Even the frontiersmen themselves put second to this the right to people the vast continent which lay between the Pacific and the Mississippi.

The statesmen at Washington viewed this last proposition with positive alarm, and cared only to acquire New Orleans.

The winning of Louisiana was due to no one man, and least of all to any statesman or set of statesmen.

It followed inevitably upon the great westward thrust of the settler-folk; a thrust which was delivered blindly, but which no rival race could parry, until it was stopped by the ocean itself.
Pressure of the Backwoodsmen on the Spanish Dominions.
Louisiana was added to the United States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands; and had already begun to build their raw hamlets on the banks of the Mississippi, and to cover its waters with their flat-bottomed craft.

Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nominal, and the Indian the real, master; and with a more immediate longing they fiercely coveted the creole province at the mouth of the river.
The Mississippi formed no barrier whatsoever to the march of the backwoodsmen.