The Sabine River shaped life in western Louisiana and eastern Texas as both a natural corridor and a contested border. When Spain and America created an official neutral buffer in western Louisiana to define the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, the Sabine stood as the western edge of that neutral strip, and because no troops patrolled it, the region quickly became lawless, with the river often marking the line between law and lawlessness. Running from the rolling terrain of eastern Texas and central Louisiana south to the mires and swamps of the Gulf Coast, the Sabine basin included flat slopes, wide timber floodplains, pine, oak, blackgum, dogwood, and once-abundant cypress, from which the river took its name from the Spanish word for cypress. In its early years the river was the region's lifeline, carrying settlers and cargo, supporting small lumber and cotton processing sites, and later floating timber rafts downstream. In the neutral strip it also served squatters, smugglers, fugitive slaves, wanted men, and men launching military forays into the South. Efforts to police No Man's Land required delicate diplomacy between Spain and America, and after Texas Governor Manuel Salcedo approached Louisiana Governor William C. C. Claiborne, Claiborne appointed Lieutenant Colonel Zebulon Pike to lead a joint expedition in 1812 with orders to remove only squatters and outlaws while sparing settlers who had lived there before the Louisiana Purchase, but Pike's troops also burned houses, tents, and camps of many established settlers. Life along the Sabine during this era was harsh, yet in the early 1800s Jonathan Day Cain and Dr. Timothy Burr became the first Anglo men to settle the area after traveling down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and then overland to the Sabine; Burr established a homestead at what became Burr Ferry, and Cain settled farther south at what became Evans. In the fall of 1843 the steamboat Sabine, commanded by Captain John Clemmons, made the first steamer trip up the river, and soon steamers carried cotton to Sabine Bay for transfer to larger ships bound for New Orleans or Galveston. This trade helped give rise to Logansport, Louisiana, Port Arthur, and Orange, Texas, along with many small river towns and landings. Residents knew the boats by name and even by their whistles, and steamers brought commerce, news, and rare social contact to isolated communities along muddy roads. By the 1870s and 1880s railroads began replacing steamboats as the chief means of transport, though riverboats continued on the Sabine until 1900, after which many steamer-era towns disappeared. The Sabine also gained a reputation for outlaw activity and treasure legends. Before railroads, log rafts, flatboats, and keelboats crowded the river with cargo vulnerable to thieves hiding in riverside thickets. Jean Lafitte found the Sabine's waterways and the neutral strip useful as cover and as a backdoor into America, and local tradition holds that some of his former crew later became early settlers in the region. Legends along the Sabine tell of Lafitte's buried gold near a grove of gum trees, wagonloads of Spanish silver, a hidden silver mine worked by Native Americans and later submerged when the river changed course, and wrecks of Spanish ships, towboats, steamboats, barges, and other vessels beneath the water.