How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

The Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776, becoming the United States. However, some colonists such as the hunter Daniel Boone, “asserted an independence of a different sort” (25) by heading past the boundaries and going west from North Carolina with up to 30 followers. They stopped in Kentucky—inhabited by the Shawnee—and called their settlement “Boonesborough.” The location “on the far side of the Appalachians” was significant—a natural barrier “in law and practice” to British North America (25). Boone “had opened a channel through which hundreds of thousands of whites would soon pour” (25) along with enslaved Black people. While European Enlightenment thinkers considered him a man returning to a more natural way of life, he was not celebrated domestically at that time.

The settlement encroached on the lands of the Indigenous people, who sometimes fought back. At the same time, Boone was adopted into a Shawnee family after being captured by them. These complexities “put Washington in favor of enforcing a British-style settlement boundary” (27). The Founding Fathers started using the term “territory” in the context of the mainland frontier expansion. Congress had “the power to advance or impede territories” (29), as some became states but others, like West Dakota, did not (29).