p. vii  Acknowledgment

The writing of history is no longer an individual achievement, if indeed it ever was. It is the work of many hands, some living and some dead. Archivists, collectors, benefactors, other historians, and the persons whose correspondence chance and foresight have preserved, all play their part in determining what monuments of the past the writer shall see and how he shall regard them.

My own debit column is a long one. The present work could not have been written at all but for the indefatigable labors of Lyman C. Draper, the establishment of the Archive of the Indies by Charles III, the publication of its voluminous records by the state of North Carolina. The writings of early historians, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Justin Winsor and Archibald Henderson have been of invaluable assistance. One of the most noteworthy of recent contributions in this field is Pinckney's Treaty, by Professor Samuel Flagg Bemis, a book which it was my privilege to read in manuscript (not in its final form) towards the end of my fifteen months' residence in Spain. Important additions to the bibliographical resources of Spanish history have been made within the last few years by B. Sánchez Alonso (Fuentes de la historia española), and R. Ballester y Castell (Bibliografía de la historia de España). The bibliographical aids on the American side are so familiar that it does not seem necessary to name them here.

It was under an appointment as Amherst Memorial Fellow (Amherst College) that I spent two years in France, Spain, England and the United States in the  p. viii preparation of this book, the plan of which was conceived in 1922. It was also the generosity of the Amherst Memorial Fellowship Committee that enabled me to make the present arrangement for publication. My first studies in the history of the Old Southwest were carried on under the guidance of Frederick Jackson Turner, to whom this book is dedicated as a mark of esteem for a great historian and of gratitude to an unfailing friend.

For reading and criticising my manuscript, I am indebted to Dr. James A. Robertson, editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review; Professor Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard University; Professor Laurence B. Packard, on behalf of the Amherst Memorial Fellowship Committee; and Professors Isaac J. Cox and J. A. James of Northwestern University.

I may add that I am planning a companion volume to the present one, carrying through to its conclusion the story of the Spanish retreat from Louisiana and the Floridas in the face of the advancing American frontier. The present work while complete in itself, needs the sequel.

A. P. W.

June 20, 1927

 p. ix  Introduction

Through an amazing web of intrigue and diplomacy the irrepressible frontiersmen of the old South-West burst their way to the Mississippi. When Roosevelt wrote his Winning of the West, little that was certain could be told of this story. Dr. Whitaker has pursued every clue to the Spanish archives, where the servants of declining empire carefully recorded every letter and interview and bargain concluded in their colonies on the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi. From the material so gathered, he has reconstructed a fascinating story of relations between rough-necked backwoodsmen of the Daniel Boone breed and courtly representatives of the King of Spain; Scots fur-traders and the half-breed chiefs of the Creek and Cherokee; picturesque rascals like O'Fallon and Tom Washington, and venal legislatures. The influence of this frontier underworld on the formal diplomacy between Spain and the United States has been clearly brought out; and the significance of it, as a conflict between two different civilizations, adequately appreciated. Twelve eventful years of this conflict are concluded by the Madrid negotiations of 1795 between Thomas Pinckney and Manuel de Godoy, and the treaty of San Lorenzo, which cleared Spanish obstructions from our westward advance.

S. E. Morison