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249 Eventually, with the end of the Revolutionary War, the threat of British hostilities receded, and the newest power in the region, the United States, brought a fresh source of anxiety and instability. The erstwhile friendship between Spain and America, established so quickly and warmly in St. Louis between Leyba and Clark, lasted only as long as the war. Once the war was over, officially concluded by the 1783 peace treaty, and it became clear that Americans were a more numerous, active, and expansive presence on the eastern banks of the Mississippi than the British ever had been, Spain’s pro-American fervor was replaced with concern about competition and territorial boundaries. In 1784, Spain announced that it would not permit free navigation of the Mississippi, a gesture designed, as William Foley described it, to deter “western American settlements by shutting off their only commercial outlet.”1 In the first years after the war, the American presence in Illinois, combined with a host of other difficulties—from epic floods, chronic poor harvests, and widespread sickness to a wave of arson and the threat of an Indian slave uprising—made St. Louis in the 1780s a village always seemingly on the brink of a disaster comparable to that of the May 1780 attack. In the face of myriad challenges, the villagers and the colonial officials who attempted to govern them struggled to keep the community going. Throughout the decade, the difficulties administrators encountered served as a reminder that Spain did not exercise its authority unchallenged; dissension within the territory, powerful indigenous actors, and unstable foreign and domestic diplomatic relations all plagued Spain’s attempts to rule. Chapter 9 The Struggles of the 1780s 1. Foley, History of Missouri, 1: 33. t h e Wo r l d , t h e F l e s h , a n d t h e D e v i l / 2 5 0 The worries that Spanish officials expressed about American aggressiveness and expansion were shared by the region’s indigenous inhabitants. The war between Britain and her rebellious colonists had been a devastating one for American Indians. Whether particular nations supported the British or the Americans or maintained neutrality throughout the conflict, all Indians were losers in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The peace treaty that concluded the war contained no recognition of indigenous territorial rights, and the newly minted Americans showed little compunction about such niceties as Indian nations’ long-standing occupation of the land. The former colonists were a land-hungry, restless people, ready and willing to lump all Indians together and treat them as conquered enemies without rights.2 In response to American actions against them following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Indian leaders sought alliances with Spain. In August 1784, 260 Indians from the Iroquois, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Loup nations came to St. Louis, stayed for six days, and asked for Spanish aid against the newcomers. Reporting the visit, Cruzat noted that there were many important chiefs, who presented him with large, symbolic collars of porcelain beads, and he met with them in a great council, “with all the formalities customary on such occasions.” They spoke to him of their plight, addressing him as their Spanish father: “From the moment we had the misfortune of losing our French father and learned that the Spaniards were to be our neighbors,” Cruzat quotes the chiefs, “we had a great desire to know them and to establish with them a sincere friendship which would assure to us their affection.”3 Depictions of peaceful and friendly relations between the Indians and the French were followed by representations of equally harmonious ties between the Indians and the Spanish. The English and then the Americans destroyed all hope that the Indian peoples had of peaceful coexistence, the Indian chiefs told Cruzat. “The Master of Life willed that our lands should be inhabited by the English, and that these should dominate us tyrannically, until they and the Americans, separating their interests, formed two distinct nations.” That event proved “the greatest blow that could have been dealt,” short of the Indians’ “total destruction.” With the split between the English and the Americans, and the victory of the latter in the recent war of independence, a new threat arose. “The Americans, a great deal more ambitious and numerous than the English, put us out of our lands,” forming great settlements and invading Indian lands along the Ohio River “like a plague of locusts.” In presenting...

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