James Fenimore Cooper

The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper

Much was said and written, at the time, concerning the policy of adding the vast regions ofLouisiana, to the already immense and but half-tenanted territories of the United States. As thewarmth of controversy however subsided, and party considerations gave place to more liberal views, the wisdom of the measure began to be generally conceded. It soon became apparent to the meanestcapacity, that, while nature had placed a barrier of desert to the extension of our population in thewest, the measure had made us the masters of a belt of fertile country, which, in the revolutions ofthe day, might have become the property of a rival nation. It gave us the sole command of the greatthoroughfare of the interior, and placed the countless tribes of savages, who lay along our borders, entirely within our control; it reconciled conflicting rights, and quieted national distrusts; it opened athousand avenues to the inland trade, and to the waters of the Pacific; and, if ever time or necessityshall require a peaceful division of this vast empire, it assures us of a neighbour that will possess ourlanguage, our religion, our institutions, and it is also to be hoped, our sense of political justice. Although the purchase was made in 1803, the spring of the succeeding year was permitted toopen, before the official prudence of the Spaniard, who held the province for his European master, admitted the authority, or even of the entrance of its new proprietors. But the forms of the transferwere no sooner completed, and the new government acknowledged, than swarms of that restlesspeople, which is ever found hovering on the skirts of American society, plunged into the thicketsthat fringed the right bank of the Mississippi, with the same careless hardihood, as had alreadysustained so many of them in their toilsome progress from the Atlantic states, to the eastern shoresof the "father of rivers."[1]Time was necessary to blend the numerous and affluent colonists of the lower province with theirnew compatriots; but the thinner and more humble population above, was almost immediatelyswallowed in the vortex which attended the tide of instant emigration. The inroad from the east wasa new and sudden out-breaking of a people, who had endured a momentary restraint, after havingbeen rendered nearly resistless by success. The toils and hazards of former undertakings wereforgotten, as these endless and unexplored regions, with all their fancied as well as real advantages, were laid open to their enterprise. The consequences were such as might easily have beenanticipated, from so tempting an offering, placed, as it was, before the eyes of a race long trained inadventure and nurtured in difficult