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This settlement, as well as the lesser one in the
Farallone Islands, endured for nearly a generation, a menace to
Spain's ascendancy in California in the chaotic period when her
colonies were in revolt. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of
California, II., 628; Hittel, Hist. of California.]
In the mean time, from St. Louis as a center, American fur-traders,
the advance-guard of settlement, were penetrating into the heart of
the vast wilderness between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast.
[Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade of the Far West] This was a
more absolute Indian domain than was the region between the
Alleghenies and the Mississippi at the end of the seventeenth
century--an empire of mountains and prairies, where the men of the
Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling waves of that tide
of civilization that was to sweep them away. The savage population
of the far west has already been described in an earlier volume of
this series.[Footnote: Farrand, Basis of Am. Hist.


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