THE FAR WEST (1820-1830)
In the decade of which we write, more than two-thirds of the present
area of the United States was Indian country--a vast wilderness
stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. East of the
Mississippi, the pioneers had taken possession of the hardwoods of
the Ohio, but over the prairies between them and the Great Lakes the
wild flowers and grasses grew rank and undisturbed. To the north,
across Michigan and Wisconsin, spread the somber, white-pine
wilderness, interlaced with hardwoods, which swept in ample zone
along the Great Lakes, and, in turn, faded into the treeless expanse
of the prairies beyond the Mississippi. To the south, in the Gulf
plains, Florida was, for the most part, a wilderness; and, as we
have seen, great areas of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia were
still unoccupied by civilization.
West of the Mississippi lay a huge new world--an ocean of grassy
prairie that rolled far to the west, till it reached the zone where
insufficient rainfall transformed it into the arid plains, which
stretched away to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. Over this
vast waste, equal in area to France, Germany, Spain, Portugal,
Austria-Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium combined, a land where
now wheat and corn fields and grazing herds produce much of the food
supply for the larger part of America and for great areas of Europe,
roamed the bison and the Indian hunter. Beyond this, the Rocky
Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, enclosing high plateaus, heaved up
their vast bulk through nearly a thousand miles from east to west,
concealing untouched treasures of silver and gold. The great valleys
of the Pacific coast in Oregon and California held but a sparse
population of Indian traders, a few Spanish missions, and scattered
herdsmen.
At the beginning of Monroe's presidency, the Pacific coast was still
in dispute between England, Spain, Russia, and the United States.
Holding to all of Texas, Spain also raised her flag over her
colonists who spread from Mexico along the valley of the Rio Grande
to Santa Fe, and she claimed the great unoccupied wilderness of
mountain and desert comprising the larger portion of Colorado,
Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, as well as California. In the decade of
1820-1830, fur-traders threaded the dark and forbidding defiles of
the mountains, unfolded the secrets of the Great Basin, and found
their way across the Rockies to California and Oregon; the
government undertook diplomatic negotiations to safeguard American
rights on the Pacific, and extended a line of forts well into the
Indian country; while far-seeing statesmen on the floor of Congress
challenged the nation to fulfill its destiny by planting its
settlements boldly beyond the Rocky Mountains on the shores of the
Pacific. It was a call to the lodgment of American power on that
ocean, the mastery of which is to determine the future relations of
Asiatic and European civilizations. [Footnote: Cf. Babcock, Am.
Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xv.]
A survey of the characteristics of the life of the far west shows
that, over Wisconsin and the larger part of Michigan, the Indian
trade was still carried on by methods introduced by the French.
[Footnote: Masson, Le Bourgeois de Nordwest; Parkman. Old Regime.]
Aster's American Fur Company practically controlled the trade of
Wisconsin and Michigan. It shipped its guns and ammunition,
blankets, gewgaws, and whiskey from Mackinac to some one of the
principal posts, where they were placed in the light birch canoes,
manned by French boatmen, and sent throughout the forests to the
minor trading-posts. Practically all of the Indian villages of the
tributaries of the Great Lakes and of the upper Mississippi were
regularly visited by the trader. The trading-posts became the nuclei
of later settlements; the traders' trails grew into the early roads,
and their portages marked out the location for canals. Little by
little the fur-trade was undermining the Indian society and paving
the way for the entrance of civilization. [Footnote: Turner,
Character and Influence of the Fur Trade in Wis., in Wis. Hist.
Soc., Transactions, 1889.]
In the War of 1812, all along the frontier of Indiana, Illinois, and
Missouri, as well as in the southwest, the settlers had drawn back
into forts, much as in the early days of the occupation of Kentucky
and Tennessee, and the traders and the Indians had been entirely
under the influence of Great Britain. In the negotiations at Ghent,
that power, having captured the American forts at Mackinac, Prairie
du Chien, and Chicago, tried to incorporate in the treaty a
provision for a neutral belt, or buffer state, of Indian territory
in the northwest, to separate Canada from the United States.
[Footnote: Cf. Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap.
x.] Taught by this experience, the United States, at the close of
the war, passed laws excluding aliens from conducting the Indian
trade, and erected forts at Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, Chicago,
and Fort Snelling. By order of Secretary of War Calhoun, Governor
Cass, of Michigan, made an expedition in 1820 along the south shore
of Lake Superior into Minnesota, to compel the removal of English
flags and to replace British by American influence. [Footnote:
Schoolcraft, Hist, of Indian Tribes, VI., 422; ibid., Narrative
Journal; "Doty's Journal," in Wis. Hist. Soc., Collections, XIII.,
163.] At the same time, an expedition under Major Long visited the
upper waters of the Minnesota River on a similar errand. [Footnote:
Keating, Long's Expedition.] An agent who was sent by the government
to investigate the Indian conditions of this region in 1820,
recommended that the country now included in Wisconsin, northern
Michigan, and part of Minnesota should be an Indian reservation,
from which white settlements should be excluded, with the idea that
ultimately the Indian population should be organized as a state of
the Union. [Footnote: Morse, Report on Indian Affairs in 1820.]
The Creeks and Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws of the Gulf
region were more advanced towards civilization than the Indians of
the northwest. While the latter lived chiefly by hunting and
trapping, the southwestern Indians had developed a considerable
agriculture and a sedentary life. For that very reason, however,
they were the more obnoxious to the pioneers who pressed upon their
territory from all sides; and, as we shall see, strenuous efforts
were made to remove them beyond the Mississippi.
Throughout the decade the problem of the future of the Indians east
of this river was a pressing one, and the secretaries of war, to
whose department the management of the tribes belonged, made many
plans and recommendations for their civilization, improvement, and
assimilation. But the advance of the frontier broke down the efforts
to preserve and incorporate these primitive people in the dominant
American society. [Footnote: Am. State Paps., Indian, II., 275, 542,
et passim; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, VII., 89, 90, 92; Richardson,
Messages and Papers, II., 234, et seq.]
Across the Mississippi, settlement of the whites had, in the course
of this decade, pushed up the Missouri well towards the western
boundary of the state, and, as the map of the settlement shows, had
made advances towards the interior in parts of Arkansas as well. But
these were only narrow wedges of civilization thrust into the Indian
country, the field of operations of the fur-traders. Successors to
the French traders who had followed the rivers and lakes of Canada
far towards the interior, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the
Northwest Company under British charters had carried their
operations from the Great Lakes to the Pacific long before Americans
entered the west. As early as 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reached the
Pacific from the Great Lakes by way of Canada. [Footnote: Mackenzie,
Travels.] The year before, an English ship under Vancouver explored
the northwestern coast in the hope of finding a passage by sea to
the north and east. He missed the mouth of the Columbia, which in
the following month was entered by an American, Captain Gray, who
ascended the river twenty miles. The expedition of Lewis and Clark,
1804-1806, made the first crossing of the continent from territory
of the United States, and strengthened the claims of that country to
the region of the Columbia. [Footnote: Cf. Charming, Jeffersonian
System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap vii.]
John Jacob Astor's attempt to plant a trading-post at Astoria
[Footnote: Irving, Astoria.] had been defeated by the treachery of
his men, who, at the opening of the War of 1812, turned the post
over to the British Northwest fur-traders. The two great branches of
the Columbia, the one reaching up into Canada, and the other pushing
far into the Rocky Mountains, on the American side, constituted
lines of advance for the rival forces of England and the United
States in the struggle for the Oregon country. The British traders
rapidly made themselves masters of the region. [Footnote: Coues
(editor), Greater Northwest.] By 1825 the Hudson's Bay Company
monopolized the English fur-trade and was established at Fort George
(as Astoria was rechristened), Fort Walla-Walla, and Fort Vancouver,
near the mouth of the Willamette. Here, for twenty-two years, its
agent, Dr. John McLoughlin, one of the many Scotchmen who have built
up England's dominion in the new countries of the globe, ruled like
a benevolent monarch over the realms of the British traders.
[Footnote: Schafer, Pacific Northwest, chap. viii.] From these
Oregon posts as centers they passed as far south as the region of
Great Salt Lake, in what was then Mexican territory.
While the British traders occupied the northwest coast the Spaniards
held California. Although they established the settlement of San
Francisco in the year of the declaration of American independence,
settlement grew but slowly. The presidios, the missions, with their
Indian neophytes, and the cattle ranches feebly occupied this
imperial domain. Yankee trading-ships gathered hides and tallow at
San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco; Yankee whalers, seal-
hunters, and fur-traders sought the northwest coast and passed on to
China to bring back to Boston and Salem the products of the far
east. [Footnote: R. H. Dana, Two Years before the Mast.] But Spain's
possession was not secure. The genius for expansion which had
already brought the Russians to Alaska drew them down the coast even
to California, and in 1812 they established Fort Ross at Bodega Bay,
a few miles below the mouth of Russian River, north of San
Francisco. This settlement, as well as the lesser one in the
Farallone Islands, endured for nearly a generation, a menace to
Spain's ascendancy in California in the chaotic period when her
colonies were in revolt. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of
California, II., 628; Hittel, Hist. of California.]
In the mean time, from St. Louis as a center, American fur-traders,
the advance-guard of settlement, were penetrating into the heart of
the vast wilderness between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast.
[Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade of the Far West] This was a
more absolute Indian domain than was the region between the
Alleghenies and the Mississippi at the end of the seventeenth
century--an empire of mountains and prairies, where the men of the
Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling waves of that tide
of civilization that was to sweep them away. The savage population
of the far west has already been described in an earlier volume of
this series.[Footnote: Farrand, Basis of Am. Hist. (Am. Nation,
II.), chaps, viii., ix., xii.; see also chap. iv. On the location of
the Indians, see map, p. 309; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., pt.
v., chaps, viii., ix., x.; Bureau of Ethnology, Seventh Annual
Report.]
With the development of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the most
flourishing period of the St. Louis trade in the far west began. The
founder of this company was William H. Ashley, a Virginian. Between
the autumn of 1823 and the spring of the next year, one of his
agents erected a post at the mouth of the Bighorn, and sent out his
trappers through the Green River valley, possibly even to Great Salt
Lake. A detachment of this party found the gateway of the Rocky
Mountains, through the famous South Pass by way of the Sweetwater
branch of the north fork of the Platte. This pass commanded the
routes to the great interior basin and to the Pacific Ocean. What
Cumberland Gap was in the advance of settlement across the
Alleghenies, South Pass was in the movement across the Rocky
Mountains; through it passed the later Oregon and California trails
to the Pacific coast.
On the lower Missouri and at various places in the
interior,[Footnote: See map, p. 114; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I.,
44-51 (describes posts, etc.).] stockaded trading-posts were erected
by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its rival, the American Fur
Company. In these posts the old fur-trade life of the past went on,
with French half-breed packmen and boatmen, commanded by the
bourgeois. But in some of the best trading-grounds, the savages
declined to permit the erection of posts, and so, under Ashley's
leadership, bands of mounted American trappers, chiefly Kentuckians,
Tennesseeans, and Missourians, were sent out to hunt and trade in
the rich beaver valleys of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain
trappers were the successors to the Allegheny frontiersmen, carrying
on in this new region, where nature wrought on a vaster plan, the
old trapping life which their ancestors had carried on through
Cumberland Gap in the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky.
Yearly, in June and July, a rendezvous was held in the mountains, to
which the brigades of trappers returned with the products of their
hunt, to receive the supplies for the coming year. Here, also, came
Indian tribes to trade, and bands of free trappers, lone wanderers
in the mountains, to sell their furs and secure supplies. [Footnote:
Irving, Bonneville, chap. i.] The rendezvous was usually some
verdure-clad valley or park set in the midst of snow-capped
mountains, a paradise of game. Such places were Jackson's Hole, at
the foot of the lofty Tetons, Pierre's Hole, not far away, and
Ogden's Hole, near the present site of Ogden, in Utah. Great Salt
Lake was probably first visited by Bridger in 1824, and the next
year a party of Hudson Bay trappers were expelled by Americans who
took possession of their furs. In 1826, Ashley carried a six-pounder
cannon on wheels to Utah Lake for the defense of his post.
A new advance of the American fur-trader was made when Jedediah
Smith succeeded Ashley as the leader in Rocky Mountain trade and
exploration. In 1826 he left the Salt Lake rendezvous with a party
of trappers to learn the secrets of the lands between the Rocky
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Proceeding to the southwest along
the Virgin River, Smith descended it to the Colorado, and crossed
the desert to San Diego, California. Here, by the intercession of a
Yankee captain then in that port, he obtained supplies from the
Spaniards, and turned to the northwest, traveling parallel to the
coast for some three hundred miles to wintering grounds on the
headwaters of the San Joaquin and the Merced. Leaving most of his
party behind, he crossed the mountains, by a route south of the
Humboldt, and returned to Great Salt Lake.
Almost immediately he set out again for California by the previous
route, and in 1827 reached the San Jose mission. Here he was
arrested by the Spanish authorities and sent under guard to
Monterey, where another Yankee skipper secured his release.
Wintering once more in California, this time on the American Fork,
he reached the coast in the spring of 1828, and followed the Umpquah
River towards the Oregon country. While he was absent, his camp was
attacked by the Indians and fifteen of his men killed. Absolutely
alone, Smith worked his way through the forest to Fort Vancouver,
where he enjoyed the hospitality of Dr. McLoughlin through the
winter. In the following spring he ascended the Columbia to the
Hudson Bay posts among the Flatheads, and made his way in the summer
of 1829 to the rendezvous of his company at the Tetons. In three
years this daring trader, braving the horrors of the desert and
passing unscathed from Indian attacks which carried off most of his
companions, opened to knowledge much of the vast country between
Great Salt Lake and the Pacific. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft,
California, III., 152-160, citing the sources.] In 1831, while on
the Santa Fe trail, Smith and his companions lost their way.
Perishing with thirst, he finally reached the Cimaron, where, as he
was digging for water in its sandy bed, he was shot by an Indian.
Thus the active men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, in the decade
between 1820 and 1830, revealed the sources of the Platte, the
Green, the Yellowstone, and the Snake rivers, and the
characteristics of the Great Salt Lake region; they pioneered the
way to South Pass, descended Green River by boat, carried cannon
into the interior basin; showed the practicability of a wagon route
through the Rockies, reached California from Salt Lake, crossed the
Sierras and the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and became intimately
acquainted with the activity of the British traders of the northwest
coast. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I., 306.]
Already an interest in Oregon and the Rocky Mountain region was
arising on the eastern seaboard. In 1832, Captain Bonneville, an
officer in the United States army, on leave of absence, passed with
a wagon-train into the Rocky Mountains, where for nearly three years
he trapped and traded and explored. [Footnote: Irving, Bonneville.]
Walker, one of his men, in 1833, reached California by the Humboldt
River (a route afterwards followed by the emigrants to California),
and made known much new country. A New England enthusiast, Hall
Kelley, had for some years been lecturing on the riches of the
Oregon country and the need of planting an agricultural colony
there. It was natural that Boston should be interested in the Oregon
country, which was visited by so many vessels from that port. In
1820, New England missionaries settled in the Hawaiian Islands,
closely connected by trade with the coast. In 1832, Nathaniel Wyeth,
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a party of New-Englanders west,
with the plan of establishing a trading and fishing post on the
waters of the Columbia. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I.,
435; Wyeth's "Journals" are published by the Oregon Hist. Soc.; cf.
Irving, Bonneville, chap. vi.]
With Wyeth, on a second expedition in 1834, went the Reverend Jason
Lee and four Methodist missionaries. Two years later came Dr. Marcus
Whitman and another company of missionaries with their wives; they
brought a wagon through South Pass and over the mountains to the
Snake River, and began an agricultural colony. Thus the old story of
the sequence of fur-trader, missionary, and settler was repeated.
The possession of Oregon by the British fur-trader was challenged by
the American farmer.
Contemporaneously with the development of the fur-trade in the Rocky
Mountains, a trade was opened between St. Louis and the old Spanish
settlements at Santa Fe. Although even in the days of Washington
adventurous frontiersmen like George Rogers Clark had set their eyes
on Santa Fe and the silver-mines of the southwest, it was not until
the Mexican revolution (1821), when Spain's control was weakened
throughout her whole domain, that systematic trade was possible. In
1822, Becknell, of Missouri, took a wagon-train to Santa Fe, to
trade for horses and mules and to trap en route. Year after year
thereafter, caravans of Missouri traders found their way across the
desert, by the Santa Fe trail, with cottons and other dry-goods
furnished from St. Louis, and brought back horses, mules, furs, and
silver. The trade averaged about one hundred and thirty thousand
dollars a year, and was an important source of supply of specie for
the west; and it stimulated the interest of St. Louis in the Mexican
provinces. The mode of handling the wagon--trains that passed
between Missouri and Santa Fe furnished the model for the caravans
that later were to cross the plains in the rush to the gold-fields
of California.[Footnote: Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies;
Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., chap. xxix.] By 1833 the important
western routes were clearly made known.[Footnote: Semple, Am. Hist.
and its Geographic Conditions, chap, x.] The Oregon trail, the Santa
Fe trail, the Spanish trail, and the Gila route [Footnote: Personal
Narrative of James O. Pattie; H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of California,
III., 162.] had been followed by frontiersmen into the promised land
of the Pacific coast and the southwest. In the course of ten years,
not only had the principal secrets of the topography of the Rocky
Mountains, the Great Basin, the passes across the Sierra Nevadas
been revealed, but also the characteristics of the Spanish-American
settlements of California and the Rio Grande region. Already
pioneers sought Texas, and American colonization was preparing for
another and greater conquest of the wilderness.
The interest of the United States government in the far west in this
period was shown in exploration and diplomacy. Calhoun projected an
extension of the forts of the United States well up the Missouri
into the Indian country, partly as protection to the traders and
partly as a defense against English aggressions. Two Yellowstone
expeditions [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., 562; Long's
Expedition (Early Western Travels, XIV.-XVII.).] were designed to
promote these ends. The first of these, 1819-1820, was a joint
military and scientific undertaking; but the military expedition,
attempting to ascend the Missouri in steamboats, got no farther than
Council Bluffs. Mismanagement, extravagance, and scandal attended
the undertaking, and the enterprise was made an occasion for a
political onslaught on Calhoun's management of the war department.
The scientific expedition, under Major Long, of the United States
Engineering Corps, ascended the Missouri in the Western Engineer,
the first steamboat which navigated those waters above St. Louis--a
stern-wheeler, with serpent-mouthed figure-head, through which the
steam escaped, bringing terror to the savages along the banks. The
expedition advanced far up the South Platte, discovered Long's Peak,
and camped near the site of Denver. Thence the party passed to La
Junta, Colorado, whence it broke into two divisions, one of which
descended the Arkansas; the other reached the Canadian River (which
it mistook for the Red) and descended to its junction with the
Arkansas. The effort to push the military power of the government to
the mouth of the Yellowstone failed, and the net result, on the
military side, was a temporary post near the present site of Omaha.
The most important effect of the expedition was to give currency to
Long's description of the country through which he passed as the
"Great American Desert," unfit for cultivation and uninhabitable by
agricultural settlers. The whole of the region between the Missouri
River and the Rocky Mountains seemed to him adapted as a range for
buffalo, "calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an
extension of our population westward," and to secure us against the
incursions of enemies in that quarter. [Footnote: Long's Expedition
(Early Western Travels, XVII.), 147, 148.] A second expedition, in
1825, under General Atkinson and Major O'Fallon, reached the mouth
of the Yellowstone, having made treaties with various Indian tribes
on the way.
In the mean time, Congress and the president were busy with the
question of Oregon. By the convention of 1818, with Great Britain,
the northern boundary of the United States was carried from the Lake
of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, along the forty-ninth parallel.
Beyond the mountains, the Oregon country was left open, for a period
of ten years, to joint occupation of both powers, without prejudice
to the claims of either. Having thus postponed the Oregon question,
the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, turned to his Spanish
relations. Obliged by Monroe to relinquish our claim to Texas in the
treaty of 1819, by which we obtained Florida, he insisted on so
drawing our boundary-line in the southwest as to acquire Spain's
title to the Pacific north of the forty-second parallel, and to the
lands that lay north and east of the irregular line from the
intersection of this parallel with the Rocky Mountains to the
Sabine. Adams was proud of securing this line to the Pacific Ocean,
for it was the first recognition by an outside power of our rights
in the Oregon country.[Footnote: Treaties and Conventions (ed. of
1889), 416, 1017; Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.),
chap, xvi.; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, IV., 275.]
Although Russia put forward large and exclusive claims north of the
fifty-first parallel, which we challenged, the contest for Oregon
lay between England and the United States. At the close of 1820,
Floyd, of Virginia, moved in the House of Representatives to inquire
into the feasibility of the occupation of the Columbia River; and
early the next year [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess.,
945; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, V., 238, 243-260.] a committee report was
brought in, discussing the American rights. Floyd's bill provided
for the military occupation of the Columbia River, donation of lands
to actual settlers, and control of the Indians. No vote was reached,
however, and it was not until the close of 1822 that the matter
secured the attention of Congress.
Whatever may have been his motives, Floyd stated with vividness the
significance of western advance in relation to the Pacific coast. He
showed that, while in 1755, nearly a hundred and fifty years after
the foundation of Jamestown, the population of Virginia had spread
but three hundred miles into the interior of the country, during the
last forty-three years population had spread westward more than a
thousand miles. He recalled the days when more than a month was
required to furnish Kentucky with eastern goods, by way of
Pittsburgh, and when it required a voyage of over a month to pass
from Louisville to New Orleans and nearly three months for the
upward voyage. This had now been shortened by steamboat to seven
days down and sixteen days up. From these considerations and the
time from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia by steamboat and
wagon, he argued that Oregon was no more distant from St. Louis in
1822 than St. Louis was twenty years before from Philadelphia. The
fur-trade, the whale and seal fisheries, the trade with China, and
the opportunity for agricultural occupation afforded by Oregon were
all set forth.[Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 397.]
Against the proposal, his opponents argued inexpediency rather than
our treaties with Great Britain. Tracy, of New York, doubted the
value of the Oregon country, and, influenced perhaps by Long's
report, declared that "nature has fixed limits for our nation; she
has kindly introduced as our Western barrier, mountains almost
inaccessible, whose base she has skirted with irreclaimable deserts
of sand."[Footnote: Ibid., 590.] In a later debate, Smyth, of
Virginia, amplified this idea by a proposal to limit the boundaries
of the United States, so that it should include but one or two tiers
of states beyond the Mississippi. He would remove the Indians beyond
this limit, and, if American settlements should cross it, they might
be in alliance with, or under the protection of, the United States,
but outside of its bounds. [Footnote: Register of Debates, 18 Cong.,
2 Sess., I., 37.]
Baylies, of Massachusetts, declared that there were living witnesses
"who have seen a population of scarcely six hundred thousand swelled
into ten millions; a population which, in their youth, extended
scarcely an hundred miles from the ocean, spreading beyond the
mountains of the West, and sweeping down those mighty waters which
open into regions of such matchless fertility and beauty." "Some now
within these walls may, before they die, witness scenes more
wonderful than these; and in aftertimes may cherish delightful
recollections of this day, when America, almost shrinking from the
'shadows of coming events,' first placed her feet upon untrodden
ground, scarcely daring to anticipate the grandeur which awaited
her." Tucker, of Virginia, agreed that settlement "marches on, with
the increasing rapidity of a fire, and nothing will stop it until it
reaches the shores of the Pacific," which he estimated would be by
1872. But he was loath to see it accelerated, believing that the
people on the east and the west side of the Rocky Mountains would
have a permanent separation of interests. [Footnote: Annals of
Cong., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 422.] Nor were even western men sanguine
that the nation could retain the Pacific coast as an integral part
of its vast empire. Senator Benton, of Missouri, was the
congressional champion of the far west. Born in interior North
Carolina, he had followed the frontier to Tennessee, and then, after
killing his man in a duel and exchanging pistol-shots in a free
fight with Jackson, he removed to the new frontier at St. Louis.
Pedantic and ponderous, deeply read in curious historical lore, in
many ways he was not characteristic of the far west, but in the
coarse vigor with which he bore down opposition by abuse, and in the
far horizon line of the policies he advocated, he thoroughly
represented its traits.
Familiar as he was with frontier needs and aspirations, he urged the
United States to block England's control of the northwest, and to
assert title to the Oregon territory, with the idea of ultimately
founding a new and independent American nation there. It is true
that he admitted that along the ridge of the Rocky Mountains "the
western limit of this republic should be drawn, and the statue of
the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak,
never to be thrown down." [Footnote: Register of Debates, I., 712.]
Nevertheless, in his utterances the ideal of expansion was not to be
mistaken. He spoke bravely in favor of the protection and extension
of the fur-trade, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 17 Cong., 1 Sess., I.,
416; cf. ibid., 18 Cong., I Sess., I., 456.] pointing out that
inasmuch as England occupied Oregon, she would, under the law of
nations, have the right of possession until the question of
sovereignty were decided. He warned his countrymen, in 1823, that
Great Britain would monopolize the Pacific Ocean, and by obtaining
control of the Rocky Mountain fur-trade would be able to launch the
Indians of the north and west against the frontiers of Missouri and
Arkansas, Illinois and Michigan, upon the first renewal of
hostilities between the United States of America and the king of
Great Britain. [Footnote: Ibid., 17 Cong., 2 Sess., 246-251.]
Benton believed that, within a century, a population greater than
that of the United States of 1820 would exist on the west side of
the Rocky Mountains; and he saw in the occupation of the northwest
coast the means of promoting a trade between the valley of the
Mississippi, the Pacific Ocean, and Asia. Upon the people of eastern
Asia, he thought, the establishment of a civilized power on the
opposite coast of America would produce great benefits. "Science,
liberal principles in government, and the true religion, might cast
their lights across the intervening sea. The valley of the Columbia
might become the granary of China and Japan, and an outlet to their
imprisoned and exuberant population.... Russia and the legitimates
menace Turkey, Persia, China, and Japan; they menace them for their
riches and dominions; the same Powers menace the two Americas for
the popular forms of their Governments. To my mind the proposition
is clear, that Eastern Asia and the two Americas, as they have
become neighbors, should become friends." [Footnote: Register of
Debates, I., 712.]
With true western passion he denounced the relinquishment of Texas
by the treaty of 1819. "The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is
ours," he proclaimed, "with all its fountains, springs, and floods
and woe to the statesman who shall undertake to surrender one drop
of its water, one inch of its soil, to any foreign power." He was
ready for a war with Spain, believing that it would give the United
States the Floridas and Cuba, "the geographical appurtenance of the
valley of the Mississippi"; that it would free the New from the Old
World; and that it would create a cordon of republics across the two
continents of North and South America. He pointed to the west as the
route to the east--the long-sought way to India; and, in
imagination, he outlined the states to be laid off "from the center
of the valley of the Mississippi to the foot of the shining
mountains." "It is time," he wrote, "that Western men had some share
in the destinies of this republic." [Footnote: Meigs, Benton, 98,
99, cf. 91.]