Decisive Battles of America

The settlers’ task of conquering the wilderness might have been simpler had they not spent so much energy in conquering one another; for side by side with the advance of the frontier goes a process of territorial rivalry of which the end is not yet. Along with a contest with the aborigines for the face of the country went a nominal subdivision of the continent among the occupying European powers, a process made more difficult by the slow development of knowledge about the interior: as late as 1660 people thought that the upper Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California.