Missouri River Quotes
This was the beginning of the Jeffersonian effort culminating in the Corps of Discovery and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Presidential, confidential memoranda to the Congress were more common then than now when they have become a rarity.
Maury helped organize the Thomas Walker expeditions. These were precursors to the Jefferson organized Lewis and Clark expedition later.
if trade between the British and the Sioux were terminated The essential difference between the British and American interests were that the Hudson Bay Company—the English authority in Canada—was generally interested in short term commercial profits from trading including guns and alcohol while the Americans wanted pacification so that the Westward expansion and growth of the country could move forward. To the Americans at the time, it was a forgone conclusion that the few Indians would have to share their land with the more numerous whites. The different between doves and hawks at the time was how. The hawks wanted to simply drive the Indians out. The doves like Meriwether wanted to develop a trading dependency on America for modern goods. Therefore, the problem boiled down to making America the sole supplier of most goods. The strategy did not work as the bloody history of relations with the Sioux will attest.
He had introduced a bill to provision a military garrison at the mouth of the Columbia River on the West Coast and protect and develop trade with China and India. President Monroe was for it and he persuaded the House to vote for it, but the bill to encourage foreign free trade with the Orient died in the Senate. Floyd was another American ahead of his time. . Floyd was very modern in his economic views, so much so that he, even as a Southern politician, opposed slavery on the grounds that it was economically inefficient and the South would never develop industrially if it had no incentive, as existed in the North and England, to reduce the amount of labor required for economic opportunity. He was right on that point as well.
This treaty ended Red Cloud’s War. It shows a very sophisticated attempt by the white and Indian leadership. In addition to assuring the Indians control over the Black Hills, the parties provided for economic development. A white doctor, teacher, engineer, blacksmith and other technicians were to live on the reservation and teach their trades to the Indians. The Lakota Sioux had been at war with their neighbors before the whites ever came. Hunting and war was all they knew, and this treaty would give them a chance to modernize and earn a living. Unfortunately, gold was found in the Black Hills and whites soon usurped the land breaking the treaty and undoing the progress that had been made. Then the whites seized and confiscated the Sioux land in violation of the treaty and the Government was later ordered to pay $105 million by the courts. The Indians however did not want the money—a fortune then; they wanted their land back.
Refers to the French army which the French king sent to support the Spanish monarch, Fernando VII, in 1823.
