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went to Washington “with his old, muzzle-loading shotgun, not with any intention probably of ridding the country of any budding statesmen, but just to let them know at the capital that he was in earnest.” More likely is that Walker relied on something other than a shotgun or eloquence to convince the lawmakers, something neither party would want recorded—such as money. Indeed, no record of this wealthy landowner’s presence in Washington has been found in any newspapers or in any annals of Congress, despite the fact that shotguns in Congress were newsworthy even then, and eloquent reasoning is not something lobbyists keep private.

The debate in Congress over Missouri statehood suggests how Walker could have operated without attracting attention. It was highly emotional, touching on the nation’s very existence. At issue was slavery in the states to be created out of the Louisiana Purchase. What ultimately resulted was the Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery in any new territory or state north of 36°30’, with the exception (this being the compromise) of Missouri. In the newspapers and the halls of Congress, attention was closely focused on this issue, thereby enabling Walker to go about his particular business unnoticed. Indeed, the only time the debate turned to the “boot heel” being appended to Missouri’s southern border was when Rhode Island Senator James Burrill Jr. declared, “With respect to the boundaries of the new state, I desire more definite information.… By a certain bill which has been laid on our desk by mistake, it appears that certain other boundaries have been thought of, and I wish to know the cause of this variation of boundaries.” The record shows no response being provided.

Immediately after Missouri became a state, Walker made his first public appearance in the political arena. He became the sheriff in his neck of the woods, New Madrid County. He was just twenty-four years old. He went on to be the county’s presiding judge and later created the city plan for the town of Caruthersville, close by where Little Prairie had been. There he lived out his days and is buried alongside the Methodist church.

TEXAS, LOUISIANA, OKLAHOMA

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

The Massachusetts Texan

Mr. Onis … was willing that the boundary line with the United States should extend to the South Sea [Pacific Ocean].… [But] we would yield something of the western line we had proposed … that she might have a barrier for Santa Fe. I told him … if Spain had come to the determination. to begin the line at the Sabine. I could not express the disgust with which I was forced to carry on a correspondence with him upon subjects which it was ascertained that we could not adjust.

—SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN QUINCY ADAMS1

John Quincy Adams is widely remembered for the use of his middle name, distinguishing him from his more famous father, who is widely remembered for doing the things the Founding Fathers did. One thing the Founding Fathers indisputably did was to leave the next generation a tough act to follow. This challenge was vividly illustrated in the life stories of John Adams’s three sons: one rose to become, like his father, a president; the other two failed to sustain successful careers and died as alcoholics.

As this second generation moved into the presidential ranks, the major rival to John Quincy Adams was Andrew Jackson. Adams was seen as representing the upper class from which all the previous presidents had come, and even as a bit monarchical, being the eldest son of a president. Jackson, on the other hand, represented the prototypical American, newly minted by democracy, whose citizens possessed no class (in both senses of the phrase). Both men, however, despite their differences, played key roles in establishing what is today the eastern border of Texas.

The event that ultimately resulted in today’s eastern border of Texas was the Louisiana Purchase. When President Thomas Jefferson acquired this region from France in 1803, John Quincy Adams was a thirty-six-year-old senator from Massachusetts and Andrew Jackson,