In truth, the Spaniards were the weakest, and were driven to use the pet
weapons of weakness in opposing their stalwart and masterful foes. They
were fighting against their doom, and they knew it. Already they had
begun to fear, not only for Louisiana and Florida, but even for sultry
Mexico and far-away golden California. It was hard, wrote one of the
ablest of the Spanish Governors, to gather forces enough to ward off
attacks from adventurers so hardy that they could go two hundred leagues
at a stretch, or live six months in the wilderness, needing to carry
nothing save some corn-meal, and trusting for everything solely to their
own long rifles.
Spaniards Invite Americans to Become Colonists.
Next to secretly rousing the Indians, the Spaniards placed most reliance
on intriguing with the Westerners, in the effort to sunder them from the
seaboard Americans. They also at times thought to bar the American
advance by allowing the frontiersmen to come into their territory and
settle on condition of becoming Spanish subjects. They hoped to make of
these favored settlers a barrier against the rest of their kinsfolk. It
was a foolish hope. A wild and hardy race of rifle-bearing freemen, so
intolerant of restraint that they fretted under the slight bands which
held them to their brethren, were sure to throw off the lightest yoke
the Catholic King could lay upon them, when once they gathered strength.
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