Santa Fé, which had been cut off from each other by the intervening Apaches and Comanches. The principal agent in this work was Pedro Vial. Vial was sent in 1786 from San Antonio to find a direct route to Santa Fé. In spite of a fall from his horse, with one companion he made his way to Red River; thence westward through the Comanche country to Santa Fé. He had found the Comanches friendly, but his route was roundabout. José Mares found a more direct trail to San Antonio (1787) while Vial explored from Santa Fé, down the Red and Sabine rivers, to Natchitoches, returning thence to San Antonio and to Santa Fé by a still more direct route than that of Mares. On the journey he had traveled farther than from Chicago to San Francisco. This tireless pathfinder next explored from Santa Fé to St. Louis (1792) returning by a route approximating that of the later Santa Fé Trail. He had preceded Pike by fifteen years. He was not a great diarist, but he was a good frontiersman.

What Mézières and Vial had done in lower Louisiana, Clamorgan and his associates now did in upper Louisiana. Americans from the Ohio Valley and Scotch traders from Canada were invading the country in growing numbers. Making their way

by the Des Moines, the St. Peters, and the Assiniboine rivers, they traded and even built posts among the Omahas, Arikaras, and Mandans. At the same time Russians and British were threatening the Oregon coast. To ward off these dangers, in 1793 the "Company of Explorers of the Missouri" was chartered at St. Louis. A prize of $2000 was offered to the first person who should reach the Pacific by way of the Missouri. Now there was a spurt of energy, and by 1797 Trudeau, Lecuyer, Mackay, and Evans, in the service of Clamorgan's Company, had carried the Spanish flag above the Mandan villages in North Dakota. But the ambitious schemes of the Company were not realized. The Government failed to pay Clamorgan the promised annual subsidy of $10,000 and rival traders opposed the Company's monopoly. The St. Louis trade, however, continued to develop, and Lewis and Clark in 1804 found traces of Spaniards far up Cheyenne River.

American traders invaded upper Louisiana and the backwoodsmen pressed upon the lower Mississippi frontier. To hold them back, Spain intrigued and employed Indian agents, like Alexander McGillivray of West Florida. Spain denied to the backwoodsmen the right to navigate the

Mississippi, but they protested, intrigued, made reprisals, and appealed to the Government, till in 1795 their point was gained through diplomacy. Still they kept pressing on across the Mississippi. To check their advance, Spain imported Canary Islanders and invited British Loyalists to settle. Finally she tried counter-colonies formed of the Americans themselves. Thus in 1790 Colonel George Morgan crossed over and founded New Madrid. Before the end of the century scores of other Americans, among them Moses Austin and Daniel Boone, had been given liberal Spanish grants in the vain hope that they would hold back their brethren. By the opening of the new century the population of Louisiana had reached fifty thousand, as against some ten thousand at the end of the French régime, and a large part of the increase was due to American immigration.

Napoleon needed Louisiana for his own purposes, and in 1800 he took it. Three years later with as little ceremony he sold it to the United States. Spain now fell back again on her old Texas and New Mexico frontier, where the struggle with the Anglo-Americans was renewed. They pushed on across Louisiana into Texas. Horse drovers and traders, like Philip Nolan, operated in Texas from

the time of the American Revolution. Early in the nineteenth century adventurers like Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson laid plans for filibustering raids. During the Mexican War of Independence Americans led expeditions into Texas to aid in the struggle for liberty, while others crowded over the borders and settled on the bottom lands along the Red and Sabine rivers. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, Austin and a host of others obtained princely grants of rich Texas soil. Fifteen years later the American settlers revolted and set up a republic, which, after nine proud years of independence was annexed to the United States. War with Mexico followed, and in 1848 New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California went the way of Texas. Five years afterwards, the Gadsden Purchase added to the United States another slice of the old Spanish domain. From Jamestown (1607) to the Gadsden Purchase (1853) is a continuous story of the pressure of Anglo-Americans upon Hispanic borderlands not effectively occupied. On the south the American tide stopped at the Río Grande, finding there a bulwark of substantial settlement.

17

CHAPTER X

CALIFORNIA

THE English had made the occupation of Louisiana imperative. Carlos lifted his eyes to the West, and there he saw another menace. Russian fur hunters had overrun Siberia to the Pacific by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Catherine of Russia, continuing the age-old quest for the Strait of Anian, in 1725 had sent Vitus Bering, the Dane, to seek a northern passage from the Pacific into the Atlantic. On his first voyage (1725-1730) he discovered Bering Strait, leading, not into the Atlantic, but into the Arctic Ocean, where Siberia and Alaska all but touch hands. By the close of the Seven Years' War Russian fur-trading posts had been established on Bering, Kadiak, and Unalaska Islands, and Russian vessels were cruising Pacific waters southward toward Oregon. Moreover, there was the perilous prospect of an English incursion overland from Canada or from the Ohio Valley.