The Making of the Great West, 1512-1883

But La Salle had his drawbacks also. Naturally thoughtful and reserved he lived too much apart, in himself, to be a good companion in the wandering republic of which he was the...

Now to describe Acoma itself. It consists of ranges of massive buildings rising in successive tiers from the ground. The second story is set a little back from the first, and th...

Thus, in 1682, La Salle had secured an empire for France, and at last found a legitimate field for his own ambition. His Louisiana comprised every thing between the Alleghanies...

Pike found but one American living in Santa Fé. This man had been a trapper, accustomed to the wild and free life of the plains, and this was the story he told.

The Spaniards did not mean to till the soil themselves, but to make the Indians do it for them. Setting this scheme at work, a Franciscan mission was begun at San Diego in July,...

Men and women wore mantles woven either of the bark of trees or of a wild sort of hemp which the Indians knew how to dress properly for the purpose. They also understood the art...

The North had got rid of slavery. It had done more. Its voice had excluded slavery from the great North-West. But the South owed its growth to slave labor, and wherever her peop...

"How strange are the freaks of destiny! Mary de Medicis, widow of Henry IV., exiled and abandoned, had a daughter, Henrietta, widow of Charles I., who died at Cologne, in the ho...

What El Dorado[1] had been to the active imaginings of De Soto's Spaniards, was now to become a reality that would startle the world from its long forgetfulness. The world belie...

Supreme on land and sea, Spain pushed on her conquests abroad without hinderance. If such deeds as hers had so irritated the self-love of a rival prince, how must they have stir...

Many believed Natchez to be the best point on the river for founding a settlement. Natchez therefore assumed importance to French plans for the future. But Natchez was the princ...

Fort Walla Walla marks an important strategic point in the early movement of emigration to Oregon. Situated only nine miles below the junction of the two great branches of the C...

"In the morning the country was covered with mist. We were always early risers, but before we were ready the voices of men driving in the cattle sounded all around us. As we pas...

Referring to what Drake had done for England, and De Fuca for Spain, the one tacking a name to the coast here, the other there, we find little for more than a century going to s...

Thomas Jefferson was, at this time (1785), our minister to France, "in every word and deed the representative of a young, vigorous and determined state." Ledyard often sought hi...

In Thomas Jefferson the people of the West found a more sagacious advocate. The cession could not long remain a secret. It was soon known in the United States; but instead of ca...

Bills of indictment had also been found against the two newspapers printed at Lawrence, as well as the hotel in which the free-State men were in the habit of holding their meeti...

The petition of California to be a free State was strongly resisted by the Southern men in Congress, who had hoped it would come in as a slave State. Once again it brought up th...

[5] CALIFORNIA AND NEBRASKA routes. That begun in California is called the Central Pacific. The one leaving Omaha is the Union Pacific. Both lines have many branches. On the Cal...

On the 13th of June, while scouting in advance of his party, Captain Lewis saw, in the distance, a thin cloudlike mist rising up out of the plain. To him it was like the guiding...

The following alternate spellings were identified and retained: practise and practice Pekitanoüi and Pekitanoui Clarke and Clark Compte and Comte Nicolet and Nicollet Cortes and...

Fremont, J. C., meets Senator Benton, 234; sent to explore South Pass, 234; ascends Fremont's Peak, 236; what he accomplished or recommended, 236; corrects the popular error abo...