Creative Books

Holding to all of Texas, Spain also raised her flag over her
colonists who spread from Mexico along the valley of the Rio Grande
to Santa Fe, and she claimed the great unoccupied wilderness of
mountain and desert comprising the larger portion of Colorado,
Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, as well as California. In the decade of
1820-1830, fur-traders threaded the dark and forbidding defiles of
the mountains, unfolded the secrets of the Great Basin, and found
their way across the Rockies to California and Oregon; the
government undertook diplomatic negotiations to safeguard American
rights on the Pacific, and extended a line of forts well into the
Indian country; while far-seeing statesmen on the floor of Congress
challenged the nation to fulfill its destiny by planting its
settlements boldly beyond the Rocky Mountains on the shores of the
Pacific. It was a call to the lodgment of American power on that
ocean, the mastery of which is to determine the future relations of
Asiatic and European civilizations.


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