Cavelier de La Salle, 1684-1687 157
And suddenly we see de La Salle and his last expedition
reappearing on the horizon. No sooner had the government
of the United States acquired Louisiana than the famous
question of its frontiers arose. Till then the United States
had paid little attention to the struggles and adventures of
the French on a territory which after all did not belong to
them. But having bought Louisiana, the government of the
United States felt that it was entitled to all the territories
claimed and partly occupied by the French in the seventeenth
century under the name of Louisiana. Hence the indignant
protest from the Spanish authorities who began gathering
all available documents establishing their rights over Texas,
the territory contested. The American government did not
remain idle, either—and a vigorous diplomatic controversy
arose which went on till 1819, when the cession of Florida,
which was surrendered by the Spaniards so as to keep Texas,
brought it momentarily to an end. The chief exponent of
the American claim was no other than the Secretary of State,
John Quincy Adams. Through his correspondence with de
Onis, the Spanish Ambassador at Washington, we find that
if previously the American authorities had not fully realized
the import of de La Salle’s last expedition, they unques-
tionably did so between 1803 and 1819. The whole claim
of the United States was based exclusively on that one expe-
dition of de La Salle. It was then studied in Washington
as it had never been anywhere else, France included. The
Spaniards tried to represent de La Salle’s expedition as “a
transient venture” an “incursion” into the territory of an-
other nation. To this John Quincy Adams, who had become
a great admirer of de La Salle, retorted, “Of all heroic enter-
prises, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sig-
nalized the discoveries by Europeans upon this continent,
there is not one of which the evidence is more certain,