Choosing Enemies: The Prospects for an Anti-American Alliance in the Louisiana Territory

Abstract

AFTER 1800, THE FORTUNES of both Spaniards and Native Americans in the North American West changed dramatically. Spain evacuated the vast Louisiana Territory in 1803 and surrendered the Southwest upon Mexican independence. The United States had acquired Texas by 1845 and much of the rest of the Southwest at the end of the Mexican War in 1848. More tragically, Anglo Americans pushed Native Americans off their homelands and into Indian Territory or onto reservations that represented only a tiny fraction of the lands these Indians had once occupied. We tend to think of the United States in the nineteenth century as a juggernaut, but what if Europeans and Indians in the trans-Mississippi West had banded together? Could they have changed history by blocking United States expansion? Could Arkansas, and Missouri be part of Mexico now, or the Spanish-speaking or French-speaking Republic of Louisiana, or an Osage-dominated or pan-Indian nation, bordered on the east by the United States and the south by Mexico, with its own representatives at the United Nations? Those possibilities sound far-fetched in the twenty-first century. But Tecumseh and other Indian leaders in the Ohio Valley built a powerful pan-Indian alliance, supported and armed by the British, in the early nineteenth century. West of the Mississippi, there were Spaniards and Indians who in the late eighteenth century had conceived of a similar collaboration against the United States. It is not simply in retrospect that the Louisiana Purchase was understood as a crucial step in American expansion. Spain had fought against Britain during the American Revolution, but by the end of the war officials in Spanish North America already had reason to worry about the new republic with which they were sharing the continent. In 1783, neither Spaniards nor Indians who had fought in the war were invited to participate in negotiating the Treaty of Paris. As part of the treaty, the British surrendered what would become the states of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama to the United States. The Congress quickly began surveying these lands and selling them off. But it was Spain's troops that during the war had seized much of this region from the British. With good reason, Spanish officials worried about the unmeasured ambition of a new and vigorous people, hostile to all subjection, advancing and multiplying . . . with a prodigious rapidity, as the Spanish governor of Francois Luis Hector, the Baron de Carondelet, put it. The Spanish predicted that this expansionist people's next acquisition would be which spanned the entire western Mississippi Valley, from present-day Louisiana to Minnesota in the north and the Rockies in the west.1 Likewise, Louisiana's native peoples heard rumors of a new kind of Luropean, who came in unprecedented numbers, trampled Indian land rights, and called themselves Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and Americans. In the 1780s, Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw speakers from the east toured telling tales of an ambitious plague of locusts that was streaming across the Appalachians. The visitors warned Louisiana Indians that their lands would be next.2 If the Indians and Europeans of Louisiana had banded together, they could have assembled ten thousand men to defend against the expanding United States, and more if they had recruited Indians and Frenchmen in the contested regions just east of the Mississippi. So why didn't they? The peoples west of the Mississippi failed to resist Anglo-American expansion because of their own historical relationships within the region. No united front, they were instead a barely co-existing collection of peoples who did not necessarily trust one another any more than they trusted the United States. Their failure to unite had clear precedent. Most of the people in Louisiana had in fact contemplated joint military action against another expansionist people, the Osage Indians, themselves residents of the purchase territory. …