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Anglo-French rivalry for the Mississippi valley began

Source: New Paths Beaten: Verner Crane's The Southern Frontier #564

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If Crane unwittingly helped to give birth to several recent trends in historical writing, he can be more explicitly credited with championing the neglected history of the colonial Deep South, a South that existed long before cotton became king. Crane's belief that the southern frontier merited closer historical attention appears to have derived from his admiration of the work of Herbert Bolton and his students at the University of California at Berkeley. Whereas Turner's frontier progressed from east to west, the "Bolton School," as it is often termed, called attention to the frontier of New Spain, which stretched from Florida to California and progressed from south to north. Though Crane did not attempt to duplicate the Spanish archival work of the Bolton School, he drew extensively upon its research and credited Bolton as being the catalyst of a "renaissance" of interest in the history of the Old Southeast. Throughout the pages of The Southern Frontier, Crane dropsINTRODUCTION xxv subtle and not-so-subtle hints intended to correct the nation's historical myopia. He expresses a thinly veiled disdain for Francis Parkman, author of classic works on Anglo-French rivalry in the North, who, in Crane's words, "has been permitted to say almost the last word upon the colonial frontier in its international aspects." The roots of Anglo-French rivalry for control of the Mississippi Valley did not, in Crane's view, begin in the Ohio Valley in the mid-eighteenth century. "It was on the southern frontier [during Qyeen Anne's War]," Crane wrote, "that the conflict was first clearly joined for the control of the valley of the Mississippi." British imperial tactics devised to counteract French influence, Crane maintained, were also southern in origin.