In the 18th century, Louisiana was not just today's smallish southern state bordered by the Mississippi on one side and Texas on the other. It encompassed the modern states of Montana, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana itself, and parts of Minnesota, Wyoming, and Colorado. In short, the whole of the central US. A huge stretch of plains land, originally populated by many different Indian tribes.
Although this area had in fact belonged to France during the first half of the 18th century, in the treaties following the Seven Years War (1755-62) where France had been on the losing side, it had been ceded to Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762). This Spanish territory was to be further enlarged twenty years later in the aftermath of the collapse of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France in 1795, when England ceded to Spain both East and West Florida, leaving Spain not only in possession of the central part of the North American continent but also master of its entire southern seaboard.
