This volume covers the period which opened with the checkered but
finally successful war waged by the United States Government against the
Northwestern Indians, and closed with the acquisition and exploration of
the vast region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was during this
period that the West rose to real power in the Union. The boundaries of
the old West were at last made certain, and the new West, the Far West,
the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was added to the
national domain. The steady stream of incoming settlers broadened and
deepened year by year; Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states,
Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi territories. The population in the
newly settled regions increased with a rapidity hitherto unexampled; and
this rapidity, alike in growth of population and in territorial
expansion, gave the West full weight in the national councils.

The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the north, and the innumerable
obscure forays and reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in the
south, so cowed the Indians, that they all, north and south alike, made
peace; the first peace the border had known for fifty years. At the same
time the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in fact the boundaries
which the peace of 1783 had only given us in name. The execution of
these treaties put an end in the north to the intrigues of the British,
who had stirred the Indians to hostility against the Americans; and in
the south to the far more treacherous intrigues of the Spaniards, who
showed astounding duplicity, and whose intrigues extended not only to
the Indians but also to the baser separatist leaders among the
Westerners themselves.

The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true history is to be found, not
in the doings of the diplomats who determined merely the terms upon
which it was made, but in the western growth of the people of the United