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226 18 Out to Missouri In 1799, when Boone and his family moved there, Missouri was still part of the Spanish territory of Upper Louisiana, but Spain’s grasp on that territory was far from strong, and Spain knew it was vulnerable to attack . The whole of Upper Louisiana had few non-Indian occupants—only perhaps four thousand in 1799, consisting almost entirely of settlements clinging to the Mississippi River and a few on the lower Missouri.1 Many of the whites in Upper Louisiana were French, not Spanish—descendants of the French who had moved into the region before and after France ceded Upper Louisiana to Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. The Spanish garrisons were small and isolated. Traders from Canada were taking an ever greater share of the Indian trade in the Upper Louisiana. Moreover, after Spain broke with Great Britain by making peace with revolutionary France, Spain in 1796 found itself once again at war with Great Britain. The British had seized all of Canada from the French in 1763, had forts down into the Illinois country, had besieged St. Louis in 1780, and in the 1790s had opened trading posts with the Mandans and other Indian groups on the Missouri. Senior Spanish officials worried that there was little to prevent the British from taking Upper Louisiana—and by gaining control of the mouth of the Missouri, gaining control of the fur trade with the entire Missouri River basin—and then coming down the Mississippi in strength, seizing the vital port of New Orleans, and pressing on to the rich silver mines of Mexico. The Spanish also feared that the British in Canada might effect a rapprochement with the Americans and act jointly against the Spanish in Louisiana and perhaps beyond. The Spanish saw no way to prevent these dire outcomes by themselves. Spain’snavywasnomatchforBritain’s,andthefewSpanishtroopsinMissouri were not equal to America’s Illinois garrisons, particularly if coupled with the veteran British regiments in Canada. What to do? The Spanish sought 227 Out to Missouri to encourage immigration into Upper Louisiana of French Canadians— fellow Catholics, after all—but not many came.2 The Spanish also encouraged Shawnees and Delawares to settle, but there were limited numbers of them. The only large buffer the Spanish could think of interposing was frontiersmen from America—people who were hardy, scrappy, anti-British (having just fought the British for eight years to gain their country’s independence), and hungry for the sparsely populated land west of the Mississippi. With hindsight the Spanish were inviting the fox into the chicken coop, as much so as when the Romans hired Goths as mercenaries to defend the Roman Empire’s eastern borders from barbarian hordes. The Spanish were aware of the American risk. As early as 1792, the governor-general of Louisiana had warned Lt. Gov. Zenon Trudeau, in charge of Upper Louisiana, that the Americans are “much more terrible at present for the Dominions of His Majesty than the English.”3 But the Spanish had limited military resources of their own to devote to North America. Even though they realized that the Americans themselves posed a grave threat to continued Spanish control of Upper Louisiana, they had few other ways of keeping the British out of Louisiana. In 1798 Trudeau wrote the governor-general of Louisiana that to increase the population of the settlements on the western bank of the Mississippi in Upper Louisiana, “I see no other means than that of the United States, who alone can supply a great number of families.” Trudeau recognized that bringing settlers up from New Orleans was impracticable, the trip being too great and costly, and said that the American immigrants to Missouri “have behaved very well, for since they have found lands superior to those of the Ohio, they are earnestly beginning to improve them.”4 So the Spanish, starting in 1796, encouraged, by word of mouth and by circulating handbills in Kentucky, American frontiersmen to come to Missouri, offering land grants and no property taxes. Those inducements were greater than what had induced tens of thousands of Americans to come to Kentucky— where the best land was already taken, the remaining land was being sold (not granted for free) to settlers, and game had become hard to find. Boone’s oldest surviving son, Daniel Morgan Boone, in 1797, then in his late twenties, decided to take a look at land prospects in Missouri. Boone told him to meet the Spanish governor...

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