French traders and trappers
Upon the eve of the downfall of New France, the crafty
Louis XV, in order to prevent England from obtaining them,
ceded to Spain (November, 1762) the town and
neighborhood of New Orleans and the broad possessions
of France west of the Mississippi. But the
Spaniards who came to New Orleans and St. Louis were in
the main only public officials. French habitans occupied their
little waterside villages, as of old; being joined in the closing
decade of the century by Kentuckians like Boone, who, weary
of the legal and social restraints of growing American settlements,
were willing to accept Spanish land grants with their
promise of a return to primitive conditions, in which farming
operations alternated with hunting. French trappers, many of
them blood relatives of the red men, and now released from
the tyranny of the fur-trade monopoly of New France freely
plied their nomadic calling upon the lower reaches of the
Missouri and its branches, and even up the Platte and
Arkansas to the bases of the Rockies. French and half-breed
fur-traders—either on their own account or, in the northern
regions, as agents of the warring British companies—wandered
far and near among the tribesmen, visiting them in their permanent
villages and accompanying them upon hunting-, fishing-,
and war-parties. Their long journeyings by land and
water occasionally carried them as far afield as the great northern
bend of the Missouri, where were the villages of the trade-loving
Mandans, who bartered indiscriminately with Gauls from
St. Louis and Britons from the Assiniboin.
