Spain
SLOWLY pushing northward from Mexico, Spaniards
had by the close of the seventeenth century established
towns and Indian missions at many points in Texas,
New Mexico, and Arizona—a slender chain, stretching across
the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific
Ocean. By the opening of our Revolutionary War,
their mission villages, with an aggregate population of over
thirteen thousand barbarian converts, extended upwards through
California to San Francisco and Monterey; Spanish mariners,
seeking vainly for a waterway through to the Atlantic, that
should furnish a short route between Spain and India, had by
this time become familiar with the coast as far north as the
modern Sitka, and developed a considerable trade with the
natives, chiefly at Nootka Sound, on Vancouver's Island;
while adventurous Spanish missionaries had contemporaneously
penetrated eastward to the Great Basin.
