While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas plains, Congress made

a more definite movement towards supplying the Pacific Slope with

adequate service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in 1857 to call

for bids for an overland mail which, in a single organization, should

join the Missouri to Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run

at a high scheduled speed. The service which the Postmaster-general

invited in his advertisement was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or

semi-monthly at his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years;

it was to carry through the mails in four-horse wagons in not more

than twenty-five days. A long list of bidders, including most of the

firms engaged in plains freighting, responded with their bids and

itineraries; from them the department selected the offer of a company

headed by one John Butterfield, and explained to the public in 1857 the

reasons for its choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract

was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made a junction near the

western border of Arkansas, and proceeded thence through Preston,

Texas, El Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails the company was

to receive $600,000 a year. The choice of the most southern of routes

required considerable explanation, since the best-known road ran

by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this latter route the

Postmaster-general pointed out the cold and snow of winter, and claimed

that the experience of the department during seven years proved the

impossibility of maintaining a regular service here. A second available

road had been revealed by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across

northern Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but this was

likewise too long and too severe. The best route, in his mind--the one

open all the year, through a temperate climate, suitable for migration

as well as traffic--was this southern route, via El Paso. It is well to

remember that the administration which made this choice was democratic

and of strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific railway was

expected to follow the course of the overland mail.

The first overland coaches left the opposite ends of the line on

September 15, 1858. The east-bound stage carried an agent of the

Post-office Department, whose report states that the through trip to

Tipton, Missouri, and thence by rail to St. Louis, was made in 20 days,

18 hours, 26 minutes, actual time. "I cordially congratulate you upon

the result," wired President Buchanan to Butterfield. "It is a glorious

triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon follow

the course of the road, and the East and West will be bound together

by a chain of living Americans which can never be broken." The route

was 2795 miles long. For nearly all the way there was no settlement

upon which the stages could rely. The company built such stations as it

needed.

The vehicle of the overland mail, the most interesting vehicle of

the plains, was the coach manufactured by the Abbott-Downing Company

of Concord, New Hampshire. No better wagon for the purpose has been

devised. Its heavy wheels, with wide, thick tires, were set far apart

to prevent capsizing. Its body, braced with iron bands, and built of

stout white oak, was slung on leather thoroughbraces which took the

strain better and were more nearly unbreakable than any other springs.

Inside were generally three seats, for three passengers each, though

at times as many as fourteen besides the driver and messenger were

carried. Adjustable curtains kept out part of the rain and cold. High

up in front sat the driver, with a passenger or two on the box and a

large assortment of packages tucked away beneath his seat. Behind the

body was the triangular "boot" in which were stowed the passengers'

boxes and the mail sacks. The overflow of mail went inside under the

seats. Mr. Clemens tells of filling the whole body three feet deep with

mail, and of the passengers being forced to sprawl out on the irregular

bed thus made for them. Complaining letter-writers tell of sacks

carried between the axles and the body, under the coach, and of the

disasters to letters and contents resulting from fording streams. Drawn

by four galloping mules and painted a gaudy red or green, the coach

was a visible emblem of spectacular western advance. Horace Greeley's

coach, bright red, was once charged by a herd of enraged buffaloes and

overturned, to the discomfort and injury of the venerable editor.

It was no comfortable or luxurious trip that the overland passenger

had, with all the sumptuous equipment of the new route. The time

limit was twenty-five days, reduced in practice to twenty-two or

twenty-three, at the price of constant travel day and night, regardless

of weather or convenience. One passenger who declined to follow this

route has left his reason why. The "Southern, known as the Butterfield

or American Express, offered to start me in an ambulance from St.

Louis, and to pass me through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on the

Gila River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate portion

of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and nights--twenty-five being

schedule time--must be spent in that ambulance; passengers becoming

crazy by whiskey, mixed with want of sleep, are often obliged to be

strapped to their seats; their meals, despatched during the ten-minute

halts, are simply abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate

malarious; lamps may not be used at night for fear of non-existent

Indians: briefly there is no end to this Via Mala's miseries." But the

alternative which confronted this traveller in 1860 was scarcely more

pleasant. "You may start by stage to the gold regions about Denver City

or Pike's Peak, and thence, if not accidentally or purposely shot, you

may proceed by an uncertain ox train to Great Salt Lake City, which

latter part cannot take less than thirty-five days."

Once upon the road, the passenger might nearly as well have been at

sea. There was no turning back. His discomforts and dangers became

inevitable. The stations erected along the trail were chiefly for the

benefit of the live stock. Horses and mules must be kept in good shape,

whatever happened to passengers. Some of the depots, "home stations,"

had a family in residence, a dwelling of logs, adobe, or sod, and

offered bacon, potatoes, bread, and coffee of a sort, to those who were

not too squeamish. The others, or "swing" stations, had little but a

corral and a haystack, with a few stock tenders. The drivers were often

drunk and commonly profane. The overseers and division superintendents

differed from them only in being a little more resolute and dangerous.

Freighting and coaching were not child's play for either passengers or

employees.

The Butterfield Overland Express began to work its six year contract

in September, 1858. Other coach and mail services increased the number

of continental routes to three by 1860. From New Orleans, by way of

San Antonio and El Paso, a weekly service had been organized, but its

importance was far less than that of the great route, and not equal to

that by way of the Great Salt Lake.

Staging over the Platte trail began on a large scale with the discovery

of gold near Pike's Peak in 1858. The Mormon mails, interrupted by the

Mormon War, had been revived; but a new concern had sprung up under the

name of the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company. The firm of

Jones and Russell, soon to give way to Russell, Majors, and Waddell,

had seen the possibilities of the new boom camps, and had inaugurated

regular stage service in May, 1859. Henry Villard rode out in the

first coach. Horace Greeley followed in June. After some experimenting

in routes, the line accepted a considerable part of the Platte trail,

leaving the road at the forks of the river. Here Julesburg came into

existence as the most picturesque home station on the plains. It was

at this station that Jack Slade, whom Mark Twain found to be a mild,

hospitable, coffee-sharing man, cut off the ears of old Jules, after

the latter had emptied two barrels of bird-shot into him. It was

"celebrated for its desperadoes," wrote General Dodge. "No twenty-four

hours passed without its contribution to Boots Hill (the cemetery whose

every occupant was buried in his boots), and homicide was performed in

the most genial and whole-souled way."

Before the Denver coach had been running for a year another enterprise

had brought the central route into greater prominence. Butterfield had

given California news in less than twenty-five days from the Missouri,

but California wanted more even than this, until the electric telegraph

should come. Senator Gwin urged upon the great freight concern the

starting of a faster service for light mails only. It was William H.

Russell who, to meet this supposed demand, organized a pony express,

which he announced to a startled public in the end of March. Across the

continent from Placerville to St. Joseph he built his stations from

nine to fifteen miles apart, nearly two hundred in all. He supplied

these with tenders and riders, stocked them with fodder and fleet

American horses, and started his first riders at both ends on the 3d of

April, 1860.

Only letters of great commercial importance could be carried by the

new express. They were written on tissue paper, packed into a small,

light saddlebag, and passed from rider to rider along the route. The

time announced in the schedule was ten days,--two weeks better than

Butterfield's best. To make it called for constant motion at top

speed, with horses trained to the work and changed every few miles.

The carriers were slight men of 135 pounds or under, whose nerve and

endurance could stand the strain. Often mere boys were employed in the

dangerous service. Rain or snow or death made no difference to the

express. Dangers of falling at night, of missing precipitous mountain

roads where advance at a walk was perilous, had to be faced. When

Indians were hostile, this new risk had to be run. But for eighteen

months the service was continued as announced. It ceased only when the

overland telegraph, in October, 1861, declared its readiness to handle

through business.

In the pony express was the spectacular perfection of overland service.

Its best record was some hours under eight days. It was conducted along

the well-known trail from St. Joseph to Forts Kearney, Laramie, and

Bridger; thence to Great Salt Lake City, and by way of Carson City to

Placerville and Sacramento. It carried the news in a time when every

day brought new rumors of war and disunion, in the pregnant campaign

of 1860 and through the opening of the Civil War. The records of its

riders at times approached the marvellous. One lad, William F. Cody,

who has since lived to become the personal embodiment of the Far West

as Buffalo Bill, rode more than 320 consecutive miles on a single

tour. The literature of the plains is full of instances of courage and

endurance shown in carrying through the despatches.

The Butterfield mail was transferred to the central route of the pony

express in the summer of 1861. For two and a half years it had run

steadily along its southern route, proving the entire practicability

of carrying on such a service. But its expense had been out of all

proportion to its revenue. In 1859 the Postmaster-general reported

that its total receipts from mails had been $27,229.94, as against a

cost of $600,000. It is not unlikely that the fast service would have

been dropped had not the new military necessity of 1861 forbidden any

act which might loosen the bonds between the Pacific and the Atlantic

states. Congress contemplated the approach of war and authorized early

in 1861 the abandonment of the southern route through the confederate

territory, and the transfer of the service to the line of the pony

express. To secure additional safety the mails were sent by way of

Davenport, Iowa, and Omaha, to Fort Kearney a few times, but Atchison

became the starting-point at last, while military force was used to

keep the route free from interference. The transfer worked a shortening

of from five to seven days over the southern route.

In the autumn of 1861, when the overland mail and the pony express were

both running at top speed along the Platte trail, the overland service

reached its highest point. In October the telegraph brought an end to

the express. "The Pacific to the Atlantic sends greeting," ran the

first message over the new wire, "and may both oceans be dry before a

foot of all the land that lies between them shall belong to any other

than one united country." Probably the pony express had done its share

in keeping touch between California and the Union. Certainly only its

national purpose justified its existence, since it was run at a loss

that brought ruin to Russell, its backer, and to Majors and Waddell,

his partners.

Russell, Majors, and Waddell, with the biggest freighting business of

the plains, had gone heavily into passenger and express service in

1859-1860. Russell had forced through the pony express against the

wishes of his partners, carried away from practical considerations

by the magnitude of the idea. The transfer of the southern overland

to their route increased their business and responsibility. The

future of the route steadily looked larger. "Every day," wrote the

Postmaster-general, "brings intelligence of the discovery of new

mines of gold and silver in the region traversed by this mail route,

which gives assurance that it will not be many years before it will

be protected and supported throughout the greater part of the route

by a civilized population." Under the name of the Central Overland,

California, and Pike's Peak Express the firm tried to keep up a

struggle too great for them. "Clean out of Cash and Poor Pay" is said

to have been an irreverent nickname coined by one of their drivers.

As their embarrassments steadily increased, their notes were given to

a rival contractor who was already beginning local routes to reach

the mining camps of eastern Washington. Ben Holladay had been the

power behind the company for several months before the courts gave him

control of their overland stage line in 1862. The greatest names in

this overland business are first Butterfield, then Russell, Majors, and

Waddell, and then Ben Holladay, whose power lasted until he sold out

to Wells, Fargo, and Company in 1866. Ben Holladay was the magnate of

the plains during the early sixties. A hostile critic, Henry Villard,

has written that he was "a genuine specimen of the successful Western

pioneer of former days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful,

false, and cunning." In later days he carried his speculation into

railways and navigation, but already his was the name most often heard

in the West. Mark Twain, who has left in "Roughing It" the best picture

of life in the Far West in this decade, speaks lightly of him when he

tells of a youth travelling in the Holy Land with a reverend preceptor

who was impressing upon him the greatness of Moses, "'the great guide,

soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot where

we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in

extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children

of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over

the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and

landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot. It

was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack. Think of it!"

"'Forty years? Only three hundred miles?'" replied Jack. "'Humph! Ben

Holladay would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!'"

Under Holladay's control the passenger and express service were

developed into what was probably the greatest one-man institution in

America. He directed not only the central overland, but spur lines with

government contracts to upper California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

He travelled up and down the line constantly himself, attending in

person to business in Washington and on the Pacific. The greatest

difficulties in his service were the Indians and progress as stated in

the railway. Man and nature could be fought off and overcome, but the

life of the stage-coach was limited before it was begun.

The Indian danger along the trails had steadily increased since the

commencement of the migrations. For many years it had not been large,

since there was room for all and the emigrants held well to the beaten

track. But the gold camps had introduced settlers into new sections,

and had sent prospectors into all the Indian Country. The opening of

new roads to the Pacific increased the pressure, until the Indians

began to believe that the end was at hand unless they should bestir

themselves. The last years of the overland service, between 1862 and

1868, were hence filled with Indian attacks. Often for weeks no coach

could go through. Once, by premeditation, every station for nearly two

hundred miles was destroyed overnight, Julesburg, the greatest of them

all, being in the list. The presence of troops to defend seemed only to

increase the zeal of the red men to destroy.

Besides these losses, which lessened his profits and threatened ruin,

Holladay had to meet competition in his own trade, and detraction as

well. Captain James L. Fiske, who had broken a new road through from

Minnesota to Montana, came east in 1863, "by the 'overland stage,'

travelling over the saline plains of Laramie and Colorado Territory

and the sand deserts of Nebraska and Kansas. The country was strewed

with the skeletons and carcases of cattle, and the graves of the early

Mormon and California pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst

emigrant route that I have ever travelled; much of the road is through

deep sand, feed is very scanty, a great deal of the water is alkaline,

and the snows in winter render it impassable for trains. The stage line

is wretchedly managed. The company undertake to furnish travellers with

meals, (at a dollar a meal,) but very frequently on arriving at a

station there was nothing to eat, the supplies had not been sent on. On

one occasion we fasted for thirty-six hours. The stages were sometimes

in a miserable condition. We were put into a coach one night with only

two boards left in the bottom. On remonstrating with the driver, we

were told to hold on by the sides."

At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay controlled a monopoly

in stage service between the Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The

express companies and railways met him at the ends of his link, but had

to accept his terms for intermediate traffic. In the summer of 1865

a competing firm started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on

the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that Indian dangers here

were greater than along the Platte, and it learned how near it was to

bankruptcy when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had sent

his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand a more detailed

statement of resources and conditions than the Overland Despatch itself

possessed. He purchased easily at his own price and so ended this

danger of competition.

Such was the character of the overland traffic that any day might

bring a successful rival, or loss by accident. Holladay seems to have

realized that the advantages secured by priority were over, and that

the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866 he sold out his

lines to the greatest of his competitors, Wells, Fargo, and Company.

He sold out wisely. The new concern lost on its purchase through the

rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the Pacific railway had

advanced so far that the end of the mail route was moved to Fort

Kearney in November. By May, 1869, some years earlier than Wells, Fargo

had estimated, the road was done. And on the completion of the Union

and Central Pacific railways the great period of the overland mail was

ended.

Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland freight that lacked

the seeming romance of the former, but possessed quite as much of

real significance. No one has numbered the trains of wagons that

supplied the Far West. Santa Fé wagons they were now; Pennsylvania

or Pittsburg wagons they had been called in the early days of the

Santa Fé trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the remoter time

of the trans-Alleghany migrations. But whatever their name, they

retained the characteristics of the wagons and caravans of the earlier

period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons, organized in trains

of twenty-six, from the Butterfield Overland Despatch in 1866. Six

thousand were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in 1865. One

of the drivers on the overland mail, Frank Root, relates that Russell,

Majors, and Waddell owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height of

their business. The long trains, crawling along half hidden in their

clouds of dust, with the noises of the animals and the profanity of

the drivers, were the physical bond between the sections. The mail and

express served politics and intellect; the freighters provided the

comforts and decencies of life.

The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the first migrations.

Its growth during the fifties and its triumphant period in the sixties

were great arguments in favor of the construction of railways to take

its place. It came to an end when the first continental railroad

was completed in 1869. For decades after this time the stages still

found useful service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional

exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the railways were following

them closely, for a new period of American history had begun.

CHAPTER XII

THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER

In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented

the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the

Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus

and had advocates throughout its section of the country. The list of

claimants is a catalogue of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans,

Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Duluth were all

entered in the competition. By 1860 the idea had received general

acceptance; no one in the future need urge its adoption, but the

greatest part of the work remained to be done.

Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway was of

uncertain origin and parentage. Just so soon as there was a railroad

anywhere, it was inevitable that some enterprising visionary should

project one in imagination to the extremity of the continent. The

railway speculation, with which the East was seething during the

administrations of Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West,

so that the group of men advocating a railway to connect the oceans

were but the product of their time.

Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant

interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the

Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be

possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none

had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted

a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that

"the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate

nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned

Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that

the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated

persistently for his project.

The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest, coming in the years

immediately after the commencement of Whitney's advocacy, gave new

point to arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional

element. So long as Oregon constituted the whole American frontage on

the Pacific it was idle to debate railway routes south of South Pass.

This was the only known, practicable route, and it was the course

recommended by all the projectors, down to Whitney. But with California

won, the other trails by El Paso and Santa Fé came into consideration

and at once tempted the South to make the railway tributary to its own

interests.

Chief among the politicians who fell in with the growing railway

movement was Senator Benton, who tried to place himself at its

head. "The man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I

say (without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October, 1844,

"who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific

Ocean--entering the Oregon River--climbing the western slopes of the

Rocky Mountains--issuing from its gorges--and spreading its fertilizing

streams over our wide-extended Union!" After this date there was no

subject closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy

was constant. His last word in the Senate was concerning it. In 1849

he carried off its feet the St. Louis railroad convention with his

eloquent appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron road, and

make it from sea to sea--States and individuals making it east of

the Mississippi, the nation making it west. Let us ... rise above

everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ... build the great

road ... which shall be adorned with ... the colossal statue of the

great Columbus--whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass

of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road ... pointing

with outstretched arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying

passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"

By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad could be built along

the Platte route, and it was believed that the mountains could be

penetrated in several other places, but the process of surveying

with reference to a particular railway had not yet been begun. It

is possible and perhaps instructive to make a rough grouping, in two

classes divided by the year 1842, of the explorations before 1853.

So late as Frémont's day it was not generally known whether a great

river entered the Pacific between the Columbia and the Colorado.

Prior to 1842 the explorations are to be regarded as "incidents"

and "adventures" in more or less unknown countries. The narratives

were popular rather than scientific, representing the experiences of

parties surveying boundary lines or locating wagon roads, of troops

marching to remote posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and

casual explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed a large mass

of detailed but unorganized information concerning the country where

the continental railway must run. But Lieutenant Frémont, in 1842,

commenced the effort by the United States to acquire accurate and

comprehensive knowledge of the West. In 1842, 1843, and 1845 Frémont

conducted the three Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him

for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by Charles Preuss for his

second expedition, confined itself in strict scientific fashion to the

facts actually observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the best

map made before 1853. The individual expeditions which in the later

forties filled in the details of portions of the Frémont map are too

numerous for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before 1853, all

serving to extend both general and particular knowledge of the West. To

these was added a great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants

and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific knowledge of

nearly all the West, and accurate information concerning some portions

of it. The railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction in

which the roads must run, but no road could well be located without a

more comprehensive survey than had yet been made.

The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was founded almost

exclusively upon general and inaccurate knowledge of the West. The

exact location of the line was naturally left for the professional

civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself with general

principles. Frequently these were sufficient, yet, as in the case

of Benton, misinformation led to the waste of strength upon routes

unquestionably bad. But there was slight danger of the United States

being led into an unwise route, since in the diversity of routes

suggested there was deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as

the idea was received with unanimity, the routes were fought with

increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved in 1852 when the choice of

routes had become more important than the method of construction.

In 1852-1853 Congress worked upon one of the many bills to construct

the much-desired railway to the Pacific. It was discovered that an

absolute majority in favor of the work existed, but the enemies of the

measure, virulent in proportion as they were in the minority, were

able to sow well-fertilized dissent. They admitted and gloried in

the intrigue which enabled them to command through the time-honored

method of division. They defeated the road in this Congress. But when

the army appropriation bill came along in February, 1853, Senator

Gwin asked for an amendment for a survey. He doubted the wisdom of a

survey, since, "if any route is reported to this body as the best,

those that may be rejected will always go against the one selected."

But he admitted himself to be as a drowning man who "will catch at

straws," and begged that $150,000 be allowed to the President for a

survey of the best routes from the Mississippi to the Pacific, the

survey to be conducted by the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the

regular army. To a non-committal measure like this the opposition could

make slight resistance. The Senate, by a vote of 31 to 16, added this

amendment to the army appropriation bill, while the House concurred in

nearly the same proportion. The first positive official act towards the

construction of the road was here taken.

Under the orders of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, well-organized

exploring parties took to the field in the spring of 1853. Farthest

north, Isaac I. Stevens, bound for his post as first governor of

Washington territory, conducted a line of survey to the Pacific between

the parallels of 47° and 49°, north latitude. South of the Stevens

survey, four other lines were worked out. Near the parallels of 41° and

42°, the old South Pass route was again examined. Frémont's favorite

line, between 38° and 39°, received consideration. A thirty-fifth

parallel route was examined in great detail, while on this and another

along the thirty-second parallel the most friendly attentions of the

War Department were lavished. The second and third routes had few

important friends. Governor Stevens, because he was a first-rate

fighter, secured full space for the survey in his charge. But the

thirty-second and thirty-fifth parallel routes were those which were

expected to make good.

Governor Stevens left Washington on May 9, 1853, for St. Louis, where

he made arrangements with the American Fur Company to transport a large

part of his supplies by river to Fort Union. From St. Louis he ascended

the Mississippi by steamer to St. Paul, near which city Camp Pierce,

his first organized camp, had been established. Here he issued his

instructions and worked into shape his party,--to say nothing of his

172 half-broken mules. "Not a single full team of broken animals could

be selected, and well broken riding animals were essential, for most of

the gentlemen of the scientific corps were unaccustomed to riding." One

of the engineers dislocated a shoulder before he conquered his steed.

The party assigned to Governor Stevens's command was recruited with

reference to the varied demands of a general exploring and scientific

reconnaissance. Besides enlisted men and laborers, it included

engineers, a topographer, an artist, a surgeon and naturalist, an

astronomer, a meteorologist, and a geologist. Its two large volumes of

report include elaborate illustrations and appendices on botany and

seven different varieties of zoölogy in addition to the geographical

details required for the railway.

The expedition, in its various branches, attacked the northernmost

route simultaneously in several places. Governor Stevens led the

eastern division from St. Paul. A small body of his men, with much of

the supplies, were sent up the Missouri in the American Fur Company's

boat to Fort Union, there to make local observations and await the

arrival of the governor. United there the party continued overland

to Fort Benton and the mountains. Six years later than this it would

have been possible to ascend by boat all the way to Fort Benton, but

as yet no steamer had gone much above Fort Union. From the Pacific end

the second main division operated. Governor Stevens secured the recall

of Captain George B. McClellan from duty in Texas, and his detail in

command of a corps which was to proceed to the mouth of the Columbia

River and start an eastward survey. In advance of McClellan, Lieutenant

Saxton was to hurry on to erect a supply depot in the Bitter Root

Valley, and then to cross the divide and make a junction with the main

party.

From Governor Stevens's reports it would seem that his survey was a

triumphal progress. To his threefold capacities as commander, governor,

and Indian superintendent, nature had added a magnifying eye and

an unrestrained enthusiasm. No formal expedition had traversed his

route since the day of Lewis and Clark. The Indians could still be

impressed by the physical appearance of the whites. His vanity led him

at each success or escape from accident to congratulate himself on the

antecedent wisdom which had warded off the danger. But withal, his

report was thorough and his party was loyal. The _voyageurs_ whom he

had engaged received his special praise. "They are thorough woodsmen

and just the men for prairie life also, going into the water as

pleasantly as a spaniel, and remaining there as long as needed."

Across the undulating fertile plains the party advanced from St. Paul

with little difficulty. Its draught animals steadily improved in health

and strength. The Indians were friendly and honest. "My father," said

Old Crane of the Assiniboin, "our hearts are good; we are poor and have

not much.... Our good father has told us about this road. I do not

see how it will benefit us, and I fear my people will be driven from

these plains before the white men." In fifty-five days Fort Union was

reached. Here the American Fur Company maintained an extensive post

in a stockade 250 feet square, and carried on a large trade with "the

Assiniboines, the Gros Ventres, the Crows, and other migratory bands

of Indians." At Fort Union, Alexander Culbertson, the agent, became

the guide of the party, which proceeded west on August 10. From Fort

Union it was nearly 400 miles to Fort Benton, which then stood on the

left bank of the Missouri, some eighteen miles below the falls. The

country, though less friendly than that east of the Missouri, offered

little difficulty to the party, which covered the distance in three

weeks. A week later, September 8, a party sent on from Fort Benton met

Lieutenant Saxton coming east.

The chief problems of the Stevens survey lay west of Fort Benton,

in the passes of the continental divide. Lieutenant Saxton had left

Vancouver early in July, crossed the Cascades with difficulty, and

started up the Columbia from the Dalles on July 18. He reached Fort

Walla Walla on the 27th, and proceeded thence with a half-breed guide

through the country of the Spokan and the Coeur d'Alene. Crossing the

Snake, he broke his only mercurial barometer and was forced thereafter

to rely on his aneroid. Deviating to the north, he crossed Lake Pend

d'Oreille on August 10, and reached St. Mary's village, in the Bitter

Root Valley, on August 28. St. Mary's village, among the Flatheads, had

been established by the Jesuit fathers, and had advanced considerably,

as Indian civilization went. Here Saxton erected his supply depot,

from which he advanced with a smaller escort to join the main party.

Always, even in the heart of the mountains, the country exceeded his

expectations. "Nature seemed to have intended it for the great highway

across the continent, and it appeared to offer but little obstruction

to the passage of a railroad."

Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced his party at Fort

Benton, stored much of his government property there, and started

west with a pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved on

September 22, anxious lest snow should catch him in the mountains. At

Fort Benton he left a detachment to make meteorological observations

during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left another under Lieutenant

Mullan. On October 7 he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley

for Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's party, which had been

spending a difficult season in the passes of the Cascade range. Because

of overcautious advice which McClellan here gave him, and since his

animals were tired out with the summer's hardships, he practically

ended his survey for 1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia

to Olympia and his new territory.

The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to make one of the first

of the Pacific railway reports. His was the only survey from the

Mississippi to the ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30, 1854,

it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled reports. In 1859 he

submitted his "narrative and final report" which the Senate ordered

Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February of

that year. This document is printed as supplement to Volume I, but

really consists of two large volumes which are commonly bound together

as Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes of the reports,

his are filled with lithographs and engravings of fauna, flora, and

topography.

The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by Lieutenant E. G.

Beckwith, of the third artillery, in the summer of 1854. East of Fort

Bridger, the War Department felt it unnecessary to make a special

survey, since Frémont had traversed and described the country several

times and Stansbury had surveyed it carefully as recently as 1849-1850.

At the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt Lake. During

April he visited the Green River Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by

his surveys the entire practicability of railway construction here.

In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake and passed along

the Humboldt to the Sacramento Valley. He had no important adventures

and was impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians, whose

grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups" were frequently seen. As

his band approached the Indians would fearfully cache their belongings

in the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed a novel and ludicrous

sight of wretchedness to see them approach their bush and attempt,

slyly (for they still tried to conceal from me what they were about),

to repossess themselves of their treasures, one bringing out a piece

of old buckskin, a couple of feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn;

another a half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition,

sewed together, which he would swing over his shoulders by a

string--his only blanket or clothing; while a third brought out a blue

string, which he girded about him and walked away in full dress--one

of the lords of the soil." It needed no special emphasis in Beckwith's

report to prove that a railway could follow this middle route, since

thousands of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.

[Illustration: FORT SNELLING

From an old photograph, loaned by Horace B. Hudson, of Minneapolis.]

Beckwith, who started his forty-second parallel survey from Salt Lake

City, had reached that point as one of the officers in Gunnison's

unfortunate party. Captain J. W. Gunnison had followed Governor Stevens

into St. Louis in 1853. His field of exploration, the route of 38°-39°,

was by no means new to him since he had been to Utah with Stansbury

in 1849 and 1850, and had already written one of the best books upon

the Mormon settlement. He carried his party up the Missouri to a

fitting-out camp just below the mouth of the Kansas River, five miles

from Westport. Like other commanders he spent much time at the start

in "breaking in wild mules," with which he advanced in rain and mud on

June 23. For more than two weeks his party moved in parallel columns

along the Santa Fé road and the Smoky Hill fork of the Kansas. Near

Walnut creek on the Santa Fé road they united, and soon were following

the Arkansas River towards the mountains. At Fort Atkinson they found a

horde of the plains Indians waiting for Major Fitzpatrick to make a

treaty with them. Always their observations were taken with regularity.

One day Captain Gunnison spent in vain efforts to secure specimens of

the elusive prairie dog. On August 1, when they were ready to leave the

Arkansas and plunge southwest into the Sangre de Cristo range, they

were gratified "by a clear and beautiful view of the Spanish Peaks."

This thirty-ninth parallel route, which had been a favorite with

Frémont, crossed the divide near the head of the Rio Grande. Its

grades, which were difficult and steep at best, followed the Huerfano

Valley and Cochetopa Pass. Across the pass, Gunnison began his descent

of the arid alkali valley of the Uncompahgre,--a valley to-day about

to blossom as the rose because of the irrigation canal and tunnel

bringing to it the waters of the neighboring Gunnison River. With

heavy labor, intense heat, and weakening teams, Gunnison struggled on

through September and October towards Salt Lake in Utah territory. Near

Sevier Lake he lost his life. Before daybreak, on October 26, he and a

small detachment of men were surprised by a band of young Paiute. When

the rest of his party hurried up to the rescue, they found his body

"pierced with fifteen arrows," and seven of his men lying dead around

him. Beckwith, who succeeded to the command, led the remainder of the

party to Salt Lake City, where public opinion was ready to charge the

Mormons with the murder. Beckwith believed this to be entirely false,

and made use of the friendly assistance of Brigham Young, who persuaded

the chiefs of the tribe to return the instruments and records which had

been stolen from the party.

The route surveyed by Captain Gunnison passed around the northern end

of the ravine of the Colorado River, which almost completely separates

the Southwest from the United States. Farther south, within the United

States, were only two available points at which railways could cross

the cañon, at Fort Yuma and near the Mojave River. Towards these

crossings the thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallel surveys were

directed.

Second only to Governor Stevens's in its extent was the exploration

conducted by Lieutenant A. W. Whipple from Fort Smith on the Arkansas

to Los Angeles along the thirty-fifth parallel. Like that of Governor

Stevens this route was not the channel of any regular traffic, although

later it was to have some share in the organized overland commerce.

Here also was found a line that contained only two or three serious

obstacles to be overcome. Whipple's instructions planned for him to

begin his observations at the Mississippi, but he believed that the

navigable Arkansas River and the railways already projected in that

state made it needless to commence farther east than Fort Smith, on the

edge of the Indian Country. He began his survey on July 14, 1853. His

westward march was for two months up the right bank of the Canadian

River, as it traversed the Choctaw and Chickasaw reserves, to the

hundredth meridian, where it emerged from the panhandle of Texas, and

across the panhandle into New Mexico. After crossing the upper waters

of the Rio Pecos he reached the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, where his

party tarried for a month or more, working over their observations,

making local explorations, and sending back to Washington an account

of their proceedings thus far. Towards the middle of November they

started on toward the Colorado Chiquita and the Bill Williams Fork,

through "a region over which no white man is supposed to have passed."

The severest difficulties of the trip were found near the valley of the

Colorado River, which was entered at the junction of the Bill Williams

Fork and followed north for several days. A crossing here was made near

the supposed mouth of the Mojave River at a place where porphyritic

and trap dykes, outcropping, gave rise to the name of the Needles.

The river was crossed February 27, 1854, three weeks before the party

reached Los Angeles.

South of the route of Lieutenant Whipple, the thirty-second parallel

survey was run to the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. No

attempt was made in this case at a comprehensive survey under a single

leader. Instead, the section from the Rio Grande at El Paso to the

Red River at Preston, Texas, was run by John Pope, brevet captain in

the topographical engineers, in the spring of 1854. Lieutenant J. G.

Parke carried the line at the same time from the Pimas villages on the

Gila to the Rio Grande. West of the Pimas villages to the Colorado,

a reconnoissance made by Lieutenant-colonel Emory in 1847 was drawn

upon. The lines in California were surveyed by yet a different party.

Here again an easy route was discovered to exist. Within the states of

California and Oregon various connecting lines were surveyed by parties

under Lieutenant R. S. Williamson in 1855.

The evidence accumulated by the Pacific railway surveys began to pour

in upon the War Department in the spring of 1854. Partial reports

at first, elaborate and minute scientific articles following later,

made up a series which by the close of the decade filled the twelve

enormous volumes of the published papers. Rarely have efforts so great

accomplished so little in the way of actual contribution to knowledge.

The chief importance of the surveys was in proving by scientific

observation what was already a commonplace among laymen--that the

continent was traversable in many places, and that the incidental

problems of railway construction were in finance rather than in

engineering. The engineers stood ready to build the road any time and

almost anywhere.

The Secretary of War submitted to Congress the first instalment of his

report under the resolution of March 3, 1853, on February 27, 1855. As

yet the labors of compilation and examination of the field manuscripts

were by no means completed, but he was able to make general statements

about the probability of success. At five points the continental

divide had been crossed; over four of these railways were entirely

practicable, although the shortest of the routes to San Francisco ran

by the one pass, Cochetopa, where it would be unreasonable to construct

a road.

From the routes surveyed, Secretary Davis recommended one as "the most

practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi

River to the Pacific Ocean." In all cases cost, speed of construction,

and ease in operation needed to be ascertained and compared. The

estimates guessed at by the parties in the field, and revised by the

War Department, pointed to the southernmost as the most desirable

route. To reach this conclusion it was necessary to accuse Governor

Stevens of underestimating the cost of labor along his northern line;

but the figures as taken were conclusive. On this thirty-second

parallel route, declared the Secretary of War, "the progress of the

work will be regulated chiefly by the speed with which cross-ties

and rails can be delivered and laid.... The few difficult points ...

would delay the work but an inconsiderable period.... The climate on

this route is such as to cause less interruption to the work than on

any other route. Not only is this the shortest and least costly route

to the Pacific, but it is the shortest and cheapest route to San

Francisco, the greatest commercial city on our western coast; while

the aggregate length of railroad lines connecting it at its eastern

terminus with the Atlantic and Gulf seaports is less than the aggregate

connection with any other route."

The Pacific railway surveys had been ordered as the only step which

Congress in its situation of deadlock could take. Senator Gwin had long

ago told his fears that the advocates of the disappointed routes would

unite to hinder the fortunate one. To the South, as to Jefferson Davis,

Secretary of War, the thirty-second parallel route was satisfactory;

but there was as little chance of building a railway as there had been

in 1850. In days to come, discussion of railways might be founded upon

facts rather than hopes and fears, but either unanimity or compromise

was in a fairly remote future. The overland traffic, which was assuming

great volume as the surveys progressed, had yet nearly fifteen years

before the railway should drive it out of existence. And no railway

could even be started before war had removed one of the contesting

sections from the floor of Congress.

Yet in the years since Asa Whitney had begun his agitation the railways

of the East had constantly expanded. The first bridge to cross the

Mississippi was under construction when Davis reported in 1855. The

Illinois Central was opened in 1856. When the Civil War began, the

railway frontier had become coterminous with the agricultural frontier,

and both were ready to span the gap which separated them from the

Pacific.

CHAPTER XIII

THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD

It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of the Union Pacific

Railroad that the period of agitation was approaching probable success

when the latter was deferred because of the rivalry of sections and

localities into which the scheme was thrown. From about 1850 until 1853

it indeed seemed likely that the road would be built just so soon as

the terminus could be agreed upon. To be sure, there was keen rivalry

over this; yet the rivalry did not go beyond local jealousies and might

readily be compromised. After the reports of the surveys were completed

and presented to Congress the problem took on a new aspect which

promised postponement until a far greater question could be solved.

Slavery and the Pacific railroad are concrete illustrations of the two

horns of the national dilemma.

As a national project, the railway raised the problem of its

construction under national auspices. Was the United States, or

should it become, a nation competent to undertake the work? With no

hesitation, many of the advocates of the measure answered yes. Yet

even among the friends of the road the query frequently evoked the

other answer. Slavery had already taken its place as an institution

peculiar to a single section. Its defence and perpetuation depended

largely upon proving the contrary of the proposition that the Pacific

railroad demanded. For the purposes of slavery defence the United

States must remain a mere federation, limited in powers and lacking in

the attributes of sovereignty and nationality. Looking back upon this

struggle, with half a century gone by, it becomes clear that the final

answer upon both questions, slavery and railway, had to be postponed

until the more fundamental question of federal character had been

worked out. The antitheses were clear, even as Lincoln saw them in

1858. Slavery and localism on the one hand, railway and nationalism on

the other, were engaged in a vital struggle for recognition. Together

they were incompatible. One or the other must survive alone. Lincoln

saw a portion of the problem, and he sketched the answer: "I do not

expect the Union to be dissolved,--I do not expect the house to fall,

but I do expect it will cease to be divided."

The stages of the Pacific railroad movement are clearly marked

through all these squabbles. Agitation came first, until conviction

and acceptance were general. This was the era of Asa Whitney.

Reconnoissance and survey followed, in a decade covering approximately

1847-1857. Organization came last, beginning in tentative schemes which

counted for little, passing through a long series of intricate debates

in Congress, and being merged in the larger question of nationality,

but culminating finally in the first Pacific railroad bills of 1862 and

1864.

When Congress began its session of 1853-1854, most of the surveying

parties contemplated by the act of the previous March were still in

the field. The reports ordered were not yet available, and Congress

recognized the inexpediency of proceeding farther without the facts.

It is notable, however, that both houses at this time created select

committees to consider propositions for a railway. Both of these

committees reported bills, but neither received sanction even in the

house of its friends. The next session, 1854-1855, saw the great

struggle between Douglas and Benton.

Stephen A. Douglas, who had triumphantly carried through his

Kansas-Nebraska bill in the preceding May, started a railway bill in

the Senate in 1855. As finally considered and passed by the Senate,

his bill provided for three railroads: a Northern Pacific, from the

western border of Wisconsin to Puget Sound; a Southern Pacific, from

the western border of Texas to the Pacific; and a Central Pacific,

from Missouri or Iowa to San Francisco. They were to be constructed by

private parties under contracts to be let jointly by the Secretaries

of War and Interior and the Postmaster-general. Ultimately they were

to become the property of the United States and the states through

which they passed. The House of Representatives, led by Benton in the

interests of a central road, declined to pass the Douglas measure.

Before its final rejection, it was amended to please Benton and his

allies by the restriction to a single trunk line from San Francisco,

with eastern branches diverging to Lake Superior, Missouri or Iowa, and

Memphis.

During the two years following the rejection of the Douglas scheme

by the allied malcontents, the select committees on the Pacific

railways had few propositions to consider, while Congress paid little

attention to the general matter. Absorbing interest in politics,

the new Republican party, and the campaign of 1856 were responsible

for part of the neglect. The conviction of the dominant Democrats

that the nation had no power to perform the task was responsible

for more. The transition from a question of selfish localism to one

of national policy which should require the whole strength of the

nation for its solution was under way. The northern friends of the

railway were disheartened by the southern tendencies of the Democratic

administration which lasted till 1861. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary

of War, was followed by Floyd, of Virginia, who believed with his

predecessor that the southern was the most eligible route. At the same

time, Aaron V. Brown, of Tennessee, Postmaster-general, was awarding

the postal contract for an overland mail to Butterfield's southern

route in spite of the fact that Congress had probably intended the

central route to be employed.

Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress show the difficulties

under which the railroad labored. Many bills were started, but few

could get through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed a bill. In

1860 the House passed one which the Senate amended to death. In the

session of 1860-1861 its serious consideration was crowded out by the

incipiency of war.

Through the long years of debate over the organization of the road, the

nature of its management and the nature of its governmental aid were

much in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the United States had

undertaken no such scheme, while the Cumberland road, vastly less in

magnitude than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties to

last a generation. That there must be some connection between the road

and the public lands had been seen even before Whitney commenced his

advocacy. The nature of that connection was worked out incidentally to

other movements while the Whitney scheme was under fire.

The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements in transportation

had been hinted at as far back as the admission of Ohio, but it had not

received its full development until the railroad period began. To some

extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands had been allotted to

the states to aid in canal building, but when the railroad promoters

started their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the history

of the public domain was commenced. The definitive fight over the

issue of land grants for railways took place in connection with the

Illinois Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years from 1847 to

1850.

The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made its appearance

before the panic of 1837. The northwest states were now building their

own railroads, and this enterprise was designed to connect the Galena

lead country with the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi by a road

running parallel to the Mississippi through the whole length of the

state of Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran naturally from

east to west, seeking termini on the Mississippi and at the Alleghany

crossings. This one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making

useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a country where yet

the prairie hen held uncontested sway. There was little population

or freight to justify it, and hence the project, though it guised

itself in at least three different corporate garments before 1845,

failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse railways, on

whose junctions it had counted, crossed its right-of-way before 1850.

La Salle, Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its line

worth marking on a large-scale map, while Chicago was yet under forty

thousand in population.

Men who in the following decade led the Pacific railway agitation

promoted the Illinois Central idea in the years immediately preceding

1850. Both Breese and Douglas of Illinois claimed the parentage of the

bill which eventually passed Congress in 1850, and by opening the way

to public aid for railway transportation commenced the period of the

land-grant railroads. Already in some of the canal grants the method

of aid had been outlined, alternate sections of land along the line

of the canal being conveyed to the company to aid it in its work. The

theory underlying the granting of alternate sections in the familiar

checker-board fashion was that the public lands, while inaccessible,

had slight value, but once reached by communication the alternate

sections reserved by the United States would bring a higher price than

the whole would have done without the canal, while the construction

company would be aided without expense to any one. The application of

this principle to railroads came rather slowly in a Congress somewhat

disturbed by a doubt as to its power to devote the public resources to

internal improvements. The sectional character of the Illinois Central

railway was against it until its promoters enlarged the scheme into a

Lake-to-Gulf railway by including plans for a continuation to Mobile

from the Ohio. With southern aid thus enticed to its support, the bill

became a law in 1850. By its terms, the alternate sections of land in

a strip ten miles wide were given to the interested states to be used

for the construction of the Illinois Central and the Mobile and Ohio.

The grants were made directly to the states because of constitutional

objections to construction within a state without its consent and

approval. It was twelve years before Congress was ready to give the

lands directly to the railroad company.

The decade following the Illinois Central grant was crowded with

applications from other states for grants upon the same terms. In this

period of speculative construction before the panic of 1857, every

western state wanted all the aid it could get. In a single session

seven states asked for nearly fourteen million acres of land, while

before 1857 some five thousand miles of railway had been aided by land

grants.

When Asa Whitney began his agitation for the Pacific railway, he asked

for a huge land grant, but the machinery and methods of the grants had

not yet become familiar to Congress. During the subsequent fifteen

years of agitation and survey the method was worked out, so that when

political conditions made it possible to build the road, there had

ceased to be great difficulty in connection with its subsidy.

The sectional problem, which had reached its full development in

Congress by 1857, prevented any action in the interest of a Pacific

railway so long as it should remain unchanged. As the bickerings

widened into war, the railway still remained a practical impossibility.

But after war had removed from Congress the representatives of the

southern states the way was cleared for action. When Congress met in

its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in favor of southern

routes was silenced by disunion. It remained only to choose among the

routes lying north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize the

construction along one of them of the railway which all admitted to be

possible of construction, and to which military need in preservation of

the union had now added an imperative quality.

The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a Pacific railway,

and handed them over to the regular session of 1861-1862 as unfinished

business. In the lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah, a

young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave powerful aid to the

final settlement of route and means. Judah had come east in the autumn

in company with one of the newly elected California representatives.

During the long sea voyage he had drilled into his companion, who

happily was later appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of

the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem which he had acquired

in his advocacy of the railway on the Pacific Coast. California had

begun the construction of local railways several years before the war

broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant need and prayer. Her own

corporations were planned with reference to the time when tracks from

the East should cross her border and find her local creations waiting

for connections with them.

When the advent of war promised an early maturity for the scheme, a few

Californians organized the most significant of the California railways,

the Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company was incorporated,

having for its leading spirits Judah, its chief engineer, and Collis

Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford,

soon to be governor of the state. Its founders were all men of moderate

means, but they had the best of that foresight and initiative in which

the frontier was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861 Judah

prospected for routes across the mountains into Utah territory, where

the new silver fields around Carson indicated the probable course of a

route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on to Washington in the

fall to aid in the quick settlement of the long-debated question.

Judah's interest in a special California road coincided well with the

needs and desires of Congress. Already various bills were in the hands

of the select committees of both houses. The southern interest was

gone. The only remaining rivalries were among St. Louis, Chicago, and

the new Minnesota; while the first of these was tainted by the doubtful

loyalty of Missouri, and the last was embarrassed by the newness of its

territory and its lack of population. The Sioux were yet in control of

much of the country beyond St. Paul. Out of this rivalry Chicago and a

central route could emerge triumphant.

The spring of 1862 witnessed a long debate over a Union Pacific

railroad to meet the new military needs of the United States as well

as to satisfy the old economic necessities. Why it was called "Union"

is somewhat in doubt. Bancroft thinks its name was descriptive of the

various local roads which were bound together in the single continental

scheme. Davis, on the contrary, is inclined to believe that the name

was in contrast to the "Disunion" route of the thirty-second parallel,

since the route chosen was to run entirely through loyal territory.

Whatever the reason, however, the Union Pacific Railroad Company was

incorporated on the 1st of July, 1862.

Under the act of incorporation a continental railway was to be

constructed by several companies. Within the limits of California, the

Central Pacific of California, already organized and well managed,

was to have the privilege. Between the boundary line of California

and Nevada and the hundredth meridian, the new Union Pacific was

to be the constructing company. On the hundredth meridian, at some

point between the Republican River in Kansas and the Platte River in

Nebraska, radiating lines were to advance to various eastern frontier

points, somewhat after the fashion of Benton's bill of 1855. Thus

the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western of Kansas was authorized to

connect this point with the Missouri River, south of the mouth of the

Kansas, with a branch to Atchison and St. Joseph in connection with

the Hannibal and St. Joseph of Missouri. The Union Pacific itself was

required to build two more connections; one to run from the hundredth

meridian to some point on the west boundary of Iowa, to be fixed by

the President of the United States, and another to Sioux City, Iowa,

whenever a line from the east should reach that place.

The aid offered for the construction of these lines was more generous

than any previously provided by Congress. In the first place, the

roads were entitled to a right-of-way four hundred feet wide, with

permission to take material for construction from adjacent parts of the

public domain. Secondly, the roads were to receive ten sections of land

for each mile of track on the familiar alternate section principle.

Finally, the United States was to lend to the roads bonds to the

amount of $16,000 per mile, on the level, $32,000 in the foothills,

and $48,000 in the mountains, to facilitate construction. If not

completed and open by 1876, the whole line was to be forfeited to the

United States. If completed, the loan of bonds was to be repaid out of

subsequent earnings.

The Central Pacific of California was prompt in its acceptance of the

terms of the act of July 1, 1862. It proceeded with its organization,

broke ground at Sacramento on February 22, 1863, and had a few miles of

track in operation before the next year closed. But the Union Pacific

was slow. "While fighting to retain eleven refractory states," wrote

one irritated critic of the act, "the nation permitted itself to be

cozened out of territory sufficient to form twelve new republics." Yet

great as were the offered grants, eastern capital was reluctant to put

life into the new route across the plains. That it could ever pay, was

seriously doubted. Chances for more certain and profitable investment

in the East were frequent in the years of war-time prosperity. Although

the railroad organized according to the terms of the law, subscribers

to the stock of the Union Pacific were hard to find, and the road

lay dormant for two more years until Congress revised its offer and

increased its terms.

In the session of 1863-1864 the general subject was again approached.

Writes Davis, "The opinion was almost universal that additional

legislation was needed to make the Act of 1862 effective, but the

point where the limit of aid to patriotic capitalists should be set

was difficult to determine." It was, and remained, the belief of the

opponents of the bill now passed that "lobbyists, male and female,

... shysters and adventurers" had much to do with the success of the

measure. In its most essential parts, the new bill of 1864 increased

the degree of government aid to the companies. The land grant was

doubled from ten sections per mile of track to twenty, and the road

was allowed to borrow of the general public, on first mortgage bonds,

money to the amount of the United States loan, which was reduced by a

self-denying ordinance to the status of a second mortgage. With these

added inducements, the Union Pacific was finally begun.

The project at last under way in 1864-1865, as Davis graphically

pictures it, "was thoroughly saturated and fairly dripping with the

elements of adventure and romance." But he overstates his case when he

goes on to remark that, "Before the building of the Pacific railway

most of the wide expanse of territory west of the Missouri was _terra

incognita_ to the mass of Americans." For twenty years the railway had

been under agitation; during the whole period population had crossed

the great desert in increasing thousands; new states had banked up

around its circumference, east, west, and south, while Kansas had been

thrust into its middle; new camps had dotted its interior. The great

West was by no means unknown, but with the construction of the railway

the American frontier entered upon its final phase.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR

That the fate of the outlying colonies of the United States should

have aroused grave concerns at the beginning of the Civil War is not

surprising. California and Oregon, Carson City, Denver, and the other

mining camps were indeed on the same continent with the contending

factions, but the degree of their isolation was so great that they

might as well have been separated by an ocean. Their inhabitants were

more mixed than those of any portion of the older states, while in

several of the communities the parties were so evenly divided as to

raise doubts of the loyalty of the whole. "The malignant secession

element of this Territory," wrote Governor Gilpin of Colorado, in

October, 1861, "has numbered 7,500. It has been ably and secretly

organized from November last, and requires extreme and extraordinary

measures to meet and control its onslaught." At best, the western

population was scanty and scattered over a frontier that still

possessed its virgin character in most respects, though hovering at

the edge of a period of transition. An English observer, hopeful for

the worst, announced in the middle of the war that "When that 'late

lamented institution,' the once United States, shall have passed

away, and when, after this detestable and fratricidal war--the most

disgraceful to human nature that civilization ever witnessed--the New

World shall be restored to order and tranquility, our shikaris will

not forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel suffices to

transport them from fallow deer and pheasant shooting to the haunts of

the bison and the grizzly bear. There is little chance of these animals

being 'improved off' the Prairies, or even of their becoming rare

during the lifetime of the present generation." The factors of most

consequence in shaping the course of the great plains during the Civil

War were those of mixed population, of ever present Indian danger, and

of isolation. Though the plains had no effect upon the outcome of the

war, the war furthered the work already under way of making known the

West, clearing off the Indians, and preparing for future settlement.

Like the rest of the United States the West was organized into

military divisions for whose good order commanding officers were made

responsible. At times the burden of military control fell chiefly upon

the shoulders of territorial governors; again, special divisions were

organized to meet particular needs, and generals of experience were

detached from the main armies to direct movements in the West.

Among the earliest of the episodes which drew attention to the western

departments was the resignation of Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding

the Department of the Pacific, and his rather spectacular flight

across New Mexico, to join the confederate forces. From various

directions, federal troops were sent to head him off, but he succeeded

in evading all these and reaching safety at the Rio Grande by August

1. Here he could take an overland stage for the rest of his journey.

The department which he abandoned included the whole West beyond the

Rockies except Utah and present New Mexico. The country between the

mountains and Missouri constituted the Department of the West. As the

war advanced, new departments were created and boundaries were shifted

at convenience. The Department of the Pacific remained an almost

constant quantity throughout. A Department of the Northwest, covering

the territory of the Sioux Indians, was created in September, 1862, for

the better defence of Minnesota and Wisconsin. To this command Pope was

assigned after his removal from the command of the Army of Virginia.

Until the close of the war, when the great leaders were distributed and

Sheridan received the Department of the Southwest, no detail of equal

importance was made to a western department.

The fighting on the plains was rarely important enough to receive

the dignified name of battle. There were plenty of marching and

reconnoitring, much police duty along the trails, occasional skirmishes

with organized troops or guerrillas, aggressive campaigns against

the Indians, and campaigns in defence of the agricultural frontier.

But the armies so occupied were small and inexperienced. Commonly

regiments of local volunteers were used in these movements, or returned

captives who were on parole to serve no more against the confederacy.

Disciplined veterans were rarely to be found. As a consequence of the

spasmodic character of the plains warfare and the inferior quality

of the troops available, western movements were often hampered and

occasionally made useless.

The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important as any of the military

operations on the plains. At the beginning of the war the confederate

forces seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear the way

for Johnston as he hurried east. The Tucson country was occupied about

the same time, so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts

were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the Rio Grande, with New

Mexico, Utah, and Colorado threatened. In December General Henry

Hopkins Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops in the upper

Rio Grande, while Colonel E. R. S. Canby, from Fort Craig, organized

the resistance against further extension of the confederate power.

Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio Grande country,

around Santa Fé and Albuquerque, aroused federal apprehensions in the

winter of 1862. Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened at

the danger within his own territory, and scarcely needed the order

which came from Fort Leavenworth through General Hunter to reënforce

Canby and look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility easily,

drew upon the federal treasury for funds which had not been allowed

him, and shortly had the first Colorado, and a part of the second

Colorado volunteers marching south to join the defensive columns. It is

difficult to define this march in terms applicable to movements of war.

At least one soldier in the second Colorado took with him two children

and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the regiment and

praising the chivalry of the soldiers, apparently oblivious of the fact

that it is not a soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's

family. But with wife and children, and the degree of individualism and

insubordination which these imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched

south to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was sure.

As Sibley pushed up the river, passing Fort Craig and brushing aside

a small force at Valverde, the Colorado forces reached Fort Union.

Between Fort Union and Albuquerque, which Sibley entered easily, was

the turning-point in the campaign. On March 26, 1862, Major J. M.

Chivington had a successful skirmish at Johnson's ranch in Apache

Cañon, about twenty miles southeast of Santa Fé. Two days later, at

Pigeon's ranch, a more decisive check was given to the confederates,

but Colonel John P. Slough, senior volunteer in command, fell back upon

Fort Union after the engagement, while the confederates were left

free to occupy Santa Fé. A few days later Slough was deposed in the

Colorado regiment, Chivington made colonel, and the advance on Santa Fé

begun again. Sibley, now caught between Canby advancing from Fort Craig

and Chivington coming through Apache Cañon from Fort Union, evacuated

Santa Fé on April 7, falling back to Albuquerque. The union troops,

taking Santa Fé on April 12, hurried down the Rio Grande after Sibley

in his final retreat. New Mexico was saved, and its security brought

tranquillity to Colorado. The Colorado volunteers were back in Denver

for the winter of 1862-1863, but Gilpin, whose vigorous and independent

support had made possible their campaign, had been dismissed from his

post as governor.

Along the frontier of struggle campaigns of this sort occurred from

time to time, receiving little attention from the authorities who were

directing weightier movements at the centre. Less formal than these,

and more provocative of bitter feeling, were the attacks of guerrillas

along the central frontier,--chiefly the Missouri border and eastern

Kansas. Here the passions of the struggle for Kansas had not entirely

cooled down, southern sympathizers were easily found, and communities

divided among themselves were the more intense in their animosities.

The Department of Kansas, where the most aggravated of these

guerrilla conflicts occurred, was organized in November, 1861, under

Major-general Hunter. From his headquarters at Leavenworth the

commanding officer directed the affairs of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota,

Colorado, and "the Indian Territory west of Arkansas." The department

was often shifted and reshaped to meet the needs of the frontier. A

year later the Department of the Northwest was cut away from it, after

the Sioux outbreak, its own name was changed to Missouri, and the

states of Missouri and Arkansas were added to it. Still later it was

modified again. But here throughout the war continued the troubles

produced by the mixture of frontier and farm-lands, partisan whites and

Indians.

Bushwhacking, a composite of private murder and public attack, troubled

the Kansas frontier from an early period of the war. It was easily

aroused because of public animosities, and difficult to suppress

because its participating parties retired quickly into the body of

peace-professing citizens. In it, asserted General Order No. 13, of

June 26, 1862, "rebel fiends lay in wait for their prey to assassinate

Union soldiers and citizens; it is therefore ... especially directed

that whenever any of this class of offenders shall be captured, they

shall not be treated as prisoners of war but be summarily tried by

drumhead court-martial, and if proved guilty, be executed ... on the

spot."

In August, 1863, occurred Quantrill's notable raid into Kansas to

terrify the border which was already harassed enough. The old border

hatred between Kansas and Missouri had been intensified by the

"murders, robberies, and arson" which had characterized the irregular

warfare carried on by both sides. In western Missouri, loyal unionists

were not safe outside the federal lines; here the guerrillas came and

went at pleasure; and here, about August 18, Quantrill assembled a

band of some three hundred men for a foray into Kansas. On the 20th he

entered Kansas, heading at once for Lawrence, which he surprised on the

21st. Although the city arsenal contained plenty of arms and the town

could have mustered 500 men on "half an hour's notice," the guerrilla

band met no resistance. It "robbed most of the stores and banks, and

burned one hundred and eighty-five buildings, including one-fourth

of the private residences and nearly all of the business houses of

the town, and, with circumstances of the most fiendish atrocity,

murdered 140 unarmed men." The retreat of Quantrill was followed by

a vigorous federal pursuit and a partial devastation of the adjacent

Missouri counties. Kansas, indignant, was in arms at once, protesting

directly to President Lincoln of the "imbecility and incapacity" of

Major-general John M. Schofield, commanding the Department of the

Missouri, "whose policy has opened Kansas to invasion and butchery."

Instead of carrying out an unimpeded pursuit of the guerrillas,

Schofield had to devote his strength to keeping the state of Kansas

from declaring war against and wreaking indiscriminate vengeance upon

the state of Missouri. A year after Quantrill's raid came Price's

Missouri expedition, with its pitched battles near Kansas City and

Westport, and its pursuit through southern Missouri, where confederate

sympathizers and the partisan politics of this presidential year made

punitive campaigns anything but easy.

Carleton's march into New Mexico has already been described in

connection with the mining boom of Arizona. The silver mines of the

Santa Cruz Valley had drawn American population to Tubac and Tucson

several years before the war; while the confederate successes in the

upper Rio Grande in the summer of 1861 had compelled federal evacuation

of the district. Colonel E. R. S. Canby devoted the small force at his

command to regaining the country around Albuquerque and Santa Fé, while

the relief of the forts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado was

intrusted to Carleton's California Column. After May, 1862, Carleton

was firmly established in Tucson, and later he was given command of

the whole Department of New Mexico. Of fighting with the confederates

there was almost none. He prosecuted, instead, Apache and Navaho wars,

and exploited the new gold fields which were now found. In much of

the West, as in his New Mexico, occasional ebullitions of confederate

sympathizers occurred, but the military task of the commanders was easy.

The military problem of the plains was one of police, with the

extinction of guerrilla warfare and the pacification of Indians as its

chief elements. The careers of Canby, Carleton, and Gilpin indicate

the nature of the western strategic warfare, Schofield's illustrates

that of guerrilla fighting, the Minnesota outbreak that of the Indian

relations.

In the Northwest, where the agricultural expansion of the fifties

had worked so great changes, the pressure on the tribes had steadily

increased. In 1851 the Sioux bands had ceded most of their territory in

Minnesota, and had agreed upon a reduced reserve in the St. Peter's,

or Minnesota, Valley. But the terms of this treaty had been delayed

in enforcement, while bad management on the part of the United States

and the habitual frontier disregard of Indian rights created tense

feelings, which might break loose at any time. No single grievance

of the Indians caused more trouble than that over traders' claims.

The improvident savages bought largely of the traders, on credit, at

extortionate prices. The traders could afford the risk because when

treaties of cession were made, their influence was generally able to

get inserted in the treaty a clause for satisfying claims against

individuals out of the tribal funds before these were handed over to

the savages. The memory of the savage was short, and when he found that

his allowance, the price for his lands, had gone into the traders'

pockets, he could not realize that it had gone to pay his debts, but

felt, somehow, defrauded. The answer would have been to prevent trade

with the Indians on credit. But the traders' influence at Washington

was great. It would be an interesting study to investigate the

connection between traders' bills and agitation for new cessions, since

the latter generally meant satisfaction of the former.

Among the Sioux there were factional feelings that had aroused the

apprehensions of their agents before the war broke out. The "blanket"

Indians continually mocked at the "farmers" who took kindly to the

efforts of the United States for their agricultural civilization. There

was civil strife among the progressives and irreconcilables which made

it difficult to say what was the disposition of the whole nation. The

condition was so unstable that an accidental row, culminating in the

murder of five whites at Acton, in Meeker County, brought down the most

serious Indian massacre the frontier had yet seen.

There was no more occasion for a general uprising in 1862 than there

had been for several years. The wiser Indians realized the futility

of such a course. Yet Little Crow, inclined though he was to peace,

fell in with the radicals as the tribe discussed their policy; and

he determined that since a massacre had been commenced they had best

make it as thorough as possible. Retribution was certain whether they

continued war or not, and the farmer Indians were unlikely to be

distinguished from the blankets by angry frontiersmen. The attack fell

first upon the stores at the lower agency, twenty miles above Fort

Ridgely, whence refugee whites fled to Fort Ridgely with news of the

outbreak. All day, on the 18th of August, massacres occurred along

the St. Peter's, from near New Ulm to the Yellow Medicine River. The

incidents of Indian war were all there, in surprise, slaughter of women

and children, mutilation and torture.

The next day, Tuesday the 19th, the increasing bands fell upon the

rambling village of New Ulm, twenty-eight miles above Mankato, where

fugitives had gathered and where Judge Charles E. Flandrau hastily

organized a garrison for defence. He had been at St. Peter's when

the news arrived, and had led a relief band through the drenching

rain, reaching New Ulm in the evening. On Wednesday afternoon Little

Crow, his band still growing--the Sioux could muster some 1300

warriors--surprised Fort Ridgely, though with no success. On Thursday

he renewed the attack with a force now dwindling because of individual

plundering expeditions which drew his men to various parts of the

neighboring country. On Friday he attacked once more.

On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the river again to renew

his fight upon New Ulm, which, unmolested since Tuesday, had been

increasing its defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites in

a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen, cool and

determined, of unerring aim; but most were German settlers, recently

arrived, and often terrified by their new experiences. During the week

of horrors the depredations covered the Minnesota frontier and lapped

over into Iowa and Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated,

or led captive into the wilderness, were common. Stories of those who

survived these dangers form a large part of the local literature of

this section of the Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become so

desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the town and led its

whole remaining population to safety at Mankato.

Long before the week of suffering was over, aid had been started to

the harassed frontier. Governor Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to

Mendota, and there organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota

Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from him of Rio Grande

fame, commanded the column and reached St. Peter's with his advance

on Friday. By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the panic

and restore peace and repopulate the deserted country. He was now

joined by Ignatius Donnelly, Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater

speed. The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th, they had reached

Fort Ridgely, passing through country "abandoned by the inhabitants;

the houses, in many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture

undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors or through the

cultivated fields." The country had been settled up to the very edge

of the Fort Ridgely reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only

partially devastated. Donnelly commented in his report upon the

prayer-books and old German trunks of "Johann Schwartz," strewn upon

the ground in one place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored,

and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent, Thomas J. Galbraith,

who was at Fort Ridgely during the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737

whites were known to have been massacred.

Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at first to reconnoitre

and bury the dead, then to follow the Indians and rescue the captives.

More than once the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off

prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify or prevent

punishment for the original outbreak. Early in September there were

pitched battles at Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake.

At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was able not only

to defeat the tribes and take nearly 2000 prisoners, but to release

227 women and children, who had been the "prime object," from whose

"pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The Indians were handed

over under arrest to Agent Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower

Agency, and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.

The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's massacre at Spirit

Lake was still remembered and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in

battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders escaped. In 1863,

Pope, who had been called to command a new department in the Northwest,

organized a general campaign against the tribes, sending Sibley up the

Minnesota River to drive them west, and Sully up the Missouri to head

them off, planning to catch and crush them between the two columns.

The manoeuvre was badly timed and failed, while punishment drifted

gradually into a prolonged war.

Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with judicial irony, on

the farmer Sioux who had been drawn reluctantly into the struggle.

At the Lower Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while

more than four hundred of their men were singled out for trial for

murder. Nothing is more significant of the anomalous nature of the

Indian relation than this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The

United States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt free to

punish individuals as though they were citizens of the United States.

The military commission sat at Redwood for several weeks with the

missionary and linguist, Rev. S. R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand Jury

of the court." Three hundred and three were condemned to death by

the court for murder, rape, and arson, their condemnation starting a

wave of protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner,

W. P. Dole. To the indignation of the frontier, naturally revengeful

and never impartial, President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the

case of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of them were hanged on

a single scaffold at Mankato on December 26, 1862. The innocent and

uncondemned were punished also, when Congress confiscated all their

Minnesota reserve in 1863, and transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson

on the Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found for them.

All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota to the Rio Grande,

were problems that drew the West into the movement of the Civil War.

The situation was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere did

the Indians suffer between the millstones as they did in the Indian

Territory, where the Cherokee and Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and

Seminole, had been colonized in the years of creation of the Indian

frontier. For a generation these nations had resided in comparative

peace and advancing civilization, but they were undone by causes which

they could not control.

The confederacy was no sooner organized than its commissioners demanded

of the tribes colonized west of Arkansas their allegiance and support,

professing to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the

United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized and better, this

demand raised difficulties which would have been a strain on any

diplomacy. If they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate

forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and already coveting their

lands, would cut them to pieces. If they adhered to the confederacy and

the latter lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the United

States. Yet they were too weak to stand alone and were forced to go

one way or other. The resulting policy was temporizing and brought to

them a large measure of punishment from both sides, and the heavy

subsequent wrath of the United States.

John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation, tried to maintain

his neutrality at the commencement of the conflict, but the fiction

of Indian nationality was too slight for his effort to be successful.

During the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against the

confederate control to which he succumbed by August, when confederate

troops had overrun most of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents

had surrendered United States property to the enemy. The war which

followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts of Kansas, with the addition

of the Indian element.

By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate control. When

the Indian Territory forts--Gibson, Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb--fell

into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their homes and sought

protection within the United States lines. Almost the only way to

fight a war in which a population is generally divided, is by means of

depopulation and concentration. Along the Verdigris River, in southeast

Kansas, these Indian refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number

of 6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as best he could, and

organized them to fight when that was possible. With the return of

federal success in the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas

during the next two years, the natives began to return to their homes.

But the relation of their tribes to the United States was tainted. The

compulsory cession of their western lands which came at the close of

the conflict belongs to a later chapter and the beginnings of Oklahoma.

Here, as elsewhere, the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.

The great plains and the Far West were only the outskirts of the Civil

War. At no time did they shape its course, for the Civil War was, from

their point of view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East,

and merely an episode in the grander development of the United States.

The way is opening ever wider for the historian who shall see in this

material development and progress of civilization the central thread

of American history, and in accordance with it, retail the story.

But during the years of sectional strife the West was occasionally

connected with the struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly

into a period in which it came to be the admitted centre of interest.

The last stand of the Indians against the onrush of settlement is a

warfare with an identity of its own.

CHAPTER XV

THE CHEYENNE WAR

It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous restlessness of

the Indians during and after the Civil War to the evil machinations of

the Confederacy. It has been plausible to charge that agents of the

South passed among the tribes, inciting them to outbreak by pointing

out the preoccupation of the United States and the defencelessness of

the frontier. Popular narratives often repeat this charge when dealing

with the wars and depredations, whether among the Sioux of Minnesota,

or the Northwest tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians of

the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus to harass the enemy it

is not improbable that it would have done it. It is not impossible that

it actually did it. But at least the charge has not been proved. No one

has produced direct evidence to show the existence of agents or their

connection with the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general

belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs have admitted,

regretfully, their inability to add incitement of Indians to the

charges against the South. If such a cause were needed to explain the

increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth while to search

further in the hope of establishing it, but nothing occurred in these

wars which cannot be accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and

well authenticated.

Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly on friendly terms

with the United States. Occasional wars broke this friendship, and

frequent massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another,

for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the frontiersman was

reckless and inconsiderate. But the outbreaks were exceptional, they

were easily put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By 1865

this condition had changed over most of the West. Warfare had become

systematic and widely spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks

in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or at least similar

reactions from similar provocations. From 1865, for nearly five years,

these wars continued with only intervals of truce, or professed peace;

while during a long period after 1870, when most of the tribes were

suppressed and well policed, upheavals occurred which were clearly to

be connected with the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from

peace to war has caused many to charge it to the South. It is, however,

connected with the culmination of the westward movement, which more

than explains it.

For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement of the events before

1861 is needed. By 1840 the agricultural frontier of the United States

had reached the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes, with

plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains. In the generation

following appeared the heavy traffic along the overland trails, the

advance of the frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific railway

surveys. Each of these served to compress the Indians and restrict

their range. Accompanying these came curtailing of reserves, shifting

of residences to less desirable grounds, and individual maltreatment to

a degree which makes marvellous the incapacity, weakness, and patience

of the Indians. Occasionally they struggled, but always they lost. The

scalped and mutilated pioneer, with his haystacks burning and his stock

run off, is a vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic

than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable, and moving to

let the white man in.

The necessary results of white encroachment were destruction of game

and education of the Indian to the luxuries and vices of the white man.

At a time when starvation was threatening because of the disappearance

of the buffalo and other food animals, he became aware of the

superior diet of the whites and the ease with which robbery could be

accomplished. In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier than ever.

The railway surveys reached nearly every corner of the Indian Country.

In the next few years came the prospectors who started hundreds of

mining camps beyond the line of settlements, while the engineers

began to stick the advancing heads of railways out from the Missouri

frontier and into the buffalo range.

Even the Indian could see the approaching end. It needed no confederate

envoy to assure him that the United States could be attacked. His

own hunger and the white peril were persuading him to defend his

hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the widespread Indian wars of the

later sixties, uniformity of action came without much previous

coöperation. A general Indian league against the whites was never

raised. The general war, upon dissection and analysis, breaks up into a

multitude of little wars, each having its own particular causes, which,

in many instances, if the word of the most expert frontiersmen is to be

believed, ran back into cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.

The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of the general wars,

with causes rising from the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux

in 1851. The plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly

stated in this year. "We are constrained to say," wrote the men who

made these treaties, "that in our opinion _the time has come_ when the

extinguishment of the Indian title to this region should no longer

be delayed, if government would not have the mortification, on the

one hand, of confessing its inability to protect the Indian from

encroachment; or be subject to the painful necessity, upon the other,

of ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a land which they

desire to make their homes, and which, without their occupancy and

labor, will be comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties

concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie were equally the fountains

of discontent which boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at

last to one of the most horrible incidents of the plains war.

In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt to partition the

plains among the tribes was made. The lines agreed upon recognized

existing conditions to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in

consideration of which the savages agreed to stay at peace, to allow

free migration along the trails, and to keep within their boundaries.

The Sioux here agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The

Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as lying between the Platte

and the Arkansas, the mountains and, roughly, the hundred and first

meridian. For ten years after these treaties the last-named tribes kept

the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon settlers or emigrants. They

even allowed the Senate in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the

term of the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.

In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians lay off the beaten tracks

and apart from contact with the whites. Their home was in the triangle

between the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them that

offered almost insuperable obstacles to those who would cross the

continent through their domain. The Gunnison railroad survey, which

was run along the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa

Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range at this point.

Accordingly, a decade which built up Oregon and California made little

impression on this section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry

Creek. Then came the deluge.

Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on crossed the plains to

the Pike's Peak country in 1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst

of the Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than the right of

transit over these lands," admitted the Peace Commissioners in 1868.

Yet they "took possession of them for the purpose of mining, and,

against the protest of the Indians, founded cities, established farms,

and opened roads. Before 1861 the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven

from the mountain regions down upon the waters of the Arkansas, and

were becoming sullen and discontented because of this violation of

their rights." The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in their

possession, pledging the United States to prevent depredations by the

whites, but here, as in most similar cases, the guarantees had no

weight in the face of a population under way. The Indians were brushed

aside, the United States agents made no real attempts to enforce the

treaty, and within a few months the settlers were demanding protection

against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw their former homes and

hunting grounds overrun by a greedy population, thirsting for gold,"

continued the Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east to the

plains, and soon found themselves the objects of jealousy and hatred.

They too must go. The presence of the injured is too often painful to

the wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of guilt. It now

became apparent that what had been taken by force must be retained

by the ravisher, and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a

treaty consecrating the act."

Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho and Cheyenne strove to

defend their lands and to drive out the intruders, a war in which the

United States ought to have coöperated with the Indians, a treaty of

cession followed. On February 18, 1861, at Fort Wise, which was the new

name for Bent's old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed by

which these tribes gave up much of the great range reserved for them in

1851, and accepted in its place, with what were believed to be greater

guarantees, a triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by Sand

Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by the Arkansas and Purgatory

rivers; and extending west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand

Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the Ute on the other

side of the range, not long after this, are another part of the same

story of mining aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed to

remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from under the feet of the restless

prospectors. For years they had kept the peace in the face of great

provocation. For three years more they put up with white encroachment

before their war began.

The Colorado miners, like those of the other boom camps, had been loud

in their demand for transportation. To satisfy this, overland traffic

had been organized on a large scale, while during 1862 the stage and

freight service of the plains fell under the control of Ben Holladay.

Early in August, 1864, Holladay was nearly driven out of business.

About the 10th of the month, simultaneous attacks were made along

his mail line from the Little Blue River to within eighty miles of

Denver. In the forays, stations were sacked and burned, isolated farms

were wiped out, small parties on the trails were destroyed. At Ewbank

Station, a family of ten "was massacred and scalped, and one of the

females, besides having suffered the latter inhuman barbarity, was

pinned to the earth by a stake thrust through her person, in a most

revolting manner; ... at Plum Creek ... nine persons were murdered,

their train, consisting of ten wagons, burnt, and two women and two

children captured.... The old Indian traders ... and the settlers ...

abandoned their habitations." For a distance of 370 miles, Holladay's

general superintendent declared, every ranch but one was "deserted and

the property abandoned to the Indians."

Fifteen years after the destruction of his stations, Holladay was still

claiming damages from the United States and presenting affidavits from

his men which revealed the character of the attacks. George H. Carlyle

told how his stage was chased by Indians for twenty miles, how he had

helped to bury the mutilated bodies of the Plum Creek victims, and how

within a week the route had to be abandoned, and every ranch from Fort

Kearney to Julesburg was deserted. The division agent told how property

had been lost in the hurried flight. To save some of the stock, fodder

and supplies had to be sacrificed,--hundreds of sacks of corn, scores

of tons of hay, besides the buildings and their equipment. Nowhere

were the Indians overbold in their attacks. In small bands they waited

their time to take the stations by surprise. Well-armed coaches might

expect to get through with little more than a few random shots, but

along the hilltops they could often see the savages waiting in safety

for them to pass. Indian warfare was not one of organized bodies and

formal manoeuvres. Only when cornered did the Indian stand to fight.

But in wild, unexpected descents the tribes fell upon the lines of

communication, reducing the frontier to an abject terror overnight.

The destruction of the stage route was not the first, though it was the

most general hostility which marked the commencement of a new Indian

war. Since the spring of 1864 events had occurred which in the absence

of a more rigorous control than the Indian Department possessed, were

likely to lead to trouble. The Cheyenne had been dissatisfied with the

Fort Wise treaty ever since its conclusion. The Sioux were carrying on

a prolonged war. The Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were ready to be

started on the war-path. It was the old story of too much compression

and isolated attacks going unpunished. Whatever the merits of an

original controversy, the only way to keep the savages under control

was to make fair retribution follow close upon the commission of an

outrage. But the punishment needed to be fair.

In April, 1864, a ranchman named Ripley came into one of the camps on

the South Platte and declared that some Indians had stolen his stock.

Perhaps his statement was true; but it must be remembered that the

ranchman whose stock strayed away was prone to charge theft against

the Indians, and that there is only Ripley's own word that he ever had

any stock. Captain Sanborn, commanding, sent out a troop of cavalry

to recover the animals. They came upon some Indians with horses which

Ripley claimed as his, and in an attempt to disarm them, a fight

occurred in which the troop was driven off. Their lieutenant thought

the Indians were Cheyenne.

A few weeks after this, Major Jacob Downing, who had been in Camp

Sanborn inspecting troops, came into Denver and got from Colonel

Chivington about forty men, with whom "to go against the Indians."

Downing later swore that he found the Cheyenne village at Cedar Bluffs.

"We commenced shooting; I ordered the men to commence killing them....

They lost ... some twenty-six killed and thirty wounded.... I burnt up

their lodges and everything I could get hold of.... We captured about

one hundred head of stock, which was distributed among the boys."

On the 12th of June, a family living on Box Elder Creek, twenty miles

east of Denver, was murdered by the Indians. Hungate, his wife, and

two children were killed, the house burned, and fifty or sixty head

of stock run off. When the "scalped and horribly mangled bodies" were

brought into Denver, the population, already uneasy, was thrown into

panic by this appearance of danger so close to the city. Governor Evans

began at once to organize the militia for home defence and to appeal to

Washington for help.

By the time of the attack upon the stage line it was clear that an

Indian war existed, involving in varying degrees parts of the Arapaho,

Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the causes which

provoked it were considerably in doubt. On the frontier there was no

hesitation in charging it all to the innate savagery of the tribes.

Governor Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the Indians

might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a general peace on the

plains, until after a severe chastisement of the Indians for these

depredations."

In restoring tranquillity the frontier had to rely largely upon its own

resources. Its own Second Colorado was away doing duty in the Missouri

campaign, while the eastern military situation presented no probability

of troops being available to help out the West. Colonel Chivington and

Governor John Evans, with the long-distance aid of General Curtis,

were forced to make their own plans and execute them.

As early as June, Governor Evans began his corrective measures,

appealing first to Washington for permission to raise extra troops,

and then endeavoring to separate the friendly and warlike Indians in

order that the former "should not fall victims to the impossibility

of soldiers discriminating between them and the hostile, upon whom

they must, to do any good, inflict the most severe chastisement." To

this end, and with the consent of the Indian Department, he sent out

a proclamation, addressed to "the friendly Indians of the Plains,"

directing them to keep away from those who were at war, and as

evidence of friendship to congregate around the agencies for safety.

Forts Lyons, Laramie, Larned, and Camp Collins were designated as

concentration points for the several tribes. "None but those who intend

to be friendly with the whites must come to these places. The families

of those who have gone to war with the whites must be kept away

from among the friendly Indians. The war on hostile Indians will be

continued until they are all effectually subdued." The Indians, frankly

at war, paid no attention to this invitation. Two small bands only

sought the cover of the agencies, and with their exception, so Governor

Evans reported on October 15, the proclamation "met no response from

any of the Indians of the plains."

The war parties became larger and more general as the summer advanced,

driving whites off the plains between the two trails for several

hundred miles. But as fall approached, the tribes as usual sought

peace. The Indians' time for war was summer. Without supplies, they

were unable to fight through the winter, so that autumn brought them

into a mood well disposed to peace, reservations, and government

rations. Major Colley, the agent on the Sand Creek reserve at Fort

Lyon, received an overture early in September. In a letter written for

them on August 29, by a trader, Black Kettle, of the Cheyenne, and

other chiefs declared their readiness to make a peace if all the tribes

were included in it. As an olive branch, they offered to give up seven

white prisoners. They admitted that five war parties, three Cheyenne

and two Arapaho, were yet in the field.

Upon receipt of Black Kettle's letter, Major E. W. Wynkoop, military

commander at Fort Lyon, marched with 130 men to the Cheyenne camp at

Bend of Timbers, some eighty miles northeast of Fort Lyons. Here he

found "from six to eight hundred Indian warriors drawn up in line

of battle and prepared to fight." He avoided fighting, demanded and

received the prisoners, and held a council with the chiefs. Here he

told them that he had no authority to conclude a peace, but offered to

conduct a group of chiefs to Denver, for a conference with Governor

Evans.

On September 28, Governor Evans held a council with the Cheyenne and

Arapaho chiefs brought in by Major Wynkoop; Black Kettle and White

Antelope being the most important. Black Kettle opened the conference

with an appeal to the governor in which he alluded to his delivery of

the prisoners and Wynkoop's invitation to visit Denver. "We have come

with our eyes shut, following his handful of men, like coming through

the fire," Black Kettle went on. "All we ask is that we may have peace

with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand. You are our father.

We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever

since the war began. These braves who are with me are all willing to do

what I say. We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they

may sleep in peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers

here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace,

that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies." To him Governor Evans

responded that this submission was a long time coming, and that the

nation had gone to war, refusing to listen to overtures of peace. This

Black Kettle admitted.

"So far as making a treaty now is concerned," continued Governor

Evans, "we are in no condition to do it.... You, so far, have had the

advantage; but the time is near at hand when the plains will swarm with

United States soldiers. I have learned that you understand that as the

whites are at war among themselves, you think you can now drive the

whites from this country; but this reliance is false. The Great Father

at Washington has men enough to drive all the Indians off the plains,

and whip the rebels at the same time. Now the war with the whites is

nearly through, and the Great Father will not know what to do with all

his soldiers, except to send them after the Indians on the plains. My

proposition to the friendly Indians has gone out; [I] shall be glad

to have them all come in under it. I have no new proposition to make.

Another reason that I am not in a condition to make a treaty is that

war is begun, and the power to make a treaty of peace has passed to

the great war chief." He further counselled them to make terms with

the military authorities before they could hope to talk of peace.

No prospect of an immediate treaty was given to the chiefs. Evans

disclaimed further powers, and Colonel Chivington closed the council,

saying: "I am not a big war chief, but all the soldiers in this

country are at my command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians

is to fight them until they lay down their arms and submit." The same

evening came a despatch from Major-general Curtis, at Fort Leavenworth,

confirming the non-committal attitude of Evans and Chivington: "I want

no peace till the Indians suffer more.... I fear Agent of the Interior

Department will be ready to make presents too soon.... No peace must be

made without my directions."

The chiefs were escorted home without their peace or any promise of it,

Governor Evans believing that the great body of the tribes was still

hostile, and that a decisive winter campaign was needed to destroy

their lingering notion that the whites might be driven from the plains.

Black Kettle had been advised at the council to surrender to the

soldiers, Major Wynkoop at Fort Lyon being mentioned as most available.

Many of his tribe acted on the suggestion, so that on October 20 Agent

Colley, their constant friend, reported that "nearly all the Arapahoes

are now encamped near this place and desire to remain friendly, and

make reparation for the damages committed by them."

The Indians unquestionably were ready to make peace after their fashion

and according to their ability. There is no evidence that they were

reconciled to their defeat, but long experience had accustomed them

to fighting in the summer and drawing rations as peaceful in the

winter. The young men, in part, were still upon the war-path, but the

tribes and the head chiefs were anxious to go upon a winter basis.

Their interpreter who had attended the conference swore that they left

Denver, "perfectly contented, deeming that the matter was settled,"

that upon their return to Fort Lyon, Major Wynkoop gave them permission

to bring their families in under the fort where he could watch them

better; and that "accordingly the chiefs went after their families and

villages and brought them in, ... satisfied that they were in perfect

security and safety."

While the Indians gathered around the fort, Major Wynkoop sent to

General Curtis for advice and orders respecting them. Before the

orders arrived, however, he was relieved from command and Major Scott

J. Anthony, of the First Colorado Cavalry, was detailed in his place.

After holding a conference with the Indians and Anthony, in which the

latter renewed the permission for the bands to camp near the fort, he

left Fort Lyons on November 26. Anthony meanwhile had become convinced

that he was exceeding his authority. First he disarmed the savages,

receiving only a few old and worn-out weapons. Then he returned these

and ordered the Indians away from Fort Lyons. They moved forty miles

away and encamped on Sand Creek.

The Colorado authorities had no idea of calling it a peace. Governor

Evans had scolded Wynkoop for bringing the chiefs in to Denver. He had

received special permission and had raised a hundred-day regiment for

an Indian campaign. If he should now make peace, Washington would think

he had misrepresented the situation and put the government to needless

expense. "What shall I do with the third regiment, if I make peace?" he

demanded of Wynkoop. They were "raised to kill Indians, and they must

kill Indians."

Acting on the supposition that the war was still on, Colonel Chivington

led the Third Colorado, and a part of the First Colorado Cavalry, from

900 to 1000 strong, to Fort Lyons in November, arriving two days

after Wynkoop departed. He picketed the fort, to prevent the news of

his arrival from getting out, and conferred on the situation with

Major Anthony, who, swore Major Downing, wished he would attack the

Sand Creek camp and would have done so himself had he possessed troops

enough. Three days before, Anthony had given a present to Black Kettle

out of his own pocket. As the result of the council of war, Chivington

started from Fort Lyon at nine o'clock, on the night of the 28th.

About daybreak on November 29 Chivington's force reached the Cheyenne

village on Sand Creek, where Black Kettle, White Antelope, and some

500 of their band, mostly women and children, were encamped in the

belief that they had made their peace. They had received no pledge of

this, but past practice explained their confidence. The village was

surrounded by troops who began to fire as soon as it was light. "We

killed as many as we could; the village was destroyed and burned,"

declared Downing, who further professed, "I think and earnestly

believe the Indians to be an obstacle to civilization, and should be

exterminated." White Antelope was killed at the first attack, refusing

to leave the field, stating that it was the fault of Black Kettle,

others, and himself that occasioned the massacre, and that he would

die. Black Kettle, refusing to leave the field, was carried off by his

young men. The latter had raised an American flag and a white flag in

his effort to stop the fight.

The firing began, swore interpreter Smith, on the northeast side of

Sand Creek, near Black Kettle's lodge. Driven thence, the disorderly

horde of savages retreated to War Bonnet's lodge at the upper end of

the village, some few of them armed but most making no resistance. Up

the dry bottom of Sand Creek they ran, with the troops in wild charge

close behind. In the hollows of the banks they sought refuge, but the

soldiers dragged them out, killing seventy or eighty with the worst

barbarities Smith had seen: "All manner of depredations were inflicted

on their persons; they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men

used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked

them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated

their bodies in every sense of the word." The affidavits of soldiers

engaged in the attack are printed in the government documents. They are

too disgusting to be more than referred to elsewhere.

Here at last was the culmination of the plains war of 1864 in the

"Chivington massacre," which has been the centre of bitter controversy

ever since its heroes marched into Denver with their bloody trophies.

It was without question Indian fighting at its worst, yet it was

successful in that the Indian hostilities stopped and a new treaty was

easily obtained by the whites in 1865. The East denounced Chivington,

and the Indian Commissioner described the event in 1865 as a butchery

"in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States."

"Comment cannot magnify the horror," said the _Nation_. The heart of

the question had to do with the matter of good faith. At no time did

the military or Colorado authorities admit or even appear to admit that

the war was over. They regarded the campaign as punitive and necessary

for the foundation of a secure peace. The Indians, on the other hand,

believed that they had surrendered and were anxious to be let alone.

Too often their wish in similar cases had been gratified, to the

prolongation of destructive wars. What here occurred was horrible from

any standard of civilized criticism. But even among civilized nations

war is an unpleasant thing, and war with savages is most merciful, in

the long run, when it speaks the savages' own tongue with no uncertain

accent. That such extreme measures could occur was the result of the

impossible situation on the plains. "My opinion," said Agent Colley,

"is that white men and wild Indians cannot live in the same country

in peace." With several different and diverging authorities over

them, with a white population wanting their reserves and anxious

for a provocation that might justify retaliation upon them, little

difficulties were certain to lead to big results. It was true that the

tribes were being dispossessed of lands which they believed to belong

to them. It was equally true that an Indian war could terrify a whole

frontier and that stern repression was its best cure. The blame which

was accorded to Chivington left out of account the terror in Colorado,

which was no less real because the whites were the aggressors. The

slaughter and mutilation of Indian women and children did much to

embitter Eastern critics, who did not realize that the only way to

crush an Indian war is to destroy the base of supplies,--the camp

where the women are busy helping to keep the men in the field; and who

overlooked also the fact that in the mêlée the squaws were quite as

dangerous as the bucks. Indiscriminate blame and equally indiscriminate

praise have been accorded because of the Sand Creek affair. The

terrible event was the result of the orderly working of causes over

which individuals had little control.

In October, 1865, a peace conference was held on the Little Arkansas at

which terms were agreed upon with Apache, Kiowa and Comanche, Arapaho

and Cheyenne, while the last named surrendered their reserve at Sand

Creek. For four years after this, owing to delays in the Senate and

ambiguity in the agreements, they had no fixed abode. Later they were

given room in the Indian Territory in lands taken from the civilized

tribes.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SIOUX WAR

The struggle for the possession of the plains worked the displacement

of the Indian tribes. At the beginning, the invasion of Kansas had

undone the work accomplished in erecting the Indian frontier. The

occupation of Minnesota led surely to the downfall and transportation

of the Sioux of the Mississippi. Gold in Colorado attracted multitudes

who made peace impossible for the Indians of the southern plains. The

Sioux of the northern plains came within the influence of the overland

march in the same years with similar results.

The northern Sioux, commonly known as the Sioux of the plains, and

distinguished from their relatives the Sioux of the Mississippi, had

participated in the treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, had granted rights

of transit to the whites, and had been recognized themselves as nomadic

bands occupying the plains north of the Platte River. Heretofore they

had had no treaty relations with the United States, being far beyond

the frontier. Their people, 16,000 perhaps, were grouped roughly in

various bands: Brulé, Yankton, Yanktonai, Blackfoot, Hunkpapa, Sans

Arcs, and Miniconjou. Their dependence on the chase made them more

dependent on the annuities provided them at Laramie. As the game

diminished the annuity increased in relative importance, and scarcely

made a fair equivalent for what they lost. Yet on the whole, they

imitated their neighbors, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and kept the peace.