temporary and futile stand in Fort Massae, forty miles above its mouth. This was the last fortification that France built in North America. At the same time the English rebuilt Fort Duquesne, which was their first military post beyond the Alleghanies, after expelling the French from the Valley. Only four years before, the English flag had crossed the mountains, and it was with great historical fitness that Washington, the almost beardless major of twenty-two years, had carried it over and planted it. By the treaty of 1763, even so soon, it waved supreme from the great lakes almost to the Gulf of Mexico.

But if these great and primitive facts in the origin of the Republic are all spread out in detail, we shall have a history of the United States instead of the proposed chapter of sketches. We must hasten over the field of first things on selected stepping-stones, suggesting rather than unfolding. The line of first facts, like kernels of seed grain in the drill and furrow, will show how we come by the grand Western harvests of to-day.

While the French had secured a position and made their first settlement in Texas by building Fort St. Louis there as early as 1685, they did not introduce cotton culture into their new France till 1750, nor the sugar-mill till eight years later. The sugar plantation of Dubreuil then covered what is now the lower portion of New Orleans, and there the first sugar mill in America was operated. In 1763, Laclede, a Frenchman, received authority at New Orleans to assume the monopoly of the fur trade on the Missouri, and to plant a fort for its protection. In February following he felled the first trees for his new town on the limestone bluff where St. Louis now stands. Then the only white settlement west of the Mississippi was St. Genevieve, sixty miles below. Meanwhile, between the time when his grant was made and the founding of the town, Louisiana was conveyed to the Spanish, and so St. Louis was founded in trespass, by a Frenchman, on Spanish soil, and it was a long time before the sale was known in the valley. In 1765 the first cargo of sugar was exported to France, and it was so poorly manufactured that one-half of it was lost by leakage on the voyage.

It will be remembered that at this time, and from 1763 to 1800, Louisiana belonged to Spain, and in 1769 the Spanish power was so far advanced that Spanish was made the official language for judicial records. This was done in a stormy time and in the turn of the tide from the French to the Spanish régime. The excitement and strong national feelings involved made the transfer of authority at New Orleans one of much peril, and only the presence of 4,500 Spanish troops and the retiring

French forces made the lowering of the French flag, till then delayed, an orderly proceeding. The population of the province at this time was 10,348, of whom almost half, 4,792, were African slaves; and the exports the same year were $250,000.

In 1773 the first survey for white settlements was made on the Kentucky, and Boone led in his own and four other families. His wife and two daughters were the first American women to locate on “the dark and bloody ground." Seven years later, Gen. George Roger Clark, so renowned and honored in our frontier life, built a block house where Cincinnati now stands, and in 1788 the city was founded. This was the beginning of that city of 255,000 people in 1880.

English-speaking emigrants have been accustomed to carry with them the printing press, under the conviction of its immense worth for good interests. The founders of the Republic were not tardy in appreciating the power of the newspaper press, and Jefferson expressed the views of many of them when he said: "I would rather live in a country with newspapers, and without a government, than in a country with a government, but without newspapers." Napoleon pays the same tribute to their power in the remark attributed to him: "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a hundred thousand bayonets." And before Napoleon's day, when printing began to give a free Bible, the ignorant and illiterate and dominating monks cried out against it, and the vicar of Croydon, in Surrey, then preaching at St. Paul's Cross, said: "We must root out printing, or printing will root us out.'

We are not surprised, therefore, to find the first number of the Pittsburg Gazette, bearing the early date of July 29, 1786. This was the first newspaper published west of the Alleghanies.

***

"The circular, addressed to the militia companies in December, 1784, was in manuscript copies, as was also the address of the Convention to the people in August, 1785. Heretofore the whole western country on the Ohio, south of Pittsburg, could not boast a single newspaper or periodical."+

In 1792 Kentucky, into which, only nineteen years before, Boone had led the first five white families, was admitted as a State to the Union. In such close step did great events march along in those days, as they have ever since, ❝out West."

Back of telephones and telegraphs, and steamboats and locomotives, in

*Fox's "Acts and Monuments, " vol. i, p. 927.

Monette, His. Miss. Valley, ii. 174.

that deep interior, what quiet must have reigned! In the year 1800 and prior, eight or ten keel-boats, of about twenty-five tons each, performed all the carrying between Pittsburg and Cincinnati. The first steamer was not launched at the former city till 1811, nor on Lake Michigan till 1826.

Among first things stands pre-eminent the tour of Mackenzie from Montreal to the Pacific in 1793, as being the first made across the continent. Three years after this Chillicothe was founded, and the following passage from Monette concerning it suggests wonderful contrasts with the conditions of life now, as they were ninety years ago, in the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley: "The first town west of the mountains which was built in peace and quietude, and not requiring the protection of stockades and forts against Indian hostilities."*

It is only a short time after, 1806, that the English follow up the explorations of the great fur trader, and Simon Frazer established a trading post on the lake bearing his name. This was the first post founded by the English west of the Rocky Mountains.

Two years after another of those great steps was taken which so mark the growth of a nation; for the United States then ordered the English language to be the legal language in the Louisiana Territory. Therefore, the court records in New Orleans stand first in French, then in Spanish, and since 1808 in English. And soon, in a widely distant section, two events record the entrance of the nation for a habitation on the Pacific coast. In 1811, three years after English is ordered as the court language west of the Mississippi, timber is cut on the Columbia for Astoria, and the first schooner is built, and that by the irrepressible Americans, on the northwest coast. The first steamboat was launched the same year at Pittsburg.

It is not a record very creditable and honorable to humanity that the means of civilization are so generally accompanied with the means of destruction. Yet, as settlements have pressed the frontier westward, military occupation and defenses have kept pace, and the bridle path and Indian trail have early become the highways for the supplies of war.

This is supposed Wagons soon fol

In 1826, Mr. W. H. Ashley, of St. Louis, who had opened an Indian trade three years before on Green River, and the year before near Salt Lake, took out a six-pound cannon to the latter post. to be the first ever taken over into the Great Basin. lowed. In 1829, Messrs. Smith, Jackson & Sublette, fur traders, left St. Louis with wagons, which were taken as far as the traders' Grand Rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains. "This is the first time that wagons ever

* Vol. ii., p. 315.

went to the Rocky Mountains, and the ease and safety with which it was done proved the facility of communicating overland with the Pacific Ocean."*

So rapidly the cannon followed the rifle, and wheels the saddle, and then the locomotive, on the Oregon Trail.

The year 1832 is marked in the frontier annals for several first things. This year the first steamer went up as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone, on the Missouri. The American Fur Company had there a trading post, and this steamer was in their employ, and on its first trip carried so far toward their mountain home on the Upper Oregon the two Nez Percés Indians who had come the long trail to St. Louis for the white man's Book, to tell them of the white man's God. This steamer also carried Catlin, renowned for his Indian portraits and biographies. It will always be regretted that Congress, lavish of money in so many ways, did not make the Indian portrait gallery of this historic painter safe against fire. Its irreparable loss, however, is quite in keeping with the humiliating history of the American Indians. About this time Mr. Wyeth and company commenced Fort Hall on the Snake or Lewis branch of the Columbia, one hundred miles north of Salt Lake. As a rival in the Indian trade, and to ruin the American enterprise, the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Boisé, farther down the stream, and where the Boisé or Read's River empties into the Snake. By underselling and forest plotting they ruined Mr. Wyeth and took Fort Hall, and held it quite successfully against American immigration as the gateway to Oregon, till Dr. Whitman opened a highway by it. "About the time of Wyeth's expedition also took place the earliest emigrations from the United States to the territories of the Columbia, for the purpose of settlement, and without any special commercial objects." +

The first successful and permanent colony was planted 1834, in the Willamette Valley, and under the religious leading of the Methodists. Two years before, that country had begun to be called Oregon, and that important name had taken its place in history.

Other leading outposts of the coming West were taken in those fruitful years, and growth was marked at many points on the magnificent curve of our border. In June, 1833, the first Anglo-Americans settled Dubuque, and before the year closed the town numbered five hundred. It took its name from Julien Dubuque, the early proprietor of the "Spanish Mines on the upper Mississippi, included in a tract of 103,680 acres on the west bank of that river, which he obtained from the Indians in 1788, and which * Oregon Its History. By Rev. Gustavus Hines. 1851. Buffalo. p. 409. + Greenhow. His. Oregon and California, p. 360.

was confirmed to him by Baron Carondelet and the seal of the King of Spain in 1796.

It was long after this pressure into the Northwest that the light of letters and the encroachment of American civilization began to show over our borders on the southwest. The first printing press was set up in New Mexico in 1835, and on the twenty-ninth of November in that year the first number of the first newspaper was issued in that territory-El Crepuscula, and of letter-cap size; Cura Martinez, of Taos, proprietor. It lived only four weeks. American trade, especially from St Louis, had now been active many years as far as Santa Fé. The newspaper would seem

to have been well called The Dawn under those dark and illiterate shadows, if one considers how light has flooded that region between 1833 and 1883-a marvelous half century for New Spain.

The first goods came overland to New Mexico from Kaskaskia, Illinois, in 1804, by Baptiste La Lande; in 1812 more came by another company, who were arrested as spies, and the goods confiscated. In 1822 trade to New Mexico from the Missouri became established; in 1825-7 the United States surveyed a route from Fort Osage, in Missouri, to Taos; in 1829 Bent's Fort was built on the Arkansas, and in 1832 Bent and St. Vrain, of St. Louis, established themselves as traders at Taos; in 1846 the "Adobe Palace" at Santa Fé was said to be the only house in New Mexico that had window-glass; and on the 18th of August in that year General Kearny took peaceable possession of it and of New Mexico for the United States, and February 9, 1880, the cars of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé road entered that city-the oldest on the continent known to Americans.

It was in 1839 that such a beacon light was set up on the northwest coast, and its first printing press was a gift back to America from our Christian missions in the Sandwich Islands-bread cast upon the Pacific waters, and returning after not many days.

In speaking of first things, the little item is sometimes as suggestive as the great, in showing beginnings, and in furnishing the waymarks of growth. To the thoughtful, therefore, the fact will be helpful, in marking the stages of progress westward, that the first family carriage beyond the Mississippi was that of General William Clark, of the Oregon Expedition of Lewis and Clark. He was Indian agent and brigadier-general in upper Louisiana, Governor of Missouri Territory till it became a State, and afterward Superintendent of Indian Affairs till he died, in 1838. In 1840 that first carriage in Louisiana was sold for a trifle at auction. So young are the United States, that our antiquities and historical relics are so recent as to be worthless.