The Spanish authorities encouraged Shawnee and Delaware immigration, and had hoped their settlement would act as a buffer against the unremitting raids and thefts by the Osage, another tribe to the south, as well as forming a bulwark against the possibility of American invasion.

Lorimier had operated an Indian trading post in Ohio, and his close association with the Shawnee, enabled him to encourage a number of them to settle in Upper Louisiana.

In 1793, Baron de Carondelet authorized Don Louis Lorimier to establish these tribes in the New Bourbon district of the province of Upper Louisiana, on the Mississippi between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers.

The task was made easier on account of Shawnee and Delaware hatred of the Americans, who had conquered them through the victory of General Wayne and the Treaty of Greenville (1795).

The concession granted them by the Spanish contained approximately 750 square miles, which included extensive prairies and woodland, karst plains and alluvial bottoms.

This trace was part of the Royal Road (Le Chemin du Roi) connecting several administrative posts of Upper Louisiana, and the Indian villages experienced a considerable amount of through them by officials and outsiders.

Although the Shawnee and Delaware interpreted the entire grant as being exclusively theirs and excluding Americans, district commandants awarded concessions to white settlers within and as close as three miles to the villages.

From early on, the Shawnee said that Spanish Illinois (Upper Louisiana) was not a tranquil place due to the Osages, and they threatened to return to the United States.

These witch-hunts eventually reached the Shawnee in Upper Louisiana, and about 1808−1809, the Native American communities along Apple Creek became possessed with the belief that witchcraft was practiced among them and consequently burned to death some 50 women within 12 months.

The frenzy was suddenly quelled by the appearance of Tecumseh, who was then busy with his plans to form a vast confederacy of all Indians, to check the advance of the white settlers.

The Apple Creek Shawnees, being legally powerless to stop the harassment and thefts, complained that "the whites do not steal these things merely for their value, but more to make us abandon our land and take if for themselves."

Despite the overwhelming evidence and protests from both the Shawnees and Pierre Menard, a country judge refused to prosecute the man and allowed the statute of limitations for his crimes to pass.

Only ten years after the signing of the Treaty of St. Louis the encroachment of white settlers had compelled these tribes to sell their Spanish grant and leave the State for a home farther west.

[2][10][9] Missouri entered the union as the 24th state in 1821, and the federal government, in 1825, moved to extinguish any remaining Shawnee claims under the Spanish land grant.

In November the 1,400 Shawnee in Missouri agreed to a treaty signed at St. Louis with William Clark, exchanging their lands along Apple Creek, near Cape Girardeau, for 2,500 square miles in eastern Kansas.

It was noted at the time by Spanish officials that the Apple Creek villages certainly had as much “white blood” in them as French villages had “Indian blood.”[4] Some houses were log constructed in the vertical French poteaux en terre (posts-in-the-ground) or poteaux-sur-sol (post-on-a-sill) style, with perpendicular log posts set closely together in the ground or on a sill, and with clay chinked in-between filling the interstices.