34 The Winning of the West 



or along the banks of the streams flowing into the 

 Atlantic. When the fight at Lexington took place 

 they had no settlements beyond the mountain chain 

 on our western border. It had taken them over a 

 century and a half to spread from the Atlantic to 

 the Alleghanies. In the next three quarters of a 

 century they spread from the Alleghanies to the Pa- 

 cific. In doing this they not only dispossessed the 

 Indian tribes, but they also won the land from its 

 European owners. Britain had to yield the terri- 

 tory between the Ohio and the Great Lakes. By 

 a purchase, of which we frankly announced that the 

 alternative would be war, we acquired from France 

 the vast, ill-defined region known as Louisiana. 

 From the Spaniards, or from their descendants, we 

 won the lands of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and 

 California. 



All these lands were conquered after we had be- 

 come a power, independent of every other, and one 

 within our own borders; when we were no longer 

 a loose assemblage of petty seaboard communities, 

 each with only such relationship to its neighbor as 

 was implied in their common subjection to a foreign 

 king and a foreign people. Moreover, it is well 

 always to remember that at the day when we began 

 our career as a nation we already differed from our 

 kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name; the 

 word American already had more than a merely 

 geographical signification. Americans belong to 

 the English race only in the sense in which English- 

 men belong to the German. The fact that no change 



