of the State. Until this time the settlement was purely British
in character save for the now negligible remnant of French on the
Mississippi. Missouri then began to get a part of the immigration of
German Alpines which makes Saint Louis still one of the American cities
with a most marked German tinge. At the same time some of the old
American stock who objected to slavery and its influences were passing
north and west of Missouri into Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. On the
whole, however, at the close of this period Missouri remained a Nordic
community mostly of Virginian stock going back eventually to Great
Britain. Its population of well over a million was nine-tenths white
and eight-tenths American-born, the Germans outnumbering the Irish
two to one among the foreigners. Kentucky had been by far the largest
contributor, Tennessee came next, followed by Virginia, while Ohio,
Illinois, and Indiana together accounted for only about as many as
Kentucky alone, that is, 100,000.
This Missouri population, with its Ulster Scotch tinge, played an
important part in the settlement of the trans-Missouri West. It
contributed a large percentage of the plainsmen and mountain men of
later date, as well as of the cowboys on the cattle ranges, to say
nothing of the gun-men and bad men of the frontier.
* * * * *
Florida missed the establishment of one of the earliest and what might
have been one of the greatest of Nordic colonies in North America when
Coligny's settlement of Huguenots was massacred by the Spanish on
September 20, 1565. The latter made no effective use of the territory
which was looked upon by the government of Mexico probably in about the
same light as the Virgin Islands are now looked upon by the government
in Washington. In 1763 Spain ceded Florida to England in return for
Havana, which had been captured during the Seven Years' War.
A second Nordic invasion of Florida occurred at the time of the
American Revolution when the English Loyalists from the Southern
colonies sought refuge there to the number of more than 13,000. If
these had remained as permanent settlers the State would have benefited
immensely, but most of them left in 1784, when the Spaniards reoccupied
the territory and abolished religious freedom. Some went to England
and others to the West Indies or Nova Scotia. The development of the
peninsula was thereby long delayed.
East and West Florida became part of the United States in 1819. A
Florida colonization scheme, of little importance numerically, deserves
mention in passing because it represented the first real establishment
in American territory of the Mediterranean peoples who have formed such
an important element in the immigration of the last half-century. This
was a colony established by British promoters to which they brought
1,500 Greeks, Italians, and Minorcans about 1767. Sickness soon greatly
reduced their numbers, but a few of the descendants of these people are
in the State at the present time.
As late as the Civil War, Florida was one of the weakest of the
American States, with but 140,000 population, of which well over a
third was colored. Nearly all of the Whites represented a southward
thrust of the Atlantic seaboard states, from or through Georgia.
Foreigners were a scattered lot, constituting but one in twenty-five of
the white population.
X
FROM THE MISSISSIPPI TO THE OREGON
After the Old Northwest Territory was filled up, it began to overflow
into the territories across the Mississippi which the Louisiana
Purchase had provided.
* * * * *
Minnesota's early settlers were French and half-breeds, who came over
the border from Canada, together with a small number of Scots escaping
from the breakup of the Red River Colony in Manitoba in the first
quarter of the last century. This Red River is, of course, the Red
River of the North which forms the present boundary between Minnesota
and the Dakotas.
Beginning in 1837 treaties were made with the Indians which gradually
opened up the land to settlement; but in 1849, when a territorial
organization was effected and the first official census taken, there
were less than 5000 persons in the region.
Meanwhile the flood of immigration was reaching the nearby States, and
Wisconsin and Iowa were growing with tremendous spurts. The tide soon
began to flow up to Minnesota, coming by four principal routes. Some of
the invaders came from Milwaukee across Wisconsin by land. Others from
Chicago by land through northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin.
Still others from Chicago to Galena, embarking there on the river
steamers. Another group embarked at Saint Louis and came 800 miles up
the Mississippi to Fort Snelling, the nucleus around which the Twin
Cities began to develop.
When the Rock Island and Pacific Railway was built through to the
Mississippi in the early summer of 1854, the gateways really opened.
The next season saw 50,000 persons in the territory of Minnesota.
That number was doubled in 1856. In 1854 the sales of public land
had amounted to 300,000 acres, in 1856 to 2,300,000. Most of this
population, which evidently came to stay, was from the Middle States.
The States of the Old Northwest and New England were not far behind,
but little of the Southern emigration came this far north. The years
1855, 1856, and 1857 marked the high tide of the flood of immigration
of territorial days which has not since been duplicated.
The Scandinavian immigration, which has colored Minnesota so strongly,
began in this decade, and brought a steady stream of hardy Nordics who
avoided the cities, their objective being to acquire land, establish
a home, develop a farm, and become American citizens. A substantial
part of the German migration also reached Minnesota, so that in the
census of 1860 one-third of the foreign-born population was German.
By this time the Canadian elements had been completely swamped. The
Federal Census of 1860, three years after the territory had been
admitted to Statehood, found 170,000 inhabitants, of whom 58,000 were
foreign-born. The Germans at this time still somewhat exceeded the
Scandinavians in number. The native-born were overwhelmingly of British
ancestry and represented a prolongation of the westward movement of
population from New England that had been going on for more than two
centuries. Minnesota at this time had a Nordic population and was
pre-dominantly Anglo-Saxon in character.
* * * * *
Dakota was included in Minnesota in 1860 when a few settlers had
already begun to enter the region. Dakota Territory, however, scarcely
deserves consideration until the final period is herein reviewed.
* * * * *
Iowa had no real settlement until the spring of 1833, when several
companies of Americans from Illinois and elsewhere settled in the
vicinity of Burlington, although John Dubuque established a settlement
in 1788 on the site of the city which now bears his name, and, with his
descendants, carried on a business of mining lead and trading with the
Indians for a generation or more. Settlements then began to be made at
other points along the Mississippi, and in 1838 the country was cut off
from Wisconsin and established as a separate territory.
As in the States of the Old Northwest Territory, the early population
of Iowa was made up principally from the Southern States; and when
Dubuque was formally declared to be a town in 1834 its 500 citizens
were mostly from Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
The delay in the settlement of Iowa, as compared with that of the
States east of the Mississippi, was due mainly to the fact that it was
held by the Indians. The Black Hawk War kept the country disturbed for
three years. At the end of that time the chief was utterly routed and
ultimately captured, and in September, 1832, a treaty was signed in
which the Indians relinquished what was afterward known as the Black
Hawk Purchase, comprising about one-third of the present State of Iowa.
At that time there were probably not fifty white men in Iowa, but
thenceforward the settlement was extraordinarily rapid. The pioneers
from the South came up the Mississippi, while those from the East could
go down the Ohio. But since the purpose of most of the settlers was to
take up farm land and since the livestock and implements necessary for
this purpose could not be transported easily on the small river boats,
the great bulk of the immigration was overland in wagons drawn by oxen,
horses, or mules.
In 1836 there were 10,000 Southerners in the territory. In the
following two years this number had more than doubled and the census of
1840 made it 43,000.
Foreign immigrants began to appear in small numbers, but the new
arrivals were still largely of Southern upland stock, mainly of
Scottish ancestry. By the Federal Census of 1850 Iowa had nearly
200,000 people and, although the settlement had begun at the most only
seventeen years before, one-fourth of the population was Iowa-born.
As in the Old Northwest Territory, the direct contribution of New
England was small. Most of the settlers came from adjoining States,
and, while many of them went back to New England in pedigree, a still
larger number in the early years came from the Southern States. This
was true in Iowa nearly up to the time of the Civil War.
The ebb and flow of population in these States was so rapid as to make
the task of tracing its details difficult. Thus in 1843 meetings were
held in various points in Iowa to form companies of emigrants for
Oregon. In 1849 the territory contributed its share to the California
gold rush. Whole communities were depopulated almost as fast as they
had been populated a few years previously, but many of these travellers
probably returned after failing to find fortune ready to hand in the
Golden State. Ohio was sending on settlers to the three States beyond
her. Indiana and Illinois were attracting large bodies of settlers
from Ohio but sending on others to Iowa. Iowa itself was contributing
heavily to the population of Utah and Oregon. But these were all of the
old native English Nordic stock.
By 1860 Iowa had a population of 674,913. The foreign-born made up
nearly one-sixth of the total, two-thirds were German or Irish, and the
remainder English or Scandinavian.
Iowa, by the outbreak of the Civil War, had become a Northern State,
not so much from the direct New England immigration (only 25,000
of its people were New England born) as from the general drift of
population, and from the fact that, as pointed out previously, many of
the Southerners who came into the Northwest Territory had very little
sympathy with the slave-holding point of view.
Iowa then entered the Union as a State almost completely Nordic and
overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, populated by settlers from all parts of
the original States who were moving westward in the hope of finding an
advantage. What an immigrant of the 1830's said about Iowa pioneers
he encountered, holds good of most of the westward movement--that it
was made up of three classes: "men with families seeking to ameliorate
fortune, men with families seeking to retrieve fortune, and young men
attempting fortune." While the first pioneer surge into a new territory
often contained a surplus of bachelors, the permanent settlement was
made by men who brought their families.
* * * * *
Kansas-Nebraska's settlement in the decade before the Civil War is a
familiar episode to every one who remembers his American history.
Daniel Morgan Boone, a son of the Kentucky Pathfinder, is often alleged
to have been the first American settler in Kansas, having been sent
there by the government in 1819 to aid the Indians in agriculture. But
the settlement of the State did not begin seriously until 1854, when
treaties were made with the tribes of what was at that time an Indian
territory.
Missouri, adjoining Kansas to the east, had then nearly 600,000
inhabitants, and the counties bordering on the Kansas line contained a
population of some 80,000 whites, as shown by the census of 1850. These
naturally were the most available material for settlement of the new
land and in a short time they had staked out the best claims in the
river bottoms. While they do not bear a good reputation in the Kansas
histories, where they generally go by the name of "border ruffians,"
they represented, worthily or not, pure Nordic American stock. Most
of the Missourians who had moved into Kansas at that time were simply
seeking new homes and were not even in favor of slavery. The trouble
that was made on the border was due to small organized gangs of quite a
different complexion.
Kansas represented a real battleground for the slavery and free-soil
elements, and colonies were organized in a number of the Southern
States, but particularly in Alabama and Kentucky, to move to the new
territory and insure its retention for the cause. Most of the Southern
settlers naturally stayed as close to the Missouri border as possible.
The Free-State settlers on the other hand tended to get away from the
border, to leave the belt of pro-slavery settlers behind, and to stake
out their claims well within the interior of the territory.
The New England Emigrant Aid Company was the principal crusader in the
campaign to make Kansas free soil, and proclaimed widely that it would
send 10,000 men into the region. Its funds, however, were scanty, and
beyond advertising the opportunities of the country, it gave little
substantial aid to the emigration. Contrary to what is generally
supposed, the number of settlers who came directly from New England to
Kansas was small. As had been the history elsewhere in this country,
most of the settlers came from nearby States such as Illinois; though
often of New England ancestry.
In the first census of the territory, in 1855, more than half of the
population was found to be from the South, although the Slave States'
representatives made strong protests against the manner of taking the
census which was sudden and in mid-winter when many of the Missouri
settlers had returned to their old homes. The high-water mark of the
Southern immigration was in 1856. Thereafter the emigration from the
Free States increased until by 1860 it outnumbered the Slave-State
natives nearly three to one. That year's census, crediting Kansas with
107,000 population, also revealed that Missouri and Kentucky were
the principal sources of the pro-slavery immigration, while the main
sources of the free-soil immigration were in the following order: Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York, with only 3000 direct
from all the New England States together. Indeed, there were almost
as many natives of North Carolina in Kansas as there were natives of
Massachusetts.
Kansas was at the end of this period a western State, of almost wholly
British complexion. The streams of Scandinavians and Germans which
afterward entered the State had scarcely begun at this period. Kansas
was, to a marked degree, the offspring of New England through the
Central States, while not much more than one-fourth of its population,
arriving from the border States, had ancestral lines running back to
Virginia.
* * * * *
Nebraska, like many other Western States, was first settled by
trappers, traders, missionaries, and soldiers. In 1845 the Mormons,
driven out of Illinois and Iowa, stopped in the Nebraska country, but
most of them afterward moved on to Utah. Meanwhile, the State was
being traversed each year by hundreds of emigrant trains on their way
to the Pacific Coast, and thus became known to people from all parts
of the Union. During the years 1849 and 1850 it was estimated that
more than 100,000 people crossed the Nebraska plains in this way. Some
of them would stop there for various reasons, while others came into
the section to cater to the needs of the emigrants. Thus Nebraska was
gradually built up out of the overland traffic. The early migration
to Utah and to Oregon was succeeded by the rush to California, and
that had scarcely died down when the boom days in Colorado brought
new contingents to the region. Before this had disappeared the
Transcontinental Railway opened up the territory in real earnest.
The first boom year in the territory was in 1856 when a large number
of permanent settlers came in. In 1860 the population numbered 28,841,
and even at this time relatively few of the settlers depended upon
agriculture, most of them still "living off of the tourists," which
became a recognized profession in some States half a century later.
* * * * *
Utah, when Brigham Young led his Saints there in 1847, was a desert as
to the region of the Great Salt Lake, with scarcely even a population
of Indians. The early population was almost wholly Nordic, made up of
people from the New England States, New York, and those States in which
the Mormon Church had temporarily settled, or through which it had
moved successively to Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska.
The Mormon authorities made a determined effort from the outset to
bring converts from Europe, the first one arriving from Liverpool in
1849. At that time the English mission was said to have 30,000 members.
In the fall of 1849 the Mormon leaders established the famous Perpetual
Emigrating Fund which was used thenceforth to aid the transport of
converts.
The Mormon Utah settlement by 1850 had a population of 11,000. The
number of converts brought from abroad during the first ten years is
put at 17,000, mostly from England. By 1887 the Mormons are said to
have brought more than 85,000 of the working classes from England and
northern Europe to the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains.
Brigham Young in 1849 organized his territory as "The Provisional
State of Deseret," including what is now Utah and Nevada, and parts
of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. This had
but a short existence even on paper, for in 1850 Congress passed a law
organizing the territory of Utah which also included what is now Nevada.
Toward the end of this period the discovery of rich silver mines in the
Nevada section began to attract a miscellaneous population from all
parts of the West. By 1863 a Mormon census of Utah gave the territory a
population of 88,206, of whom probably a majority were foreigners. The
great bulk of these were English, particularly from the factory towns,
but Brigham Young boasted that fifty nationalities were represented in
his territory a few years later. On the whole, however, the population
was almost entirely Nordic.
* * * * *
Idaho's first settlement is supposed to have been made by a party of
Mormons in 1855 when it was still a part of Washington territory.
At the close of the period here considered it was still a part of
Washington and was just beginning to get a population of its own
because of a gold rush in 1860.
Its early settlers were from Oregon, Washington, and northern
California, and included an unusual proportion of men bred in the
Southern and Southwestern States.
* * * * *
Montana had scarcely begun to receive settlers at this time.
Meanwhile the tides of colonization were flowing over the "great
plains" to deposit their load on the Pacific Coast.
* * * * *
Oregon's settlement may be conveniently dated from the expedition of
Marcus Whitman in 1836. The few trappers and traders who had arrived in
early days may be disregarded. Thus began the short-lived race between
the United States and Great Britain to colonize the country and to have
their claims to possession based on effective occupation. American
immigration did not commence in earnest until 1842 or 1843, but
continued steadily, until the discovery of gold in California diverted
many to that territory.
Most of the early American settlers came from Missouri or Iowa, and
represented therefore either the Southern or New England pioneer stock.
In general it may be said that Oregon at that time was settled from the
Mississippi Valley, and mainly by men who came as genuine settlers with
their families, in striking contrast to the adventurers who invaded
California.
Meanwhile, the British colonizers were coming from Canada, many of
them French-Canadians, while the rest were mostly of Scotch ancestry.
But the American population grew so much more rapidly that by 1846,
when the Treaty was made defining the parallel of 49° as the boundary
between the two nations, there were nearly 8000 American settlers in
the Oregon territory as against about 1500 of British allegiance.
In 1860, of the 30,500 native immigrants in the State 40 per cent
were of Southern birth. Nearly half of these were from Missouri, and
a large part of the others from Kentucky or Tennessee. The remainder
represented principally the New England stock which has always been
considered to be the foundation of Oregon.
The actual permanent settlement of the Puget Sound country began in
1845, but progress for some years was slow. Scarcely had a start been
made here when the gold rush turned everyone's attention to California.
Following this came the Indian war of 1855 to 1856, and shortly
afterward the Civil War upset all plans, leaving the few scattered
inhabitants of the Puget Sound region in the midst of a wilderness,
surrounded by hostile savages, and inevitably neglected by the
government to which they naturally looked for attention.
* * * * *
Washington was separated from Oregon and established as an independent
territory in 1853. The census found there only 3965 white persons, a
small number to assume the responsibilities of a separate political
existence. Walla Walla Valley was opened up in 1859, when the removal
of a military interdict and a survey of public lands allowed a waiting
population of some 2000 to rush in and spread over the whole of eastern
Washington within a short time.
XI
THE SPOILS OF THE MEXICAN WAR
It has been remarked often that it was a mere accident that gave
North America to the Nordics instead of to the King of Spain, when
Columbus turned from his course to follow a flock of birds and thus
sighted the West Indies instead of the mainland, but several other
incidents played an equally important part in giving this empire to
the British. The defeat of the Invincible Armada by the captains of
Elizabeth stopped the expansion of Spain and thus gave the British an
opportunity to begin their colonization, and the Louisiana Purchase
by Thomas Jefferson's administration virtually made certain that by
far the larger part of the North American continent should belong to
British stock, rather than to French or Spanish. Jefferson himself,
who believed that the Purchase was illegal, saw its tremendous
possibilities, but no one in his day could realize just what this
action would mean in extending a Nordic civilization to the Pacific
Ocean.
The settlement of the Louisiana Purchase by Americans made certain
the conquest of Texas, which was extraordinarily aided by the fact
that in the period after the War of 1812 there were not many more
than 5000 Mexicans in that vast territory. The great Plains stretched
southward as a wide-open domain, inviting settlement by those who were
far-sighted and aggressive enough to possess themselves of it.
The beginning of the American settlement of Texas is always dated
from 1820, when the Connecticut Yankee, Moses Austin, started his
colonization scheme. Austin himself had lived for some years in
Missouri, but most of his settlers, like most of the other early
pioneers of Texas, came from the lower Mississippi Valley or from
Tennessee and Kentucky, with a sprinkling of adventurers from the
Central and New England States and even from Europe.
By 1835, when the Americans so outnumbered the Mexicans that the
throwing off of the Mexican yoke was inevitable, there were 30,000
or 35,000 Nordics settled in the territory. The original background
of these can easily be remembered from what has been said before in
these pages about the settlement of their respective States. They
were overwhelmingly English and Scotch and pre-dominantly from the
trans-Appalachian part of the United States.