Download or read book Economic Beginnings of the Far West, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) written by and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Economic Beginnings of the Far West, Vol. 1 For three centuries possession of the Far West, the vast unknown that lay beyond the Mississippi River, was in dispute. The maritime nations of Europe who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contended for control of the north Atlantic coast and the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley, were engaged at the same time in a less dramatic but no less fateful tug of war for the great rivers, the arid plains, and the windswept coasts of western America. France through her fur traders laid hold on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and the net-work of lakes and sluggish streams that stretch from the Great Lakes to the Canadian Rockies. Soon after the Peace of Paris had given Canada to Great Britain, the indomitable Scotch traders of Montreal carried their enterprises across the Rockies to the Pacific. Long before this, Spanish conquistadores and Franciscan missionaries had found their way over the lofty plateaus of northern Mexico to the headwaters of the Rio Grande and along the western foot-hills of the Coast Range to the harbors of San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco. Spanish ships had already explored the coast well into Arctic waters and, while missing the key to the Northwest, the Columbia River, they had established the title of the most Christian Prince to all of the Pacific slope south of the Russian settlements. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.