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revolt quickly and bloodlessly, it proved to be a harbinger of things to come. The Kemper brothers—Samuel, Nathan, and Reuben — who emerged as leaders in this early revolt, awaited the opportunity to present Spain with a real revolution.
In the period following the Louisiana Purchase, the interest of the American government in the Mississippi Gulf Coast reached the highest levels. President Jefferson sent a detailed list of questions to Ephraim Kirby, the American magistrate at Fort Stoddard (located above Mobile on the Tombig-beej^etrresting~mformation regarding coastal settlement. s'lhc Kirby Report, dated May 1, 1804, contained the following information: *^£lom the ■ towR-gr Mobile to the Pascagoula there are about 18 families settled along the shores of the Bay and at the mouth of the river; and from thence to Pearl River, and upon the same are about 30 families.”
As to the character of the people, Kirby deemed the original French as “few in number but generally honest, well disposed citizens.” The next most ancient group, Tories and others who had fled Georgia and the Carolinas during the American Revolution, he dismissed as treasonable and "felons of the first magnitude.” Since territorial status, however, American emigrants of a more “meritorious class” had arrived. He concluded by informing Jefferson that only the establishment of American rule could end the economic depression of the area wrought by Spanish control.
The extension of American postal service to New Orleans in 1804 prompted Jefferson to inquire about possible overland post routes designed to connect that city with the principal southwest-tending trunk out of Washington, D.C. Judging from the 1805 report sent to the President by post rider Issac Briggs, roads were almost nonexistent. The 200-mile journey on horseback from Fort Stoddard through Mobile across the coast to New Orleans required 25 days of hard traveling. Briggs crossed the Pascagoula approximately 20 miles above its mouth by borrowing a canoe and swimming his horse alongside. From that point he rode in a generally southwesterly direction to the Farve Farm on the Pearl and there, to avoid the virtually impassable Pearl River swamps, boarded a schooner for New Orleans. American authorities approved this route for use, but due to the certainty of its closure in the event of trouble with the Spanish, they also decreed the blazing of an alternate route. This Federal Road, authorized in 1806, ran the length of the 31st parallel from Fort Stoddard to the Mississippi River but at Ford’s Fort on the Pearl a fork ran south from it to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
By the portentous year of 1810 the new roads and trails penetrating the pine barrens had opened the region to an ever increasing number of settlers moving overland from Georgia and the Carolinas. These people, of primarily Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stock, were herdsmen and huntcrs-gathcrcrs who grew a few subsistence food crops on the fertile lands of the creek bottoms. They and their descendants raised huge herds of cattle and swine, which fed on the grasses and pine mast of the forests. They were crack shots hunting the deer of the forests and the bear of the cancbrakcs. They were content with, and indeed sought, a life of unrestrained freedom bereft of the amenities of civilization, and they were not fond of Indians or- Spaniards.
A traveler’s account of that same year gave a more complete situation report of coastal families than that of Kirby six years before. This account listed 18 families on the lower Pascagoula and more upstream, 12 families at