When the Spaniards held such views it was absolutely inevitable that a conflict should come.  Whether the frontiersman did or did not possess deep religious convictions, he was absolutely certain to refuse to be coerced into becoming a Catholic; and his children were sure to fight as soon as they were given the choice of changing their faith or abandoning their country.  The minute that the American settlers were sufficiently numerous to stand a chance of success in the conflict it was certain that they would try to throw off the yoke of the fanatical and corrupt Spanish Government.  As early as 1801 bands of armed Americans had penetrated here and there into the Spanish provinces in defiance of the commands of the authorities, and were striving to set up little bandit governments of their own. [Footnote:  Do., p. 447.]

    Advantages of the Frontiersmen.

The frontiersmen possessed every advantage of position, of numbers, and of temper.  In any contest that might arise with Spain they were sure to take possession at once of all of what was then called Upper Louisiana.  The immediate object of interest to most of them was the commerce of the Mississippi River and the possession of New Orleans; but this was only part of what they wished, and were certain to get, for they demanded all the Spanish territory that lay across the line of their westward march.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century the settlers on the Western waters recognized in Spain their natural enemy, because she was the power who held the mouth and the west bank of the Mississippi.  They would have transferred their hostility to any other power which fell heir to her possessions, for these possessions they were bound one day to make their own.

    Predominance of the Middle West.

A thin range of settlements extended from the shores of Lake Erie on the north to the boundary of Florida on the south; and there were out-posts here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in Kentucky and Tennessee.  These two States were the oldest, and long remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West.  They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners, and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements north of them no less than the settlements south of them.  This fact of itself tended to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a unit with a peculiar character of its own, neither Northern nor Southern in political and social tendency.  It was the middle West which was first settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies.  Inasmuch as west of the mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that, considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own.  A distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.