ABSTRACT
In his American Geography of 1789 Jedidiah Morse described Louisiana as a Spanish province, bounded on the east by the Mississippi River, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the west by New Mexico, and running indefinitely north. It was huge, and it was difficult to describe. 1 Much of it was unexplored. Before 1763 the European powers had acknowledged the region as belonging to France. Her explorers and fur traders knew some of it, but there was no precise boundary separating it from the possessions of Spain in the Southwest. France had ceded the region to Spain in 1763. Spain, France, and the United States all ignored any Indian right to territorial sovereignty over the region; the best the Indians could hope for was some acknowledgment of their right of soil.
