Go West Young Man!

The fur traders moved westward.  In 1673, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet had reached the
Mississippi River from the Great Lakes region.  They reported an all water route between the northern lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

This idea inspired others, beginning with Robert Cavalier, Sieur de LaSalle,  who launched an enterprise in 1675 to establish trading posts in the interior to ship furs to Europe via the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi.  LaSalle lost his life trying to plant a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi.

In the 1680s trappers and traders operated out of a base at the head of Lake Michigan, Michillimackinac.  Their miserable work and brutal hardships built a network of Indians alliances that gave France supremacy in the Mississippi Valley and challenged the Spanish in Texas and New Mexico.

Ironically, the gold and furs that won the empires for Spain and France also doomed them to destruction in North America.  Both colonizing powers were bent on skimming the surface wealth from the New World, so much so that they disregarded the unoccupied central coastlands.  Regions between Canada and Florida, with the temperate climate and tillable soil, were necessary to sustain a permanent colony.

Next time...England's good fortune
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Today in Pioneer History:  On August 10, 1846, after a decade of debate about how best to spend a bequest left to America from an obscure English scientist, President James K. Polk signs the Smithsonian Institution Act into law.