This is Part I in a multi-part series about the American West. You can read Part II here and Part III here. It probes our understanding and perceptions of the West as a historical place, or collection of places. It aims to get at the root of why we think about and portray the West the ways that we do. It also indulges the author’s personal fondness for the West.
Stories about the American West have a certain mystique. As Americans we conjure up a collective nostalgia for the West. In our minds it’s a specific place with a slate of historical characters — maybe cowboys and Indians on the plains, or gold prospectors in the mountains. The West held the promise of rugged individualism and opportunity. It still has the power to feel both familiar and unknowable.
That’s because the American West isn’t any one place at all. It’s a collection of places. There are many different Wests, each with their own unique historical narratives. The West is a patchwork of people, places, and moments in time.
When we look at its history this way, we see that the West — that is, the West as we tend to imagine it — is a cultural construct. It’s an amalgam of images and biases fused together in the American imagination. This can make for great media but risks distorting our sense of history. To understand the West is to confront its complexities and contradictions. This helps give us a firmer grasp on what and why the West is.
The construction of the West as this compilation of ideas and images comes from the diverse people who experienced the West in diverse ways. One such example has hyperlocal ties.[1] This is the story of a group of New Englanders who sought their fortune in the West and lost it all along the way.
This series investigates an expedition that people from Massachusetts and Connecticut undertook in the age of the American Revolution. They endeavored to settle a tract of land that we, in our time, wouldn’t normally associate with the West. In their time, though, it was well within the realm of the West.
We’re talking about today’s Gulf Coast, from the Florida Panhandle to New Orleans and the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.
I’m going to refer to this expedition as the West Florida Expedition, because it was the British colony of West Florida that the New England settlers were after, and as the Military Adventurers, which was how they incorporated themselves as a land company. These are interchangeable terms for the same group of people.
The West Florida Expedition was doomed from the start. They immediately ran into political roadblocks exacerbated by the revolutionary crisis. By the time they were ready to sail for West Florida, many of the original proprietors had died of old age. Others who survived the journey died of disease on arrival. Those left over had little time to plant roots, for global politics intervened. Belligerents they perceived as invaders forced them off their new settlement. For refuge they trekked more than 1,000 miles on foot. They reached Georgia and from there the remaining Adventurers scattered away in failure.
We’re going to see that this story contributes to our idea of the American West. In fact, we can’t get closer to knowing the West without it. It’s a nuanced story that complicates our understanding of the West and New England’s role in creating the West as an idea.
Before we jump into this history, we need to set the scene. Context is important. To understand the circumstances at hand, we need to understand the perspectives, values, norms, power dynamics, and landscapes of the people and places we’re going to investigate. That is to say, we need to step into the Adventurers’ world.
On a similar point, we need to remember the perspectives, values, norms, power dynamics, and landscapes of our own time and place. My approach to and understanding of this as a white New England man will be much different than, say, a person from Creole Louisiana or the Cherokee Nation.[2]
We begin in the early 1760s.[3] The global military conflict known as the Seven Years’ War (or, as it’s known here in North America, the French and Indian War) is drawn to a close while revolutionary sentiment stirs in British North America.
The Treaty of Paris brought a formal conclusion to the war in February 1763. The terms of the treaty also brought to North America a seismic realignment of colonial imperial power. It pretty much booted France from the continent. It for the most part relegated Spain west of the Mississippi River. The British now controlled its 13 Atlantic colonies and Nova Scotia plus Spanish Florida, French Canada, French Louisiana east of the Mississippi, and a handful of Caribbean islands. With the stroke of a pen Great Britain found in its possession a huge piece of North America, and its major European rivals, more or less, out of the picture.[4]
That October, King George III issued a royal proclamation. It outlined the first administrative steps to organize and govern the new additions to the British Empire. One such step was setting new boundaries. One such boundary was the Proclamation Line.
The Appalachian Mountains had long hemmed British North Americans along the Atlantic Coast. The new treaty gave the British control of the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. But instead of opening that land up for settlement, the King decreed that the land would become an Indian Reserve. The Proclamation Line would create a buffer between the Indigenous powers who still occupied that area and British interests already established along the coast. The short-term goal was containment. Indigenous nations had resisted Europeans’ presence since the latter first arrived on the continent, and this moment was no exception. From 1763-1765 the British fought against Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and Siouan-speaking peoples in a conflict known as “Pontiac’s War” or “Pontiac’s Uprising” in the Great Lakes region. New colonial settlements beyond the Proclamation Line threatened to disrupt the now-stable but fragile relations between the British and Indigenous sovereignties.
British treaties with other Indigenous nations revised the Proclamation Line in 1768 and 1770. These revisions were supposed to appease colonists’ discontent with the moratorium on western settlement. It didn’t matter. Colonists disregarded the line and attempted to settle anyway. Land companies like the Military Adventurers lobbied hard for the King and Parliament to open the region for speculation.
Meanwhile, activity during this period engendered revolutionary fervor in the Northeast. Various grievances justified the American Revolution, most famously taxation and Parliamentary representation. But another was colonists’ inability to spread west and profit from that expansion.
Colonists kindled that revolutionary fire in Boston. By the time the Adventurers embarked for West Florida, Bostonians had resisted the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, Declaratory Act, Quartering Acts, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act. They responded to those laws with violence. They staged riots, tarring and feathering, burnings and hangings in effigy, destruction of private property, and theatrical acts of defiance like the so-called Boston Tea Party. They also endured the so-called Boston Massacre, not knowing if or when British soldiers might again fire upon the public. The spirit of the Revolution emanated from Boston and opposition to British authority accelerated.
Indeed, by the time the Adventurers reached the Gulf Coast the Revolutionary War was imminent.
Part II to follow.
[1] Hyperlocal, that is, to the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts, where I lived when I first started researching and writing about this topic.
[2] Check your biases, people.
[3] The following descriptions of the time period are pretty broad but bear with me.
[4] Per the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau of 1762, France ceded its Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi to Spain. Thus, French sovereignty was gone from North America until Spain ceded Louisiana back to France in 1800.
The Sketch Book of Nick DeLuca 
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