Louisiana

Blount had also spent his personal fortune invested in western lands.

In late 1796, he heard rumors that Spain planned to cede Louisiana territory and the Floridas to France.

Given the hostility between France and the U.S., This would make settlement of those western lands far less attractive, destroying their value and his investments in them.

Blount did not trust the federal government to handle the situation, so he turned to the British.

Because in his dying moments, Mackay just said some things about that to people who were there, members of this posse.

So he came to a somewhat untimely end, and I will sort of save some of those details for my readers, but Willie escaped in that moment and he disappeared for several years and then allegedly resurfaced under a different name in the Mississippi, the lower Mississippi River Valley several years later in the time, the sort of confusing time right around the Louisiana Purchase when Louisiana, which was once French and had become Spanish, was about to undergo another series of changing hands.

And Jefferson was president and very, very consciously thinking about this territory that's sitting just to the west of the United States.

In this moment, in a very dramatic way, Willie Harp seems to resurface in the Mississippi River Valley under a different name.

After unpacking that Victorian obsession with the unseen, it’s striking how much of that same thirst for explanation carried on into the seventeen sixties, when Europe was juggling colonial fortunes like chess pieces on an imperial board.

The secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed in early November seventeen sixty-two in a damp London hallway, quietly slipped Louisiana—wider than all of France’s New France—into Spanish hands while Britain secured its northern crown with the surrender of Canada and a handful of Caribbean islands.

In doing so, Paris effectively traded an unprofitable foothold for the strategic advantage of a new ally on Spain’s side, and behind that diplomatic handshake was a shiver of resentment across the Atlantic.

Colonial merchants in New York began whispering that their ships would be hunted by Spanish privateers.

The Treaty of Fontainebleau, though a quiet exchange, was a pivotal moment.

It swapped one foreign influence for another while giving Britain the legal backing to press its navy further west.

In return, Spanish Louisiana became a strategic buffer against French expansion and a corridor through which British commerce would later funnel goods into a booming Atlantic market.

Thus, even as the empire's reach expanded, the same paradox of power-driven hope, be it psychic or imperial, remained a constant in Britain's history.