BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER _Frontispiece_
PAGE
MAP: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841 22
CHIEF KEOKUK _facing_ 30
IOWA SOD PLOW. (From a Cut belonging to the Historical
Department of Iowa.) 46
MAP: OVERLAND TRAILS 57
FORT LARAMIE, 1842 _facing_ 78
MAP: THE WEST IN 1849 120
MAP: THE WEST IN 1854 140
"HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE" _facing_ 144
THE MINING CAMP " 158
FORT SNELLING " 204
RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH " 274
MAP: THE WEST IN 1863 300
POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN _facing_ 360
MAP: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884 380
THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
CHAPTER I
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which
the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which
courage and foresight have gradually transformed from desert waste to
virile commonwealth. It is the story of one long struggle, fought over
different lands and by different generations, yet ever repeating the
conditions and episodes of the last period in the next. The winning of
the first frontier established in America its first white settlements.
Later struggles added the frontiers of the Alleghanies and the Ohio,
of the Mississippi and the Missouri. The winning of the last frontier
completed the conquest of the continent.
The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West.
For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas
of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to
migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness
stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.
Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails
and clearing in the valleys. The advance line of the farmsteads was
never far behind it. And out of this shifting frontier between man and
nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American
governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved
them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has
always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled
the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic
development and social organization, have in most instances originated
near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier
interest.
The controlling influence of the frontier in shaping American problems
has been possible because of the construction of civilized governments
in a new area, unhampered by institutions of the past or conservative
prejudices of the present. Each commonwealth has built from the
foundation. An institution, to exist, has had to justify itself again
and again. No force of tradition has kept the outlawed fact alive. The
settled lands behind have in each generation been forced to remodel
their older selves upon the newer growths beyond.
Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the
frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with
the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have
counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive
courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings
or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a
picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements,
but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad
man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both
have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and
initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted
an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their
strength in numbers.
The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor
in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the
earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century,
when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous
in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose
characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New
England were not too early for its shaping.
The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier,
separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness
in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the
successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations
and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended.
The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at
once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and
translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments
of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious
and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a
melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a
generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made
a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which
by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the
middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking
distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always,
determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line
of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating
link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along
its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The
extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the
contour of the seaboard along which it lay.
Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic
rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems
in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the
neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the
settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on
the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the
various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river
mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into
the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.
For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are
navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge
upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the
foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a
line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once
the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second
frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was
reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.
Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began.
English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in
growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the
needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English
in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly
to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the
similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier.
Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached,
the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism
plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.
The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an
end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing,
up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they
approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind,
the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the
combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley
routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run
parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge
among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every
reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the
pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and
meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause
against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where
the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the
Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have
common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in
which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with
talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was
already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union
than had been known before.
The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700.
By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing
down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping
backward to north and south. The French war of 1756-1763 saw the
apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the
Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and
Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river
valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and
population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both
sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested
the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian
strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was
the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by
all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the
three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.
The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started
down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed
by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the
boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed
it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi
itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The
new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations
which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties
felt the frontier pressure from the start.
Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states
appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its
advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony
Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge
to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio
entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet
the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to
till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern
communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation;
but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines
were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or
interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes,
through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as
state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war
with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.
The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad
investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military
reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was
signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern
population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt
too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result
of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was
the western accompaniment.
The westward movement has been continuous in America since the
beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have
never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession
of pioneers has marched up the slopes of the Appalachians, across
the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the
Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream
has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed
the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever
before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years
following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in
the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.
Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement
down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its
junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with
states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north
and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more
apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended
the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including
New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north.
The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as
yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than
to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the
convenience of the natural route.
For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit
of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio
facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred
and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to
afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the
Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and
it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend
an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas
all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The
emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed
by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission
of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend
of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease.
Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was
simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out
to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge
began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of
population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the
northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and
Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the
apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in
1821.
There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri
than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers
were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major
of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a
tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty,
steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew
longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.
Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from
the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American
desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their
maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara
or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded
upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the slopes approach
the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who
traversed the country in 1819-1820. Long reported that it could never
support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of
the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc."
A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber,
the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point
the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are
annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many
years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from
Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy
desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the
states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the
western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had
reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.
By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward
march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the
Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn.
Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached
nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the
nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert
and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which
had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War,
even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier
scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of
life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired
an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its
doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,
threatened to become a constant quantity.
From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for
the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard
continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are
filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains
in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear
the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian
tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility
of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once.
A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of
the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the
continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and
intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the
control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out
the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian
policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period,
the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating
the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is
larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such,
before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American
history has been closed.
CHAPTER II
THE INDIAN FRONTIER
A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly
relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the
continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its
advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands,
concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating
their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed
had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly
enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements
and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every
twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never
more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it
until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt
that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual
members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable
as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the
part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and
contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the
danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not
responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries,
real or imaginary,--and too often they were real,--made him the most
dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier.
The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and
endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached
a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but
never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had
been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.
The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have
ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful
of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade
among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land,
possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase,
could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a
higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against
the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against
self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian
must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with
progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever
have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for
him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss
of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that
invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national
honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed
maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older
ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all
these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government
has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to
administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade,
punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct
not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.
The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its
responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In
theory the disposition of the government was generally benevolent, but
the scheme was badly conceived, while human frailty among officers of
the law and citizens as well rendered execution short of such ideal as
there was.
For thirty years the government under the Constitution had no Indian
policy. In these years it acquired the habit of dealing with the tribes
as independent--"domestic dependent nations," Justice Marshall later
called them--by means of formal treaties. Europe thought of chiefs as
kings and tribes as nations. The practice of making treaties was based
on this delusion. After a century of practice it was finally learned
that nomadic savages have no idea of sovereign government or legal
obligation, and that the assumption of the existence of such knowledge
can lead only to misconception and disappointment.
As the frontier moved down the Ohio, individual wars were fought and
individual treaties were made as occasion offered. At times the tribes
yielded readily to white occupation; occasionally they struggled
bitterly to save their lands; but the result was always the same. The
right bank of the river, long known as the Indian Shore, was contested
in a series of wars lasting nearly until 1800, and became available for
white colonization only after John Jay had, through his treaty of 1794,
removed the British encouragement to the Indians, and General Wayne had
administered to them a decisive defeat. Isolated attacks were frequent,
but Tecumseh's war of 1811 was the next serious conflict, while, after
General Harrison brought this war to an end at Tippecanoe, there was
comparative peace along the northwest frontier until the time of Black
Hawk and his uprising of 1832.
The left bank of the river was opened with less formal resistance,
admitting Kentucky and Tennessee before the Indian Shore was a safe
habitation for whites. South of Tennessee lay the great southern
confederacies, somewhat out of the line of early western progress, and
hence not plunged into struggles until the War of 1812 was over. But
as Wayne and Harrison had opened the Northwest, so Jackson cleared
the way for white advance into Alabama and Mississippi. By 1821 new
states touched the Mississippi River along its whole course between New
Orleans and the lead mines of upper Illinois.
In the advance of the frontier to the bend of the Missouri some of the
tribes were pushed back, while others were passed and swallowed up by
the invading population. Experience showed that the two races could
not well live in adjacent lands. The conditions which made for Indian
welfare could not be kept up in the neighborhood of white settlements,
for the more lawless of the whites were ever ready, through illicit
trade, deceit, and worse, to provoke the most dangerous excesses of
the savage. The Indian was demoralized, the white became steadily more
intolerant.
Although the ingenious Jefferson had anticipated him in the idea,
the first positive policy which looked toward giving to the Indian
a permanent home and the sort of guardianship which he needed until
he could become reconciled to civilized life was the suggestion of
President Monroe. At the end of his presidency, Georgia was angrily
demanding the removal of the Cherokee from her limits, and was ready to
violate law and the Constitution in her desire to accomplish her end.
Monroe was prepared to meet the demand. He submitted to Congress, on
January 27, 1825, a report from Calhoun, then Secretary of War, upon
the numbers of the tribes, the area of their lands, and the area of
available destinations for them. He recommended that as rapidly as
agreements could be made with them they be removed to country lying
westward and northwestward,--to the further limits of the Louisiana
Purchase, which lay beyond the line of the western frontier.
Already, when this message was sent to Congress, individual steps
had been taken in the direction which it pointed out. A few tribes
had agreed to cross the Mississippi, and had been allotted lands in
Missouri and Arkansas. But Missouri, just admitted, and Arkansas, now
opening up, were no more hospitable to Indian wards than Georgia and
Ohio had been. The Indian frontier must be at some point still farther
west, towards the vast plains overrun by the Osage[1] and Kansa tribes,
the Pawnee and the Sioux. There had been few dealings with the Indians
beyond the Mississippi before Monroe advanced his policy. Lieutenant
Pike had visited the head of the Mississippi in 1805 and had treated
with the Sioux for a reserve at St. Paul. Subsequent agreements farther
south brought the Osage tribes within the treaty arrangements. The year
1825 saw the notable treaties which prepared the way for peace among
the western tribes, and the reception by these tribes of the eastern
nations.
[1] My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed
upon by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American
Ethnology, and printed in C. J. Kappler, Indian Affairs,
Laws and Treaties, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452,
Serial 4253, p. 1021.
Five weeks after the special message Congress authorized a negotiation
with the Kansa and Osage nations. These tribes roamed over a vast
country extending from the Platte River to the Red, and west as far as
the lower slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Their limits had never been
definitely stated, although the Osage had already surrendered claim to
lands fronting on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Missouri
and the Arkansas. Not only was it now desirable to limit them more
closely in order to make room for Indian immigrants, but these tribes
had already begun to worry traders going overland to the Southwest. As
soon as the frontier reached the bend of the Missouri, the profits of
the Santa Fé trade had begun to tempt caravans up the Arkansas valley
and across the plains. To preserve peace along the Santa Fé trail was
now as important as to acquire grounds. Governor Clark negotiated the
treaties at St. Louis. On June 2, 1825, he persuaded the Osage chiefs
to surrender all their lands except a strip fifty miles wide, beginning
at White Hair's village on the Neosho, and running indefinitely west.
The Kaw or Kansa tribe was a day later in its agreement, and reserved a
thirty-mile strip running west along the Kansas River. The two treaties
at once secured rights of transit and pledges of peace for traders to
Santa Fé, and gave the United States title to ample lands west of the
frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.
The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien the first step
towards peace and condensation along the northern frontier. The Erie
Canal, not yet opened, had not begun to drain the population of the
East into the Northwest, and Indians were in peaceful possession of
the lake shores nearly to Fort Wayne. West of Lake Michigan were
constant tribal wars. The Potawatomi, Menominee, and Chippewa, first,
then Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes, and finally the various bands of
Sioux around the Mississippi and upper Missouri, enjoyed still their
traditional hostility and the chase. Governor Clark again, and Lewis
Cass, met the tribes at the old trading post on the Mississippi to
persuade them to bury the tomahawk among themselves. The treaty, signed
August 19, 1825, defined the boundaries of the different nations by
lines of which the most important was between the Sioux and Sauk and
Foxes, which was later to be known as the Neutral Line, across northern
Iowa. The basis of this treaty of Prairie du Chien was temporary at
best. Before it was much more than ratified the white influx began,
Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake Michigan blossomed out into Chicago,
and squatters penetrating to Rock Island in the Mississippi had
provoked the war of 1832, in which Black Hawk made the last stand of
the Indians in the old Northwest. In the thirties the policy of removal
completed the opening of Illinois and Wisconsin to the whites.
[Illustration: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841
Showing the solid line of reservation lands extending from the Red
River to Green Bay, and the agricultural frontier of more than six
inhabitants per square mile.]
The policy of removal and colonization urged by Monroe and Calhoun was
supported by Congress and succeeding Presidents, and carried out during
the next fifteen years. It required two transactions, the acquisition
by the United States of western titles, and the persuasion of eastern
tribes to accept the new lands thus available. It was based upon an
assumption that the frontier had reached its final resting place.
Beyond Missouri, which had been admitted in 1821, lay a narrow strip of
good lands, merging soon into the American desert. Few sane Americans
thought of converting this land into states as had been the process
farther east. At the bend of the Missouri the frontier had arrived;
there it was to stay, and along the lines of its receding flanks the
Indians could be settled with pledges of permanent security and growth.
Here they could never again impede the western movement in its creation
of new communities and states. Here it would be possible, in the words
of Lewis Cass, to "leave their fate to the common God of the white man
and the Indian."
The five years following the treaty of Prairie du Chien were filled
with active negotiation and migration in the lands beyond the Missouri.
First came the Shawnee to what was promised as a final residence.
From Pennsylvania, into Ohio, and on into Missouri, this tribe had
already been pushed by the advancing frontier. Now its ever shrinking
lands were cut down to a strip with a twenty-five-mile frontage on the
Missouri line and an extension west for one hundred and twenty-five
miles along the south bank of the Kansas River and the south line of
the Kaw reserve. Its old neighbors, the Delawares, became its new
neighbors in 1829, accepting the north bank of the Kansas, with a
Missouri River frontage as far north as the new Fort Leavenworth, and a
ten-mile outlet to the buffalo country, along the northern line of the
Kaw reserve. Later the Kickapoo and other minor tribes were colonized
yet farther to the north. The chase was still to be the chief reliance
of the Indian population. Unlimited supplies of game along the plains
were to supply his larder, with only occasional aid from presents of
other food supplies. In the long run agriculture was to be encouraged.
Farmers and blacksmiths and teachers were to be provided in various
ways, but until the longed-for civilization should arrive, the red man
must hunt to live. The new Indian frontier was thus started by the
colonization of the Shawnee and Delawares just beyond the bend of the
Missouri on the old possessions of the Kaw.
The northern flank of the Indian frontier, as it came to be
established, ran along the line of the frontier of white settlements,
from the bend of the Missouri, northeasterly towards the upper lakes.
Before the final line of the reservations could be determined the
Erie Canal had begun to shape the Northwest. Its stream of population
was filling the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and
working up into Michigan and Wisconsin. Black Hawk's War marked the
last struggle for the fertile plains of upper Illinois, and made
possible an Indian line which should leave most of Wisconsin and part
of Iowa open to the whites.
Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie
du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same
place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reënforced the
guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the
Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto
and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the
Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became
a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the
Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had
threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the
frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along
the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond
the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had
clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might
have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois,
and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the
pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike
promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought
over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the
frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger
threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from
eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a
campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a
new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their
resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the
Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to
the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west
bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and
Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this
time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the
Neutral Strip.
The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work
of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the
line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west
line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black
Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter
acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the
Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established
a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others
forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more
correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the
tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these
three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago
to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to
cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and
east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors
to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River,
gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live
on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of
the Wisconsin River.
The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies,
they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the
old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made
further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion
of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future
eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the
Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St.
Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country.
With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had
been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white
occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to
Green Bay.
While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established
beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was
extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the
Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine
River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of
the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians
roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo,
in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into
Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the
country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way
for the colonizing policy.
The southern part of the Indian Country was early set aside as the new
home of the eastern confederacies lying near the Gulf of Mexico. The
Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had in the twenties
begun to feel the pressure of the southern states. Jackson's campaigns
had weakened them even before the cession of Florida to the United
States removed their place of refuge. Georgia was demanding their
removal when Monroe announced his policy.
A new home for the Choctaw was provided in the extreme Southwest in
1830. Ten years before, this nation had been given a home in Arkansas
territory, but now, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, it received a new eastern
limit in a line drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas due south to the
Red River. Arkansas had originally reached from the Mississippi to the
hundredth meridian, but it was, after this Choctaw cession, cut down
to the new Choctaw line, which remains its boundary to-day. From Fort
Smith the new boundary was run northerly to the southwest corner of
Missouri.
The Creeks and Cherokee promised in 1833 to go into the Indian Country,
west of Arkansas and north of the Choctaw. The Creeks became the
neighbors of the Choctaw, separated from them by the Canadian River,
while the Cherokee adjoined the Creeks on the north and east. With
small exceptions the whole of the present state of Oklahoma was thus
assigned to these three nations. The migrations from their old homes
came deliberately in the thirties and forties. The Chickasaw in 1837
purchased from the Choctaw the right to occupy the western end of their
strip between the Red and Canadian. The Seminole had acquired similar
rights among the Creeks, but were so reluctant to keep the pledge to
emigrate that their removal taxed the ability of the United States army
for several years.
Between the southern portion of the Indian Country and the Missouri
bend minor tribes were colonized in profusion. The Quapaw and United
Seneca and Shawnee nations were put into the triangle between the
Neosho and Missouri. The Cherokee received an extra grant in the
"Cherokee Neutral Strip," between the Osage line of 1825 and the
Missouri line. Next to the north was made a reserve for the New York
Indians, which they refused to occupy. The new Miami home came next,
along the Missouri line; while north of this were little reserves for
individual bands of Ottawa and Chippewa, for the Piankashaw and Wea,
the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the last of which adjoined the Shawnee line
of 1825 upon the south.
The Indian frontier, determined upon in 1825, had by 1840 been carried
into fact, and existed unbroken from the Red River and Texas to the
Lakes. The exodus from the old homes to the new had in many instances
been nearly completed. The tribes were more easily persuaded to promise
than to act, and the wrench was often hard enough to produce sullenness
or even war when the moment of departure arrived. A few isolated bands
had not even agreed to go. But the figures of the migrations, published
from year to year during the thirties, show that all of the more
important nations east of the new frontier had ceded their lands, and
that by 1840 the migration was substantially over.
[Illustration: CHIEF KEOKUK
From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C. F.
Davis. Reproduced by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.]
President Monroe had urged as an essential part of the removal policy
that when the Indians had been transferred and colonized they should be
carefully educated into civilization, and guarded from contamination by
the whites. Congress, in various laws, tried to do these things. The
policy of removal, which had been only administrative at the start,
was confirmed by law in 1830. A formal Bureau of Indian Affairs was
created in 1832, under the supervision of a commissioner. In 1834 was
passed the Indian Intercourse Act, which remained the fundamental law
for half a century.
The various treaties of migration had contained the pledge that never
again should the Indians be removed without their consent, that
whites should be excluded from the Indian Country, and that their
lands should never be included within the limits of any organized
territory or state. To these guarantees the Intercourse Act attempted
to give force. The Indian Country was divided into superintendencies,
agencies, and sub-agencies, into which white entry, without license,
was prohibited by law. As the tribes were colonized, agents and schools
and blacksmiths were furnished to them in what was a real attempt to
fulfil the terms of the pledge. The tribes had gone beyond the limits
of probable extension of the United States, and there they were to
settle down and stay. By 1835 it was possible for President Jackson to
announce to Congress that the plan approached its consummation: "All
preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians" had failed;
but now "no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the
United States to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the
scattered remnants of this race which are left within our borders....
The pledge of the United States," he continued, "has been given by
Congress that the country destined for the residence of this people
shall be forever 'secured and guaranteed to them.' ... No political
communities can be formed in that extensive region.... A barrier has
thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of
our citizens." And now, he concluded, "they ought to be left to the
progress of events."
The policy of the United States towards the wards was generally
benevolent. Here, it was sincere, whether wise or not. As it turned
out, however, the new Indian frontier had to contend with movements
of population, resistless and unforeseen. No Joshua, no Canute, could
hold it back. The result was inevitable. The Indian, wrote one of the
frontiersmen in a later day, speaking in the language of the West, "is
a savage, noxious animal, and his actions are those of a ferocious
beast of prey, unsoftened by any touch of pity or mercy. For them he
is to be blamed exactly as the wolf or tiger is blamed." But by 1840
an Indian frontier had been erected, coterminous with the agricultural
frontier, and beyond what was believed to be the limit of expansion.
The American desert and the Indian frontier, beyond the bend of the
Missouri, were forever to be the western boundary of the United States.
CHAPTER III
IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST
In the end of the thirties the "right wing" of the frontier, as a
colonel of dragoons described it, extended northeasterly from the bend
of the Missouri to Green Bay. It was an irregular line beyond which
lay the Indian tribes, and behind which was a population constantly
becoming more restless and aggressive. That it should have been a
permanent boundary is not conceivable; yet Congress professed to regard
it as such, and had in 1836 ordered the survey and construction of
a military road from the mouth of the St. Peter's to the Red River.
The maintenance of the southern half of the frontier was perhaps
practicable, since the tradition of the American desert was long to
block migration beyond the limits of Missouri and Arkansas, but north
and east of Fort Leavenworth were lands too alluring to be safe in the
control of the new Indian Bureau. And already before the thirties were
over the upper Mississippi country had become a factor in the westward
movement.
A few years after the English war the United States had erected a
fort at the junction of the St. Peter's and the Mississippi, near the
present city of St. Paul. In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike had treated
with the Sioux tribes at this point, and by 1824 the new post had
received the name Fort Snelling, which it was to retain until after the
admission of Minnesota as a state. Pike and his followers had worked
their way up the Mississippi from St. Louis or Prairie du Chien in
skiffs or keelboats, and had found little of consequence in the way of
white occupation save a few fur-trading posts and the lead mines of
Du Buque. Until after the English war, indeed, and the admission of
Illinois, there had been little interest in the country up the river;
but during the early twenties the lead deposits around Du Buque's
old claim became the centre of a business that soon made new treaty
negotiations with the northern Indians necessary.
On both sides of the Mississippi, between the mouths of the Wisconsin
and the Rock, lie the extensive lead fields which attracted Du Buque
in the days of the Spanish rule, and which now in the twenties induced
an American immigration. The ease with which these diggings could
be worked and the demand of a growing frontier population for lead,
brought miners into the borderland of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa
long before either of the last states had acquired name or boundary
or the Indian possessors of the soil had been satisfied and removed.
The nations of Winnebago, Sauk and Foxes, and Potawatomi were most
interested in this new white invasion, while all were reluctant to
yield the lands to the incoming pioneers. The Sauk and Foxes had given
up their claim to nearly all the lead country in 1804; the Potawatomi
ceded portions of it in 1829; and the Winnebago in the same year made
agreements covering the mines within the present state of Wisconsin.
Gradually in the later twenties the pioneer miners came in, one
by one. From St. Louis they came up the great river, or from Lake
Michigan they crossed the old portage of the Fox and Wisconsin. The
southern reënforcements looked much to Fort Armstrong on Rock Island
for protection. The northern, after they had left Fort Howard at Green
Bay, were out of touch until they arrived near the old trading post at
Prairie du Chien. War with the Winnebago in 1827 was followed in 1828
by the erection of another United States fort,--at the portage, and
known as Fort Winnebago. Thus the United States built forts to defend a
colonization which it prohibited by law and treaty.
The individual pioneers differed much in their morals and their
cultural antecedents, but were uniform in their determination to enjoy
the profits for which they had risked the dangers of the wilderness.
Notable among them, and typical of their highest virtues, was Henry
Dodge, later governor of Wisconsin, and representative and senator for
his state in Congress, but now merely one of the first in the frontier
movement. It is related of him that in 1806 he had been interested in
the filibustering expedition of Aaron Burr, and had gone as far as
New Madrid, to join the party, before he learned that it was called
treason. He turned back in disgust. "On reaching St. Genevieve," his
chronicler continues, "they found themselves indicted for treason by
the grand jury then in session. Dodge surrendered himself, and gave
bail for his appearance; but feeling outraged by the action of the
grand jury he pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and whipt
nine of the jurors; and would have whipt the rest, if they had not run
away." With such men to deal with, it was always difficult to enforce
unpopular laws upon the frontier. Dodge had no hesitation in settling
upon his lead diggings in the mineral country and in defying the Indian
agents, who did their best to persuade him to leave the forbidden
country. On the west bank of the Mississippi federal authority was
successful in holding off the miners, but the east bank was settled
between Galena and Mineral Point before either the Indian title had
been fully quieted, or the lands had been surveyed and opened to
purchase by the United States.
The Indian war of 1827, the erection of Fort Winnebago in 1828, the
cession of their mineral lands by the Winnebago Indians in 1829, are
the events most important in the development of the first settlements
in the new Northwest. In 1829 and 1830 pioneers came up the Mississippi
to the diggings in increasing numbers, while farmers began to cast
covetous eyes upon the prairies lying between Lake Michigan and the
Mississippi. These were the lands which the Sauk and Fox tribes had
surrendered in 1804, but over which they still retained rights of
occupation and the chase until Congress should sell them. The entry of
every American farmer was a violation of good faith and law, and so
the Indians regarded it. Their largest city and the graves of their
ancestors were in the peninsula between the Rock and the Mississippi,
and as the invaders seized the lands, their resentment passed beyond
control. The Black Hawk War was the forlorn attempt to save the lands.
When it ended in crushing defeat, the United States exercised its
rights of conquest to compel a revision of the treaty limits.
The great treaties of 1832 and 1833 not only removed all Indian
obstruction from Illinois, but prepared the way for further settlement
in both Wisconsin and Iowa. The Winnebago agreed to migrate to the
Neutral Strip in Iowa, the Potawatomi accepted a reserve near the
Missouri River, while the Black Hawk purchase from the offending Sauk
and Foxes opened a strip some forty miles wide along the west bank of
the Mississippi. These Indian movements were a part of the general
concentrating policy made in the belief that a permanent Indian
frontier could be established. After the Black Hawk War came the
creation of the Indian Bureau, the ordering of the great western road,
and the erection of a frontier police. Henry Dodge was one of the few
individuals to emerge from the war with real glory. His reward came
when Congress formed a regiment of dragoons for frontier police, and
made him its colonel. In his regiment he operated up and down the long
frontier for three years, making expeditions beyond the line to hold
Pawnee conferences and meetings with the tribes of the great plains,
and resigning his command only in time to be the first governor of the
new territory of Wisconsin, in 1836. He knew how little dependence
could be placed on the permanency of the right wing of the frontier.
"Nor let gentlemen forget," he reminded his colleagues in Congress a
few years later, "that we are to have continually the same course of
settlements going on upon our border. They are perpetually advancing
westward. They will reach, they will cross, the Rocky Mountains, and
never stop till they have reached the shores of the Pacific. Distance
is nothing to our people.... [They will] turn the whole region into the
happy dwellings of a free and enlightened people."
The Black Hawk War and its resulting treaties at once quieted the
Indian title and gave ample advertisement to the new Northwest. As yet
there had been no large migration to the West beyond Lake Michigan.
The pioneers who had provoked the war had been few in number and far
from their base upon the frontier. Mere access to the country had been
difficult until after the opening of the Erie Canal, and even then
steamships did not run regularly on Lake Michigan until after 1832.
But notoriety now tempted an increasing wave of settlers. Congress woke
up to the need of some territorial adjustment for the new country.
Ever since Illinois had been admitted in 1818, Michigan had been the
one remaining territory of the old Northwest, including the whole area
north of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and extending from Lake Huron
to the Mississippi River. Her huge size was admittedly temporary, but
as no large centre of population existed outside of Detroit, it was
convenient to simplify the federal jurisdiction in this fashion. The
lead mines on the Mississippi produced a secondary centre of population
in the late twenties and pointed to an early division of Michigan. But
before this could be accomplished the Black Hawk purchase had carried
the Mississippi centre of population to the right bank of the river.
The American possessions on this bank, west of the river, had been cast
adrift without political organization on the admission of Missouri in
1821. Now the appearance of a vigorous population in an unorganized
region compelled Congress to take some action, and thus, for temporary
purposes, Michigan was enlarged in 1834. Her new boundary extended
west to the Missouri River, between the state of Missouri and Canada.
The new Northwest, which may be held to include Iowa, Wisconsin, and
Minnesota, started its political history as a remote settlement in a
vast territory of Michigan, with its seat of government at Detroit.
Before it was cut off as the territory of Wisconsin in 1836 much had
been done in the way of populating it.
The boom of the thirties brought Arkansas and Michigan into the Union
as states, and started the growth of the new Northwest. The industrial
activity of the period was based on speculation in public lands and
routes of transportation. America was transportation mad. New railways
were building in the East and being projected West. Canals were
turning the western portage paths into water highways. The speculative
excitement touched the field of religion as well as economics,
producing new sects by the dozen, and bringing schisms into the old.
And population moving already in its inherent restlessness was made
more active in migration by the hard times of the East in 1833 and 1834.
The immigrants brought to the Black Hawk purchase and its vicinity,
in the boom of the thirties, came chiefly by the river route. The
lake route was just beginning to be used; not until the Civil War did
the traffic of the upper Mississippi naturally and generally seek its
outlet by Lake Michigan. The Mississippi now carried more than its
share of the home seekers.
Steamboats had been plying on western waters in increasing numbers
since 1811. By 1823, one had gone as far north on the Mississippi as
Fort Snelling, while by 1832 the Missouri had been ascended to Fort
Union. In the thirties an extensive packet service gathered its
passengers and freight at Pittsburg and other points on the Ohio,
carrying them by a devious voyage of 1400 miles to Keokuk, near the
southeast corner of the new Black Hawk lands. Wagons and cattle,
children and furniture, crowded the decks of the boats. The aristocrats
of emigration rode in the cabins provided for them, but the great
majority of home seekers lived on deck and braved the elements upon the
voyage. Explosions, groundings, and collisions enlivened the reckless
river traffic. But in 1836 Governor Dodge found more than 22,000
inhabitants in his new territory of Wisconsin, most of whom had reached
the promised land by way of the river.
For those whom the long river journey did not please, or who lived
inland in Ohio or Indiana, the national road was a help. In 1825 the
continuation of the Cumberland Road through Ohio had been begun. By
1836 enough of it was done to direct the overland course of migration
through Indianapolis towards central Illinois. The Conestoga wagon,
which had already done its share in crossing the Alleghanies, now
carried a second generation to the Mississippi. At Dubuque and Buffalo
and Burlington ferries were established before 1836 to take the
immigrants across the Mississippi into the new West.
By the terms of its treaty, the Black Hawk purchase was to be vacated
by the Indians in the summer of 1833. Before that year closed, its
settlement had begun, despite the fact that the government surveys had
not yet been made. Here, as elsewhere, the frontier farmer paid little
regard to the legal basis of his life. He settled upon unoccupied lands
as he needed them, trusting to the public opinion of the future to
secure his title.
The legislature of Michigan watched the migration of 1833 and 1834, and
in the latter year created the two counties of Dubuque and Demoine,
beyond the Mississippi, embracing these settlements. At the old claim
a town of miners appeared by magic, able shortly to boast "that the
first white man hung in Iowa in a Christian-like manner was Patrick
O'Conner, at Dubuque, in June, 1834." Dubuque was a mining camp,
differing from the other villages in possessing a larger proportion
of the lawless element. Generally, however, this Iowa frontier was
peaceful in comparison with other frontiers. Life and property were
safe, and except for its dealings with the Indians and the United
States government, in which frontiers have rarely recognized a law,
the community was law-abiding. It stands in some contrast with another
frontier building at the same time up the valley of the Arkansas. "Fent
Noland of Batesville," wrote a contemporary of one of the heroes of
this frontier, "is in every way one of the most remarkable men of the
West; for such is the versatility of his genius that he seems equally
adapted to every species of effort, intellectual or physical. With
a like unerring aim he shoots a bullet or a _bon mot_; and wields
the pen or the Bowie knife with the same thought, swift rapidity
of motion, and energetic fury of manner. Sunday he will write an
eloquent dissertation on religion; Monday he rawhides a rogue; Tuesday
he composes a sonnet, set in silver stars and breathing the perfume
of roses to some fair maid's eyebrows; Wednesday he fights a duel;
Thursday he does up brown the personal character of Senators Sevier
and Ashley; Friday he goes to the ball dressed in the most finical
superfluity of fashion and shines the soul of wit and the sun of merry
badinage among all the gay gentlemen; and to close the triumphs of the
week, on Saturday night he is off thirty miles to a country dance in
the Ozark Mountains, where they trip it on the light fantastic toe in
the famous jig of the double-shuffle around a roaring log heap fire in
the woods all night long, while between the dances Fent Noland sings
some beautiful wild song, as 'Lucy Neal' or 'Juliana Johnson.' Thus
Fent is a myriad-minded Proteus of contradictory characters, many-hued
as the chameleon fed on the dews and suckled at the breast of the
rainbow." Much of this luxuriant imagery was lacking farther north.
The first phase of this development of the new Northwest was ended
in 1837, when the general panic brought confusion to speculation
throughout the United States. For four years the sanguine hopes of the
frontier had led to large purchases of public lands, to banking schemes
of wildest extravagance, and to railroad promotion without reason or
demand. The specie circular of 1836 so deranged the currency of the
whole United States that the effort to distribute the surplus in 1837
was fatal to the speculative boom. The new communities suffered for
their hopeful attempts. When the panic broke, the line of agricultural
settlement had been pushed considerably beyond the northern and western
limits of Illinois. The new line ran near to the Fox and Wisconsin
portage route and the west line of the Black Hawk purchase. Milwaukee
and Southport had been founded on the lake shore, hopeful of a great
commerce that might rival the possessions of Chicago. Madison and its
vicinity had been developed. The lead country in Wisconsin had grown
in population. Across the river, Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington
gave evidence of a growing community in the country still farther west.
Nearly the whole area intended for white occupation by the Indian
policy had been settled, so that any further extension must be at the
expense of the Indians' guaranteed lands.
On the eve of the panic, which depopulated many of the villages of the
new strip, Michigan had been admitted. Her possessions west of Lake
Michigan had been reorganized as a new territory of Wisconsin, with
a capital temporarily at Belmont, where Henry Dodge, first governor,
took possession in the fall of 1836. A territorial census showed that
Wisconsin had a population of 22,214 in 1836, divided nearly equally by
the Mississippi. Most of the population was on the banks of the great
river, near the lead mines and the Black Hawk purchase, while only a
fourth could be found near the new cities along the lake. The outlying
settlements were already pressing against the Indian neighbors, so that
the new governor soon was obliged to conduct negotiations for further
cessions. The Chippewa, Menominee, and Sioux all came into council
within two years, the Sioux agreeing to retire west of the Mississippi,
while the others receded far into the north, leaving most of the
present Wisconsin open to development. These treaties completed the
line of the Indian frontier as it was established in the thirties.
The Mississippi divided the population of Wisconsin nearly equally in
1836, but subsequent years witnessed greater growth upon her western
bank. Never in the westward movement had more attractive farms been
made available than those on the right bank now reached by the river
steamers and the ferries from northern Illinois. Two years after the
erection of Wisconsin the western towns received their independent
establishment, when in 1838 Iowa Territory was organized by Congress,
including everything between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and
north of the state of Missouri. Burlington, a village of log houses
with perhaps five hundred inhabitants, became the seat of government
of the new territory, while Wisconsin retired east of the river to a
new capital at Madison. At Burlington a first legislature met in the
autumn, to choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it could for
a community still suffering from the results of the panic.
The only Iowa lands open to lawful settlement were those of the Black
Hawk purchase, many of which were themselves not surveyed and on the
market. But the pioneers paid little heed to this. Leaving titles to
the future, they cleared their farms, broke the sod, and built their
houses.
[Illustration: IOWA SOD PLOW]
The heavy sod of the Iowa prairies was beyond the strength of the
individual settler. In the years of first development the professional
sod breaker was on hand, a most important member of his community, with
his great plough, and large teams of from six to twelve oxen, making
the ground ready for the first crop. In the frontier mind the land
belonged to him who broke it, regardless of mere title. The quarrel
between the squatter and the speculator was perennial. Congress in its
laws sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest bidder,--a
scheme through which the sturdy impecunious farmer saw his clearing
in danger of being bought over his modest bid by an undeserving
speculator. Accordingly the history of Iowa and Wisconsin is full of
the claims associations by which the squatters endeavored to protect
their rights and succeeded well. By voluntary association they agreed
upon their claims and bounds. Transfers and sales were recorded on
their books. When at last the advertised day came for the formal sale
of the township by the federal land officer the population attended the
auction in a body, while their chosen delegate bid off the whole area
for them at the minimum price, and without competition. At times it
happened that the speculator or the casual purchaser tried to bid, but
the squatters present with their cudgels and air of anticipation were
usually able to prevent what they believed to be unfair interference
with their rights. The claims associations were entirely illegal; yet
they reveal, as few American institutions do, the orderly tendencies
of an American community even when its organization is in defiance of
existing law.
The development of the new territories of Iowa and Wisconsin in the
decade after their erection carried both far towards statehood.
Burlington, the earliest capital of Iowa, was in 1840 "the largest,
wealthiest, most business-doing and most fashionable city, on or in
the neighborhood of the Upper Mississippi.... We have three or four
churches," said one of its papers, "a theatre, and a dancing school in
full blast." As early as 1843 the Black Hawk purchase was overrun. The
Sauk and Foxes had ceded provisionally all their Iowa lands and the
Potawatomi were in danger. "Although it is but ten years to-day," said
their agent, speaking of their Chicago treaty of 1833, "the tide of
emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until the whites are now
crowded closely along the southern side of these lands, and will soon
swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the very worst traits of the
white man's character, and destroy, by fraud and illicit intercourse,
the remnant of a powerful people, now exposed to their influence." Iowa
was admitted to the Union in 1846, after bickering over her northern
boundary; Wisconsin followed in 1848; the remnant of both, now known as
Minnesota, was erected as a territory in its own right in the next year.
Fort Snelling was nearly twenty years old before it came to be more
than a distant military outpost. Until the treaties of 1837 it was
in the midst of the Sioux with no white neighbors save the agents of
the fur companies, a few refugees from the Red River country, and a
group of more or less disreputable hangers-on. An enlargement of the
military reserve in 1837 led to the eviction by the troops of its
near-by squatters, with the result that one of these took up his grog
shop, left the peninsula between the Mississippi and St. Peter's, and
erected the first permanent settlement across the former, where St.
Paul now stands. Iowa had desired a northern boundary which should
touch the St. Peter's River, but when she was admitted without it and
Wisconsin followed with the St. Croix as her western limit, Minnesota
was temporarily without a government.
The Minnesota territorial act of 1849 preceded the active colonization
of the country around St. Paul. Mendota, Fort Snelling, St. Anthony's,
and Stillwater all came into active being, while the most enterprising
settlers began to push up the Minnesota River, as the St. Peter's now
came to be called. As usual the Indians were in the way. As usual the
claims associations were resorted to. And finally, as usual the Indians
yielded. At Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, in the autumn of 1851, the
magnates of the young territory witnessed great treaties by which the
Sioux, surrendering their portion of the permanent Indian frontier,
gave up most of their vast hunting grounds to accept valley reserves
along the Minnesota. And still more rapidly population came in after
the cession.
The new Northwest was settled after the great day of the keelboat on
western waters. Iowa and the lead country had been reached by the
steamboats of the Mississippi. The Milwaukee district was reached by
the steamboats from the lakes. The upper Mississippi frontier was
now even more thoroughly dependent on the river navigation than its
neighbors had been, while its first period was over before any railroad
played an immediate part in its development.
The boom period between the panics of 1837 and 1857 thus added another
concentric band along the northwest border, disregarding the Indian
frontier and introducing a large population where the prophet of the
early thirties had declared that civilization could never go. The
Potawatomi of Iowa had yielded in 1846, the Sioux in 1851. The future
of the other tribes in their so-called permanent homes was in grave
question by the middle of the decade. The new frontier by 1857 touched
the tip of Lake Superior, included St. Paul and the lower Minnesota
valley, passed around Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, and reached the
Missouri near Sioux City. In a few more years the right wing of the
frontier would run due north from the bend of the Missouri.
The hopeful life of the fifties surpassed that of the thirties in
its speculative zeal. The home seeker had to struggle against the
occasional Indian and the unscrupulous land agent as well as his own
too sanguine disposition. Fictitious town sites had to be distinguished
from the real. Fraudulent dealers more than once sold imaginary lots
and farms from beautifully lithographed maps to eastern investors.
Occasionally whole colonies of migrants would appear on the steamboat
wharves bound for non-existent towns. And when the settler had escaped
fraud, and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever or
cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.
Iowa had advanced her northwest frontier up the Des Moines River, past
the old frontier fort, until in 1856 a couple of trading houses and a
few families had reached the vicinity of Spirit Lake. Here, in March,
1857, one of the settlers quarrelled with a wandering Indian over a
dog. The Indian belonged to Inkpaduta's band of Sioux, one not included
in the treaty of 1851. Forty-seven dead settlers slaughtered by the
band were found a few days later by a visitor to the village. A hard
winter campaign by regulars from Fort Ridgely resulted in the rescue
of some of the captives, but the indignant demand of the frontier for
retaliation was never granted.
In spite of fraud and danger the population grew. For the first time
the railroad played a material part in its advance. The great eastern
trunk lines had crossed the Alleghanies into the Ohio valley. Chicago
had received connection with the East in 1852. The Mississippi had been
reached by 1854. In the spring of 1856 all Iowa celebrated the opening
of a railway bridge at Davenport.
The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own
ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837.
Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development
that chartered railways and even built them between points that
scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild
with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money
finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about
to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the
railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer,
who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town
lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating
population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak
gold.
But a new Northwest had come into life in spite of the vicissitudes of
1837 and 1857. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa had in 1860 ten times
the population of Illinois at the opening of the Black Hawk War. More
than a million and a half of pioneers had settled within these three
new states, building their towns and churches and schools, pushing back
the right flank of the Indian frontier, and reiterating their perennial
demand that the Indian must go. This was the first departure from the
policy laid down by Monroe and carried out by Adams and Jackson. Before
this movement had ended, that policy had been attacked from another
side, and was once more shown to be impracticable. The Indian had too
little strength to compel adherence to the contract, and hence suffered
from this encroachment by the new Northwest. His final destruction
came from the overland traffic, which already by 1857 had destroyed
the fiction of the American desert, and introduced into his domain
thousands of pioneers lured by the call of the West and the lust for
gold.
CHAPTER IV
THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL
England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior
provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio
Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred miles above Vera
Cruz. Before the English seaboard had received its earliest colonists,
the hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters of the Rio
Grande, where her outposts had been planted around the little adobe
village of Santa Fé. For more than two hundred years this life had gone
on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened by contact with
the world or admixture of foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility
characteristic of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions and
restrictions of the law, communication with these villages of Chihuahua
and New Mexico had been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills
by the pack-trains of the king.
It was no stately procession that wound up into the hills yearly to
supply the Mexican frontier. From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through
Mexico City, and thence north along the highlands through San Luis
Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and thence to Chihuahua, and up the
valley of the Rio Grande to Santa Fé climbed the long pack-trains and
the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the provinces their whole supply
from outside. The civilization of the provincial life might fairly be
measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of this transportation
route. Nearly two thousand miles, as the road meandered, of river,
mountain gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the mule-drivers
of the caravans. What their pack-animals could not carry, could not go.
What had large bulk in proportion to its value must stay behind. The
ancient commerce of the Orient, carried on camels across the Arabian
desert, could afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and
precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree, the world's
contribution to these remote towns was confined largely to textiles,
drugs, and trinkets of adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population
of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for more than two
centuries without an effort to improve upon them. Their resignation
gives some credit to the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which
restricted their importation to the defined route and the single port.
It is due as much, however, to the hard geographic fact which made Vera
Cruz and Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors, until
in the nineteenth century another civilization came within hailing
distance, at its frontier in the bend of the Missouri.
The Spanish provincials were at once willing to endure the rigors of
the commercial system and to smuggle when they had a chance. So long as
it was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan than to develop
other sources of supply the caravans flourished without competition.
It was not until after the expulsion of Spain and the independence
of Mexico that a rival supply became important, but there are enough
isolated events before this time to show what had to occur just so soon
as the United States frontier came within range.
The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish captivity did
something to reveal the existence of a possible market in Santa Fé.
He had been engaged in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana
purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the Rio Grande while
searching for the head waters of the Red River. Here he was arrested,
in 1807, by Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.
After a short detention he was escorted to the limits of the United
States, where he was released. He carried home the news of high prices
and profitable markets existing among the Mexicans.
In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify the statements of
Pike. Rumor had come to the States of an insurrection in upper Mexico,
which might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the revolt had
been suppressed before the dozen or so of reckless Americans who
crossed the plains had arrived at their destination. The Spanish
authorities, restored to power and renewed vigor, received them with
open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua, some for ten years,
while the traffic which they had hoped to inaugurate remained still in
the future. Their release came only with the independence of Mexico,
which quickly broke down the barrier against importation and the
foreigner.
The Santa Fé trade commenced when the news of the Mexican revolution
reached the border. Late in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell,
chancing a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took a
small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in what proved to be a
profitable speculation. He returned to the States in time to lead
out a large party in the following summer. So long as the United
States frontier lay east of the Missouri River there could have been
no western traffic, but now that settlement had reached the Indian
Country, and river steamers had made easy freighting from Pittsburg
to Franklin or Independence, Santa Fé was nearer to the United States
seaboard markets than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the American
desert and the Indian frontier made by this earliest of the overland
trails.
[Illustration: OVERLAND TRAILS
The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California
appeared about 1845; the Santa Fé trail had been used since 1821. The
overland mail of 1858 followed the southern route.]
The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the Santa Fé trade, but it
saw the first wagons taken across the plains. The freight capacity
of the mule-train placed a narrow limit upon the profits and extent
of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled over the rough trails was
a matter of considerable doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper
attempted it in this year. The experiment was so successful that within
two years the pack-train was generally abandoned for the wagons by the
Santa Fé traders. The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton
goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics, calicoes, domestic,
shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom shirtings, and cotton hose," were in
high demand. There were also "a few woollen goods, consisting of super
blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths, and shawls, crapes, bombazettes,
some light articles of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses."
Backward bound their freights were lighter. Many of the wagons, indeed,
were sold as part of the cargo. The returning merchants brought some
beaver skins and mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and
silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.
Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings, could not escape the
public eye. The patron of the West came early to its aid. Senator
Thomas Hart Benton had taken his seat from the new state of Missouri
just in time to notice and report upon the traffic. No public man was
more confirmed in his friendship for the frontier trade than Senator
Benton. The fur companies found him always on hand to get them favors
or to "turn aside the whip of calamity." Because of his influence his
son-in-law, Frémont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness. Now,
in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement. A large policy in the
building of public roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.
In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided $30,000 to mark
and build a wagon road from Missouri to the United States border on the
Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road reported some annoyance
from the Indians, whose hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around
their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and Kansa treaties of 1825
these tribes agreed to let the traders traverse the country in peace.
Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the Santa Fé trade.
The long journey from the fringe of settlement to the Spanish towns
eight hundred miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican
soil, crossing the international boundary on the Arkansas near the
hundredth meridian. The Indians of the route knew no national lines,
and found a convenient refuge against pursuers from either nation in
crossing the border. There was no military protection to the frontier
at the American end of the trail until in 1827 the war department
erected a new post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it Fort
Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were stationed to guard the
border and protect the traders. The post was due as much to the new
Indian concentration policy as to the Santa Fé trade. Its significance
was double. Yet no one seems to have foreseen that the development of
the trade through the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment
of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.
From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of regulars convoyed the
caravans to the Southwest. In 1829 four companies of the sixth
infantry, under Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan at
the usual place of organization, Council Grove, a few days west of
the Missouri line, and marched with it to the confines of the United
States. Along the march there had been some worry from the Indians.
After the caravan and escort had separated at the Arkansas the former,
going on alone into Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard
before it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose promptly to the
occasion. He immediately crossed the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the
consequences of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the
Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican authorities furnished an
escort of troops which marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who
had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all summer, met them. He
entertained the Mexican officers with drill while they responded with
a parade, chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report declares,
and then he brought the traders back to the States by the beginning of
November.
There was some criticism in the United States of this costly use of
troops to protect a private trade. Hezekiah Niles, who was always
pleading for high protection to manufactures and receiving less than
he wanted, complained that the use of four companies during a whole
season was extravagant protection for a trade whose annual profits
were not over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely repeated after
1829. Fort Leavenworth and the troops gave moral rather than direct
support. Colonel Dodge, with his dragoons,--for infantry were soon
seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,--made long expeditions
and demonstrations in the thirties, reaching even to the slopes of
the Rockies. And the Santa Fé caravans continued until the forties in
relative safety.
Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an event of great
consequence in the history of the Santa Fé trail. Josiah Gregg,
impelled by ill health to seek a change of climate, made his first trip
to Santa Fé in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg would call for no
more comment than would any one who crossed the plains eight times in a
single decade. But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was watching
and thinking during his entire career, examining into the details of
Mexican life and history and tabulating the figures of the traffic.
When he finally retired from the plains life which he had come to love
so well, he produced, in two small volumes, the great classic of the
trade: "The Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé
Trader." It is still possible to check up details and add small bits
of fact to supplement the history and description of this commerce
given by Gregg, but his book remains, and is likely to remain, the
fullest and best source of information. Gregg had power of scientific
observation and historical imagination, which, added to unusual
literary ability, produced a masterpiece.
The Santa Fé trade, begun in 1822, continued with moderate growth until
1843. This was its period of pioneer development. After the Mexican War
the commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its greatest volume
in the sixties, just before the construction of the Pacific railways.
But in its later years it was a matter of greater routine and less
general interest than in those years of commencement during which it
was educating the United States to a more complete knowledge of the
southern portion of the American desert. Gregg gives a table in which
he shows the approximate value of the trade for its first twenty-two
years. To-day it seems strange that so trifling a commerce should have
been national in its character and influence. In only one year, 1843,
does he find that the eastern value of the goods sent to Santa Fé was
above a quarter of a million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,
but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter million mark. In
nine years it was under $100,000. The men involved were a mere handful.
At the start nearly every one of the seventy men in the caravan was
himself a proprietor. The total number increased more rapidly than the
number of independent owners. Three hundred and fifty were the most
employed in any one year. The twenty-six wagons of 1824 became two
hundred and thirty in 1843, but only four times in the interval were
there so many as a hundred.
Yet the Santa Fé trade was national in its importance. Its romance
contained a constant appeal to a public that was reading the Indian
tales of James Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship
and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country with quaint people
and strange habitations. The American desert, not much more than a
chartless sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must have
confirmation of the truth that frontier causes have produced results
far beyond their normal measure, such confirmation may be found here.
The traders to Santa Fé commonly travelled together in a single
caravan for safety. In the earlier years they started overland from
some Missouri town--Franklin most often--to a rendezvous at Council
Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth and an increasing navigation
of the Missouri River made possible a starting-point further west than
Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the Missouri in 1828
its place was taken by the new settlement of Independence, further
up the river and only twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at
Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties.
For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few
weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the
frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and
oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening
drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the
Southwest,--all these gave to Independence its name and place. From
Independence to Council Grove, some one hundred and fifty miles, across
the border, the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove they
halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a general company for
self-defence. Here in ordinary years the assembled traders elected
a captain whose responsibility was complete, and whose authority
was as great as he could make it by his own force. Under him were
lieutenants, and under the command of these the whole company was
organized in guards and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company
was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal vigilance was the
price of safety.
The unit of the caravan was the wagon,--the same Pittsburg or Conestoga
wagon that moved frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to
travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve mules or oxen,
and carried from three to five thousand pounds of cargo. Over the
wagon were large arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn water
and protect the contents. The careful freighter used two thicknesses
of sheetings, while the canny one slipped in between them a pair of
blankets, which might thus increase his comfort outward bound, and
be in an inconspicuous place to elude the vigilance of the customs
officials at Santa Fé. Arms, mounts, and general equipment were
innumerable in variation, but the prairie schooner, as its white canopy
soon named it, survived through its own superiority.
At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey now became one
across a treeless prairie, with water all too rare, and habitations
entirely lacking. The first stage of the trail crossed the country,
nearly west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two hundred
and seventy miles from Independence. Up the Arkansas it ran on, past
Chouteau's Island, to Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur
traders had established a post. Water was most scarce. Whether the
caravan crossed the river at the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's
Fort to follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader and on
stock. His oxen often reached Santa Fé with scarcely enough strength
left to stand alone. But with reasonable success and skilful guidance
the caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties and at last
enter Santa Fé, seven hundred and eighty miles away, in from six to
seven weeks from Independence.
When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri frontier was familiar
with all of the long trail to Santa Fé. Even in the East there had come
to be some real interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert
and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the
war was the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth,
with orders to march overland against Mexico and Upper California.
Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command of the invading army, which
he recruited largely from the frontier and into which he incorporated a
battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the summer of 1846, near
Council Bluffs, on their way to the Rocky Mountains and the country
beyond. Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken him in
1845 all the way to the mountains and back in the interest of policing
the trails. By the end of June he was ready to begin the march towards
Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was to be a common
rendezvous. To this point the army marched in separate columns, far
enough apart to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder
from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was little more than a
pleasure jaunt. The trail was well known, and Indians, never likely
to run heedlessly into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's Fort
the advance assumed more of a military aspect, for the enemy's country
had been entered and resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the
mountain passes north of Santa Fé. But the resistance came to naught,
while the army, footsore and hot, marched easily into Santa Fé on
August 18, 1846. In the palace of the governor the conquering officers
were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the provinces would
permit. "We were too thirsty to judge of its merits," wrote one of
them of the native wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything
liquid and cool was palatable." With little more than the formality of
taking possession New Mexico thus fell into the hands of the United
States, while the war of conquest advanced further to the West. In the
end of September Kearny started out from Santa Fé for California, where
he arrived early in the following January.
The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary of the United
States to the Gila and the Pacific, broadening the area of the desert
within the United States and raising new problems of long-distance
government in connection with the populations of New Mexico and
California. The Santa Fé trail, with its continuance west of the Rio
Grande, became the attenuated bond between the East and the West. From
the Missouri frontier to California the way was through the desert and
the Indian Country, with regular settlements in only one region along
the route. The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit trade
disappeared with the conquest, so that the traffic with the Southwest
and California boomed during the fifties.
The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions which had never been
dreamed of before the conquest. Kearny's baggage-trains started a new
era in plains freighting. The armies had continuously to be supplied.
Regular communication had to be maintained for the new Southwest.
But the freighting was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the
Santa Fé traders. It became a matter of business, running smoothly
along familiar channels. It ceased to have to do with the extension
of geographic knowledge and came to have significance chiefly in
connection with the organization of overland commerce. Between the
Mexican and Civil wars was its new period of life. Finally, in the
seventies, it gradually receded into history as the tentacles of the
continental railway system advanced into the desert.
The Santa Fé trail was the first beaten path thrust in advance of the
western frontier. Even to-day its course may be followed by the wheel
ruts for much of the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa
Fé. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind it at the start,
not touching it again until the end was reached. For nearly fifty
years after the trade began, this character of the desert remained
substantially unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which had rushed
west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped at the bend, and though the
trail continued, settlement would not follow it. The Indian country
and the American desert remained intact, while the Santa Fé trail, in
advance of settlement, pointed the way of manifest destiny, as no one
of the eastern trails had ever done. When the new states grew up on the
Pacific, the desert became as an ocean traversed only by the prairie
schooners in their beaten paths. Islands of settlement served but to
accentuate the unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain West.
The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the statesmen of the
twenties as the limit of American advance. It might have continued thus
had there really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of the trade
to Santa Fé created a new interest and a connecting road. In nearly
the same years the call of the fur trade led to the tracing of another
path in the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and the fur trade
had stirred up so much interest beyond the Rockies that before Kearny
marched his army into Santa Fé another trail of importance equal to his
had been run to Oregon.
The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended upon the ability of
the United States to keep whites out of the Indian Country. But with
Oregon and Santa Fé beyond, this could never be. The trails had already
shown the fallacy of the frontier policy before it had become a fact in
1840.
CHAPTER V
THE OREGON TRAIL
The Santa Fé trade had just been started upon its long career when
trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the
forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy
crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper
Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage
through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon.
As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the
Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over
the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for
new states. The Santa Fé trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The
Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.
In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those
nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of
every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the
surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded
facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden,
has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that
carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they
first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the
period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of
Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That
they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite
as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were
generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence
upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history
is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the
thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean
at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat
earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the
fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct
the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted,
they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the
century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the
British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so
confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up
the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and
allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.
In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of
the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading
prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies.
Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated
the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a
body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter
year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable
Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had
become a household word through the combined reports of traders and
missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the
lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden
might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an
added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was
approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when
Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The
thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis
of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided
an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the
farthest West.
A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government
to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were
in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the
trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been
ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task
of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the
father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the
mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new
son-in-law, John C. Frémont, a detail in command of an exploring party
to the South Pass.
The career of Frémont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great
publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of
this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from
Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He
shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte,
and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in
northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's
he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the
Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8,
just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at
Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially
over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range,
climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was
back in St. Louis with his party.
In the spring of 1843, Frémont started upon a second and more extended
governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail
along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence
he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the
Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon
for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending
part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while
he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine
Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before
reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another
detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked
upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18,
he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles
of the Columbia.
Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia
and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with
the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the
trappers, had not yet received scientific record when Frémont started
south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His
march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under
difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a
stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento
Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march
carried him into southern California and around the sources of the
Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of
the country between the mountains and the Pacific.
In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two
expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of
resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work
turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems
far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his
earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English
traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed
over by Colonel Frémont was perfectly well known to the old trappers
and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese
pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man
who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through
these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the
American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the _Platte
(Missouri) Eagle_ in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser
[_sic_] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific.
Destiny has willed it."
The year in which Frémont made his first expedition to the mountains
was also the year of the first formal, conducted emigration to
Oregon. Missionaries beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress
the appointment of an American representative and magistrate for
the country, with such effect that Dr. Elijah White, who had some
acquaintance with Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the
spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration of homeseekers
that peopled Oregon during the next ten years. His emigration was not
large, perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons; but it
seems to have been larger than he expected, and large enough to raise
doubt as to the practicability of taking so many persons across the
plains at once. In the decade following, every May, when pasturage was
fresh and green, saw pioneers gathering, with or without premeditation,
at the bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence and its
neighbor villages continued to be the posts of outfit. How many in
the aggregate crossed the plains can never be determined, in spite of
the efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record their names.
The distinguishing feature of the emigration was its spontaneous
individualistic character. Small parties, too late for the caravan,
frequently set forth alone. Single families tried it often enough to
have their wanderings recorded in the border papers. In the spring
following the crossing of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds
at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand in all is
probably not too high. In 1844 the tide subsided a little, but in
1845 it established a new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and
in 1847 ran between four and five thousand. These were the highest
figures, yet throughout the decade the current flowed unceasingly.
The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years, may be taken as
typical of the Oregon movement. Early in the year faces turned toward
the Missouri rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and young, with
wagons and cattle, household equipment, primitive sawmills, and all
the impedimenta of civilization were to be found in the hopeful crowd.
For some days after departure the unwieldy party, a thousand strong,
with twice as many cattle and beasts of burden, held together under
Burnett, their chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control soon
split the company. In addition to the general fear that the number was
dangerously high, the poorer emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some
of the latter had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,
and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian thieves during his
long night watches he felt the injustice which compelled him to protect
the property of another. Hence the party broke early in June. A "cow
column" was formed of those who had many cattle and heavy belongings;
the lighter body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting
distance; and under two captains the procession moved on. The way was
tedious rather than difficult, but habit soon developed in the trains
a life that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the migrants of 1842
had written, was a "great country for unmarried gals." Courtship and
marriage began almost before the States were out of sight. Death and
burial, crime and punishment, filled out the round of human experience,
while Dr. Whitman was more than once called upon in his professional
capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.
[Illustration: FORT LARAMIE IN 1842
From a sketch made to illustrate Frémont's report.]
The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed in the
United States. It started from the Missouri River anywhere between
Independence and Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence was
the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural frontier advanced
through Iowa in the forties numerous new crossings and ferries were
made further up the stream. From the various ferries the start began,
as did the Santa Fé trade, sometime in May. By many roads the wagons
moved westward towards the point from which the single trail extended
to the mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte River reaches
its most southerly point, these routes from the border were nearly
as numerous as the caravans, but here began the single highway along
the river valley, on its southern side. At this point, in the years
immediately after the Mexican War, the United States founded a military
post to protect the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W. Kearny,
commander of the Army of the West. From Fort Kearney (custom soon
changed the spelling of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie
Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork. Fort Laramie
itself was bought from the fur company and converted into a military
post which became a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.
Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the trail to South Pass,
where, through a gap twenty miles in width, the main commerce between
the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go. Beyond
South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the next post of importance on
the road. From Fort Hall to Fort Boisé the trail continued down the
Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to meet the Columbia
near Walla Walla.
The journey to Oregon took about five months. Its deliberate,
domesticated progress was as different as might be from the commercial
rush to Santa Fé. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily get
caught in the early mountain winter, but with a prompt start and a wise
guide, or pilot, winter always found the homeseeker in his promised
land. "This is the right manner to settle the Oregon question," wrote
Niles, after he had counted over the emigrants of 1844.
Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already
there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional
government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under
the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable
uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for
future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed
to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the
British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early
migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful
also lest future American emigration might carry political control out
of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance
among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In
May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon
blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary
association for government and adopted a code of laws.
Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this
newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White,
"at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of
Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of
any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events.
"During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened,
and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves
during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost
all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the
measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts,
securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse
among the whites."
A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension
of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His
journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,
who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from
abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called
the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost,
however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government
settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws
were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order
prevailed.
Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and
annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners
of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink
was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier.
"A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread,
sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as
corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present
at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches,
corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where
two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent
intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of
the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of
the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal
right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to
crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass
meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of
his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the
distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock
P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus
well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were
standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses.
No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having
resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset
the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my
measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the
kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and
every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and
utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where
our presence and report gave general joy."
The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair
degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional
governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its
courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was
long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title
to the country and could pass laws for it.
The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly
in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with
deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with
absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The
stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the
erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an
intimate study of the Oregon trail.
In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in
practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the
annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of
slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern
senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and
Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive
under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to
cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern
states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape
with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could
emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers,
and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence,
in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people,
of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With
a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was
closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.
Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish
Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´.
Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in
British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of
1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great
Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should
justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting
countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim
for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was
entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness
that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party
was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with
respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders
of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the
Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a
westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with
his British adversary quickly.
Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's
notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more
pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of
State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division
instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the
change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty
which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49° from the
Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater part
of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to such
legislation as Congress should prescribe.
A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the
establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All
that the United States had secured in the division was given the
popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,
popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached
American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country.
The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined
by wheel ruts and débris along the sides that even the blind could
scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient
for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way
for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and
morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were
prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A
second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American
desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that
was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.
CHAPTER VI
OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS
The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon is but a small
portion of the whole history of the Oregon trail. The trail was
not only the road to Oregon, but it was the chief road across the
continent. Santa Fé dominated a southern route that was important in
commerce and conquest, and that could be extended west to the Pacific.
But the deep ravine of the Colorado River splits the United States into
sections with little chance of intercourse below the fortieth parallel.
To-day, in only two places south of Colorado do railroads bridge it;
only one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The southern trail
could not be compared in its traffic or significance with the great
middle highway by South Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri
River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to California and Great
Salt Lake.
Of the waves of influence that drew population along the trail, the
Oregon fever came first; but while it was still raging, there came
the Mormon trek that is without any parallel in American history.
Throughout the lifetime of the trails the American desert extended
almost unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to California and
Oregon. The Mormon settlement in Utah became at once the most
considerable colony within this area, and by its own fertility
emphasized the barren nature of the rest.
Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet, but it would be fair to
ascribe the parentage of the sect to that emotional upheaval of the
twenties and thirties which broke down barriers of caste and politics,
ruptured many of the ordinary Christian churches, and produced new
revelations and new prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely
one of these, more astute perhaps than the others, having much of
the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed had had before him, and able
to direct and hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet might
have been able to arouse. History teaches that it is easy to provoke
religious enthusiasm, however improbable or fraudulent the guides or
revelations may be; but that the founding of a church upon it is a task
for greatest statesmanship.