"Oregon Trail"; Hall, "The West" (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, "Incidents
of Western Travel"; Murray, "Travels in North America"; Lloyd,
"Steamboat Directory" (Cincinnati, 1856); "Forty Days in a Western
Hotel" (Chicago), in _Putnam's Magazine_, December, 1894; Mackay, "The
Western World," ii, ch. ii, iii; Meeker, "Life in the West"; Bogen,
"German in America" (Boston, 1851); Olmstead, "Texas Journey"; Greeley,
"Recollections of a Busy Life"; Schouler, "History of the United
States," v, 261-267; Peyton, "Over the Alleghanies and Across the
Prairies" (London, 1870); Loughborough, "The Pacific Telegraph and
Railway" (St. Louis, 1849); Whitney, "Project for a Railroad to the
Pacific" (New York, 1849); Peyton, "Suggestions on Railroad
Communication with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the Indian
Islands"; Benton, "Highway to the Pacific" (a speech delivered in the U.
S. Senate, December 16, 1850).
[8:2] A writer in _The Home Missionary_ (1850), p. 239, reporting
Wisconsin conditions, exclaims: "Think of this, people of the
enlightened East. What an example, to come from the very frontier of
civilization!" But one of the missionaries writes: "In a few years
Wisconsin will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of
civilization, any more than Western New York, or the Western Reserve."
[8:3] Bancroft (H. H.), "History of California," "History of Oregon,"
and "Popular Tribunals"; Shinn, "Mining Camps."
[10:1] See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, "The Institutional
Beginnings of a Western State."
[10:2] Shinn, "Mining Camps."
[10:3] Compare Thorpe, in _Annals American Academy of Political and
Social Science_, September, 1891; Bryce, "American Commonwealth" (1888),
ii, p. 689.
[11:1] Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, ii, p. 15.
[11:2] Compare "Observations on the North American Land Company,"
London, 1796, pp. xv, 144; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina," i,
pp. 149-151; Turner, "Character and Influence of Indian Trade in
Wisconsin," p. 18; Peck, "New Guide for Emigrants" (Boston, 1837), ch.
iv; "Compendium Eleventh Census," i, p. xl.
[12:1] See _post_, for illustrations of the political accompaniments of
changed industrial conditions.
[13:1] But Lewis and Clark were the first to explore the route from the
Missouri to the Columbia.
[14:1] "Narrative and Critical History of America," viii, p. 10; Sparks'
"Washington Works," ix, pp. 303, 327; Logan, "History of Upper South
Carolina," i; McDonald, "Life of Kenton," p. 72; Cong. Record, xxiii, p.
57.
[15:1] On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of
migration, see the author's "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade
in Wisconsin."
[16:1] Lodge, "English Colonies," p. 152 and citations; Logan, "Hist. of
Upper South Carolina," i, p. 151.
[16:2] Flint, "Recollections," p. 9.
[16:3] See Monette, "Mississippi Valley," i, p. 344.
[17:1] Coues', "Lewis and Clark's Expedition," i, pp. 2, 253-259;
Benton, in Cong. Record, xxiii, p. 57.
[17:2] Hehn, _Das Salz_ (Berlin, 1873).
[17:3] Col. Records of N. C., v, p. 3.
[17:4] Findley, "History of the Insurrection in the Four Western
Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794" (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 35.
[19:1] Hale, "Daniel Boone" (pamphlet).
[21:1] Compare Baily, "Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America"
(London, 1856), pp. 217-219, where a similar analysis is made for 1796.
See also Collot, "Journey in North America" (Paris, 1826), p. 109;
"Observations on the North American Land Company" (London, 1796), pp.
xv, 144; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina."
[22:1] "Spotswood Papers," in Collections of Virginia Historical
Society, i, ii.
[23:1] [Burke], "European Settlements" (1765 ed.), ii, p. 200.
[23:2] Everest, in "Wisconsin Historical Collections," xii, pp. 7 ff.
[23:3] Weston, "Documents connected with History of South Carolina," p.
61.
[25:1] See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of
Representatives, January 30, 1824.
[25:2] See the admirable monograph by Prof. H. B. Adams, "Maryland's
Influence on the Land Cessions"; and also President Welling, in Papers
American Historical Association, iii, p. 411.
[26:1] Adams' Memoirs, ix, pp. 247, 248.
[28:1] Author's article in _The Aegis_ (Madison, Wis.), November 4, 1892.
[29:1] Compare Roosevelt, "Thomas Benton," ch. i.
[30:1] _Political Science Quarterly_, ii, p. 457. Compare Sumner,
"Alexander Hamilton," chs. ii-vii.
[31:1] Compare Wilson, "Division and Reunion," pp. 15, 24.
[32:1] On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation,
see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, ch. iii.
[32:2] I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics of
the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler and
desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes of
California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing
civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs
of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows, "United
States of Yesterday and To-morrow"; Shinn, "Mining Camps"; and Bancroft,
"Popular Tribunals." The humor, bravery, and rude strength, as well as
the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left traces on
American character, language, and literature, not soon to be effaced.
[34:1] Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829-1830.
[34:2] [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, i, p.
43; Calhoun's Works, i, pp. 401-406.
[35:1] Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, i, 721.
[36:1] Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.
[37:1] Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic
characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such
a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now
characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, "Alexander Hamilton," p. 98, and
Adams, "History of the United States," i, p. 60; ix, pp. 240, 241. The
transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812, a
period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the
West was noted for restless energy. Grund, "Americans," ii, ch. i.
II
THE FIRST OFFICIAL FRONTIER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY[39:1]
In the Significance of the "Frontier in American History," I took for my
text the following announcement of the Superintendent of the Census of
1890:
Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of
settlement but at present the unsettled area has been so
broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can
hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its
extent, the westward movement, etc., it cannot therefore any
longer have a place in the census reports.
Two centuries prior to this announcement, in 1690, a committee of the
General Court of Massachusetts recommended the Court to order what shall
be the frontier and to maintain a committee to settle garrisons on the
frontier with forty soldiers to each frontier town as a main
guard.[39:2] In the two hundred years between this official attempt to
locate the Massachusetts frontier line, and the official announcement of
the ending of the national frontier line, westward expansion was the
most important single process in American history.
The designation "frontier town" was not, however, a new one. As early as
1645 inhabitants of Concord, Sudbury, and Dedham, "being inland townes
& but thinly peopled," were forbidden to remove without authority;[40:1]
in 1669, certain towns had been the subject of legislation as "frontier
towns;"[40:2] and in the period of King Philip's War there were various
enactments regarding frontier towns.[40:3] In the session of 1675-6 it
had been proposed to build a fence of stockades or stone eight feet high
from the Charles "where it is navigable" to the Concord at Billerica and
thence to the Merrimac and down the river to the Bay, "by which meanes
that whole tract will [be] environed, for the security & safty (vnder
God) of the people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage & fury
of the enimy."[40:4] This project, however, of a kind of Roman Wall did
not appeal to the frontiersmen of the time. It was a part of the
antiquated ideas of defense which had been illustrated by the impossible
equipment of the heavily armored soldier of the early Puritan regime
whose corslets and head pieces, pikes, matchlocks, fourquettes and
bandoleers, went out of use about the period of King Philip's War. The
fifty-seven postures provided in the approved manual of arms for loading
and firing the matchlock proved too great a handicap in the chase of the
nimble savage. In this era the frontier fighter adapted himself to a
more open order, and lighter equipment suggested by the Indian warrior's
practice.[40:5]
The settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilization took up the task of
bearing the brunt of attack and pushing forward the line of advance
which year after year carried American settlements into the wilderness.
In American thought and speech the term "frontier" has come to mean the
edge of settlement, rather than, as in Europe, the political boundary.
By 1690 it was already evident that the frontier of settlement and the
frontier of military defense were coinciding. As population advanced
into the wilderness and thus successively brought new exposed areas
between the settlements on the one side and the Indians with their
European backers on the other, the military frontier ceased to be
thought of as the Atlantic coast, but rather as a moving line bounding
the un-won wilderness. It could not be a fortified boundary along the
charter limits, for those limits extended to the South Sea, and
conflicted with the bounds of sister colonies. The thing to be defended
was the outer edge of this expanding society, a changing frontier, one
that needed designation and re-statement with the changing location of
the "West."
It will help to illustrate the significance of this new frontier when we
see that Virginia at about the same time as Massachusetts underwent a
similar change and attempted to establish frontier towns, or
"co-habitations," at the "heads," that is the first falls, the vicinity
of Richmond, Petersburg, etc., of her rivers.[41:1]
The Virginia system of "particular plantations" introduced along the
James at the close of the London Company's activity had furnished a type
for the New England town. In recompense, at this later day the New
England town may have furnished a model for Virginia's efforts to create
frontier settlements by legislation.
An act of March 12, 1694-5, by the General Court of Massachusetts
enumerated the "Frontier Towns" which the inhabitants were forbidden to
desert on pain of loss of their lands (if landholders) or of
imprisonment (if not landholders), unless permission to remove were
first obtained.[42:1] These eleven frontier towns included Wells, York,
and Kittery on the eastern frontier, and Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable,
Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough,[42:2] and Deerfield. In
March, 1699-1700, the law was reenacted with the addition of Brookfield,
Mendon, and Woodstock, together with seven others, Salisbury,
Andover,[42:3] Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley, Westfield, and Northampton,
which, "tho' they be not frontiers as those towns first named, yet lye
more open than many others to an attack of an Enemy."[42:4]
In the spring of 1704 the General Court of Connecticut, following
closely the act of Massachusetts, named as her frontier towns, not to
be deserted, Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester, Windham,
Mansfield, and Plainfield.
Thus about the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier line for
New England. The line passing through these enumerated towns represents:
(1) the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the
Merrimac and its tributaries,--a region threatened from the Indian
country by way of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of
settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian Indians by
way of the Lake Champlain and Winooski River route to the Connecticut;
(3) boundary towns which marked the edges of that inferior agricultural
region, where the hard crystalline rocks furnished a later foundation
for Shays' Rebellion, opposition to the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, and the abandoned farm; and (4) the isolated intervale of
Brookfield which lay intermediate between these frontiers.
Besides this New England frontier there was a belt of settlement in New
York, ascending the Hudson to where Albany and Schenectady served as
outposts against the Five Nations, who menaced the Mohawk, and against
the French and the Canadian Indians, who threatened the Hudson by way of
Lake Champlain and Lake George.[43:1] The sinister relations of leading
citizens of Albany engaged in the fur trade with these Indians, even
during time of war, tended to protect the Hudson River frontier at the
expense of the frontier towns of New England.
The common sequence of frontier types (fur trader, cattle-raising
pioneer, small primitive farmer, and the farmer engaged in intensive
varied agriculture to produce a surplus for export) had appeared, though
confusedly, in New England. The traders and their posts had prepared the
way for the frontier towns,[44:1] and the cattle industry was most
important to the early farmers.[44:2] But the stages succeeded rapidly
and intermingled. After King Philip's War, while Albany was still in the
fur-trading stage, the New England frontier towns were rather like mark
colonies, military-agricultural outposts against the Indian enemy.
The story of the border warfare between Canada and the frontier towns
furnishes ample material for studying frontier life and institutions;
but I shall not attempt to deal with the narrative of the wars. The
palisaded meeting-house square, the fortified isolated garrison houses,
the massacres and captivities are familiar features of New England's
history. The Indian was a very real influence upon the mind and morals
as well as upon the institutions of frontier New England. The occasional
instances of Puritans returning from captivity to visit the frontier
towns, Catholic in religion, painted and garbed as Indians and speaking
the Indian tongue,[44:3] and the half-breed children of captive Puritan
mothers, tell a sensational part of the story; but in the normal, as
well as in such exceptional relations of the frontier townsmen to the
Indians, there are clear evidences of the transforming influence of the
Indian frontier upon the Puritan type of English colonist.
In 1703-4, for example, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered five
hundred pairs of snowshoes and an equal number of moccasins for use in
specified counties "lying Frontier next to the Wilderness."[45:1]
Connecticut in 1704 after referring to her frontier towns and garrisons
ordered that "said company of English and Indians shall, from time to
time at the discretion of their chief co[=m]ander, range the woods to
indevour the discovery of an approaching enemy, and in especiall manner
from Westfield to Ousatunnuck.[45:2] . . . And for the incouragement of
our forces gone or going against the enemy, this Court will allow out of
the publick treasurie the su[=m]e of five pounds for every mans scalp of
the enemy killed in this Colonie."[45:3] Massachusetts offered bounties
for scalps, varying in amount according to whether the scalp was of men,
or women and youths, and whether it was taken by regular forces under
pay, volunteers in service, or volunteers without pay.[45:4] One of the
most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the
Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton in the fall of 1703, urging the use
of dogs "to hunt Indians as they do Bears." The argument was that the
dogs would catch many an Indian who would be too light of foot for the
townsmen, nor was it to be thought of as inhuman; for the Indians "act
like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves."[45:5] In fact
Massachusetts passed an act in 1706 for the raising and increasing of
dogs for the better security of the frontiers, and both Massachusetts
and Connecticut in 1708 paid money from their treasury for the trailing
of dogs.[46:1]
Thus we come to familiar ground: the Massachusetts frontiersman like his
western successor hated the Indians; the "tawney serpents," of Cotton
Mather's phrase, were to be hunted down and scalped in accord with law
and, in at least one instance by the chaplain himself, a Harvard
graduate, the hero of the Ballad of Pigwacket, who
many Indians slew,
And some of them he scalp'd when bullets round him flew.[46:2]
Within the area bounded by the frontier line, were the broken fragments
of Indians defeated in the era of King Philip's War, restrained within
reservations, drunken and degenerate survivors, among whom the
missionaries worked with small results, a vexation to the border
towns,[46:3] as they were in the case of later frontiers. Although, as
has been said, the frontier towns had scattered garrison houses, and
palisaded enclosures similar to the neighborhood forts, or stations, of
Kentucky in the Revolution, and of Indiana and Illinois in the War of
1812, one difference is particularly noteworthy. In the case of
frontiersmen who came down from Pennsylvania into the Upland South along
the eastern edge of the Alleghanies, as well as in the more obvious case
of the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee, the frontier towns were
too isolated from the main settled regions to allow much military
protection by the older areas. On the New England frontier, because it
was adjacent to the coast towns, this was not the case, and here, as in
seventeenth century Virginia, great activity in protecting the frontier
was evinced by the colonial authorities, and the frontier towns
themselves called loudly for assistance. This phase of frontier defense
needs a special study, but at present it is sufficient to recall that
the colony sent garrisons to the frontier besides using the militia of
the frontier towns; and that it employed rangers to patrol from garrison
to garrison.[47:1]
These were prototypes of the regular army post, and of rangers,
dragoons, cavalry and mounted police who have carried the remoter
military frontier forward. It is possible to trace this military cordon
from New England to the Carolinas early in the eighteenth century, still
neighboring the coast; by 1840 it ran from Fort Snelling on the upper
Mississippi through various posts to the Sabine boundary of Texas, and
so it passed forward until to-day it lies at the edge of Mexico and the
Pacific Ocean.
A few examples of frontier appeals for garrison aid will help to an
understanding of the early form of the military frontier. Wells asks,
June 30, 1689:
1 That yo{r} Hon{rs} will please to send us speedily twenty
Eight good brisk men that may be serviceable as a guard to us
whilest we get in our Harvest of Hay & Corn, (we being unable
to Defend ourselves & to Do our work), & also to Persue &
destroy the Enemy as occasion may require
2 That these men may be compleatly furnished with Arms,
Amunition & Provision, and that upon the Countrys account, it
being a Generall War.[48:1]
Dunstable, "still weak and unable both to keep our Garrisons and to send
out men to get hay for our Cattle; without doeing which wee cannot
subsist," petitioned July 23, 1689, for twenty footmen for a month "to
scout about the towne while wee get our hay." Otherwise, they say, they
must be forced to leave.[48:2] Still more indicative of this temper is
the petition of Lancaster, March 11, 1675-6, to the Governor and
Council: "As God has made you father over us so you will have a father's
pity to us." They asked a guard of men and aid, without which they must
leave.[48:3] Deerfield pled in 1678 to the General Court, "unlest you
will be pleased to take us (out of your fatherlike pitty) and Cherish us
in yo{r} Bosomes we are like Suddainly to breathe out o{r} Last
Breath."[48:4]
The perils of the time, the hardships of the frontier towns and
readiness of this particular frontier to ask appropriations for losses
and wounds,[48:5] are abundantly illustrated in similar petitions from
other towns. One is tempted at times to attribute the very frank
self-pity and dependent attitude to a minister's phrasing, and to the
desire to secure remission of taxes, the latter a frontier trait more
often associated with riot than with religion in other regions.
As an example of various petitions the following from Groton in 1704 is
suggestive. Here the minister's hand is probably absent:
1 That wharas by the all dessposing hand of god who orders all
things in infinit wisdom it is our portion to liue In such a
part of the land which by reson of the enemy Is becom vary
dangras as by wofull experiants we haue falt both formarly and
of late to our grat damidg & discoridgment and espashaly this
last yere hauing lost so many parsons som killed som
captauated and som remoued and allso much corn & cattell and
horses & hay wharby wee ar gratly Impouerrished and brought
uary low & in a uary pore capasity to subsist any longer As
the barers her of can inform your honors
2 And more then all this our paster mr hobard is & hath been
for aboue a yere uncapable of desspansing the ordinances of
god amongst us & we haue advised with th Raurant Elders of our
nayboring churches and they aduise to hyare another minister
and to saport mr hobard and to make our adras to your honours
we haue but litel laft to pay our deus with being so pore and
few In numbr ather to town or cuntrey & we being a frantere
town & lyable to dangor there being no safty in going out nor
coming in but for a long time we haue got our brad with the
parel of our liues & allso broght uery low by so grat a charg
of bilding garisons & fortefycations by ordur of athorety &
thar is saural of our Inhabitants ramoued out of town & others
are prouiding to remoue, axcapt somthing be don for our
Incoridgment for we are so few & so por that we canot pay two
ministors nathar ar we wiling to liue without any we spand so
much time in waching and warding that we can doe but litel els
& truly we haue liued allmost 2 yers more like soulders then
other wise & accapt your honars can find out some bater way
for our safty and support we cannot uphold as a town ather by
remitting our tax or tow alow pay for building the sauarall
forts alowed and ordred by athority or alls to alow the one
half of our own Inhabitants to be under pay or to grant
liberty for our remufe Into our naiburing towns to tak cer for
oursalfs all which if your honors shall se meet to grant you
will hereby gratly incoridg your humble pateceners to conflect
with th many trubls we are ensadant unto.[50:1]
Forced together into houses for protection, getting in their crops at
the peril of their lives, the frontier townsmen felt it a hardship to
contribute also to the taxes of the province while they helped to
protect the exposed frontier. In addition there were grievances of
absentee proprietors who paid no town taxes and yet profited by the
exertions of the frontiersmen; of that I shall speak later.
If we were to trust to these petitions asking favors from the government
of the colony, we might impute to these early frontiersmen a degree of
submission to authority unlike that of other frontiersmen,[51:1] and
indeed not wholly warranted by the facts. Reading carefully, we find
that, however prudently phrased, the petitions are in fact complaints
against taxation; demands for expenditures by the colony in their
behalf; criticisms of absentee proprietors; intimations that they may be
forced to abandon the frontier position so essential to the defense of
the settled eastern country.