at different times either
sought to found colonies in the Spanish-speaking lands under Spanish
authority, or else strove to conquer these lands outright by force of
arms. Boone settled in Missouri when it was still under the Spanish
Government, and himself accepted a Spanish commission. Whether Missouri
had or had not been ceded first by Spain to France and then by France to
the United States early in the present century, really would not have
altered its final destiny, so far at least as concerns the fact that it
would ultimately have been independent of both France and Spain, and
would have been dominated by an English-speaking people; for when once
the backwoodsmen, of whom Boone was the forerunner, became sufficiently
numerous in the land they were certain to throw off the yoke of the
foreigner; and the fact that they had voluntarily entered the land and
put themselves under this yoke would have made no more difference to
them than it afterwards made to the Texans. So it was with Aaron Burr.
His conspiracy was merely one, and by no means the most dangerous, of
the various conspiracies in which men like Wilkinson, Sebastian, and
many of the members of the early Democratic societies in Kentucky, bore
a part. It was rendered possible only by the temper of the people and by
the peculiar circumstances which also rendered the earlier conspiracies
possible; and it came to naught for the same reasons that they came to
naught, and was even more hopeless, because it was undertaken later,
when the conditions were less favorable.

Clark's Part in the Proposed French Attack on Spain.

The movement deliberately entered into by many of the Kentuckians in the
years 1793 and 1794, to conquer Louisiana on behalf of France, must be
treated in this way. The leader in this movement was George Rogers
Clark. His chance of success arose from the fact that there were on the
frontier many men of restless, adventurous, warlike type, who felt a
spirit of unruly defiance toward the home government and who greedily
eyed the rich Spanish lands. Whether they got the lands by conquest or
by colonization, and whether they warred under one flag or another, was
to them a matter of little moment. Clark's career is of itself
sufficient to prove the truth of this. He had already been at the head
of a movement to make war against the Spaniards, in defiance of the
Central Government, on behalf of the Western settlements. On another
occasion he had off