The day was but beginning for the young American republic. All the air was vibrant with the passion of youth and romance. Yonder in the West there might be fame and fortune for any man with courage to adventure. The world had not yet settled down to inexorable grooves of life, from which no human soul might fight its way out save at cost of sweetness and content and hope. The chance of one man might still equal that of another--yonder, in that vast new world along the Mississippi, beyond the Mississippi, more than a hundred years ago.
Into that world there now pressed a flowing, seething, restless mass, a new population seeking new avenues of hope and life, of adventure and opportunity. Riflemen, axmen, fighting men, riding men, boatmen, plowmen--they made ever out and on, laughing the Cossack laugh at the mere thought of any man or thing withstanding them.
Over this new world, alert, restless, full of Homeric youth, full of the lust of life and adventure, floated three flags. The old war of France and Spain still smoldered along the great waterway into the South. The flag of Great Britain had withdrawn itself to the North. The flag of our republic had not yet advanced.
Those who made the Western population at that time cared little enough about flags or treaty rights. They concerned themselves rather with possession. Let any who liked observe the laws. The strong made their own laws from day to day, and wrote them in one general codex of adventure and full-blooded, roistering life. The world was young. Buy land? No, why buy it, when taking it was so much more simple and delightful?
Based on this general lust of conquest, this Saxon zeal for new territories, must have been that inspiration of Thomas Jefferson in his venture of the far Northwest. He saw there the splendid vision of his ideal republic. He saw there a citizenry no longer riotous and roistering, not yet frenzied or hysterical, but strong, sober, and constant. His was a glorious vision. Would God we had fully realized his dream!
There were three flags afloat here or there in the Western country then, and none knew what land rightly belonged under any of the three. Indeed, over the heart of that region now floated all the three banners at the same time--that of Spain, passing but still proud, for a generation actual governor if not actual owner of all the country beyond the Mississippi, so far as it had any government at all; that of France, owner of the one great seaport, New Orleans, settler of the valley for a generation; and that of the new republic only just arriving into the respect of men either of the East or the West--a republic which had till recently exacted respect chiefly through the stark deadliness of its fighting and marching men.