40 University of California Publication inTHitory

stead of being merely the area between the Sabine and the Iber-
ville rivers and including just the watershed of the Mississippi,
the province rightfully embraced West Florida, Texas to the Rio
Grande, and an undefined area beyond the Rockies to the Pacific.
 Jefferson thus definitely formulated the United States' claims to
Texas. His arguments in defense of his position were substantially
the same as those used repeatedly in succeeding discussions, in-
eluding the negotiations resulting in the Adams-Onis Treaty. The
alleged title was of course based on that of France, but on the whole
little help was obtained from that Power in defining the rights it
had held previous to 1803. Thus Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and
Adams had to study with more or less thoroughness the whole
Franco-Spanish colonial story.
 Briefly, the French claim was based upon the following activi-
 ties of adventurer-traders which were alleged to have resulted in
 permanent title to land west of the Sabine: the futile journey of
 La Salle to the Bay of St. Bernard (Bahia de San Bernardo, or
 Matagorda Bay), between the mouths of the Guadalupe and Colo-
 rado rivers, in 1686; the grant by Louis XIV in 1712 to Antoine
 Crozat, for his trading company, of a monopoly over all the terri-
 tory from New Mexico to the Carolinas, and from the Gulf to the
 Illinois country; the journeys of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis to
 Natchitoches in 1713, and to the Rio Grande, where he was cap-
 tured by the Spanish, in 1717; and the expeditions of La Harpe
 up the Red River and across to the mouth of the Canadian in 1719,
 and to the Bahia del Espiritu Santo (Bay of the Holy Spirit-
 Galveston Bay) in 1721.
 Jefferson in his memoir on the subject asserted that at the time
 of La Salle the Spanish frontier was far around on the Gulf Coast,
 at the Pnnuco River, and that the Rio Grande was taken as the
 boundary because it was halfway between the outposts of the two
 nations. No evidence of any such agreement appears, and certainly
 the Spanish had established themselves far north of Panuco." Bet-
 ter grounds might have been found in the almost complete French
 control of the Indian tribes in northern Texas, and in the lack of
 effective Spanish occupation either to the north or along the Gulf
 Coast. Dr. Herbert E. Bolton has pointed out that Los Adaes was
 but the tip of a wedge thrust by the Spaniards into territory in
 which the French had control both of the Indians and of trade."