The discovery of the golden plates and the magic spectacles, and

the building upon them of a militant church has little part in the

conquest of the frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for

the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other than as a joke,

and its perpetrator as a successful charlatan. Mormon apologists and

their enemies have gone over the details of its production without

establishing much sure evidence on either side. The theological

teaching of the church seems to put less stress upon it than its

supposed miraculous origin would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain,

with his light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome to

read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of

morals is unobjectionable--it is 'smouched' from the New Testament

and no credit given." Converts came slowly to the new prophet at the

start, for he was but one of many teachers crying in the wilderness,

and those who had known him best in his youth were least ready to

see in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring of 1830 it was

possible to organize, in western New York, the body which Rigdon was

later to christen the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where

proselyting had proved to be successful in both religion and finance.

Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new sect. Revelations came

in upon the prophet rapidly, pointing out the details of organization

and administration, the duty of missionary activity among the Indians

and gentiles, and the future home further to the west. Scouts were sent

to the Indian Country at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland

the leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts who, by

1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in hopeful numbers. The frontier of

this decade was equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,

banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates possessed the germ

of leadership to take advantage of every chance. Until the panic

of 1837 they flourished, apparently not always beyond reproach in

financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had the right to throw

the stone. Antagonism, already appearing against the church, was due

partly to an essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors

and partly to the whole-souled union between church and life which

distinguished the Mormons from the other sects. Their political

complexion was identical with their religion,--a combination which

always has aroused resentment in America.

For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract in Missouri, not far

from Independence, close to the Indians whose conversion was a part of

the Mormon duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa Fé were by-words

along the Missouri, the Mormons were getting a precarious foothold near

the commencement of the trails. The population around Independence was

distinctly inhospitable, with the result that petty violence appeared,

in which it is hard to place the blame. There was a calm assurance

among the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit the earth.

Their neighbors maintained that poultry and stock were unsafe in their

vicinity because of this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges of

well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all the bickerings the

sources of information are partisan and cloudy with prejudice, so that

it is easier to see the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit.

From the south side of the Missouri around Independence the Saints

were finally driven across the river by armed mobs; a transaction in

which the Missourians spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the

peace. North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached in a few

miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell County, they settled down at

last, to build their tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of

1838 their corner-stone was laid.

Far West remained their goal in belief longer than in fact. Before

1838 ended they had been forced to agree to leave Missouri; yet they

returned in secret to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and

continued to dream of this as their future home. Up to the time of

their expulsion from Missouri in 1838 they are not proved to have been

guilty of any crime that could extenuate the gross intolerance which

turned them out. As individuals they could live among Gentiles in

peace. It seems to have been the collective soul of the church that

was unbearable to the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had

facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled it from Missouri,

in a few more years drove them again on their migrations. The cohesion

of the church in politics, economics, and religion explains the

opposition which it cannot well excuse.

In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old Fort Madison ferry

which led into the half-breed country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered

a village of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement

from which the business genius of Smith now purchased it on easy

terms. It was occupied in 1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a

new tabernacle was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken young

clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet had now developed

into a successful man of affairs, with ambitions that reached even to

the presidency at Washington. With a strong sect behind him, money at

his disposal, and supernatural powers in which all faithful saints

believed, Joseph could go far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen

thousand by the end of 1840.

Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely contested presidential

election, at a time when the state feared to lose its population in

an emigration to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to

be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the Mormons insured

for themselves a hearty welcome from both Democrats and Whigs. A

complaisant legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of

privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so that the ideal

of the Mormons of a state within the state was fully realized. The

town council was emancipated from state control, its courts were

independent, and its militia was substantially at the beck of Smith.

Proselyting and good management built up the town rapidly. To an

importunate creditor Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but

to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of milk and honey.

Here it began to be noticed that desertions from the church were not

uncommon; that conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks. It

was noised about that the wealthy convert had the warmest reception,

but was led on to let his religious passion work his impoverishment for

the good of the cause.

Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the church took the decisive

step that carried Mormonism beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable,

religious sects. Rumors of immorality circulated among the Gentile

neighbors. It was bad enough, they thought, to have the Mormons chronic

petty thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail among the

leaders was more than could be endured by a community that did not

count this form of iniquity among its own excesses. The Mormons were in

general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen until they took

to this. At the time, all immorality was denounced and denied by the

prophet and his friends, but in later years the church made public a

revelation concerning celestial or plural marriage, with the admission

that Joseph Smith had received it in the summer of 1843. Never does

Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent as its enemies have

charged. But no church countenancing the practice could hope to be

endured by an American community. The odium of practising it was

increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It was only a matter of

time until the Mormons should resume their march.

The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated by the murder of

Joseph Smith, and Hyrum his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the

summer of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an attack upon the

Saints similar to that in Missouri. Under promise of protection the

Smiths had surrendered themselves. Their martyrdom at once disgraced

the state in which it could be possible, and gave to Mormonism in a

murdered prophet a mighty bond of union. The reins of government fell

into hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young succeeded Joseph

Smith.

Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a formal way president

of the church, but his authority was complete in fact after the death

of Joseph. A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain knew him, and

has left an estimate of him which must be close to truth. He was "a man

of great ability. Apparently deficient in education and refinement,

he was fair and honest in his dealings, and seemed extremely liberal

in conversation upon religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so

Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates, "as anything but a

religious fanatic or even enthusiast; but he knew how to make use of

the fanaticism of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly after

the murder of Joseph it became clear that Nauvoo must be abandoned, and

Brigham began to consider an exodus across the plains so familiar by

hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky Mountains beyond the limits

of the United States. Persecution, for the persecuted can never see

two sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened eviction came in the

autumn of 1845. In 1846 the last great trek began.

The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at Nauvoo as early as

February, 1846. By the hundred, in the spring of the year, the wagons

of the persecuted sect were ferried across the river. Five hundred and

thirty-nine teams within a single week in May is the report of one

observer. Property which could be commuted into the outfit for the

march was carefully preserved and used. The rest, the tidy houses, the

simple furniture, the careful farms (for the backbone of the church was

its well-to-do middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced sale

to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full of real estate vultures

hoping to thrive upon the Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more

abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple within the year.

Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as Brigham Young liked to

call his headquarters, advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer

allowed. To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railway follows

the Mormon road for many miles, but in 1846 the western half of Iowa

territory was Indian Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and

Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over, but who were in

possession at this time. Along the line of march camps were built by

advance parties to be used in succession by the following thousands.

The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri River, near Council

Bluffs, where as yet no city stood, to plant a crop of grain, since

manna could not be relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of the

population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter quarters not far above

the present site of Omaha, preserving the orderly life of the society,

and enduring hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate by gaiety

and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi country of Iowa, opposite

their winter quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all the

way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the Platte Mormon detachments

were scattered along the roads. The destination was yet in doubt.

Westward it surely was, but it is improbable that even Brigham knew

just where.

The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted and driven westward

like themselves, kindly at first, but discontent came as the winter

residence was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha, west of the

Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit Mormon settlement, but

east, in the abandoned Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain

Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several years. A permanent

residence here was not desired even by the Mormons themselves. Spring

in 1847 found them preparing to resume the march.

In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance of no less a person

than Brigham Young started out the Platte trail in search of Zion.

One hundred and forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred and

seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they took along, if

the figures of one of their historians may be accepted. Under strict

military order, the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is one of

the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no sooner selected their abode

beyond the line of the United States in their flight from persecution

than conquest from Mexico extended the United States beyond them to the

Pacific. They themselves aided in this defeat of their plan, since from

among them Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army of

invasion.

Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and beyond, the

prospectors followed the well-beaten trail. Oregon homeseekers had been

cutting it deep in the prairie sod for five years. West of South Pass

they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on the 24th of July, 1847,

Brigham gazed upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious

premeditation, so far as is known, and against the advice of one of the

most experienced of mountain guides, this valley by a later-day Dead

Sea was chosen for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground

was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were commenced at

once, and within a month the town site was baptized the City of the

Great Salt Lake.

Behind the advance guard the main body remained in winter quarters,

making ready for their difficult search for the promised land; moving

at last in the late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere

would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph relied but little

upon supernatural aid in keeping his flock under control. Commonly he

depended upon human wisdom and executive direction. But upon the eve

of his own departure from winter quarters he had made public, for the

direction of the main body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will

of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their Journeyings to the

West." Such revelations as this, had they been repeated, might well

have created or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration of

the leader. The order given was such as a wise source of inspiration

might have formed after constant intercourse with emigrants and traders

upon the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers of the way.

"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints, and those who journey with them," read the revelation, "be

organized into companies, with a covenant and a promise to keep all

the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God. Let the companies

be organized with captains of hundreds, and captains of fifties, and

captains of tens, with a president and counsellor at their head, under

direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be our covenant, that

we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord.

"Let each company provide itself with all the teams, wagons,

provisions, and all other necessaries for the journey that they can.

When the companies are organized, let them go with all their might,

to prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company, with their

captains and presidents, decide how many can go next spring; then

choose out a sufficient number of able-bodied and expert men to take

teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers to prepare for

putting in the spring crops. Let each company bear an equal proportion,

according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the

widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone

with the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not

up into the ears of the Lord against his people.

"Let each company prepare houses and fields for raising grain for those

who are to remain behind this season; and this is the will of the Lord

concerning this people.

"Let every man use all his influence and property to remove this people

to the place where the Lord shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do

this with a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed in

your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields, and in your houses,

and in your families...."

The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk Horn River, whence the

head of the procession moved late in June and early in July. In careful

organization, with camps under guard and wagons always in corral at

night, detachments moved on in quick succession. Kanesville and a

large body remained behind for another year or longer, but before

Brigham had laid out his city and started east the emigration of

1847 was well upon its way. The foremost began to come into the city

by September. By October the new city in the desert had nearly four

thousand inhabitants. The march had been made with little suffering and

slight mortality. No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the

trail.

The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to become an oasis in the

American desert, supporting the only agricultural community existing

therein during nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the Mormons at

the start. In Illinois and Missouri they were used to wood and water;

here they found neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to

carry their water to their crops in a way in which their leader had

more confidence than themselves. The urgency of Brigham in setting his

first detachment to work on fields and crops was not unwise, since for

two years there was a real question of food to keep the colony alive.

Inexperience in irrigating agriculture and plagues of crickets kept

down the early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its maintenance

does still more credit to its skilful leadership. Its people, apart

from foreign converts who came in later years, were of the stuff that

had colonized the middle West and won a foothold in Oregon; but nowhere

did an emigration so nearly create a land which it enjoyed as here.

A paternal government dictated every effort, outlined the streets and

farms, detailed parties to explore the vicinity and start new centres

of life. Little was left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical

success and a high state of general welfare rewarded the Saints for

their implicit obedience to authority.

Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became as common as that to

Oregon in the years following 1847, but, except in the disastrous

hand-cart episode of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial

increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living in the West, who,

walking all the way, with their own hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled

carts from the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad

management in handling proselytes the hand-cart catastrophe was chiefly

due. From the beginning missionary activity had been pressed throughout

the United States and even in Europe. In England and Scandinavia the

lower classes took kindly to the promises, too often impracticable, it

must be believed, of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon

success abroad. The convert with property could pay his way to the

Missouri border and join the ordinary annual procession. But the poor,

whose wealth was not equal to the moderately costly emigration, were

a problem until the emigration society determined to cut expenses by

reducing equipment and substituting pushcarts and human power for the

prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.

In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants left Liverpool, at

contract rates, for Iowa City, where the parties were to be organized

and ample equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised

to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found that slovenly

management had not built enough of the carts. Delayed by the necessary

construction of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the

trail until late in the summer,--too late for a successful trip, as a

few of their more cautious advisers had said. The earliest company got

through to Salt Lake City in September with considerable success. It

was hard and toilsome to push the carts; women and children suffered

badly, but the task was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains

broke down the last company. A friendly historian speaks of a loss of

sixty-seven out of a party of four hundred and twenty. Throughout the

United States the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling

against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom, with

clothing going and food quite gone, increased the conviction that the

Mormon hierarchy was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.

That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of the whole United States

came to be believed as well. In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement

three years old, Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending

from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°, and the President

had made Brigham Young its governor. The close association of the

Mormon church and politics had prevented peaceful relations from

existing between its people and the federal officers of the territory,

while Washington prejudiced a situation already difficult by sending

to Utah officers and judges, some of whom could not have commanded

respect even where the sway of United States authority was complete.

The vicious influence of politics in territorial appointments, which

the territories always resented, was specially dangerous in the case

of a territory already feeling itself persecuted for conscience' sake.

Yet it was not impossible for a tactful and respectable federal officer

to do business in Utah. For several years relations increased in bad

temper, both sides appealing constantly to President and Congress,

until it appeared, as was the fact, that the United States authority

had become as nothing in Utah and with the church. Among the earliest

of President Buchanan's acts was the preparation of an army which

should reëstablish United States prestige among the Mormons. Large

wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1857,

with an army under Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and

again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.

The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base, and operating in a

desert against plainsmen of remarkable skill, the army was helpless.

At will, the Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply trains,

confining their attacks to property rather than to armed forces. When

the army reached Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his

people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned. With difficulty

could the army of invasion have lived through the winter without aid.

In the spring of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons, being

invulnerable, were forgiven. The army marched down the trail again.

The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the

heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence.

What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd

leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving

population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as

the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold

followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then

in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West.

The Mormons would have fared much worse had their leader not located

his stake of Zion near the point where the trail to the Southwest

deviated from the Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay

tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through his oasis on

their way to California.

CHAPTER VII

CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS

On his second exploring trip, John C. Frémont had worked his way south

over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found

himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in 1844 a small group

of Americans had already been established for several years. Mexican

California was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient

central government that the province had almost fallen away of its

own weight. John A. Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was

the magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed a liberal

hospitality to the Pathfinder's party.

In 1845, Frémont started on his third trip, this time entering

California by a southern route and finding himself at Sutter's early in

1846. In some respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance

of a filibustering party from the start. When it crossed the Rockies,

it began to trespass upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with

whom the United States was yet at peace. Whether the explorer was

actually instructed to detach California from Mexico, or whether he

only imagined that such action would be approved at home, is likely

never to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were already under

orders in the event of war to seize California at once; and Polk was

from the start ambitious to round out the American territory on the

Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were at variance with their

Mexican neighbors, who resented the steady influx of foreign blood.

Between 1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased. And in June,

1846, certain of them, professing to believe that they were to be

attacked, seized the Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors

of what they called their Bear Flag Republic. Frémont, near at hand,

countenanced and supported their act, if he did not suggest it.

The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly after the American

population in California had begun its little revolution. Frémont was

in his glory for a time as the responsible head of American power

in the province. Naval commanders under their own orders coöperated

along the coast so effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,

learned that the conquest was substantially complete, soon after

he left Santa Fé, and was able to send most of his own force back.

California fell into American hands almost without a struggle, leaving

the invaders in possession early in 1847. In January of that year the

little village of Yerba Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the

American occupants began the sale of lots along the water front and the

construction of a great seaport.

The relations of Oregon and California to the occupation of the West

were much the same in 1847. Both had been coveted by the United States.

Both had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come first because

it was most easily reached by the great trail, and because it had

no considerable body of foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It

was, under the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field for

colonization. But California had been the territory of Mexico and was

occupied by a strange population. In the early forties there were from

4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province, living the easy

agricultural life of the Spanish colonist. The missions and the Indians

had decayed during the past generation. The population was light

hearted and generous. It quarrelled loudly, but had the Latin-American

knack for bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized by long

association with those trappers who had visited it since the twenties,

and the settlers who had begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied

foreign territory it had not invited American colonization as Oregon

had done. Hence the Oregon movement had been going on three or four

years before any considerable bodies of emigrants broke away from the

trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out homes in California. If war had

not come, American immigration into California would have progressed

after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities would have

allowed. As it was, the actual conquest removed the barrier, so that

California migration in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon under

the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement. The settlement of the

Mormons at Salt Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at the

head of the most perilous section of the California trail. Both Mormons

and Californians profited by its traffic.

With respect to California, the treaty which closed the Mexican War

merely recognized an accomplished fact. By right of conquest California

had changed hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid the penalty

under that organic law of politics which forbids a nation to sit still

when others are moving. In no conceivable way could the occupation

of California have been prevented, and if the war over Texas had not

come in 1846, a war over California must shortly have occurred. By the

treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory which she

had never been able to develop, and made way for the erection of the

new America on the Pacific.

Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in California was John

A. Sutter, whose establishment on the Sacramento had been a centre

of the new life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government he

had erected his adobe buildings in the usual semi-fortified style

that distinguished the isolated ranch. He was ready for trade, or

agriculture, or war if need be, possessing within his own domain

equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and supplies. As his

ranch prospered, and as Americans increased in San Francisco and on the

Sacramento, the prospects of Sutter steadily improved. In 1847 he made

ready to reap an additional share of profit from the boom by building a

sawmill on his estate. Among his men there had been for some months a

shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W. Marshall, who had been chiefly

carpenter while in Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall was

sent out to find a place where timber and water-power should be near

enough together to make a profitable mill site. He found his spot on

the south bank of the American, which is a tributary of the Sacramento,

some forty-five miles northeast of Sacramento.

In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall came to their agreement

by which the former was to furnish all supplies and the latter was to

build the mill and operate it on shares. Construction was begun before

the year ended, and was substantially completed in January, 1848.

Experience showed the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too

shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of turning the river

into it by night to wash out earth and deepen the channel. Here it was

that after one of these flushings, toward the end of January, he picked

up glittering flakes which looked to him like gold.

With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter, at the ranch.

Together they tested the flakes in the apothecary's shop, proving the

reality of the discovery before returning to the mill to prospect more

fully.

For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None could tell how large the

field might be, but he saw clearly that once the news of the find got

abroad, the whole population would rush madly to the diggings. His

ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under way, all needed labor.

But none would work for hire with free gold to be had for the taking.

The discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks, but the news

leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands in a few days, and reached

even to San Francisco in the form of rumor before February was over. A

new force had appeared to change the balance of the West and to excite

the whole United States.

The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two parts: the earlier

including the population of California, near enough to hear of the find

and get to the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the world, but

could not start until the news had percolated by devious and tedious

courses to centres of population thousands of miles away. The movement

within California started in March and April.

Further prospecting showed that over large areas around the American

and Sacramento rivers free gold could be obtained by the simple

processes of placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six or eight

men was the most profitable tool, but a tin dishpan would do in an

emergency. San Francisco was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and

was not excited even by the first of April, but as nuggets and bags

of dust appeared in quantity, the doubters turned to enthusiasts.

Farms were abandoned, town houses were deserted, stores were closed,

while every able-bodied man tramped off to the north to try his luck.

The city which had flourished and expanded since the beginning of

1847 became an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper is mute

witness of the desertion, lapsing into silence for a month after May

29th because its hands had disappeared. Farther south in California

the news spread as spring advanced, turning by June nearly every face

toward Sacramento.

The public authorities took cognizance of the find during the summer.

It was forced upon them by the wholesale desertions of troops who

could not stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor Mason, who

represented the sovereignty of the United States, visited the scenes in

person and described the situation in their official letters home. The

former got his news off to the Secretary of State by the 1st of June;

the latter wrote on August 17; together they became the authoritative

messengers that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk published

some of their documents in his message to Congress in December, 1848.

The rumors had reached the East as early as September, but now, writes

Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."

How to get to California became a great popular question in the winter

of 1848-1849. The public mind was well prepared for long migrations

through the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the journals

for at least six years. Route, time, method, and cost were all to be

considered. Migration, of a sort, began at once.

Land and water offered a choice of ways to California. The former

route was now closed for the winter and could not be used until spring

should produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the impetuous and

the well-to-do could start immediately by sea. All along the seaboard

enterprising ship-owners announced sailings for California, by the Horn

or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired hulks were called again into

commission for the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many were

willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery, Congress had arranged

for a postal service, _via_ Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship

Company had been organized to work the contracts. The _California_

had left New York in the fall of 1848 to run on the western end of

the route. It had sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news

of gold on the South American coast, had begun to load up at Latin

ports. When it reached Panama, a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many

times beyond its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled over its

accommodations. On February 28, 1849, it reached San Francisco at last,

starting the influx from the world at large.

The water route was too costly for most of the gold-seekers, who were

forced to wait for spring, when the trails would be open. Various

routes then guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most of all they

crowded once more the great Platte trail. Oregon migration and the

Mormon flight had familiarized this route to all the world. For its

first stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any turnpike in

our country."

The usual crowd, which every May for several years had brought to

the Missouri River crossings around Fort Leavenworth, was reënforced

in 1849 and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle regiment of

regulars was there, bound for Forts Laramie and Hall to erect new

frontier posts. Lieutenant Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying

party which was to prospect for a railway route to Salt Lake. By

thousands and tens of thousands others came, tempted by the call of

gold. This was the cheap and popular route. Every western farmer was

ready to start, with his own wagons and his own stock. The townsman

could easily buy the simple equipment of the plains. The poor could

work their way, driving cattle for the better-off. Through inexperience

and congestion the journey was likely to be hard, but any one might

undertake it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850 wagons

had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and 1500 more at the other ferries.

Familiarity had done much to divest the overland journey of its

terrors. We hear in this, and even in earlier years, of a sort of

plains travel de luxe, of wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from

the weather and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the world

as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury, hurrying out in June

and overtaking the trains, was impressed with the picturesque character

of the emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in company with

multitudes of emigrants the whole day," he wrote on June 12. "The road

has been lined to a long extent with their wagons, whose white covers,

glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a distance, ships upon the

ocean.... We passed also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon, drawn

by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household furniture. Behind

followed a covered cart containing the wife, driving herself, and a

host of babies--the whole bound to the land of promise, of the distance

to which, however, they seemed to have not the most remote idea. To the

tail of the cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls; two

milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare, upon the back of which

was perched a little, brown-faced, barefooted girl, not more than seven

years old, while a small sucking colt brought up the rear." Travellers

eastward bound, meeting the procession, reported the hundreds and

thousands whom they met.

The organization of the trains was not unlike that of the Oregonians

and the Mormons, though generally less formal than either of these.

The wagons were commonly grouped in companies for protection, little

needed, since the Indians were at peace during most of 1849. At

nightfall the long columns came to rest and worked their wagons into

the corral which was the typical plains encampment. To form this the

wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with its tongue overlapping

the vehicle ahead, and each fastened to the next with the brake or yoke

chains. An opening at one end allowed for driving in the stock, which

could here be protected from stampede or Indian theft. In emergency

the circle of wagons formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside

ordinary Indian attacks. When the companies had been on the road for a

few weeks the forming of the corral became an easy military manoeuvre.

The itinerant circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of prairie

schooners.

The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by worse sufferings

than the trail had yet known. Cholera broke out among the trains at the

start. It stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five thousand

graves, until they reached the hills beyond Fort Laramie. The price

of inexperience, too, had to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock

died. The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this. On July 27,

Stansbury observed: "To-day we find additional and melancholy evidence

of the difficulties encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before

halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had been broken up, the

spokes of the wheels taken to make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or

otherwise destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with articles

that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and steel, large blacksmiths'

anvils and bellows, crowbars, drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels,

axes, lead, trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,

cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels, harness, clothing, bacon,

and beans, were found along the road in pretty much the order in which

they have been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen, lying

in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained a part of the

trouble." In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and

twenty-seven dead oxen.

Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In

the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away,

so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were

forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.

The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy.

Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian

who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached

the gold fields.

It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California after July,

1849, when the overland folk began to arrive. All countries and all

stations in society had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000

or more whites who were there in the end of the year. The farmer, the

amateur prospector, and the professional gambler mingled in the crowd.

Loose women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who had come by

sea contained an over-share of the undesirable element that proposed

to live upon the recklessness and vices of the miners. The overland

emigrants were largely of farmer stock; whether they had possessed

frontier experience or not before the start, the 3000-mile journey

toughened and seasoned all who reached California. Nearly all possessed

the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.

The experience of Oregon might point to the future of California when

its strenuous population arrived upon the unprepared community. The

Mexican government had been ejected by war. A military government

erected by the United States still held its temporary sway, but

felt out of place as the controlling power over a civilian American

population. The new inhabitants were much in need of law, and had

the American dislike for military authority. Immediately Congress

was petitioned to form a territorial government for the new El

Dorado. But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of slavery

and freedom in the Southwest during its session of 1848-1849. It

adjourned with nothing done for California. The mining population was

irritated but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It had already

organized its miners' courts and begun to execute summary justice in

emergencies. It was quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion

of its administrative officers and erect its state government without

the consent of Congress. The military governor called the popular

convention; the constitution framed during September, 1849, was

ratified by popular vote on November 13; a few days later Governor

Riley surrendered his authority into the hands of the elected governor,

Burnett, and the officials of the new state. All this was done

spontaneously and easily. There was no sanction in law for California

until Congress admitted it in September, 1850, receiving as one of its

first senators, John C. Frémont.

The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon slavery in the Southwest,

a compromise made necessary by the appearance on the Pacific of a new

America. The "call of the West and the lust for gold" had done their

work in creating a new centre of life beyond the quondam desert.

The census of 1850 revealed something of the nature of this population.

Probably 125,000 whites, though it was difficult to count them and

impossible to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon and

California. Nine-tenths of these were in the latter colony. More than

11,000 were found in the settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many

more than 3000 Americans were scattered among the Mexican population

along the Rio Grande. The great trails had seen most of these

home-seekers marching westward over the desert and across the Indian

frontier which in the blindness of statecraft had been completed for

all time in 1840.

CHAPTER VIII

KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER

The long line separating the Indian and agricultural frontiers was

in 1850 but little farther west than the point which it had reached

by 1820. Then it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it

remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung out during this

generation, including Arkansas on the south and Iowa, Minnesota, and

Wisconsin on the north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War the

line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri at its bend. West

of this spot it had been kept from going by the tradition of the desert

and the pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind had filled up

with population, Oregon and California had appeared across the desert,

but the barrier had not been pushed away.

Through the great trails which penetrated the desert accurate knowledge

of the Far West had begun to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike

and Long had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and covetous

eyes had been cast upon the Indian lands across the border,--lands from

which the tribes were never to be removed without their consent, and

which were never to be included in any organized territory or state.

Most of the traffic over the trails and through this country had been

in defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes had granted

rights of transit, but such privileges as were needed and used by the

Oregon, and California, and Utah hordes were far in excess of these.

Most of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon Indian lands as

well as violators of treaty provisions. Trouble with the Indians had

begun early in the migrations.

[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1849

Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The

Southwest acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.]

At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the Indian office had

foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties have occurred during the

spring of the last and present year [1845] from the passing of

emigrants for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country. Large

companies have frequently rendezvoused on the Indian lands for months

previous to the period of their starting. The emigrants have two

advantages in crossing into the Indian Country at an early period of

the spring; one, the facility of grazing their stock on the rushes with

which the lands abound; and the other, that they cross the Missouri

River at their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be forced

by the military to put back. This passing of the emigrants through

the Indian Country without their permission must, I fear, result in

an unpleasant collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the

whites have no right to be in their country without their consent;

and the upper tribes, who subsist on game, complain that the buffalo

are wantonly killed and scared off, which renders their only means of

subsistence every year more precarious." Frémont had seen, in 1842,

that this invasion of the Indian Country could not be kept up safely

without a show of military force, and had recommended a post at the

point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.

The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated the relations

with the tribes, while the Indian agents continually called upon

Congress to redress or stop the wrongs being done as often by

panic-stricken emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate persuasion

and force," wrote the Commissioner in 1854, "some of these tribes have

been removed, step by step, from mountain to valley, and from river

to plain, until they have been pushed halfway across the continent.

They can go no further; on the ground they now occupy the crisis must

be met, and their future determined.... [There] they are, and as they

are, with outstanding obligations in their behalf of the most solemn

and imperative character, voluntarily assumed by the government." But a

relentless westward movement that had no regard for rights of Mexico in

either Texas or California could not be expected to notice the rights

of savages even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens rights

not inferior to those conceded by the government "to wandering nations

of savages." A shrewd and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who

had the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in 1853. "But

one course remains," he wrote, "which promises any permanent relief

to them, or any lasting benefit to the country in which they dwell.

That is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse laws' as

will invite the residence of traders amongst them, and _open the whole

Indian territory to settlement_. In this manner will be introduced

amongst them those who will set the example of developing the resources

of the soil, of which the Indians have not now the most distant idea;

who will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial to their

nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly, to those modes

of life which can alone secure them from the miseries of penury.

Trade is the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor

of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of all hereafter....

The present 'intercourse laws' too, so far as they are calculated to

protect the Indians from the evils of civilized life--from the sale of

ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals--are nothing more than a

dead letter; while, so far as they contribute to exclude the benefits

of civilization from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly

enforced."

In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress from the War

Department to the Interior, with the idea that the Indians would be

better off under civilian than military control, and shortly after

this negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements with the

tribes. The Sioux were persuaded in the summer of 1851 to make way for

increasing population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the same

year the tribes of the western plains were induced to make concessions.

The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte agency at Fort Laramie in

1851 were in the interest of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had

spent the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho

to the conference. Shoshoni were brought in from the West. From the

north of the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara, Grosventres,

and Crows. The treaties here concluded were never ratified in full,

but for fifteen years Congress paid various annuities provided by

them, and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right of the

United States to make roads across the plains and to fortify them

with military posts was fully agreed to, while the Indians pledged

themselves to commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two years later,

at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a conference with the plains Indians

of the south, Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of faith, which

the Indians did not have in the Government, nor the Government in them."

Overland traffic was made more safe for several years by these

treaties. Such friction and fighting as occurred in the fifties were

due chiefly to the excesses and the fears of the emigrants themselves.

But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern tribes

along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were in constant danger of

dispossession by the advance of the frontier itself.

The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in the early fifties,

was the impending danger threatening the peace of the border. There

was not as yet any special need to extend colonization across the

Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota were but

sparsely inhabited. Settlers for years might be accommodated farther

to the east. But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and aroused

passions in both North and South. Motives were so thoroughly mixed

that participants were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of

themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge, political ambition,

all mingled with pure philanthropy and a reasonable fear of outside

interference with domestic institutions. The compromise had settled

the future of the new lands, but between Missouri and the mountains

lay the residue of the Louisiana purchase, divided truly by the

Missouri compromise line of 36° 30', but not yet settled. Ambition to

possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for freedom was

stimulated by the debate and the fears of outside interference. The

nearest part of the unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence it

was that Kansas came within the public vision first.

It is possible to trace a movement for territorial organization in

the Indian Country back to 1850 or even earlier. Certain of the more

intelligent of the Indian colonists had been able to read the signs

of the times, with the result that organized effort for a territory

of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot country and had besieged

Congress between 1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment

were the Indians and the laws. Experience had long demonstrated the

unwisdom of permitting Indians and emigrants to live in the same

districts. The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties based

upon them, had guaranteed in particular that no territory or state

should ever be organized in this country. Good faith and the physical

presence of the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory could

appear.

The guarantee of permanency was based upon treaty, and in the eye of

Congress was not so sacred that it could not be modified by treaty.

As it became clear that the demand for the opening of these lands

would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared for the inevitable

by ordering, in March, 1853, a series of negotiations with the tribes

west of Missouri with a view to the cession of more country. The

Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, who later wrote a

book on "Our Indian Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to the

Indians the hard news that they were expected once more to vacate. He

found the tribes uneasy and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering

over their lands, had set them thinking. There had been no actual white

settlement up to October, 1853, so Manypenny declared, but the chiefs

feared that he was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The Indian

mind had some difficulty in comprehending the difference between ceding

their land by treaty and losing it by force.

At a long series of council fires the Commissioner soothed away some of

the apprehensions, but found a stubborn resistance when he came to talk

of ceding all the reserves and moving to new homes. The tribes, under

pressure, were ready to part with some of their lands, but wanted to

retain enough to live on. When he talked to them of the Great Father

in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony of the situation; the

guarantee of permanency had been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged

for a series of treaties in the following year.

In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with most of the tribes

fronting on Missouri between 37° and 42° 40'. Some of these had been

persuaded to move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of

the thirties. Others, always resident there, had accepted curtailed

reserves. The Omaha faced the Missouri, north of the Platte. South of

the Platte were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes of Missouri,

the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas,

and around Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization of a

high order. The Shawnee, immediately south of the Kansas, were also

well advanced in agriculture in the permanent home they had accepted.

The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea and Piankashaw, and the

Miami were further south. From those tribes more than thirteen million

acres of land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered and

reduced reserves the Indians retained for themselves about one-tenth

of what they ceded. Generally, when the final signing came, under

the persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the strange

surroundings of Washington, the chiefs surrendered the lands outright

and with no condition.

Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to give title at once

and held out for conditions of sale. The Iowa, the confederated minor

tribes, and notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust to the

United States, with the treaty pledge that the lands so yielded should

be sold at public auction to the highest bidder, the remainders should

then be offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre, and the

final remnants should be disposed of by the United States, the accruing

funds being held in trust by the United States for the Indians. By

the end of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In July, 1854,

Congress provided a land office for the territory of Kansas.

While the Indian negotiations were in progress, Senator Douglas was

forcing his Kansas-Nebraska bill at Washington. The bill had failed in

1853, partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of the Indian

agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the Democratic party carried it

along relentlessly. With words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as

Rhodes has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed by the

westward movement, subversive of the national pledge, and, blind as he

was, destructive as well of his party and his own political future.

The support of President Pierce and the coöperation of Jefferson Davis

were his in the struggle. It was not his intent, he declared, to

legislate slavery into or out of the territories; he proposed to leave

that to the people themselves. To this principle he gave the name of

"popular sovereignty," "and the name was a far greater invention than

the doctrine." With rising opposition all about him, he repealed the

Missouri compromise which in 1820 had divided the Indian Country by

the line of 36° 30' into free and slave areas, and created within these

limits the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was signed

by the President on May 30, 1854. In later years this day has been

observed as a memorial to those who lost their lives in fighting the

battle which he provoked.

With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri compromise repealed,

eager partisans prepared in the spring of 1854 to colonize the new

territories in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the slavery

side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the

leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves

and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these

for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the

future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of

voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas,

and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing

the erection of a free state on her western boundary. The northern

states had been stirred by the act as deeply as the South. In New

England the bill was not yet passed when leaders of the abolition

movement prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer, of Worcester, urged

during the spring that friends of freedom could do no better work than

aid in the colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own state, in

April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, through

which he proposed to aid suitable men to move into the debatable

land. Churches and schools were to be provided for them. A stern New

England abolition spirit was to be fostered by them. And they were

not to be left without the usual border means of defence. Amos A.

Lawrence, of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made Thayer's scheme

financially possible. Dr. Charles Robinson was their choice for leader

of emigration and local representative in Kansas.

The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated little by the

ordinary westward impulse but greatly by political ambition and

sectional rivalry. As late as October, 1853, there had been almost no

whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they began to come in,

in increasing numbers. The Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at

once, before the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before

land offices had been opened. The approach was by the Missouri River

steamers to Kansas City and Westport, near the bend of the river, where

was the gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north of the Kansas

River, was not yet open to legal occupation, but the Shawnee lands

had been ceded completely and would soon be ready. So the New England

companies worked their way on foot, or in hired wagons, up the right

bank of the Kansas, hunting for eligible sites. About thirty miles west

of the Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they picked their

spot late in July. The town of Lawrence grew out of their cluster of

tents and cabins.

It was more than two months after the arrival of the squatters at

Lawrence before the first governor of the new territory, Andrew H.

Reeder, made his appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established civil

government in Kansas. One of his first experiences was with the attempt

of United States officers at the post to secure for themselves pieces

of the Delaware lands which surrounded it. "While lying at the fort,"

wrote a surveyor who left early in September to run the Nebraska

boundary line, "we heard a great deal about those d--d squatters who

were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None of the Delaware lands

were open to settlement, since the United States had pledged itself to

sell them all at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But certain

speculators, including officers of the regular army, organized a town

company to preëmpt a site near the fort, where they thought they

foresaw the great city of the West. They relied on the immunity which

usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands, and seem even to have

used United States soldiers to build their shanties. They had begun to

dispose of their building lots "in this discreditable business" four

weeks before the first of the Delaware trust lands were put on sale.

However bitter toward each other, the settlers were agreed in their

attitude toward the Indians, and squatted regardless of Indian

rights or United States laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his

legislature, first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort Riley ejected it;

then at the Shawnee mission, close to Kansas City, where his presence

and its were equally without authority of law. He established election

precincts in unceded lands, and voting places at spots where no white

man could go without violating the law. The legal snarl into which the

settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the Indian policy. It

is even intimated that Governor Reeder was interested in a land scheme

at Pawnee similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.

The fight for Kansas began immediately after the arrival of Governor

Reeder and the earliest immigrants. The settlers actually in residence

at the commencement of 1855 seem to have been about 8500. Propinquity

gave Missouri an advantage at the start, when the North was not yet

fully aroused. At an election for territorial legislature held on

March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was revealed in all

its fulness when more than 6000 votes were counted among a population

which had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men had ridden over

in organized bands to colonize the precincts and carry the election.

The whole area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride of the

Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that Governor Reeder disavowed

certain of the results, yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July,

1855, was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members, while the

rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri code of law, thus laying the

foundations for a slave state.

The political struggle over Kansas became more intense on the border

and more absorbing in the nation in the next four years. The free-state

men, as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known, disavowed the

first legislature on the ground of its fraudulent election, while

President Pierce steadily supported it from Washington. Governor

Reeder was removed during its session, seemingly because he had thrown

doubts upon its validity. Protesting against it, the northerners held

a series of meetings in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some

twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and crystallized their

opposition under Dr. Robinson. Their efforts culminated at Topeka

in October in a spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary,

convention which framed a free-state constitution for Kansas and

provided for erecting a rival administration. Dr. Robinson became its

governor.

Before the first legislature under the Topeka constitution assembled,

Kansas had still further trouble. Private violence and mob attacks

began during the fall of 1855. What is known as the Wakarusa War

occurred in November, when Sheriff Jones of Douglas County tried to

arrest some free-state men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance

reënforced with Sharpe rifles from New England. Governor Wilson

Shannon, who had succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility

continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly the centre of

northern settlement and the object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri

mob visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving presence, it is

said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel and printing shop, and burned

the residence of Dr. Robinson.

In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river and attacked

Lecompton, but within a week of the sacking of Lawrence retribution

was visited upon the pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were

murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by a group of fanatical

free-state men. Just what provocation John Brown and his family had

received which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In many instances

individual anti-slavery men retaliated lawlessly upon their enemies.

But the leaders of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring Brown

and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts. It is certain that

in this struggle the free-state party, in general, wanted peaceful

settlement of the country, and were staking their fortunes and families

upon it. They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression was no

part of their platform.

The course of Governor Shannon reached its end in the summer of 1856.

He was disliked by the free-state faction, while his personal habits

gave no respectability to the pro-slave cause. At the end of his

régime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka constitution was

prevented by federal troops from convening in session at Topeka. A few

weeks later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and established his

seat of government in Lecompton, by this time a village of some twenty

houses. It took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only six weeks to

fall out with the pro-slave element and the federal land officers. He

resigned in March, 1857.

Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed Geary, the first official

attempt at a constitution was entered upon. The legislature had already

summoned a convention which sat at Lecompton during September and

October. Its constitution, which was essentially pro-slavery, however

it was read, was ratified before the end of the year and submitted to

Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which called the convention had

fallen into free-state hands, disavowed the constitution, and summoned

another convention. At Leavenworth this convention framed a free-state

constitution in March, which was ratified by popular vote in May,

1858. Governor Walker had already resigned in December, 1857. Through

holding an honest election and purging the returns of slave-state

frauds he had enabled the free-state party to secure the legislature.

Southerner though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty of the

administration in Kansas. He had yielded to the evidence of his eyes,

that the population of Kansas possessed a large free-state majority.

But so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington. Even Senator

Douglas, the patron of the popular sovereignty doctrine, had now broken

with President Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to form

their own institutions. No attention was ever paid by Congress to

this Leavenworth constitution, but when the Lecompton constitution

was finally submitted to the people by Congress, in August, 1858, it

was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a total of 13,000. Kansas

was henceforth in the hands of the actual settlers. A year later,

at Wyandotte, it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last

entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the Wyandotte Convention,"

says one of the local historians, "there were a few Democrats and one

or two cranks, and probably both were of some use in their way."

There had been no white population in Kansas in 1853, and no special

desire to create one. But the political struggle had advertised

the territory on a large scale, while the whole West was under the

influence of the agricultural boom that was extending settlement into

Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found

that about 8500 had come in since the erection of the territory. The

rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles and the stories of

Lawrence and Potawatomi, instead of frightening settlers away, drew

them there in increasing thousands. Some few came from the South, but

the northern majority was overwhelming before the panic of 1857 laid

its heavy hand upon expansion. There was a white population of 106,390

in 1860.

The westward movement, under its normal influences, had extended the

range of prosperous agricultural settlement into the Northwest in this

past decade. It had coöperated in the extension into that part of the

old desert now known as Kansas. But chiefly politics, and secondly the

call of the West, is the order of causes which must explain the first

westward advance of the agricultural frontier since 1820. Even in 1860

the population of Kansas was almost exclusively within a three days'

journey of the Missouri bend.

CHAPTER IX

"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"[2]

[2] This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The

Territory of Colorado" which was published in _The

American Historical Review_ in October, 1906.

The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of

the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land

beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without any semblance of

organization or law. Indeed within the area whites had been forbidden

to enter, since here was the final abode of the Indians. But with the

Kansas-Nebraska act all this was changed. In five years a series of

amorphous territories had been provided for by law.

Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct divisions.

From the Canadian border to the fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended.

Kansas lay between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the old Indian

Country, now much reduced by partition, embraced the rest. The whole

plains country, east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial

projects. Indian Territory was without the government which its name

implied, but popular parlance regarded it as the others and refused to

see any difference among them.

Beyond the mountain wall which formed the western boundary of Kansas

and Nebraska lay four other territories equally without particular

reason for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in 1846, had been

divided in 1853 by a line starting at the mouth of the Columbia and

running east to the Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its

northern side. The Utah territory which figured in the compromise

of 1850, and which Mormon migration had made necessary, extended

between California and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42° to New Mexico

at 37°. New Mexico, also of the compromise year, reached from Texas

to California, south of 37°, and possessed at its northeast corner a

panhandle which carried it north to 38° in order to leave in it certain

old Mexican settlements.

These divisions of the West embraced in 1854 the whole of the country

between California and the states. As yet their boundaries were

arbitrary and temporary, but they presaged movements of population

which during the next quarter century should break them up still

further and provide real colonies in place of the desert and the Indian

Country. Congress had no formative part in the work. Population broke

down barriers and showed the way, while laws followed and legalized

what had been done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the

mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains no prophecy of the four

states which were shortly to appear.

[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1854

Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky

Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.]

For several decades the area of Kansas territory, and the southern

part of Nebraska, had been well known as the range of the plains

Indians,--Pawnee and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche

and Apache. Through this range the caravans had gone. Here had been

constant military expeditions as well. It was a common summer's

campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort Leavenworth to

the mountains by either the Arkansas or Platte route, to skirt the

eastern slopes along the southern fork of the Platte, and return home

by the other trail. Those military demonstrations, which were believed

to be needed to impress the tribes, had made this march a regular

performance. Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner and

Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous others in between.

A well-known trail had been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on

the north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte at Cherry

Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and on to Bent's Fort and the

New Mexican towns. Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end.

Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling over slavery, but they

had scarcely scratched the soil for one-fourth of the length of the

territory.

The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme west of Kansas, lay

between the great trails, so that it was off the course of the chief

migrations, and none visited it for its own sake. The deviating trails,

which commenced at the Missouri bend, were some 250 miles apart at the

one hundred and third meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized

in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose the hills around

Pike's Peak, which rumor came in three years more to tip with gold.

The discovery of gold in California prepared the public for similar

finds in other parts of the West. With many of the emigrants

prospecting had become a habit that sent small bands into the mountain

valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories of success in various

regions arose repeatedly during the fifties and are so reasonable that

it is not possible to determine with certainty the first finds in many

localities. Any mountain stream in the whole system might be expected

to contain some gold, but deposits large enough to justify a boom were

slow in coming.

In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to Omaha from the

mountains, confirmed the rumors of a new discovery that had been

persistent for several months. The previous summer had seen organized

attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region the deposits whose

existence had been believed in, more or less, since 1850. Parties from

the gold fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton are

known to have been in the field and to have started various mushroom

settlements. El Paso, near the present site of Colorado Springs,

appeared, as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the South

Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry Creek,--Montana, Auraria,

Highland, and St. Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the

States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by trifling finds,

remained to occupy their flimsy cabins or to jump the claims of the

absentees. In the sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold

the finders and to start a small migration thither in the autumn. In

the early winter the groups on Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the

name of Denver City.

The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri Valley at the

strategic moment when the newness of Kansas had worn off, and the

depression of 1857 had brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier.

The adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to move, had been

reënforced by individuals down on their luck and reduced to any sort of

extremity. The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration to the new

diggings which started in the fall of 1858 and assumed great volume in

the spring of 1859.

The edge of the border for these emigrants was not much farther west

than it had been for emigrants of the preceding decade. A few miles

from the Missouri River all traces of Kansas or Nebraska disappeared,

whether one advanced by the Platte or the Arkansas, or by the

intermediate routes of the Smoky Hill and Republican. The destination

was less than half as far away as California had been. No mountains and

no terrible deserts were to be crossed. The costs and hardships of the

journey were less than any that had heretofore separated the frontier

from a western goal. There is a glimpse of the bustling life around the

head of the trails in a letter which General W. T. Sherman wrote to his

brother John from Leavenworth City, on April 30, 1859: "At this moment

we are in the midst of a rush to Pike's Peak. Steamboats arrive in twos

and threes each day, loaded with people for the new gold region. The

streets are full of people buying flour, bacon, and groceries, with

wagons and outfits, and all around the town are little camps preparing

to go west. A daily stage goes west to Fort Riley, 135 miles, and every

morning two spring wagons, drawn by four mules and capable of carrying

six passengers, start for the Peak, distance six hundred miles, the

journey to be made in twelve days. As yet the stages all go out and

don't return, according to the plan for distributing the carriages;

but as soon as they are distributed, there will be two going and two

returning, making a good line of stages to Pike's Peak. Strange to say,

even yet, although probably 25,000 people have actually gone, we are

without authentic advices of gold. Accounts are generally favorable

as to words and descriptions, but no positive physical evidence comes

in the shape of gold, and I will be incredulous until I know some

considerable quantity comes in in way of trade."

[Illustration: "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"

Reproduced by permission of the Montana Historical Society, from the

original handbill in its possession.]

Throughout the United States newspapers gave full notice to the new

boom, while a "Pike's Peak Guide," based on a journal kept by one of

the early parties, found a ready sale. No single movement had ever

carried so heavy a migration upon the plains as this, which in one

year must have taken nearly 100,000 pioneers to the mountains. "Pike's

Peak or Bust!" was a common motto blazoned on their wagon covers. The

sawmill, the press, and the stage-coach were all early on the field.

Byers, long a great editor in Denver, arrived in April to distribute

an edition of his _Rocky Mountain News_, which he had printed on one

side before leaving Omaha. Thenceforth the diggings were consistently

advertised by a resident enthusiast. Early in May the first coach of

the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company brought Henry Villard

into Denver. In June came no less a personage than Horace Greeley to

see for himself the new wonder. "Mine eyes have never yet been blessed

with the sight of any floor whatever in either Denver or Auraria,"

he could write of the village of huts which he inspected. The seal

of approval which his letters set upon the enterprise did much to

encourage it.

With the rush of prospectors to the hills, numerous new camps quickly

appeared. Thirty miles north along the foothills and mesas Boulder

marked the exit of a mountain creek upon the plains. Behind Denver,

in Clear Creek Valley, were Golden, at the mouth, and Black Hawk and

Central City upon the north fork of the stream. Idaho Springs and

Georgetown were on its south fork. Here in the Gregory district was the

active life of the diggings. The great extent of the gold belt to the

southwest was not yet fully known. Farther south was Pueblo, on the

Arkansas, and a line of little settlements working up the valley, by

Canyon City to Oro, where Leadville now stands.

Reaction followed close upon the heels of the boom, beginning its work

before the last of the outward bound had reached the diggings. Gold

was to be found in trifling quantities in many places, but the mob of

inexperienced miners had little chance for fortune. The great deposits,

which were some months in being discovered, were in refractory quartz

lodes, calling for heavy stamp mills, chemical processes, and, above

all, great capital for their working. Even for laborers there was no

demand commensurate with the number of the fifty-niners. Hence, more

than half of these found their way back to the border before the year

was over, bitter, disgusted, and poor, scrawling on deserted wagons, in

answer to the outward motto, "Busted! By Gosh!"

The problem of government was born when the first squatters ran the

lines of Denver City. Here was a new settlement far away from the seat

of territorial government, while the government itself was impotent.

Kansas had no legislature competent to administer law at home--far less

in outlying colonies. But spontaneous self-government came easily to

the new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers in his diary,

"that within two weeks of the arrival of a few dozen Americans in a

wilderness, they set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States

Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory! But we are of

a fast race and in a fast age and must prod along." An early snow in

November, 1858, had confined the miners to their cabins and started

politics. The result had been the election of two delegates, one to

Congress and one to Kansas legislature, both to ask for governmental

direction. Kansas responded in a few weeks, creating five new counties

west of 104°, and chartering a city of St. Charles, long after St.

Charles had been merged into Denver. Congress did nothing.

The prospective immigration of 1859 inspired further and more

comprehensive attempts at local government. It was well understood

that the news of gold would send in upon Denver a wave of population

and perhaps a reign of lawlessness. The adjournment of Congress

without action in their behalf made it certain that there could

be no aid from this quarter for at least a year, and became the

occasion for a caucus in Denver over which William Larimer presided

on April 11, 1859. As a result of this caucus, a call was issued for

a convention of representatives of the neighboring mining camps to

meet in the same place four days later. On April 15, six camps met

through their delegates, "being fully impressed with the belief, from

early and recent precedents, of the power and benefits and duty of

self-government," and feeling an imperative necessity "for an immediate

and adequate government, for the large population now here and soon to

be among us ... and also believing that a territorial government is not

such as our large and peculiarly situated population demands."

The deliberations thus informally started ended in a formal call for

a constitutional convention to meet in Denver on the first Monday in

June, for the purpose, as an address to the people stated, of framing

a constitution for a new "state of Jefferson." "Shall it be," the

address demanded, "the government of the knife and the revolver, or

shall we unite in forming here in our golden country, among the ravines

and gulches of the Rocky Mountains, and the fertile valleys of the

Arkansas and the Platte, a new and independent State?" The boundaries

of the prospective state were named in the call as the one hundred

and second and one hundred and tenth meridians of longitude, and the

thirty-seventh and forty-third parallels of north latitude--including

with true frontier amplitude large portions of Utah and Nebraska and

nearly half of Wyoming, in addition to the present state of Colorado.

When the statehood convention met in Denver on June 6, the time was

inopportune for concluding the movement, since the reaction had set in.

The height of the gold boom was over, and the return migration left it

somewhat doubtful whether any permanent population would remain in the

country to need a state. So the convention met on the 6th, appointed

some eight drafting committees, and adjourned, to await developments,

until August 1. By this later date, the line had been drawn between

the confident and the discouraged elements in the population, and for

six days the convention worked upon the question of statehood. As to

permanency there was now no doubt; but the body divided into two nearly

equal groups, one advocating immediate statehood, the other shrinking

from the heavy taxation incident to a state establishment and so

preferring a territorial government with a federal treasury behind it.

The body, too badly split to reach a conclusion itself, compromised by

preparing the way for either development and leaving the choice to

a public vote. A state constitution was drawn up on one hand; on the

other, was prepared a memorial to Congress praying for a territorial

government, and both documents were submitted to a vote on September

5. Pursuant to the memorial, which was adopted, another election was

held on October 3, at which the local agent of the new Leavenworth

and Pike's Peak Express Company, Beverly D. Williams, was chosen as

delegate to Congress.

The adoption of the territorial memorial failed to meet the need for

immediate government or to prevent the advocates of such government

from working out a provisional arrangement pending the action of

Congress. On the day that Williams was elected, these advocates chose

delegates for a preliminary territorial constitutional convention

which met a week later. "Here we go," commented Byers, "a regular

triple-headed government machine; south of 40 deg. we hang on to the

skirts of Kansas; north of 40 deg. to those of Nebraska; straddling

the line, we have just elected a Delegate to the United States

Congress from the 'Territory of Jefferson,' and ere long we will have

in full blast a provisional government of Rocky Mountain growth and

manufacture." In this convention of October 10, 1859, the name of

Jefferson was retained for the new territory; the boundaries of April

15 were retained, and a government similar to the highest type of

territorial establishment was provided for. If the convention had met

on the authority of an enabling act, its career could not have been

more dignified. Its constitution was readily adopted, while officers

under it were chosen in an orderly election on October 24. Robert

W. Steele, of Ohio, became its governor. On November 7 he met his

legislature and delivered his first inaugural address.

The territory of Jefferson which thus came into existence in the Pike's

Peak region illustrates well the spirit of the American frontier. The

fundamental principle of American government which Byers expressed in

connection with it is applicable at all times in similar situations.

"We claim," he wrote in his _Rocky Mountain News_, "that any body,

or community of American citizens, which from any cause or under

any circumstance is cut off from, or from isolation is so situated

as not to be under, any active and protecting branch of the central

government, have a right, if on American soil, to frame a government,

and enact such laws and regulations as may be necessary for their own

safety, protection, and happiness, always with the condition precedent,

that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central government

shall extend an _effective_ organization and laws over them, give it

their unqualified support and obedience." The life of the spontaneous

commonwealth thus called into existence is a creditable witness to the

American instinct for orderly government.

When Congress met in December, 1859, the provisional territory of

Jefferson was in operation, while its delegates in Washington were

urging the need for governmental action. To their influence, President

Buchanan added, on February 20, 1860, a message transmitting the

petition from the Pike's Peak country. The Senate, upon April 3,

received a report from the Committee on Territories introducing Senate

Bill No. 366, for the erection of Colorado territory, while Grow of

Pennsylvania reported to the House on May 10 a bill to erect in the

same region a territory of Idaho. The name of Jefferson disappeared

from the project in the spring of 1860, its place being taken by sundry

other names for the same mountain area. Several weeks were given,

in part, to debate over this Colorado-Idaho scheme, though as usual

the debate turned less upon the need for this territorial government

than upon the attitude which the bill should take toward the slavery

issue. The slavery controversy prevented territorial legislation in

this session, but the reasonableness of the Colorado demand was well

established.

The territory of Jefferson, as organized in November, 1859, had

been from the first recognized as merely a temporary expedient. The

movement for it had gained weight in the summer of that year from

the probability that it need not be maintained for many months. When

Congress, however, failed in the ensuing session of 1859-1860 to grant

the relief for which the pioneers had prayed, the wisdom of continuing

for a second year the life of a government admitted to be illegal came

into question. The first session of its legislature had lasted from

November 7, 1859, to January 25, 1860. It had passed comprehensive

laws for the regulation of titles in lands, water, and mines, and had

adopted civil and criminal codes. Its courts had been established

and had operated with some show of authority. But the service and

obedience to the government had been voluntary, no funds being on

hand for the payment of salaries and expenses. One of the pioneers

from Vermont wrote home, "There is no hopes [_sic_] of perfect quiet

in our governmental matters until we are securely under the wing of

our National Eagle." In his proclamation calling the second election

Governor Steele announced that "all persons who expect to be elected

to any of the above offices should bear in mind that there will be no

salaries or per diem allowed from this territory, but that the General

Government will be memorialized to aid us in our adversity."

Upon this question of revenue the territory of Jefferson was wrecked.

Taxes could not be collected, since citizens had only to plead grave

doubts as to the legality in order to evade payment. "We have tried a

Provisional Government, and how has it worked," asked William Larimer

in announcing his candidacy for the office of territorial delegate.

"It did well enough until an attempt was made to tax the people to

support it." More than this, the real need for the government became

less apparent as 1860 advanced, for the scattered communities learned

how to obtain a reasonable peace without it. American mining camps

are peculiarly free from the need for superimposed government. The

new camp at once organizes itself on a democratic basis, and in mass

meeting registers claims, hears and decides suits, and administers

summary justice. Since the Pike's Peak country was only a group of

mining camps, there proved to be little immediate need for a central

government, for in the local mining-district organizations all of

the most pressing needs of the communities could be satisfied. So

loyalty to the territory of Jefferson, in the districts outside

of Denver, waned during 1860, and in the summer of that year had

virtually disappeared. Its administration, however, held together.

Governor Steele made efforts to rehabilitate its authority, was himself

reëlected, and met another legislature in November.

When the thirty-sixth Congress met for its second session in December,

1860, the Jefferson organization was in the second year of its life,

yet in Congress there was no better prospect of quick action than there

had been since 1857. Indeed the election of Lincoln brought out the

eloquence of the slavery question with a renewed vigor that monopolized

the time and strength of Congress until the end of January. Had not

the departure of the southern members to their states cleared the way

for action, it is highly improbable that even this session would have

produced results of importance.

Grow had announced in the beginning of the session a territorial

platform similar to that which had been under debate for three

years. Until the close of January the southern valedictories held

the floor, but at last the admission of Kansas, on January 29, 1861,

revealed the fact that pro-slavery opposition had departed and that

the long-deferred territorial scheme could have a fair chance. On the

very day that Kansas was admitted, with its western boundary at the

twenty-fifth meridian from Washington, the Senate revived its bill No.

366 of the last session and took up its deliberation upon a territory

for Pike's Peak. Only by chance did the name Colorado remain attached

to the bill. Idaho was at one time adopted, but was amended out in

favor of the original name when the bill at last passed the Senate. The

boundaries were cut down from those which the territory had provided

for itself. Two degrees were taken from the north of the territory, and

three from the west. In this shape, between 37° and 41° north latitude,

and 25° and 32° of longitude west of Washington, the bill received the

signature of President Buchanan on February 28. The absence of serious

debate in the passage of this Colorado act is excellent evidence of the

merit of the scheme and the reasons for its being so long deferred.

President Buchanan, content with approving the bill, left the

appointment of the first officials for Colorado to his successor. In

the multitude of greater problems facing President Lincoln, this

was neglected for several weeks, but he finally commissioned General

William Gilpin as the first governor of the territory. Gilpin had long

known the mountain frontier; he had commanded a detachment on the

Santa Fé trail in the forties, and he had written prophetic books upon

the future of the country to which he was now sent. His loyalty was

unquestioned and his readiness to assume responsibility went so far as

perhaps to cease to be a virtue. He arrived in Denver on May 29, 1861,

and within a few days was ready to take charge of the government and to

receive from the hands of Governor Steele such authority as remained in

the provisional territory of Jefferson.

CHAPTER X

FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA

The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of mining episodes which,

within fifteen years of the discoveries in California, let in the

light of exploration and settlement upon hundreds of valleys scattered

over the whole of the Rocky Mountain West. The men who exploited

California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by

bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class,

mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which

permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced

before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for

gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana.

Activity was constant during these years all along the continental

divide. New camps were being born overnight, old ones were abandoned by

magic. Here and there cities rose and remained to mark success in the

search. Abandoned huts and half-worked diggings were scars covering a

fourth of the continent.

Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the largest of migrations,

but while Denver was being settled there began, farther west, a boom

which for the present outdid it in significance. The old California

trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada desert and entered California

by various passes through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts had

been planted along this trail by Mormons and others during the fifties,

until in 1854 the legislature of Utah had created a Carson County in

the west end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements along

the river of the same name. Small discoveries of gold were enough to

draw to this district a floating population which founded a Carson City

as early as 1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement

until after the finding of a marvellously rich vein of silver near Gold

Hill in the spring of 1859. Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a

few miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the famous Comstock

lode, upon which it was possible within five years to build a state.

The California population, already rushing about from one boom to

another in perpetual prospecting, seized eagerly upon this new district

in western Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and Placerville

was crowded beyond capacity, while hundreds marched over the mountains

on foot. "There was no difficulty in reaching the newly discovered

region of boundless wealth," asserted a journalistic visitor. "It lay

on the public highway to California, on the borders of the state. From

Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake,

the tide of emigration poured in. Transportation from San Francisco was

easy. I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead of winter, when

the mountains were covered with snow." Carson City had existed before

the great discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade southerner,

nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed it, while the typical population of

the mining camps piled in around the two.

In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The new pony express ran

through the heart of the fields and aided in advertising them east and

west. Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye. Both camps

obtained their territorial acts within the same week, that of Nevada

receiving Buchanan's signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west of

the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became the new territory

which, through the need of the union for loyal votes, gained its

admission as a state in three more years.

[Illustration: THE MINING CAMP

From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the

Montana Historical Society.]

The rush to Carson valley drew attention away from another mining

enterprise further south. In the western half of New Mexico, between

the Rio Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful mining ever

since the acquisition of the territory. The southwest boundary of the

United States after the Mexican War was defined in words that could

not possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This fact, together

with knowledge that an easy railway grade ran south of the Gila River,

had led in 1853 to the purchase of additional land from Mexico and

the definition of a better boundary in the Gadsden treaty. In these

lands of the Gadsden purchase old mines came to light in the years

immediately following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles D. Poston were most

active in promoting the mining companies which revived abandoned claims

and developed new ones near the old Spanish towns of Tubac and Tucson.

The region was too remote and life too hard for the individual miner

to have much chance. Organized mining companies here took the place of

the detached prospector of Colorado and Nevada. Disappointed miners

from California came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee of San

Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines.

Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.... It

was literally a paradise of devils." Excessive dryness, long distances,

and Apache depredation discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys of the

early fifties and the passage of the overland mail through the camps in

1858 advertised the Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.

The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the time the Mowry

mines and others in the Santa Cruz Valley, holding them in check till

a second mineral area in western New Mexico should be found. United

States army posts were abandoned, confederate agents moved in, and

Indians became bold. The federal authority was not reëstablished until

Colonel J. H. Carleton led his California column across the Colorado

and through New Mexico to Tucson early in 1862. During the next two

years he maintained his headquarters at Santa Fé, carried on punitive

campaigns against the Navaho and the Apache, and encouraged mining.

The Indian campaigns of Carleton and his aides in New Mexico have

aroused much controversy. There were no treaty rights by which the

United States had privileges of colonization and development. It

was forcible entry and retention, maintained in the face of bitter

opposition. Carleton, with Kit Carson's assistance, waged a war

of scarcely concealed extermination. They understood, he reported

to Washington, "the direct application of force as a law. If its

application be removed, that moment they become lawless. This has been

tried over and over and over again, and at great expense. The purpose

now is never to relax the application of force with a people that can

no more be trusted than you can trust the wolves that run through

their mountains; to gather them together little by little, on to a

reservation, away from the haunts, and hills, and hiding-places of

their country, and then to be kind to them; there teach their children

how to read and write, teach them the arts of peace; teach them the

truths of Christianity. Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas,

new modes of life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them

all the latent longings for murdering and robbing; the young ones will

take their places without these longings; and thus, little by little,

they will become a happy and contented people."

Mowry's mines had been seized by Carleton at the start, as tainted with

treason. The whole Tucson district was believed to be so thoroughly

in sympathy with the confederacy that the commanding officer was much

relieved when rumors came of a new placer gold field along the left

bank of the Colorado River, around Bill Williams Creek. Thither the

population of the territory moved as fast as it could. Teamsters and

other army employees deserted freely. Carleton deliberately encouraged

surveying and prospecting, and wrote personally to General Halleck and

Postmaster-general Blair, congratulating them because his California

column had found the gold with which to suppress the confederacy. "One

of the richest gold countries in the world," he described it to be,

destined to be the centre of a new territorial life, and to throw into

the shade "the insignificant village of Tucson."

The population of the silver camp had begun to urge Congress to

provide a territory independent of New Mexico, immediately after the

development of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had been sent

to Washington in the usual style. But congressional indifference to

new territories had blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened the

case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian wards and their rights,

the Superintendent of Indian Affairs had told of the sad peril of the

"unprotected miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear title.

They would offer to the "numerous and warlike tribes" an irresistible

opportunity. The territorial act was finally passed on February 24,

1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart of the new gold

field, at Fort Whipple, near which the city of Prescott soon appeared.

The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by the erection of a

territorial government. There never came in a population large enough

to intimidate the tribes, while bad management from the start provoked

needless wars. Most serious were the Apache troubles which began in

1861 and ceased only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies.

In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp Grant in 1871, when

citizens of Tucson, with careful premeditation, murdered in cold

blood more than eighty Apache, men, women, and children. The degree

of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry

has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice

of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache.

A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their

haunts--hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be

surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled--by white

flags, or any other method, human or divine--and then put to death.

If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual who thinks himself

a philanthropist, I can only say that I pity without respecting his

mistaken sympathy. A man might as well have sympathy for a rattlesnake

or a tiger."

The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by climate and

inaccessibility, brought life into the extreme Southwest. Those of

Nevada worked the partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old

Oregon country gave out its gold in these same years as miners opened

up the valleys of the Snake and the head waters of the Missouri River.

Right on the crest of the continental divide appeared the northern

group of mining camps.

The territory of Washington had been cut away from Oregon at its own

request and with Oregon's consent in 1853. It had no great population

and was the subject of no agricultural boom as Oregon had been, but

the small settlements on Puget Sound and around Olympia were too far

from the Willamette country for convenient government. When Oregon was

admitted in 1859, Washington was made to include all the Oregon country

outside the state, embracing the present Washington and Idaho, portions

of Montana and Wyoming, and extending to the continental divide.

Through it ran the overland trail from Fort Hall almost to Walla Walla.

Because of its urging Congress built a new wagon road that was passable

by 1860 from Fort Benton, on the upper Missouri, to the junction of the

Columbia and Snake. Farther east the active business of the American

Fur Company had by 1859 established steamboat communication from St.

Louis to Fort Benton, so that an overland route to rival the old Platte

trail was now available.

In eastern Washington the most important of the Indians were the Nez

Percés, whose peaceful habits and friendly disposition had been noted

since the days of Lewis and Clark, and who had permitted their valley

of the Snake to become a main route to Oregon. Treaties with these had

been made in 1855 by Governor Stevens, in accordance with which most of

the tribe were in 1860 living on their reserve at the junction of the

Clearwater and Snake, and were fairly prosperous. Here as elsewhere was

the specific agreement that no whites save government employees should

be allowed in the Indian Country; but in the summer of 1861 the news

that gold had been found along the Clearwater brought the agreement to

naught. Gold had actually been discovered the summer before. In the

spring of 1861 pack trains from Walla Walla brought a horde of miners

east over the range, while steamboats soon found their way up the

Snake. In the fork between the Clearwater and Snake was a good landing

where, in the autumn of 1861, sprang up the new Lewiston, named in

honor of the great explorer, acting as centre of life for five thousand

miners in the district, and showing by its very existence on the Indian

reserve the futility of treaty restrictions in the face of the gold

fever. The troubles of the Indian department were great. "To attempt

to restrain miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to restrain

the whirlwind," reported Superintendent Kendall. "The history of

California, Australia, Frazer river, and even of the country of which I

am now writing, furnishes abundant evidence of the attractive power of

even only reported gold discoveries.

"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed fact, and are equalled

in richness by few recorded discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility

of preventing miners from going to the mines, I have refrained from

taking any steps which, by certain want of success, would tend to

weaken the force of the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided

giving any consent to unauthorized statements, and verbally instructed

the agent in charge that, while he might not be able to enforce the

laws for want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt to lay

out a town at the juncture of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, as he

had expressed a desire of doing."

Continued developments proved that Lewiston was in the centre of a

region of unusual mineral wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed

closely by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary of the

Snake, a little farther south. The Boisé mines came on the heels of

this boom, being followed by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of

the great bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured the usual

flood of miners from the whole West. Before 1862 was over eastern

Washington had outgrown the bounds of the territorial government on

Puget Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the placers of the

Colorado Valley, and the Carson and Virginia City camps, these called

for and received a new territorial establishment.

In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska had met along a

common boundary at the top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington

was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape under the pressure

of a small but active population north of its seat of government. The

centres of population in Nebraska north of the Platte River represented

chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota. Emigrating from these

states farmers had by 1860 opened the country on the left bank of the

Missouri, in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri traffic had

developed both shores of the river past Fort Pierre and Fort Union

to Fort Benton, by 1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people

here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along the line of the

Missouri and the forty-third parallel. Dakota had been created out of

the country thus cut loose and in two years more shared in the fate

of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in 1863 to provide home

rule for the miners of the new mineral region. It included a great

rectangle, on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah and

Nebraska, west to its present western boundary at Oregon and 117°,

east to 104°, the present eastern line of Montana and Wyoming. Dakota

and Washington were cut down for its sake.

It seemed, in 1862 and 1863, as though every little rivulet in the

whole mountain country possessed its treasures to be given up to the

first prospector with the hardihood to tickle its soil. Four important

districts along the upper course of the Snake, not to mention hundreds

of minor ones, lent substance to this appearance. Almost before Idaho

could be organized its area of settlement had broadened enough to make

its own division in the near future a certainty. East of the Bitter

Root Mountains, in the head waters of the Missouri tributaries, came a

long series of new booms.

When the American Fur Company pushed its little steamer _Chippewa_ up

to the vicinity of Fort Benton in 1859, none realized that a new era

for the upper Missouri had nearly arrived. For half a century the fur

trade had been followed in this region and had dotted the country with

tiny forts and palisades, but there had been no immigration, and no

reason for any. The Mullan road, which Congress had authorized in 1855,

was in course of construction from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, but as

yet there were few immigrants to follow the new route. Considerably

before the territory of Idaho was created, however, the active

prospectors of the Snake Valley had crossed the range and inspected

most of the Blackfoot country in the direction of Fort Benton. They

had organized for themselves a Missoula County, Washington territory,

in July, 1862, an act which may be taken as the beginning of an

entirely new movement.

Two brothers, James and Granville Stuart, were the leaders in

developing new mineral areas east of the main range. After experience

in California and several years of life along the trails, they settled

down in the Deer Lodge Valley, and began to open up their mines in

1861. They accomplished little this year since the steamboat to Fort

Benton, carrying supplies, was burned, and their trip to Walla Walla

for shovels and picks took up the rest of the season. But early in

1862 they were hard and successfully at work. Reënforcements, destined

for the Salmon River mines farther west, came to them in June; one

party from Fort Benton, the other from the Colorado diggings, and both

were easily persuaded to stay and join in organizing Missoula County.

Bannack City became the centre of their operations.

Alder Gulch and Virginia City were, in 1863, a second focus for the

mines of eastern Idaho. Their deposits had been found by accident

by a prospecting party which was returning to Bannack City after an

unsuccessful trip. The party, which had been investigating the Big

Horn Mountains, discovered Alder Gulch between the Beaver Head and

Madison rivers, early in June. With an accurate knowledge of the

mining population, the discoverers organized the mining district and

registered their own claims before revealing the location of the new

diggings. Then came a stampede from Bannack City which gave to Virginia

City a population of 10,000 by 1864.

Another mining district, in Last Chance Gulch, gave rise in 1864 to

Helena, the last of the great boom towns of this period. Its situation

as well as its resources aided in the growth of Helena, which lay a

little west of the Madison fork of the Missouri, and in the direct line

from Bannack and Virginia City to Fort Benton. Only 142 miles of easy

staging above the head of Missouri River navigation, it was a natural

post on the main line of travel to the northwest fields.

The excitement over Bannack and Virginia and Helena overlapped in years

the period of similar boom in Idaho. It had begun even before Idaho had

been created. When this was once organized, the same inconveniences

which had justified it, justified as well its division to provide home

rule for the miners east of the Bitter Root range. An act of 1864

created Montana territory with the boundaries which the state possesses

to-day, while that part of Idaho south of Montana, now Wyoming, was

temporarily reattached to Dakota. Idaho assumed its present form. The

simultaneous development in all portions of the great West of rich

mining camps did much to attract public attention as well as population.

In 1863 nearly all of the camps were flourishing. The mountains were

occupied for the whole distance from Mexico to Canada, while the trails

were crowded with emigrants hunting for fortune. The old trails bore

much of the burden of migration as usual, but new spurs were opened

to meet new needs. In the north, the Mullan road had made easy travel

from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, and had been completed since 1862.

Congress authorized in 1864 a new road from eastern Nebraska, which

should run north of the Platte trail, and the war department had sent

out personally conducted parties of emigrants from the vicinity of St.

Paul. The Idaho and Montana mines were accessible from Fort Hall, the

former by the old emigrant road, the latter by a new northeast road to

Virginia City. The Carson mines were on the main line of the California

road. The Arizona fields were commonly reached from California, by way

of Fort Yuma.

The shifting population which inhabited the new territories invites

and at the same time defies description. It was made up chiefly of

young men. Respectable women were not unknown, but were so few in

number as to have little measurable influence upon social life. In

many towns they were in the minority, even among their sex, since the

easily won wealth of the camps attracted dissolute women who cannot

be numbered but who must be imagined. The social tone of the various

camps was determined by the preponderance of men, the absence of

regular labor, and the speculative fever which was the justification

of their existence. The political tone was determined by the nature

of the population, the character of the industry, and the remoteness

from a seat of government. Combined, these factors produced a type of

life the like of which America had never known, and whose picturesque

qualities have blinded the thoughtless into believing that it was

romantic. It was at best a hard bitter struggle with the dark places

only accentuated by the tinsel of gambling and adventure.

A single street meandering along a valley, with one-story huts

flanking it in irregular rows, was the typical mining camp. The saloon

and the general store, sometimes combined, were its representative

institutions. Deep ruts along the street bore witness to the heavy

wheels of the freighters, while horses loosely tied to all available

posts at once revealed the regular means of locomotion, and by the

careless way they were left about showed that this sort of property

was not likely to be stolen. The mining population centring here lived

a life of contrasts. The desolation and loneliness of prospecting and

working claims alternated with the excitement of coming to town. Few

decent beings habitually lived in the towns. The resident population

expected to live off the miners, either in way of trade, or worse.

The bar, the gambling-house, the dance-hall have been made too common

in description to need further account. In the reaction against

loneliness, the extremes of drunkenness, debauchery, and murder were

only too frequent in these places of amusement.

That the camps did not destroy themselves in their own frenzy is a

tribute to the solid qualities which underlay the recklessness and

shiftlessness of much of the population. In most of the camps there

came a time when decency finally asserted itself in the only possible

way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity with which these camps had

drawn their hundreds and their thousands into the fastnesses of the

territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary law and regular

institutions. Law and the politician followed fast enough, but there

was generally an interval after the discovery during which such peace

prevailed as the community itself demanded. In absence of sheriff and

constable, and jail in which to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance

committee was the only protection of the new camp. Such summary justice

as these committees commonly executed is evidence of innate tendency

toward law and order, not of their defiance. The typical camp passed

through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start, then came

an era of invasion by hordes of miners and disreputable hangers-on,

with accompanying violence and crime. Following this, the vigilance

committee, in its stern repression of a few of the crudest sins, marks

the beginning of a reign of law.

The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized the United

States with the whole area of the nation, and dispelled most of the

remaining tradition of desert which hung over the mountain West. They

attracted a large floating population, they secured the completion of

the political map through the erection of new territories, and they

emphasized loudly the need for national transportation on a larger

scale than the trail and the stage coach could permit. But they did

not directly secure the presence of permanent population in the new

territories. Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants as soon

as the first flush of discovery was over. Montana, Idaho, and Colorado

declined rapidly to a fraction of their largest size. None of them was

successful in securing a large permanent population until agriculture

had gained firm foothold. Many indeed who came to mine remained to

plough, but the permanent populating of the Far West was the work

of railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the mining camps

had served their purpose in revealing the nature of the whole of the

national domain.

CHAPTER XI

THE OVERLAND MAIL

Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized

traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all

the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri

border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and

left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not

self-supporting for a decade or more; few of them were independent

within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand for necessities

and luxuries which must be hauled from the states to the new market

by the routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled. Greater

than their need for material supplies was that for intellectual

stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and the regular carriage of the mails

were constantly demanded of the express companies and the post-office

department. To meet this pressure there was organized in the fifties

a great system of wagon traffic. In the years from 1858 to 1869 it

reached its mighty culmination; while its possibilities of speed,

order, and convenience had only just come to be realized when the

continental railways brought this agency of transportation to an end.

The individual emigrant who had gathered together his family, his

flocks, and his household goods, who had cut away from the life at

home and staked everything on his new venture, was the unit in the

great migrations. There was no regular provision for going unless one

could form his own self-contained and self-supporting party. Various

bands grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence, but the

characteristic feature of the emigration was private initiative. The

home-seekers had no power in themselves to maintain communication

with the old country, yet they had no disposition to be forgotten or

to forget. Professional freighting companies and carriers of mails

appeared just as soon as the traffic promised a profit.

A water mail to California had been arranged even before the gold

discovery lent a new interest to the Pacific Coast. From New York

to the Isthmus, and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be

carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which sent the

nucleus of its fleet around Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The

arrival of the first mail in San Francisco in February, 1849, commenced

the regular public communication between the United States and the

new colonies. For the places lying away from the coast, mails were

hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and

California were given a measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.

There is little interest in the earlier phases of the overland mail

service save in that they foreshadowed greater things. A stage line

was started from Independence to Santa Fé in the summer of 1849;

another contract was let to a man named Woodson for a monthly carriage

to Salt Lake City. Neither of the carriers made a serious attempt to

stock his route or open stations. Their stages advanced under the same

conditions, and with little more rapidity than the ordinary emigrant

or freighter. Mormon interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley

Carrying Company at about this time. For four or five years both

government and private industry were experimenting with the problems of

long-distance wagon traffic,--the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the

stations, the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort made in 1856,

by the War Department, to acclimate the Saharan camel on the American

desert as a beast of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the

experiment, in execution of which Secretary Davis sent Lieutenant H. C.

Wayne to the Levant to purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels

were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio. There is a long

congressional document filled with the correspondence of this attempt

and embellished with cuts of types of camels and equipment.