To-day you are on French territory."

"French territory!" I exclaimed.

"To-day Upper Louisiana is French," he answered. "To-morrow it will be
American forever. This morning Captain Stoddard of the United States
Army, empowered to act as a Commissioner of the French Republic, arrived
with Captain Lewis and a guard of American troops. Today, at noon, the
flag of Spain was lowered from the staff at the headquarters. To-night a
guard of honor watches with the French Tricolor, and we are French for
the last time. To-morrow we shall be Americans."

I saw that simple ceremony. The little company of soldiers was drawn up
before the low stone headquarters, the villagers with heads uncovered
gathered round about. I saw the Stars and Stripes rising, the Tricolor
setting. They met midway on the staff, hung together for a space, and a
salute to the two nations echoed among the hills across the waters of the
great River that rolled impassive by.

AFTERWORD

This book has been named "The Crossing" because I have tried to express
in it the beginnings of that great movement across the mountains which
swept resistless over the Continent until at last it saw the Pacific
itself. The Crossing was the first instinctive reaching out of an infant
nation which was one day to become a giant. No annals in the world's
history are more wonderful than the story of the conquest of Kentucky and
Tennessee by the pioneers.

This name, "The Crossing," is likewise typical in another sense. The
political faith of our forefathers, of which the Constitution is the
creed, was made to fit a more or less homogeneous body of people who
proved that they knew the meaning of the word "Liberty." By Liberty, our
forefathers meant the Duty as well as the Right of man to govern himself.
The Constitution amply attests the greatness of its authors, but it
was a compromise. It was an attempt to satisfy thirteen colonies,
each of which clung tenaciously to its identity. It suited the
eighteenth-century conditions of a little English-speaking confederacy
along the seaboard, far removed from the world's strife and jealousy. It
scarcely contemplated that the harassed millions of Europe would flock to
its fold, and it did not foresee that, in less than a hundred years, its
own citizens would sweep across the three thousand miles of forest and
plain and mountain to the Western Ocean, absorb French and Spanish
Louisiana, Spanish Texas, Mexico, and California, fill thi