nature of the fur trade was forced upon their attention. The only resource the Indian had with which to enrich his life was fur. The traders who bought his pelts, paid low prices for them in blankets, ammunition, guns, and household tools, and maintained headquarters without regard to nationality. Lewis found English traders on the Upper Missouri, and saw the profits of the traffic passing to the Hudson's Bay Company or its rivals at Montreal. The summer of 1805 carried he expedition from the Missouri to the Pacific. When they crossed the divide they left anything that could be called Louisiana behind them and entered a region where the scanty claims of foreign powers were divided among Russia, Spain, England, and the United States. They spent the next winter in a fort which they built at the mouth of the Columbia River, and in September, 1806, were back again at St. Louis.

The results of the Lewis and Clark expedition were not commensurate with the effort or the success that attended it. In a geographic way it greatly enlarged our knowledge of America. It made new and original contacts with many tribes of Indians. It provided descriptions, had any one cared to read them, of the Missouri and Columbia valleys. But it was many years before a fair compilation of the journals was prepared, and the century was nearly gone before the first critical edition appeared. Patrick Gass, one of the soldier-diarists, published his journal at Pittsburgh in 1807, in a small edition. Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia began to edit them in 1811, but the war with England was a distraction, and his work did not appear until 1814.2 Before the party arrived back at St. Louis the world had so changed that, whatever the original idea of Jefferson may have been, it was no longer a vital thing. If he feared the necessity to seize Louisiana, and was preparing a military survey, the ease with which the transfer had been accomplished destroyed it. No power contested the purchase, though Spain showed an irritation at being defrauded by Napoleon. If he hoped to make great scientific discoveries, the journals must have disappointed him for they contained nothing startling. By 1807 there was danger of war with

Elliott Coues, History of the Expedition under the Command of Lewis and Clark (1893), was the first critical edition. It is still useful, although for matters of definitive erudition it is supplanted by Reuben G. Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 (1904-1905). There is a convenient summary in R. G. Thwaites, Brief History of Rocky Mountain Exploration with especial Reference to the Expedition of Lewis and Clark (1904). Thwaites prepared himself for this work by editing Jesuit Relations and allied Docu ments, 1610-1791 (73 vols., 1896-1901).

England. After that date the United States was being drawn step by step into the meshes of European politics, and Jefferson had little leisure to play the man of science. Not until after 1815 was the time ripe for a profitable interest in the trans-Mississippi; and then the legend was already in formation to which the remarks of Lewis and Clark gave credence: - that, after all, the country beyond the Missouri River was not fit for white habitation or use. In 1806, the last year in which Lewis and Clark were in the field, another fragment was added to the scanty knowledge of the contents of the purchase by a lieutenant in the regular army, Zebulon Montgomery Pike. With a detachment of twenty-one men, in a good-sized keel boat, he was sent by General Wilkinson to ascertain the source of the Mississippi River.

At the time of the peace negotiations at Paris in 1782-1783 the best maps that were available indicated that the source of the Mississippi was well north of its real position. Counting on this, the boundary there described ran the line from the Lake of the Woods "on a due west course to the river Mississippi." It was impossible ever to mark this line, since no part of the Mississippi is as far north as the northwest angle of the Lake of the Woods. The defect in description of boundary was attempted to be cured by a convention signed in London by the American minister, Rufus King, in May, 1803, in which a direct line connected the source of the Mississippi and the Lake of the Woods. This treaty was never ratified, and there remained an uncertainty as to the Canadian boundary for another fifteen years.

Wilkinson sent Pike to ascertain the source at a time when the snow and ice of winter made it quite impossible to determine which of the swampy lakes of central Minnesota it really was. Ascending the Mississippi, Pike found above St. Louis almost no signs of white habitation. In the lead country, from which in later years the northwest frontier was to draw the material for its bullets and shot, he saw and described the primitive workings of Julian Dubuque, who had been operating on the west bank of the river for some years. On the east bank, at the mouth of the Wisconsin, he found the ancient trading post of Prairie du Chien. Above this point the Indian country was unbroken. The Sioux awaited him at the mouth of the Minnesota River, and here he treated with

Elliott Coues, The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River, through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, during the years 1805– 6-7(1895).

them and took possession of the land as American soil. It was not a needless act, for the agents of the Montreal fur traders were here, as they were on the upper Missouri, and he found the English flag flying over their lodges. Not until 1819 was a permanent American post established here. In January, 1806, Pike determined upon Leech Lake as the source of the river, in which he was in error, and started back to St. Louis to report. By the date of his arrival there in April, the Mississippi Valley was astir with rumors of war and speculation, Wilkinson was treading a difficult course between treason and patriotism, and the fate of Louisiana was in the balance. The purchase of Louisiana had been completed, but while Jefferson was taking the measure of its physical contents, Aaron Burr was sounding its intellectual and moral depths, and tempting the ambitious leaders of the West with visions that perhaps were cloudy even to himself.

CHAPTER XVI

PROBLEMS OF THE SOUTHWEST BORDER

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE refused to go on record as to the boundaries of Louisiana, but we know to-day that it was his intention, had he completed his colonial experiment, to seize the Gulf of Mexico shore between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande, and claim it all. When the province that he discarded into Jefferson's hands became the southwest border of the United States, its western limits were uncertain. And Spain, who had watched with apprehension the advance of both England and France, viewed with renewed alarm the presence at New Orleans of an American frontier force. The settlements in Texas had been planted in the eighteenth century to be a buffer for New Spain, the Internal Provinces had been organized, and Upper California had been colonized with the same intent. The Spanish officers who from New Orleans had watched the leaders of opinion in Kentucky and Tennessee with nervous fear since 1785, now took their station along the trail that ran from the head of the Sabine River to San Antonio, and determined to maintain an outpost here. In Louisiana, James Wilkinson was an unfit leader of the American army, for no one had illicit relations more than he with these Spanish officials. He was an unstable foundation for the cornerstone of empire.

After the delivery of New Orleans to Wilkinson and Claiborne in December, 1803, the latter became temporary governor, exercising in the name of the President full military power, and all the functions possessed by all the Spanish officials whom he displaced. Congress authorized such autocratic rule until it should have time to give further consideration to the government of the province. There were in Louisiana perhaps eight thousand whites in the vicinity of New Orleans, and fifty thousand south of the Red River. In Upper Louisiana, between New Madrid and St. Louis, there may have been six thousand more. Most of these were French or Spanish, though there was among them a new admixture

1 The best treatments of these boundary matters are Isaac J. Cox, The West Florida Controversy, 1798–1813 (1918), and Thomas M. Marshall, A History of the Western Boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, 1819–1841 (1914).

of Americans, tempted across the Mississippi by easy naturalization and generous land grants. The people spoke French, lived under the civil rather than the common law, and were in general devout followers of the communion of the Catholic Church. They contained little of the element that made American westerners clamor for self-government before they were ripe for it. Instead, the creoles of Louisiana, with the numerous half-breed mixtures, accepted what government came to them with tranquil indifference. Their normal indolent politeness did not conceal their contempt for the American representatives of a rough and ready civilization, but they made no resistance to their sale as chattels by France to the United States.

In March, 1804, Congress divided the province of Louisiana by the line of the thirty-third parallel running west from the Mississippi. South of this line, the Territory of Orleans was left in Claiborne's hands, as a territory of the lowest grade. North of the line, the District of Louisiana was attached for purposes of government to Indiana Territory, where William Henry Harrison had been in command since 1801. This latter combination was unsuccessful, and popular neither at Vincennes nor at St. Louis. In 1805, accordingly, Indiana was cut down. Michigan Territory was launched, with seat of government at Detroit, under William Hull; and Louisiana District was allowed to be a Territory, with its government at St. Louis. Both Indiana and Orleans at this time were raised to the second territorial status, and allowed a legislature.

The exploration of the tract that thus became the two territories of Orleans and Louisiana went on apace. Between 1804 and 1806 the northern and western limits were visited, without discovering anything that called for or received immediate attention. But at the south and west each year revealed increasing difficulty and uncertainty. Pike, on his return from the Upper Mississippi was transferred at once to this scene, and played there a part whose meaning is as uncertain to the historian as it may have been to him.

Under orders from Wilkinson, he left St. Louis July 15, 1806, to escort a group of Indians to their homes in the Osage and Pawnee villages, and then to proceed to the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers. The internal topography was as cloudy at the border of New Spain as it was at that of Oregon. There would have been good reason for an investigation of the region for the