THE MISSISSIPPI, AND INDEPENDENCE[5]
There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built
up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population
that continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The
settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with
the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet
broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so
intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was
easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies.
Therefore, out of the mere fact that water runs downhill, arose one of
the earliest and most dangerous political problems this country ever
knew.
The riflemen of Sevier and Robertson saved Tennessee and Kentucky to the
Union only that they might well-nigh be lost again to Spain. The Indian
fighters of the West knew little how the scales trembled in the balance
for the weak young government of the United States of America, lately
come into place as an independent power. The authorities at Washington
dared not be too firm with France or Spain, or even, with England.
Diplomacy juggled across seas, while the riflemen of the West fought for
the opening of that Great River which meant everything for them.
The league of Spain and the Cherokees kept up covert warfare against
these early Westerners. The stark, staunch men of Robertson and Sevier
hunted down the red fighters and killed them one by one over all the
Western hunting-grounds and corn-grounds; and then they rebelled against
Washington, and were for setting up a world of their own. They sent in a
petition, a veritable prayer from the wilderness, the first words of
complaint ever wrung from those hardy men.
“We endured almost unconquerable difficulties in settling this Western
country,” they said, “in full confidence that we should be enabled to
send our products to the market through the rivers that water the
country; but we have the mortification not only to be excluded from that
channel of commerce by a foreign nation, but the Indians are rendered
more hostile through the influence of that nation.”
To add to the intricacy of this situation, now came one General James
Wilkinson, late of a quasi-connection with the Continental army, who
early discovered the profit of the trade to the mouth of the
Mississippi. Discovering, likewise, the discontent of the West, which
was almost wholly dependent upon that river for its transportation, he
conceived the pretty idea of handing over this land to Spain, believing
that in the confusion consequent upon such change his own personal
fortunes must necessarily be largely bettered. The archives show the
double dealings of Wilkinson with Spain, Great Britain, and the United
States. He played fast and loose with friend and foe, until at length he
found his own level and met in part his just deserts.
Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough
all the dangers that threatened it, continued to work out the problems
crowding upon it. Some breathless, trembling years passed by—years full
of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end
of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of
America’s great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory
which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic,
and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included
wholly within the borders of the West.
The acquisition of this territory was due not so much to American
statesmanship or foresight as to either the freakishness or wisdom of
Napoleon Bonaparte, then much disturbed by the native revolts in the
West Indies, and harassed by the impending war with England. Whether
England or France would land troops at New Orleans was long a question.
The year that saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in
the history of America and of the world.
The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more in virtue of
the vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with
this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together.
It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was
forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles
of country that will one day support its thousands to the mile. But
still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into
it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into
that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other foreign power
might ever do so.
We who have the advantage of the retrospect understand the Mississippi
and its tributaries far better than did the statesmen of a hundred years
ago. Indeed, it was then the belief of many of the ablest minds that we
ought not to accept this Louisiana Purchase even as a gift. Josiah
Adams, in discussing the bill for the admission of Louisiana as a state,
said: “I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that if
this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that
the states which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and
that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to
prepare definitely for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if
they must.”
This from Massachusetts, later to be the home of abolition and of
centralization! It may sit ill with the sons of Massachusetts to reflect
that their own state was the first one deliberately to propose
secession. Still more advanced was the attitude of James White, who
painted the following dismal picture of that West which was to be:
“Louisiana must and will be settled if we hold it, and with the very
population that would otherwise occupy part of our present territory.
Thus our citizens will be removed to the immense distance of two or
three thousand miles from the capital of the Union, where they will
scarcely ever feel the rays of the general government; their affections
will become alienated; they will gradually begin to view us as
strangers; they will form other commercial connections, and our
interests will become distinct. These, with other causes that human
wisdom may not now foresee, will in time effect a separation, and I fear
our bounds will be fixed nearer to our houses than the waters of the
Mississippi. We have already territory enough, and when I contemplate
the evils that may arise to these States from this intended
incorporation of Louisiana into the Union, I would rather see it given
to France, to Spain, or to any other nation of the earth, upon the mere
condition that no citizen of the United States should ever settle within
its limits, than to see the territory sold for a hundred million of
dollars and we retain the sovereignty. . . . And I do say that, under
existing circumstances, even supposing that this extent of territory was
a valuable acquisition, fifteen million dollars was a most enormous sum
to give.”
How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last
utterance. The sum of fifteen million dollars seemed “enormous.” To-day,
less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his
lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be
two hundred and sixty-six million dollars.
One Western city, located in that despised territory, during the year
just past showed sales of grain alone amounting to one hundred and
twenty-three million three hundred thousand dollars; of live stock
alone, two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; of wholesale trade,
seven hundred and eighty-six million two hundred and five thousand
dollars; of manufactures—where manufactures were once held
impossible—the total of seven hundred and forty-one million and
ninety-seven thousand dollars.
It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington; it is now four days
from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the
individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures that surpass
all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than
a hundred years. The people have outrun all the wisdom of their leaders.
What would Daniel Webster, famous New Englander, doubter and discreditor
of the West, say, were he to know the West to-day?
Yet the men of that day were not so much to blame, for they were in the
infancy of transportation, and as no army is better than its commissary
trains, so is no nation better than its transportation. We were still in
the crude, primitive, down-stream days. Steam had not yet come upon the
great interior waterways. The west-bound mountain roads across the
Alleghanies were still only narrow tracks worn by the feet of
pack-horses that carried mostly salt and bullets. The turnpikes fit for
wagon traffic were Eastern affairs only. The National Road, from
Wheeling to the westward, was restricted in its staging possibilities.
Between the hardy Western population and its earlier home there rose the
high barrier of the Appalachians, to ascend whose streams meant a long,
grievous and dangerous journey, a Journey commercially impracticable.
The first traffic of the old mountain road was in salt and bullets, and
it was a traffic that all went one way. The difficulties of even this
crude commerce led to the establishment, as the very first manufacture
ever begun in the West, of works for the production of salt. Bullitt’s
Lick, on Salt Creek, was one of the earliest, if not the earliest,
manufacturing community west of the Alleghanies, and part of the
downstream trade of the day was in carrying kettles from Louisville down
the Ohio and up Salt Creek to the lick. This route was in hostile Indian
country, and every voyage held its own terrors.
We may note, then, the beginning of the commercial West in the local
necessities of that West. For the first west-bound generation the
problem of transportation had been largely a personal one. The first
adventurers, with little baggage but the rifle and the ax, able to live
on parched corn and jerked venison, with women almost as hardy as men,
neither possessed nor cared for the surplus things of life. They
subsisted on what nature gave them, seeking but little to add to the
productiveness of nature in any way.
But now we must, presently, conceive of our Western man as already shorn
of a trifle of his fringes. His dress was not now so near a parallel to
that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien
somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax
that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself
could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for
the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the
Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than
merely similar commodities.
Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to
assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning
history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better
in some cases did we learn the time of certain great and significant
happenings.
It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn
of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that
the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flat-boat
that supplanted his canoe. The flat-boat ran altogether down-stream.
Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western
man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help
of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out
of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters
would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to the East that was
once his home.
So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a
civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the
sea and upon the Old World. The Westerner had forgotten the oysters and
shad, the duck and terrapin of the seaboard. He still lived on venison
and corn, the best portable food ever known for hard marching and hard
work. The more dainty Easterners, the timid ones, the stay-at-homes,
said that this new man of the Western territory was a creature “half
horse and half alligator.” It were perhaps more just to accord to him a
certain manhood, either then or now. He prevailed, he conquered, he
survived, and therefore he was right. There grew the aristocracy of
ability.
The government at Washington saw this growing up of a separate kingdom,
and sought to shorten the arc of this common but far-reaching sky; it
sought to mitigate the swiftness of these streams, to soften the
steepness of these eternal hills. Witness Washington’s forgotten canal
from the headwaters of the James River—a canal whose beginning or end
would puzzle the average American of to-day to define without special
study. Witness many other canal and turnpike schemes, feeble efforts at
the solution of the one imperishable problem of a land vast in its
geography.
Prior to the Louisiana Purchase no man could think of a civilization
west of the Mississippi; but there were certain weak attempts made by
the government to bind to itself that part of the new lands that lay in
the eastern half of the Mississippi valley. The “Ordinance of the
Northwest,” done by the hand of Thomas Jefferson himself, makes
interesting reading to-day. This ordinance sought to establish a number
of states in the great valley “as soon as the lands should have been
purchased from the Indians.”
It was proposed that each state should comprehend, from north to south,
“two degrees of latitude, beginning to count from the completion of
thirty-one degrees north of the equator, but any state northwardly of
the forty-seventh degree shall make part of that state next below; and
eastwardly and westwardly they shall be bounded, those on the
Mississippi by that river on one side, and the meridian of the lowest
point on the rapids of the Ohio on the other; those adjoining on the
east by the same meridian on their western side, and on their eastern by
the meridian of the western cape of the mouth of the Great Kanawha; and
the territory eastward of this last meridian between the Ohio, Lake
Erie, and Pennsylvania shall be one state.”
The Ordinance even went so far as to propose names for these future
states, and quaint enough were some of the names suggested for those
that are now Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. “Sylvania,”
“Cherronesus,” “Asenesipia,” “Metropotamia,” “Pelesipia”—these are
names of Western states that never were born, and in this there is proof
enough of the fact that, though the government at Washington had its eye
on the West, it had established no control over the West, and under the
existing nature of things had no right ever to expect such control. As a
matter of fact, the government never did catch this truant province
until the latter, in its own good time, saw fit to come back home. This
was after the West had solved its own problems of commercial
intercourse.
It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of
this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus,
and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land
east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see Map No. 1) will prove of
the best service, and its little blotches of color will tell much in
brief regarding the West of 1800.
For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the
city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement on
the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had
been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers,
there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of
population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain
hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original Pennsylvania hotbed,
was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population
from the southward, and not from the East, though the New Englander,
Moses Cleveland, founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796.
Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious,
illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what
was known as the “Mississippi Territory.” Smaller yet, and more
inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from
Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of
population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the
Wisconsin emptied.
These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the state
of Ohio, which had lain directly in the latitudinal path of the star.
The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the
Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonty the Faithful,
seed cultivated by Boone and Kenton, by Sevier and Robertson and scores
and hundreds of stalwart early Westerners—seed despised by an ancient
and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow.
Yet, beyond the farthest settlements of the West of that day, there was
still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to
include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the
future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the
past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might
mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be
sure, an utterly unthinkable thing.
There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands
incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the
import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of
the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Santa Fé to
Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused
for the peaceful settler of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty
miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, Homerically
misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough
and chance enough in the West for any and all men.
The progress of civilization, accelerated with the passing of each
century, was none the less slow at this epoch. There was an ictus here
in the pilgrimage of humanity. It was as though the Fates wished that
for a brief time the world might see the spectacle of a land of help and
hope, of personal initiative and personal ambition. The slow-moving star
of the West trembled and quivered with a new and unknown light, caught
from these noble lakes and rivers, reflected from these mountains and
these skies.
The stars of a new heaven looked down on another king, a king in
linsey-woolsey. France kicked him forth a peasant, and, born again, he
scorned the petty limitations of her seigniories, and stood on her
rejected empire, the emperor of himself. England rotted him in her mines
and ditches, but before the reversed flags of England were borne home
from her war which did not subjugate, this same man, under another sky,
was offering hospitality, and not obeisance, to her belted earls.
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Footnote 5:
The Century Magazine; Continued.