he set about felling trees for his cabin. On the Missouri, where the
first settlers chiefly came from Tennessee and Kentucky, this dwelling
was usually two houses, built a little apart from each other, each
containing but one room, and joined together only by the roof, so
leaving an opening in the centre, where the family usually sat in the
heat of the day. The chimneys were built of sticks, plastered with
clay, and stood at the outside of the building, as the fashion is in
the Southern States. There was little difference between the dwellings
of rich and poor. In these humble abodes the first generation grew up
to man's estate to find themselves to-day the founders of an empire.
Unlike the backwoodsman, the settler had come to better his
condition,—to grow up with the country, not abandon it with the first
token of progress. Here he lived content. He broke up his forty acres
of prairie land, fenced and planted it, and from its fertility soon
reaped an abundant harvest of corn and potatoes, which with his swine
and poultry, furnished more than food enough for his wants. Though the
comforts of life were scarcely attainable in a wilderness, he had the
necessaries, and could say, with our gracious poet, to the dweller in
cities,—
"How canst thou walk in these streets, who hast trod the green
turf of the prairies?
How canst thou breathe in this air, who hast breathed the sweet
air of the mountains?"
LONG EXPLORES THE PLATTE VALLEY.
From the summit of Pike's Peak, Pike, the explorer, had looked down upon
regions watered by four great rivers,—the Platte,[1] Arkansas, Rio
Grande and Colorado. Into those dark gorges he had recklessly plunged.
But he had scarcely done more than confirm the position of the great
landmark, which nature has placed at the head of these great rivers.
War with England had put a stop to exploration for a time, but with
peace it was determined to know if the Platte would not afford a better
route than the roundabout one Lewis and Clarke had followed to the
Pacific. It was thought depressions might exist where this river issued
from the mountains, so giving access to the country on the other side,
by a way less formidable to the traveller than had yet been found.
With this object in view, Major Long[2] was sent to the Missouri in
1819 by President Monroe. As he was a man of scientific attainments,
a more thorough and critical report was expected from him than his
predecessors had so far furnished.
Long's journey marks a distinct era in the ways of travel; for while
Pike had used row-boats, Long ascended the Missouri in a steamboat built
for the purpose at Pittsburg, and named the "Western Engineer." In this
vessel he made the voyage to Council Bluffs.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING LONG'S EXPLORATIONS.]
In going up the Missouri, Long found the most populous settlements
growing up in the neighborhood of St. Charles, in what is now Callaway
County, and in that part lying between the Osage and Chariton. Above
the Chariton only a horse-path, called a trace, led northward to Council
Bluffs.
In all these primitive settlements superior wealth would be indicated by
the number and size of the corn-cribs, smoke-houses, etc., but nothing
resembling the barn found on every farm in the Northern States entered
into the make-up of these frontier homesteads.
After spending the winter in camp near Council Bluffs, Long passed on
his way into the Platte, to the village of the Otoe nation, situated
about forty miles above the confluence of the Platte with the Missouri.
Going thence he entered the Pawnee country, finding there a more
friendly welcome than Pike had met with, but, like him, getting an
impression of savage chivalry and independence, the like of which he had
found nowhere else. The braves of this nation hung out their war-shields
in the village streets, as the cavaliers of old were accustomed to
display theirs before their tents, so that every passerby might know
who the occupant was by his device.
[Illustration: PRAIRIE-DOG VILLAGE.]
Long's party turned down the South Fork of the Platte, and reached the
mountains in July, 1820, after making a journey of nearly a thousand
miles since leaving the Missouri.
In one place this traveller has noted down how they had passed by a
large and uncommonly beautiful village of the prairie marmot, covering a
grassy plain of about a mile square. As they came toward it, this spot
happened to be covered with a herd of some thousands of bisons. On the
left were a number of wild horses, and immediately in front twenty or
thirty antelopes, and about half as many deer. As it was near sunset the
light fell obliquely upon the grass, giving an additional brilliancy
to its dark verdure. The little inhabitants of the village were seen
running playfully about in all directions, and when the travellers got
near them, they sat erect on their burrows, and gave a short, sharp bark
of alarm.
A scene of this kind comprised most of what was beautiful and
interesting to the passing traveller in the wide unvaried plains of the
Missouri and Arkansas.
Before leaving this interesting region, Dr. James, the botanist and
historian of the expedition, ascended the high mountain now known as
Long's Peak (July 13). Turning south, Long's party soon struck the
waters of the Arkansas, near Pike's Peak, from whose summits they
saw the great plain they had crossed, "rising as it receded until it
appeared to mingle with the sky."
[Illustration: DIGGING IN THE RIVER-BED FOR WATER.]
From this point, the explorers descended the valleys of the Arkansas
and its largest tributary, the Canadian, to Fort Smith, and from
thence through the growing settlements of the territory,[3] to
the Mississippi, visiting, by the way, the famous Hot Springs of the
Washita. The upper waters of the Arkansas and Platte were reported
by them to lie in sandy wastes unfit for occupation by civilized man.
Often the explorers would have to dig in the bed of the river to get
water, while the arid appearance of every thing around, caused by the
disappearance of the rivers[4] beneath their own sands, the want
of wood and absence of game, stamped the whole region as one on which
nature had set the seal of perpetual barrenness and desolation.
The sum of these discoveries had traced out, as it were, the larger
veins through which emigration, the life-blood of the country, was
ultimately to flow.
FOOTNOTES
[1] THE PLATTE was called Nebraska by the Otoes, whence
comes the name of the State in which it chiefly lies. Some
authorities make the Indian word mean the same thing as the
French, or flat and shallow, which describes it well.
[2] MAJOR STEPHEN HARRIMAN LONG had been assistant professor
of mathematics at West Point. He afterwards (1823-24) explored
the Upper Mississippi. Journal of the first expedition
published in 1823, of the second 1824.
[3] ARKANSAS TERRITORY was formed in 1819, capital LITTLE
ROCK, then a village built on a bluff near the beginning of
the hilly region. The name comes from a rock in the river
exposed at low water. FORT SMITH was a new military post.
Other settlements were scattered along the Arkansas from the
White River Cut-off to Belle Point, and on Red River as far
as the Kiamesha. Though numerous, Long says all were small.
Besides these, the CHEROKEES were also forming settlements on
the Arkansas about Cadron, which Long often found superior, in
respect of the comforts of life, to those of the whites. These
people were the vanguard of their nation, to which Government
had ceded lands in Arkansas Territory, and was removing from
Georgia beyond the Mississippi. They owned black slaves, the
same as the whites. They raised considerable cotton, which
they wove into cloth for their own use.
[4] DISAPPEARANCE OF THE RIVERS. Long's party travelled
more than a hundred miles along the dry bed of the Arkansas
without once seeing water. Of course they hastened on through
this desert with all speed.
MISSOURI, AND THE COMPROMISE OF 1821.
Far back, when the original States were yet colonies, and while the
people of Massachusetts were solemnly deliberating how to deliver
themselves from oppression, a letter was read to the body to whom this
grave question had been committed, asking it to consider the state of
the negro slaves in the province.
These men had just said they were called rebels because they would not
be slaves. The dilemma was thus presented to them, either to make good
their declaration, or limit its application to themselves. After some
debate the matter was dropped, but the plea for a principle had been
uttered, the appeal to men's consciences taken, and as some secret
cause, working beneath the waters, gives notice of the agitation below
by sending up bubbles to the surface, so this question of slavery
continued at intervals to prick the conscience of the people, and
confront them at every turn with its warning.
The North had got rid of slavery. It had done more. Its voice had
excluded slavery from the great North-West. But the South owed its
growth to slave labor, and wherever her people went to found new States
they carried their slaves with them. It was inevitable, that, whenever
free and slave labor should meet on the same ground, a conflict must
arise between them, though statesmen were anxious to avert the coming
on of strife as long as possible.
It is hard to stay the march of events, or confute the logic of time.
Even as far back as the beginning of the Union, men had foreseen the
coming storm, with foreboding, yet these men were no wiser than the
Massachusetts men of 1774; for at the time of the Union slavery might
have been so restricted that it would eventually have died out in the
land, or a way provided for the gradual emancipation of the blacks.
Such steps were indeed talked of, but not consummated. So the nation was
allowed to drift on, and the two opposing systems were left to work out
their own results.
In 1819 Missouri asked for admission into the Union. Her doing so,
with a constitution recognizing slavery, proved a rock of danger to
the Republic, the wisest statesmen found it hard to steer clear of. It
provoked violent opposition at the North, and equally vehement support
in the South. Under French rule the people of the nascent State held
slaves. Those who had since come in were mostly from slaveholding
States, and wanted to have slavery recognized as part of their social
and political system.
They demanded this, not as a privilege, but as a right guaranteed
to them by the Constitution itself, in which property in slaves was
distinctly recognized. So they stood firm for what they considered their
rights, defending slavery from the charge of immorality, or inhumanity
of man to man, as men would the most righteous cause.
The North contended, broadly, that slavery was a crime, discountenanced
by Christian people and enlightened thought everywhere, of which the
nation should purge itself. It was said that the idea of a nation being
free, when it countenanced holding men in bondage, was a mockery of
freedom. Many construed the ordinance of 1787 to have forbidden, if not
in its letter, at least in spirit, the formation of slave States out
of newly acquired territory. But these men did not propose to interfere
with slavery in the States where it already existed.
Around these two differing ideas the men of the North and South
clustered themselves. Underlying all, and governing all, was the
conviction that a check to the extension of slavery meant a check to
the political power of the South itself. This view made the South a
unit, while in the North public sentiment was divided, for many there
deprecated agitation of the question, as the entering wedge which should
split the Republic asunder.
When, therefore, Congress took up the bill for the admission of
Missouri, the opponents of slavery met it with the condition that
no slaves should afterward be brought into the new State, while all
children, born in it subsequent to its admission, should be free at
the age of twenty-five years. In time this condition would have made
Missouri a free State.
The matter was hotly debated. Of the twenty-two States then constituting
the Union, ten were slave States. Two ominous phrases began to be heard.
One was "State rights," the other "Balance of power." In the violence
of party strife, patriotism was lost sight of.
The House of Representatives refused to admit Missouri without the
condition; the Senate refused to do so with it. So Missouri was not
admitted at this time.
With the two houses thus divided, it was apparent that no new State
could be admitted, since the Southern party, having control of the
Senate, would not vote to admit a free State so long as Missouri was
kept out, and Maine was then ready to come in as a free State.
As neither party would yield, the more moderate, or timid, men of each
tried to find some intermediate ground where the factions could come
together, each giving up something for the sake of restoring harmony
to the country. Finally a settlement was reached. Maine came in a free
State. Missouri was admitted with slavery, but with the restriction
attached that her southern boundary should thenceforward be the limit
north of which no new slave States should be formed. Thus the line
between freedom and slavery was first strictly drawn on the parallel of
36° 30´, but with a slave State above it. The first battle between the
two warring systems had been fought, and slavery had won. The North had
got a line, but the South had won a State.
ARKANSAS ADMITTED 1836.
Arkansas was admitted into the Union in 1836, as a slave State,
retaining the name it had been given as a Territory, when formed from
the Louisiana purchase,—a name originating with the once powerful nation
Marquette found seated on the banks of the Mississippi. Thus three slave
States had been made out of French Louisiana.
THOMAS H. BENTON'S IDEA.
"_There is the East! There lies the road to India._"
Lawyer, soldier and politician, but not yet a statesman, Thomas H.
Benton went from Tennessee to Missouri after the war with England was
over. Though St. Louis was yet only a large village, it was the focus
of the activities of the Great West. Mr. Benton saw it was the place
for a rising man to grow up in, and accordingly he settled there.
In St. Louis Mr. Benton found an aristocracy of fur-traders, whose
attachment for their own usages and old form of government bound them
together. They kept their own language and manners. With many it was a
point of honor never to learn English at all. In all things they were
as distinctively French as the French people of Canada are to-day. Thus
this scion of refinement had been grafted on a rude frontier life,
but would not assimilate with the coarser elements thrown upon it by
emigration from the States.
By the side of this middle-class (_bourgeois_) aristocracy stood the
Catholic clergy, with its traditions of the old _régime_ in Canada, its
proud record of discovery and missionary work among the barbarians of
these Western wilds, whose every stream and fountain had its story of
zeal and heroism to tell.
This was society at the core. The clergy was its rock of support. Boys
were taught in the parish school, and girls in a nunnery. So education
was as much in the keeping of the Church as religion itself. Nations may
change, but the Roman Church never abandons its people or its objects.
Around this foundation was grouped the community of French Creoles,
whom the great fur companies employed and who were their dependants.
And around them clustered again an increasing population of American
adventurers, coming mostly from the Southern States in search of a
living, for whom St. Louis was the magnet which attracts to itself the
scattered atoms of society far and near.
Outside of St. Louis, Missouri owed her rapid growth to the in-coming
of actual settlers. In 1816 only thirty families were found on the left
bank of the Missouri, above Callaway County. In three years the number
had increased to eight hundred families. Here was the real bone and
sinew of the State.
Mr. Benton found the American Fur-Trading Company sending forth its
yearly caravans over the great plains to the mountains, and from the
mountains, through passes known only to the Indians and fur-traders,
into Sonora, New Mexico and Oregon. Since the way was beset by hostile
Indians, these caravans went armed to the teeth. The same Indians might
fight them one day and trade the next. In time, the passing to and fro
of these traders had marked out well-beaten paths up the Arkansas and
the Platte, which presently came to be known on the frontier as the
Santa Fé Trail and Oregon Trail.[1]
At bottom the St. Louis fur-traders were not more friendly to
colonization than the English fur-traders, but they were quite as eager
to push their business into Oregon, conceiving they had the best right
there, as the English companies were to keep them out of it so that they
themselves might reap all the profit; and so there was rivalry and ill
blood between them.
[Illustration: STATUE OF BENTON.]
Mr. Benton was energetic, ambitious and self-reliant, qualities which
soon identified him with the thought and interests of the people
among whom he had cast in his lot in life. Thoroughly Southern in his
feelings, he had borne an active part in making Missouri a slave State,
and when that result was accomplished the people sent him to the United
States Senate as a reward for his zeal in their behalf.
When the war with England was over, our Government wished to have
the boundary between our own and the British possessions defined and
settled. Though proposed to be run on the forty-ninth parallel it
had never been done, and in buying Louisiana we inherited a dispute
which, so long as that vast region was unexplored and unknown, had
slept, but was now become a source of irritation and danger between
England and the United States. The Columbia River and its basin[2]
were the bone of contention. Both wanted them. Neither would give them
up. Since Astoria[3] had been sold, the Hudson's Bay and North-west
Companies had held uninterrupted possession of the whole country, to the
exclusion of our own ships and traders, whose interests had suffered in
consequence; but as England would not yield her pretensions peaceably,
the people of the Atlantic coast were unwilling to go to war about a
region so remote, the more so because they were just recovering from
the effects of the one lately ended, and felt that they would be the
greatest sufferers if war again broke out between the two nations.
So the two countries compromised their differences by agreeing to hold
Oregon in common, first for ten years (1818-1828), and afterward from
year to year. All this time England was growing stronger in Oregon, and
the United States losing the hold her citizens had first obtained there,
for though it was neutral ground on paper, the English with their free
access by land and sea were able to shut out our traders, and did so.
This state of things was humiliating to the West. It was as though the
nation were eating humble-pie rather than offend England. Continual
agitation of the question served to keep up a feverish feeling about
Oregon, but since Major Long had said it was of no use to think of
cultivating the land between the meridian of Council Bluffs and the
Rocky Mountains, it seemed settled that nobody but fur-traders would
want to cross this desert while so much fertile land remained vacant
in the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys. If settlement must stop at the
edge of this desert, then the idea of geographical unity vanished, and
Oregon would, in truth, be worth little to us. Mr. Benton, himself, was
at one time of this opinion.
So when Mr. Benton wanted the Government to take Oregon with an armed
force, he was told it was not worth the trouble, for Oregon could never
become a State if we did.
There was another element to the dispute, which found much favor in the
West. This was Mr. Monroe's declaration that no European power would
be allowed to subdue or overturn the independent governments of our
continent. This was a notice to England that she could not have Oregon.
It has since been known as the Monroe Doctrine,[4] and so Mr. Monroe
became the author of a national policy.
Mr. Benton mastered all the details of the vexatious Oregon question.
The interests of his constituents were at stake. His patriotism was
aroused. He felt equal disgust with the artifices by which England kept
us out of Oregon, as with the cautious spirit of the East, which counted
the cost of every thing beforehand, less, it seemed to him, in the
spirit of statesmanship, than for what it would be worth at the present
moment.
It should not be forgotten, however, that New England enterprise had
first made known the resources of our possessions on the Pacific.
In fine, Mr. Benton made himself the champion of the growing West. He
had already become, in a sense, the trustee of Mr. Jefferson's pet
scheme of a great overland highway to India, which, indeed, proved
too great for the time that wise man lived in, but only waited for the
people to grow up to it. Mr. Benton knew from Mr. Jefferson's own lips
what results had been hoped for, but not realized,—how the best-laid
plans had been thwarted, or suffered to sleep the sleep of oblivion,—and
the Missouri senator had gone away from his memorable interview more
than ever impressed with the greatness of the mission he was henceforth
to take upon himself as Mr. Jefferson's disciple.
England managed, in one or another way, to delay a settlement just
forty-nine years. A few Americans had gone into Oregon, but as yet they
were only a handful. In 1832 Captain Bonneville[5] took the first
wagon train across the Wind River chain into the Green River Valley,
thus proving the mountains were practicable for vehicles. The same year
Nathaniel J. Wyeth[6] led a party all the way from New England to
Fort Vancouver, after a journey lasting seven months, in which some of
his men were killed by the Blackfeet. In 1834 and 1835 some American
missionaries[7] were sent out to Oregon, one of whom, Marcus Whitman,
was to figure largely in its history. In the following year Dr. Whitman
went through to Fort Walla Walla with a wagon, thus doing what had been
declared impossible. Yet up to the close of 1841 not quite a hundred
and fifty Americans, in all, had settled in Oregon, though the Oregon
Trail was largely shorn of its terrors by the intrepidity of these
real pathfinders. For his part, Dr. Whitman saw clearly, that, since
diplomacy was purposely hindering it, emigration must step in and settle
the question who should have Oregon. And Dr. Whitman was not only a man
of clear sight, but of action.
FOOTNOTES
[1] SANTA FÉ TRAIL and OREGON TRAIL. Independence was long
the farthest white settlement in Missouri, and consequently
became the starting point. So far the Missouri River could be
followed. See map. Westport, and finally Kansas City, grew
from this cause. As settlements extended up the river, the
main trails were struck from many points, as Fort Leavenworth,
St. Joseph, Council Bluffs, etc.,—like trunk roads with many
branches.
[2] THE COLUMBIA AND ITS BASIN. England claimed that Drake
and Cook had first discovered and taken possession of Oregon,
which then included the present Oregon, Idaho, Washington and
part of Montana. In 1671 Saint Lusson, at Sault Ste. Marie,
had taken possession of all the country west to the South Sea
for France. (See preceding chapters.) Whatever rights France
acquired became ours by purchase from her. But Spain had the
better title on the Pacific. She, however, relinquished to
us, on the cession of the Floridas, in 1819, all north of
42°, the present north line of California. We thus became
possessed of all rights either power had laid claim to north
of that parallel. The north boundary, between Louisiana and
the British Possessions, was supposed to be fixed by the
Treaty of Utrecht (1713) at the forty-ninth degree.
[3] ASTORIA was restored to us (1818), after much wrangling,
but the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Vancouver,
ninety miles up the Columbia, so cutting off Astoria from the
upper valleys. It was burnt to the ground in 1821, except a
few huts.
[4] THE MONROE DOCTRINE. "The American Continents, by the
free and independent condition they have assumed and maintain,
are not to be considered as subjects for colonization by
European powers."
[5] CAPTAIN BONNEVILLE'S adventures are related by
Washington Irving.
[6] NATHANIEL J. WYETH established Fort Hall on Lewis River,
in what is now Idaho. The Hudson's Bay Company at once set up
a rival post called Fort Boisé below it, so compelling Wyeth
to sell out to it or be ruined by its competition.