Since Spain
still controlled the upper Missouri, rumors of upstream trading led
Spanish authorities in St. Louis to send David MacKay, who had
abandoned the English, back up the river with John Evans, a devotee
of the popular theory that the Mandan's were descendants of the
lost tribe of Welshmen.
Evans and
MacKay were instructed to reassert Spanish hegemony in the region,
and they went about their business with zeal, raising Spanish flags
over British forts. If they were banking on panache and bravado to
win over the tribes, they failed. Wisely, Missouri River
tribes remained neutral. Also, the British were too well
established in the region to be so easily dislodged, even though
the fur trade on the upper Missouri would remain hotly contested
between the British, French, Spanish, and Americans for the next
forty years.
For their part,
the Mandans had already been involved in this commercial struggle
for decades. Some thirty expeditions had reached their
villages and traded with them, so they were not at all deluded as
to what the Americans could mean to the region.