entered upon his office of President, i\larch 4, 1801, the Mississippi was still the western boundary of the United States. All west of the river was supposed by Americans to belong to Spain, which had been in possession at New^ Orleans since 1763. As a matter of fact, however, Napoleon had recently forced Spain to give back Louisiana to France, but without publishing to the world the treaty of October, 1800, by which this was accomplished. When the Americans learned, a little later, of the change of ownership of this western territory, and the prospect that France would succeed Spain at the mouth of the Mississippi, great alarm was felt throughout the country. "Perhaps nothing since the Revolutionary War," wTote Jefferson, "has produced more uneasy sensations throughout the body of the nation."
The western settlements. A glance at the condition of the West of that time will explain why this was so. The entire region beyond the Alleghenies w^as by nature tributary to the Mississippi. It was a fertile land, containing rich valleys, beautiful plains, and farstretching forests which once teemed with wild game. Daniel Boone called Kentucky "a second Paradise." He and other pioneers at first entered the region as hunters. Afterward they cut a road through the Shenandoah Valley and Cumberland Gap ("the Wilderness Road"), through which they brought their wagons, families, and cattle, to make new homes upon the western waters. The pioneers of Tennessee arrived at about the same time, just before the Revolu
