Crossword-Solution: SOUTHWESTERNERS 15 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 21

Mexico, with its gold and silver mines, its strange physical features, its population utterly foreign to us in race, religion, speech, and ways of life, and especially because of the glamour of mystery which surrounded it and partly shrouded it from sight, always dazzled and strongly attracted the minds of the Southwesterners, occupying much the same place in their thoughts that the Spanish Main did in the imagination of England during the reign of Elizabeth.

The Southwesterners are credited with altogether too complex motives when it is supposed that they were actuated in regard to the conquest of northern Mexico by a desire to provide for additional slave states to offset the growth of the North; their emotions in regard to their neighbor's land were in the main perfectly simple and purely piratical.