er the defeat of the Spanish Armada,
that culminated in the marvellous growth of the United States. The
winning of the West and Southwest is a stage in the conquest of a
continent.

1. To this I can testify of my own knowledge as regards Montana, Dakota,
and Minnesota. The mixture usually takes place in the ranks of the
population where individuals lose all trace of their ancestry after two
or three generations; so it is often honestly ignored, and sometimes
mention of it is suppressed, the man regarding it as a taint. But I also
know many very wealthy old frontiersmen whose half-breed children are
now being educated, generally at convent schools, while in the
Northwestern cities I could point out some very charming men and women,
in the best society, with a strain of Indian blood in their veins.

CHAPTER II.

THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763-1775.

The result of England's last great colonial struggle with France was to
sever from the latter all her American dependencies, her colonists
becoming the subjects of alien and rival powers. England won Canada and
the Ohio valley; while France ceded to her Spanish allies Louisiana,
including therein all the territory vaguely bounded by the Mississippi
and the Pacific. As an offset to this gain Spain had herself lost to
England both Floridas, as the coast regions between Georgia and
Louisiana were then called.

Thus the thirteen colonies, at the outset of their struggle for
independence, saw themselves surrounded north, south, and west, by lands
where the rulers and the ruled were of different races, but where rulers
and ruled alike were hostile to the new people that was destined in the
end to master them all.

The present province of Quebec, then called Canada, was already, what
she has to this day remained, a French state acknowledging the English
king as her over-lord. Her interests did not conflict with those of our
people, nor touch them in any way, and she has had little to do with our
national history, and nothing whatever to do with the history of the
west.

In the peninsula of East Florida, in the land of the cypress, palmetto,
and live oak, of open savannas, of sandy pine forests, and impenetrable,
interminable morasses, a European civilization more ancient than any in
the English colonies was mouldering in slow decay. Its capital city was
quaint St. Augustine, the old walled town that was founded by the
Spaniards long years before the keel of the _H