nce and shelter facilitate rapid
settlement. A rifle and a little corn meal in a bag are
enough for an American wandering alone in the woods for a
month. . . . With logs crossed upon one another he makes a
house, and even an impregnable fort against the Indians. . . .
Cold does not terrify him, and when a family wearies of one
place, it moves to another and settles there with the same
ease.

If such men come to occupy the banks of the Mississippi and
Missouri, or secure their navigation, doubtless nothing will
prevent them from crossing and penetrating into our provinces
on the other side, which, being to a great extent unoccupied,
can oppose no resistance. . . . In my opinion, a general
revolution in America threatens Spain unless the remedy be
applied promptly.

In fact, the pioneers who had occupied the uplands of the South, the
backwoods stock with its Scotch-Irish leaders which had formed on the
eastern edge of the Alleghanies, separate and distinct from the type of
tidewater and New England, had found in the Mississippi Valley a new
field for expansion under conditions of free land and unrestraint. These
conditions gave it promise of ample time to work out its own social
type. But, first of all, these men who were occupying the Western Waters
must find an outlet for their surplus products, if they were to become
a powerful people. While the Alleghanies placed a veto toward the east,
the Mississippi opened a broad highway to the south. Its swift current
took their flat boats in its strong arms to bear them to the sea, but
across the outlet of the great river Spain drew the barrier of her
colonial monopoly and denied them exit.

The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history at the
opening of the new republic, therefore, lay in the fact that, beyond the
area of the social and political control of the thirteen colonies, there
had arisen a new and aggressive society which imperiously put the
questions of the public lands, internal communication, local
self-government, defense, and aggressive expansion, before the
legislators of the old colonial regime. The men of the Mississippi
Valley compelled the men of the East to think in American terms instead
of European. They dragged a reluctant nation on in a new course.

From the Revolution to the end of the War of 1812 Europe regarded the
destiny of the Mississippi Valley as undetermi