permitted to open, before the official prudence of the
Spaniard, who held the province for his European master, admitted the
authority, or even of the entrance of its new proprietors. But the
forms of the transfer were no sooner completed, and the new government
acknowledged, than swarms of that restless people, which is ever found
hovering on the skirts of American society, plunged into the thickets
that fringed the right bank of the Mississippi, with the same careless
hardihood, as had already sustained so many of them in their toilsome
progress from the Atlantic states, to the eastern shores of the
"father of rivers."[*]

[*] The Mississippi is thus termed in several of the Indian languages.
The reader will gain a more just idea of the importance of this
stream, if he recalls to mind the fact, that the Missouri and the
Mississippi are properly the same river. Their united lengths
cannot be greatly short of four thousand miles.

Time was necessary to blend the numerous and affluent colonists of the
lower province with their new compatriots; but the thinner and more
humble population above, was almost immediately swallowed in the
vortex which attended the tide of instant emigration. The inroad from
the east was a new and sudden out-breaking of a people,