The Last American Frontier
by Frederic L. Paxson · English · Gutenberg #45699 · 609,542 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Last American Frontier
Author: Frederic L. Paxson
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THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
Stories from American History
* * * * * *
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
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[Illustration]
THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
by
FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON
Junior Professor of American History in the University of Michigan
Illustrated
New York
The Macmillan Company
1910
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1910,
By the Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
I have told here the story of the last frontier within the United
States, trying at once to preserve the picturesque atmosphere which
has given to the "Far West" a definite and well-understood meaning,
and to indicate those forces which have shaped the history of the
country beyond the Mississippi. In doing it I have had to rely largely
upon my own investigations among sources little used and relatively
inaccessible. The exact citations of authority, with which I might have
crowded my pages, would have been out of place in a book not primarily
intended for the use of scholars. But I hope, before many years, to
exploit in a larger and more elaborate form the mass of detailed
information upon which this sketch is based.
My greatest debts are to the owners of the originals from which the
illustrations for this book have been made; to Claude H. Van Tyne, who
has repeatedly aided me with his friendly criticism; and to my wife,
whose careful readings have saved me from many blunders in my text.
FREDERIC L. PAXSON.
ANN ARBOR, August 7, 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 1
CHAPTER II
THE INDIAN FRONTIER 14
CHAPTER III
IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST 33
CHAPTER IV
THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL 53
CHAPTER V
THE OREGON TRAIL 70
CHAPTER VI
OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS 86
CHAPTER VII
CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS 104
CHAPTER VIII
KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER 119
CHAPTER IX
"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST!" 138
CHAPTER X
FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA 156
CHAPTER XI
THE OVERLAND MAIL 174
CHAPTER XII
THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER 192
CHAPTER XIII
THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 211
CHAPTER XIV
THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR 225
CHAPTER XV
THE CHEYENNE WAR 243
CHAPTER XVI
THE SIOUX WAR 264
CHAPTER XVII
THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY 284
CHAPTER XVIII
BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID 304
CHAPTER XIX
THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS 324
CHAPTER XX
THE NEW INDIAN POLICY 340
CHAPTER XXI
THE LAST STAND: CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL 358
CHAPTER XXII
LETTING IN THE POPULATION 372
CHAPTER XXIII
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER _Frontispiece_
PAGE
MAP: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841 22
CHIEF KEOKUK _facing_ 30
IOWA SOD PLOW. (From a Cut belonging to the Historical
Department of Iowa.) 46
MAP: OVERLAND TRAILS 57
FORT LARAMIE, 1842 _facing_ 78
MAP: THE WEST IN 1849 120
MAP: THE WEST IN 1854 140
"HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE" _facing_ 144
THE MINING CAMP " 158
FORT SNELLING " 204
RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH " 274
MAP: THE WEST IN 1863 300
POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN _facing_ 360
MAP: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884 380
THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
CHAPTER I
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which
the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which
courage and foresight have gradually transformed from desert waste to
virile commonwealth. It is the story of one long struggle, fought over
different lands and by different generations, yet ever repeating the
conditions and episodes of the last period in the next. The winning of
the first frontier established in America its first white settlements.
Later struggles added the frontiers of the Alleghanies and the Ohio,
of the Mississippi and the Missouri. The winning of the last frontier
completed the conquest of the continent.
The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West.
For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas
of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to
migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness
stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.
Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails
and clearing in the valleys. The advance line of the farmsteads was
never far behind it. And out of this shifting frontier between man and
nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American
governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved
them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has
always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled
the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic
development and social organization, have in most instances originated
near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier
interest.
The controlling influence of the frontier in shaping American problems
has been possible because of the construction of civilized governments
in a new area, unhampered by institutions of the past or conservative
prejudices of the present. Each commonwealth has built from the
foundation. An institution, to exist, has had to justify itself again
and again. No force of tradition has kept the outlawed fact alive. The
settled lands behind have in each generation been forced to remodel
their older selves upon the newer growths beyond.
Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the
frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with
the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have
counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive
courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings
or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a
picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements,
but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad
man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both
have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and
initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted
an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their
strength in numbers.
The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor
in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the
earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century,
when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous
in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose
characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New
England were not too early for its shaping.
The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier,
separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness
in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the
successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations
and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended.
The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at
once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and
translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments
of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious
and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a
melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a
generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made
a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which
by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the
middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking
distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always,
determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line
of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating
link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along
its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The
extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the
contour of the seaboard along which it lay.
Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic
rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems
in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the
neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the
settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on
the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the
various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river
mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into
the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.
For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are
navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge
upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the
foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a
line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once
the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second
frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was
reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.
Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began.
English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in
growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the
needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English
in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly
to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the
similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier.
Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached,
the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism
plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.
The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an
end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing,
up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they
approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind,
the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the
combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley
routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run
parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge
among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every
reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the
pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and
meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause
against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where
the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the
Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have
common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in
which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with
talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was
already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union
than had been known before.
The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700.
By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing
down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping
backward to north and south. The French war of 1756-1763 saw the
apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the
Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and
Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river
valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and
population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both
sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested
the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian
strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was
the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by
all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the
three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.
The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started
down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed
by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the
boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed
it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi
itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The
new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations
which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties
felt the frontier pressure from the start.
Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states
appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its
advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony
Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge
to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio
entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet
the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to
till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern
communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation;
but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines
were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or
interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes,
through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as
state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war
with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.
The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad
investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military
reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was
signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern
population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt
too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result
of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was
the western accompaniment.
The westward movement has been continuous in America since the
beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have
never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession
of pioneers has marched up the slopes of the Appalachians, across
the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the
Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream
has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed
the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever
before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years
following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in
the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.
Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement
down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its
junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with
states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north
and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more
apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended
the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including
New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north.
The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as
yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than
to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the
convenience of the natural route.
For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit
of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio
facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred
and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to
afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the
Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and
it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend
an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas
all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The
emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed
by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission
of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend
of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease.
Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was
simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out
to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge
began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of
population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the
northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and
Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the
apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in
1821.
There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri
than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers
were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major
of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a
tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty,
steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew
longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.
Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from
the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American
desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their
maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara
or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded
upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the slopes approach
the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who
traversed the country in 1819-1820. Long reported that it could never
support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of
the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc."
A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber,
the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point
the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are
annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many
years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from
Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy
desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the
states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the
western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had
reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.
By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward
march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the
Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn.
Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached
nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the
nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert
and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which
had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War,
even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier
scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of
life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired
an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its
doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,
threatened to become a constant quantity.
From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for
the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard
continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are
filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains
in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear
the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian
tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility
of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once.
A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of
the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the
continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and
intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the
control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out
the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian
policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period,
the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating
the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is
larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such,
before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American
history has been closed.
CHAPTER II
THE INDIAN FRONTIER
A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly
relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the
continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its
advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands,
concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating
their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed
had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly
enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements
and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every
twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never
more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it
until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt
that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual
members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable
as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the
part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and
contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the
danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not
responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries,
real or imaginary,--and too often they were real,--made him the most
dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier.
The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and
endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached
a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but
never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had
been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.
The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have
ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful
of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade
among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land,
possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase,
could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a
higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against
the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against
self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian
must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with
progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever
have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for
him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss
of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that
invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national
honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed
maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older
ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all
these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government
has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to
administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade,
punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct
not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.
The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its
responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In
theory the disposition of the government was generally benevolent, but
the scheme was badly conceived, while human frailty among officers of
the law and citizens as well rendered execution short of such ideal as
there was.
For thirty years the government under the Constitution had no Indian
policy. In these years it acquired the habit of dealing with the tribes
as independent--"domestic dependent nations," Justice Marshall later
called them--by means of formal treaties. Europe thought of chiefs as
kings and tribes as nations. The practice of making treaties was based
on this delusion. After a century of practice it was finally learned
that nomadic savages have no idea of sovereign government or legal
obligation, and that the assumption of the existence of such knowledge
can lead only to misconception and disappointment.
As the frontier moved down the Ohio, individual wars were fought and
individual treaties were made as occasion offered. At times the tribes
yielded readily to white occupation; occasionally they struggled
bitterly to save their lands; but the result was always the same. The
right bank of the river, long known as the Indian Shore, was contested
in a series of wars lasting nearly until 1800, and became available for
white colonization only after John Jay had, through his treaty of 1794,
removed the British encouragement to the Indians, and General Wayne had
administered to them a decisive defeat. Isolated attacks were frequent,
but Tecumseh's war of 1811 was the next serious conflict, while, after
General Harrison brought this war to an end at Tippecanoe, there was
comparative peace along the northwest frontier until the time of Black
Hawk and his uprising of 1832.
The left bank of the river was opened with less formal resistance,
admitting Kentucky and Tennessee before the Indian Shore was a safe
habitation for whites. South of Tennessee lay the great southern
confederacies, somewhat out of the line of early western progress, and
hence not plunged into struggles until the War of 1812 was over. But
as Wayne and Harrison had opened the Northwest, so Jackson cleared
the way for white advance into Alabama and Mississippi. By 1821 new
states touched the Mississippi River along its whole course between New
Orleans and the lead mines of upper Illinois.
In the advance of the frontier to the bend of the Missouri some of the
tribes were pushed back, while others were passed and swallowed up by
the invading population. Experience showed that the two races could
not well live in adjacent lands. The conditions which made for Indian
welfare could not be kept up in the neighborhood of white settlements,
for the more lawless of the whites were ever ready, through illicit
trade, deceit, and worse, to provoke the most dangerous excesses of
the savage. The Indian was demoralized, the white became steadily more
intolerant.
Although the ingenious Jefferson had anticipated him in the idea,
the first positive policy which looked toward giving to the Indian
a permanent home and the sort of guardianship which he needed until
he could become reconciled to civilized life was the suggestion of
President Monroe. At the end of his presidency, Georgia was angrily
demanding the removal of the Cherokee from her limits, and was ready to
violate law and the Constitution in her desire to accomplish her end.
Monroe was prepared to meet the demand. He submitted to Congress, on
January 27, 1825, a report from Calhoun, then Secretary of War, upon
the numbers of the tribes, the area of their lands, and the area of
available destinations for them. He recommended that as rapidly as
agreements could be made with them they be removed to country lying
westward and northwestward,--to the further limits of the Louisiana
Purchase, which lay beyond the line of the western frontier.
Already, when this message was sent to Congress, individual steps
had been taken in the direction which it pointed out. A few tribes
had agreed to cross the Mississippi, and had been allotted lands in
Missouri and Arkansas. But Missouri, just admitted, and Arkansas, now
opening up, were no more hospitable to Indian wards than Georgia and
Ohio had been. The Indian frontier must be at some point still farther
west, towards the vast plains overrun by the Osage[1] and Kansa tribes,
the Pawnee and the Sioux. There had been few dealings with the Indians
beyond the Mississippi before Monroe advanced his policy. Lieutenant
Pike had visited the head of the Mississippi in 1805 and had treated
with the Sioux for a reserve at St. Paul. Subsequent agreements farther
south brought the Osage tribes within the treaty arrangements. The year
1825 saw the notable treaties which prepared the way for peace among
the western tribes, and the reception by these tribes of the eastern
nations.
[1] My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed
upon by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American
Ethnology, and printed in C. J. Kappler, Indian Affairs,
Laws and Treaties, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452,
Serial 4253, p. 1021.
Five weeks after the special message Congress authorized a negotiation
with the Kansa and Osage nations. These tribes roamed over a vast
country extending from the Platte River to the Red, and west as far as
the lower slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Their limits had never been
definitely stated, although the Osage had already surrendered claim to
lands fronting on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Missouri
and the Arkansas. Not only was it now desirable to limit them more
closely in order to make room for Indian immigrants, but these tribes
had already begun to worry traders going overland to the Southwest. As
soon as the frontier reached the bend of the Missouri, the profits of
the Santa Fé trade had begun to tempt caravans up the Arkansas valley
and across the plains. To preserve peace along the Santa Fé trail was
now as important as to acquire grounds. Governor Clark negotiated the
treaties at St. Louis. On June 2, 1825, he persuaded the Osage chiefs
to surrender all their lands except a strip fifty miles wide, beginning
at White Hair's village on the Neosho, and running indefinitely west.
The Kaw or Kansa tribe was a day later in its agreement, and reserved a
thirty-mile strip running west along the Kansas River. The two treaties
at once secured rights of transit and pledges of peace for traders to
Santa Fé, and gave the United States title to ample lands west of the
frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.
The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien the first step
towards peace and condensation along the northern frontier. The Erie
Canal, not yet opened, had not begun to drain the population of the
East into the Northwest, and Indians were in peaceful possession of
the lake shores nearly to Fort Wayne. West of Lake Michigan were
constant tribal wars. The Potawatomi, Menominee, and Chippewa, first,
then Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes, and finally the various bands of
Sioux around the Mississippi and upper Missouri, enjoyed still their
traditional hostility and the chase. Governor Clark again, and Lewis
Cass, met the tribes at the old trading post on the Mississippi to
persuade them to bury the tomahawk among themselves. The treaty, signed
August 19, 1825, defined the boundaries of the different nations by
lines of which the most important was between the Sioux and Sauk and
Foxes, which was later to be known as the Neutral Line, across northern
Iowa. The basis of this treaty of Prairie du Chien was temporary at
best. Before it was much more than ratified the white influx began,
Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake Michigan blossomed out into Chicago,
and squatters penetrating to Rock Island in the Mississippi had
provoked the war of 1832, in which Black Hawk made the last stand of
the Indians in the old Northwest. In the thirties the policy of removal
completed the opening of Illinois and Wisconsin to the whites.
[Illustration: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841
Showing the solid line of reservation lands extending from the Red
River to Green Bay, and the agricultural frontier of more than six
inhabitants per square mile.]
The policy of removal and colonization urged by Monroe and Calhoun was
supported by Congress and succeeding Presidents, and carried out during
the next fifteen years. It required two transactions, the acquisition
by the United States of western titles, and the persuasion of eastern
tribes to accept the new lands thus available. It was based upon an
assumption that the frontier had reached its final resting place.
Beyond Missouri, which had been admitted in 1821, lay a narrow strip of
good lands, merging soon into the American desert. Few sane Americans
thought of converting this land into states as had been the process
farther east. At the bend of the Missouri the frontier had arrived;
there it was to stay, and along the lines of its receding flanks the
Indians could be settled with pledges of permanent security and growth.
Here they could never again impede the western movement in its creation
of new communities and states. Here it would be possible, in the words
of Lewis Cass, to "leave their fate to the common God of the white man
and the Indian."
The five years following the treaty of Prairie du Chien were filled
with active negotiation and migration in the lands beyond the Missouri.
First came the Shawnee to what was promised as a final residence.
From Pennsylvania, into Ohio, and on into Missouri, this tribe had
already been pushed by the advancing frontier. Now its ever shrinking
lands were cut down to a strip with a twenty-five-mile frontage on the
Missouri line and an extension west for one hundred and twenty-five
miles along the south bank of the Kansas River and the south line of
the Kaw reserve. Its old neighbors, the Delawares, became its new
neighbors in 1829, accepting the north bank of the Kansas, with a
Missouri River frontage as far north as the new Fort Leavenworth, and a
ten-mile outlet to the buffalo country, along the northern line of the
Kaw reserve. Later the Kickapoo and other minor tribes were colonized
yet farther to the north. The chase was still to be the chief reliance
of the Indian population. Unlimited supplies of game along the plains
were to supply his larder, with only occasional aid from presents of
other food supplies. In the long run agriculture was to be encouraged.
Farmers and blacksmiths and teachers were to be provided in various
ways, but until the longed-for civilization should arrive, the red man
must hunt to live. The new Indian frontier was thus started by the
colonization of the Shawnee and Delawares just beyond the bend of the
Missouri on the old possessions of the Kaw.
The northern flank of the Indian frontier, as it came to be
established, ran along the line of the frontier of white settlements,
from the bend of the Missouri, northeasterly towards the upper lakes.
Before the final line of the reservations could be determined the
Erie Canal had begun to shape the Northwest. Its stream of population
was filling the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and
working up into Michigan and Wisconsin. Black Hawk's War marked the
last struggle for the fertile plains of upper Illinois, and made
possible an Indian line which should leave most of Wisconsin and part
of Iowa open to the whites.
Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie
du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same
place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reënforced the
guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the
Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto
and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the
Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became
a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the
Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had
threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the
frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along
the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond
the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had
clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might
have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois,
and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the
pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike
promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought
over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the
frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger
threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from
eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a
campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a
new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their
resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the
Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to
the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west
bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and
Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this
time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the
Neutral Strip.
The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work
of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the
line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west
line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black
Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter
acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the
Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established
a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others
forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more
correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the
tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these
three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago
to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to
cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and
east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors
to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River,
gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live
on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of
the Wisconsin River.
The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies,
they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the
old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made
further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion
of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future
eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the
Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St.
Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country.
With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had
been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white
occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to
Green Bay.
While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established
beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was
extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the
Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine
River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of
the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians
roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo,
in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into
Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the
country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way
for the colonizing policy.
The southern part of the Indian Country was early set aside as the new
home of the eastern confederacies lying near the Gulf of Mexico. The
Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had in the twenties
begun to feel the pressure of the southern states. Jackson's campaigns
had weakened them even before the cession of Florida to the United
States removed their place of refuge. Georgia was demanding their
removal when Monroe announced his policy.
A new home for the Choctaw was provided in the extreme Southwest in
1830. Ten years before, this nation had been given a home in Arkansas
territory, but now, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, it received a new eastern
limit in a line drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas due south to the
Red River. Arkansas had originally reached from the Mississippi to the
hundredth meridian, but it was, after this Choctaw cession, cut down
to the new Choctaw line, which remains its boundary to-day. From Fort
Smith the new boundary was run northerly to the southwest corner of
Missouri.
The Creeks and Cherokee promised in 1833 to go into the Indian Country,
west of Arkansas and north of the Choctaw. The Creeks became the
neighbors of the Choctaw, separated from them by the Canadian River,
while the Cherokee adjoined the Creeks on the north and east. With
small exceptions the whole of the present state of Oklahoma was thus
assigned to these three nations. The migrations from their old homes
came deliberately in the thirties and forties. The Chickasaw in 1837
purchased from the Choctaw the right to occupy the western end of their
strip between the Red and Canadian. The Seminole had acquired similar
rights among the Creeks, but were so reluctant to keep the pledge to
emigrate that their removal taxed the ability of the United States army
for several years.
Between the southern portion of the Indian Country and the Missouri
bend minor tribes were colonized in profusion. The Quapaw and United
Seneca and Shawnee nations were put into the triangle between the
Neosho and Missouri. The Cherokee received an extra grant in the
"Cherokee Neutral Strip," between the Osage line of 1825 and the
Missouri line. Next to the north was made a reserve for the New York
Indians, which they refused to occupy. The new Miami home came next,
along the Missouri line; while north of this were little reserves for
individual bands of Ottawa and Chippewa, for the Piankashaw and Wea,
the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the last of which adjoined the Shawnee line
of 1825 upon the south.
The Indian frontier, determined upon in 1825, had by 1840 been carried
into fact, and existed unbroken from the Red River and Texas to the
Lakes. The exodus from the old homes to the new had in many instances
been nearly completed. The tribes were more easily persuaded to promise
than to act, and the wrench was often hard enough to produce sullenness
or even war when the moment of departure arrived. A few isolated bands
had not even agreed to go. But the figures of the migrations, published
from year to year during the thirties, show that all of the more
important nations east of the new frontier had ceded their lands, and
that by 1840 the migration was substantially over.
[Illustration: CHIEF KEOKUK
From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C. F.
Davis. Reproduced by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.]
President Monroe had urged as an essential part of the removal policy
that when the Indians had been transferred and colonized they should be
carefully educated into civilization, and guarded from contamination by
the whites. Congress, in various laws, tried to do these things. The
policy of removal, which had been only administrative at the start,
was confirmed by law in 1830. A formal Bureau of Indian Affairs was
created in 1832, under the supervision of a commissioner. In 1834 was
passed the Indian Intercourse Act, which remained the fundamental law
for half a century.
The various treaties of migration had contained the pledge that never
again should the Indians be removed without their consent, that
whites should be excluded from the Indian Country, and that their
lands should never be included within the limits of any organized
territory or state. To these guarantees the Intercourse Act attempted
to give force. The Indian Country was divided into superintendencies,
agencies, and sub-agencies, into which white entry, without license,
was prohibited by law. As the tribes were colonized, agents and schools
and blacksmiths were furnished to them in what was a real attempt to
fulfil the terms of the pledge. The tribes had gone beyond the limits
of probable extension of the United States, and there they were to
settle down and stay. By 1835 it was possible for President Jackson to
announce to Congress that the plan approached its consummation: "All
preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians" had failed;
but now "no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the
United States to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the
scattered remnants of this race which are left within our borders....
The pledge of the United States," he continued, "has been given by
Congress that the country destined for the residence of this people
shall be forever 'secured and guaranteed to them.' ... No political
communities can be formed in that extensive region.... A barrier has
thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of
our citizens." And now, he concluded, "they ought to be left to the
progress of events."
The policy of the United States towards the wards was generally
benevolent. Here, it was sincere, whether wise or not. As it turned
out, however, the new Indian frontier had to contend with movements
of population, resistless and unforeseen. No Joshua, no Canute, could
hold it back. The result was inevitable. The Indian, wrote one of the
frontiersmen in a later day, speaking in the language of the West, "is
a savage, noxious animal, and his actions are those of a ferocious
beast of prey, unsoftened by any touch of pity or mercy. For them he
is to be blamed exactly as the wolf or tiger is blamed." But by 1840
an Indian frontier had been erected, coterminous with the agricultural
frontier, and beyond what was believed to be the limit of expansion.
The American desert and the Indian frontier, beyond the bend of the
Missouri, were forever to be the western boundary of the United States.
CHAPTER III
IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST
In the end of the thirties the "right wing" of the frontier, as a
colonel of dragoons described it, extended northeasterly from the bend
of the Missouri to Green Bay. It was an irregular line beyond which
lay the Indian tribes, and behind which was a population constantly
becoming more restless and aggressive. That it should have been a
permanent boundary is not conceivable; yet Congress professed to regard
it as such, and had in 1836 ordered the survey and construction of
a military road from the mouth of the St. Peter's to the Red River.
The maintenance of the southern half of the frontier was perhaps
practicable, since the tradition of the American desert was long to
block migration beyond the limits of Missouri and Arkansas, but north
and east of Fort Leavenworth were lands too alluring to be safe in the
control of the new Indian Bureau. And already before the thirties were
over the upper Mississippi country had become a factor in the westward
movement.
A few years after the English war the United States had erected a
fort at the junction of the St. Peter's and the Mississippi, near the
present city of St. Paul. In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike had treated
with the Sioux tribes at this point, and by 1824 the new post had
received the name Fort Snelling, which it was to retain until after the
admission of Minnesota as a state. Pike and his followers had worked
their way up the Mississippi from St. Louis or Prairie du Chien in
skiffs or keelboats, and had found little of consequence in the way of
white occupation save a few fur-trading posts and the lead mines of
Du Buque. Until after the English war, indeed, and the admission of
Illinois, there had been little interest in the country up the river;
but during the early twenties the lead deposits around Du Buque's
old claim became the centre of a business that soon made new treaty
negotiations with the northern Indians necessary.
On both sides of the Mississippi, between the mouths of the Wisconsin
and the Rock, lie the extensive lead fields which attracted Du Buque
in the days of the Spanish rule, and which now in the twenties induced
an American immigration. The ease with which these diggings could
be worked and the demand of a growing frontier population for lead,
brought miners into the borderland of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa
long before either of the last states had acquired name or boundary
or the Indian possessors of the soil had been satisfied and removed.
The nations of Winnebago, Sauk and Foxes, and Potawatomi were most
interested in this new white invasion, while all were reluctant to
yield the lands to the incoming pioneers. The Sauk and Foxes had given
up their claim to nearly all the lead country in 1804; the Potawatomi
ceded portions of it in 1829; and the Winnebago in the same year made
agreements covering the mines within the present state of Wisconsin.
Gradually in the later twenties the pioneer miners came in, one
by one. From St. Louis they came up the great river, or from Lake
Michigan they crossed the old portage of the Fox and Wisconsin. The
southern reënforcements looked much to Fort Armstrong on Rock Island
for protection. The northern, after they had left Fort Howard at Green
Bay, were out of touch until they arrived near the old trading post at
Prairie du Chien. War with the Winnebago in 1827 was followed in 1828
by the erection of another United States fort,--at the portage, and
known as Fort Winnebago. Thus the United States built forts to defend a
colonization which it prohibited by law and treaty.
The individual pioneers differed much in their morals and their
cultural antecedents, but were uniform in their determination to enjoy
the profits for which they had risked the dangers of the wilderness.
Notable among them, and typical of their highest virtues, was Henry
Dodge, later governor of Wisconsin, and representative and senator for
his state in Congress, but now merely one of the first in the frontier
movement. It is related of him that in 1806 he had been interested in
the filibustering expedition of Aaron Burr, and had gone as far as
New Madrid, to join the party, before he learned that it was called
treason. He turned back in disgust. "On reaching St. Genevieve," his
chronicler continues, "they found themselves indicted for treason by
the grand jury then in session. Dodge surrendered himself, and gave
bail for his appearance; but feeling outraged by the action of the
grand jury he pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and whipt
nine of the jurors; and would have whipt the rest, if they had not run
away." With such men to deal with, it was always difficult to enforce
unpopular laws upon the frontier. Dodge had no hesitation in settling
upon his lead diggings in the mineral country and in defying the Indian
agents, who did their best to persuade him to leave the forbidden
country. On the west bank of the Mississippi federal authority was
successful in holding off the miners, but the east bank was settled
between Galena and Mineral Point before either the Indian title had
been fully quieted, or the lands had been surveyed and opened to
purchase by the United States.
The Indian war of 1827, the erection of Fort Winnebago in 1828, the
cession of their mineral lands by the Winnebago Indians in 1829, are
the events most important in the development of the first settlements
in the new Northwest. In 1829 and 1830 pioneers came up the Mississippi
to the diggings in increasing numbers, while farmers began to cast
covetous eyes upon the prairies lying between Lake Michigan and the
Mississippi. These were the lands which the Sauk and Fox tribes had
surrendered in 1804, but over which they still retained rights of
occupation and the chase until Congress should sell them. The entry of
every American farmer was a violation of good faith and law, and so
the Indians regarded it. Their largest city and the graves of their
ancestors were in the peninsula between the Rock and the Mississippi,
and as the invaders seized the lands, their resentment passed beyond
control. The Black Hawk War was the forlorn attempt to save the lands.
When it ended in crushing defeat, the United States exercised its
rights of conquest to compel a revision of the treaty limits.
The great treaties of 1832 and 1833 not only removed all Indian
obstruction from Illinois, but prepared the way for further settlement
in both Wisconsin and Iowa. The Winnebago agreed to migrate to the
Neutral Strip in Iowa, the Potawatomi accepted a reserve near the
Missouri River, while the Black Hawk purchase from the offending Sauk
and Foxes opened a strip some forty miles wide along the west bank of
the Mississippi. These Indian movements were a part of the general
concentrating policy made in the belief that a permanent Indian
frontier could be established. After the Black Hawk War came the
creation of the Indian Bureau, the ordering of the great western road,
and the erection of a frontier police. Henry Dodge was one of the few
individuals to emerge from the war with real glory. His reward came
when Congress formed a regiment of dragoons for frontier police, and
made him its colonel. In his regiment he operated up and down the long
frontier for three years, making expeditions beyond the line to hold
Pawnee conferences and meetings with the tribes of the great plains,
and resigning his command only in time to be the first governor of the
new territory of Wisconsin, in 1836. He knew how little dependence
could be placed on the permanency of the right wing of the frontier.
"Nor let gentlemen forget," he reminded his colleagues in Congress a
few years later, "that we are to have continually the same course of
settlements going on upon our border. They are perpetually advancing
westward. They will reach, they will cross, the Rocky Mountains, and
never stop till they have reached the shores of the Pacific. Distance
is nothing to our people.... [They will] turn the whole region into the
happy dwellings of a free and enlightened people."
The Black Hawk War and its resulting treaties at once quieted the
Indian title and gave ample advertisement to the new Northwest. As yet
there had been no large migration to the West beyond Lake Michigan.
The pioneers who had provoked the war had been few in number and far
from their base upon the frontier. Mere access to the country had been
difficult until after the opening of the Erie Canal, and even then
steamships did not run regularly on Lake Michigan until after 1832.
But notoriety now tempted an increasing wave of settlers. Congress woke
up to the need of some territorial adjustment for the new country.
Ever since Illinois had been admitted in 1818, Michigan had been the
one remaining territory of the old Northwest, including the whole area
north of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and extending from Lake Huron
to the Mississippi River. Her huge size was admittedly temporary, but
as no large centre of population existed outside of Detroit, it was
convenient to simplify the federal jurisdiction in this fashion. The
lead mines on the Mississippi produced a secondary centre of population
in the late twenties and pointed to an early division of Michigan. But
before this could be accomplished the Black Hawk purchase had carried
the Mississippi centre of population to the right bank of the river.
The American possessions on this bank, west of the river, had been cast
adrift without political organization on the admission of Missouri in
1821. Now the appearance of a vigorous population in an unorganized
region compelled Congress to take some action, and thus, for temporary
purposes, Michigan was enlarged in 1834. Her new boundary extended
west to the Missouri River, between the state of Missouri and Canada.
The new Northwest, which may be held to include Iowa, Wisconsin, and
Minnesota, started its political history as a remote settlement in a
vast territory of Michigan, with its seat of government at Detroit.
Before it was cut off as the territory of Wisconsin in 1836 much had
been done in the way of populating it.
The boom of the thirties brought Arkansas and Michigan into the Union
as states, and started the growth of the new Northwest. The industrial
activity of the period was based on speculation in public lands and
routes of transportation. America was transportation mad. New railways
were building in the East and being projected West. Canals were
turning the western portage paths into water highways. The speculative
excitement touched the field of religion as well as economics,
producing new sects by the dozen, and bringing schisms into the old.
And population moving already in its inherent restlessness was made
more active in migration by the hard times of the East in 1833 and 1834.
The immigrants brought to the Black Hawk purchase and its vicinity,
in the boom of the thirties, came chiefly by the river route. The
lake route was just beginning to be used; not until the Civil War did
the traffic of the upper Mississippi naturally and generally seek its
outlet by Lake Michigan. The Mississippi now carried more than its
share of the home seekers.
Steamboats had been plying on western waters in increasing numbers
since 1811. By 1823, one had gone as far north on the Mississippi as
Fort Snelling, while by 1832 the Missouri had been ascended to Fort
Union. In the thirties an extensive packet service gathered its
passengers and freight at Pittsburg and other points on the Ohio,
carrying them by a devious voyage of 1400 miles to Keokuk, near the
southeast corner of the new Black Hawk lands. Wagons and cattle,
children and furniture, crowded the decks of the boats. The aristocrats
of emigration rode in the cabins provided for them, but the great
majority of home seekers lived on deck and braved the elements upon the
voyage. Explosions, groundings, and collisions enlivened the reckless
river traffic. But in 1836 Governor Dodge found more than 22,000
inhabitants in his new territory of Wisconsin, most of whom had reached
the promised land by way of the river.
For those whom the long river journey did not please, or who lived
inland in Ohio or Indiana, the national road was a help. In 1825 the
continuation of the Cumberland Road through Ohio had been begun. By
1836 enough of it was done to direct the overland course of migration
through Indianapolis towards central Illinois. The Conestoga wagon,
which had already done its share in crossing the Alleghanies, now
carried a second generation to the Mississippi. At Dubuque and Buffalo
and Burlington ferries were established before 1836 to take the
immigrants across the Mississippi into the new West.
By the terms of its treaty, the Black Hawk purchase was to be vacated
by the Indians in the summer of 1833. Before that year closed, its
settlement had begun, despite the fact that the government surveys had
not yet been made. Here, as elsewhere, the frontier farmer paid little
regard to the legal basis of his life. He settled upon unoccupied lands
as he needed them, trusting to the public opinion of the future to
secure his title.
The legislature of Michigan watched the migration of 1833 and 1834, and
in the latter year created the two counties of Dubuque and Demoine,
beyond the Mississippi, embracing these settlements. At the old claim
a town of miners appeared by magic, able shortly to boast "that the
first white man hung in Iowa in a Christian-like manner was Patrick
O'Conner, at Dubuque, in June, 1834." Dubuque was a mining camp,
differing from the other villages in possessing a larger proportion
of the lawless element. Generally, however, this Iowa frontier was
peaceful in comparison with other frontiers. Life and property were
safe, and except for its dealings with the Indians and the United
States government, in which frontiers have rarely recognized a law,
the community was law-abiding. It stands in some contrast with another
frontier building at the same time up the valley of the Arkansas. "Fent
Noland of Batesville," wrote a contemporary of one of the heroes of
this frontier, "is in every way one of the most remarkable men of the
West; for such is the versatility of his genius that he seems equally
adapted to every species of effort, intellectual or physical. With
a like unerring aim he shoots a bullet or a _bon mot_; and wields
the pen or the Bowie knife with the same thought, swift rapidity
of motion, and energetic fury of manner. Sunday he will write an
eloquent dissertation on religion; Monday he rawhides a rogue; Tuesday
he composes a sonnet, set in silver stars and breathing the perfume
of roses to some fair maid's eyebrows; Wednesday he fights a duel;
Thursday he does up brown the personal character of Senators Sevier
and Ashley; Friday he goes to the ball dressed in the most finical
superfluity of fashion and shines the soul of wit and the sun of merry
badinage among all the gay gentlemen; and to close the triumphs of the
week, on Saturday night he is off thirty miles to a country dance in
the Ozark Mountains, where they trip it on the light fantastic toe in
the famous jig of the double-shuffle around a roaring log heap fire in
the woods all night long, while between the dances Fent Noland sings
some beautiful wild song, as 'Lucy Neal' or 'Juliana Johnson.' Thus
Fent is a myriad-minded Proteus of contradictory characters, many-hued
as the chameleon fed on the dews and suckled at the breast of the
rainbow." Much of this luxuriant imagery was lacking farther north.
The first phase of this development of the new Northwest was ended
in 1837, when the general panic brought confusion to speculation
throughout the United States. For four years the sanguine hopes of the
frontier had led to large purchases of public lands, to banking schemes
of wildest extravagance, and to railroad promotion without reason or
demand. The specie circular of 1836 so deranged the currency of the
whole United States that the effort to distribute the surplus in 1837
was fatal to the speculative boom. The new communities suffered for
their hopeful attempts. When the panic broke, the line of agricultural
settlement had been pushed considerably beyond the northern and western
limits of Illinois. The new line ran near to the Fox and Wisconsin
portage route and the west line of the Black Hawk purchase. Milwaukee
and Southport had been founded on the lake shore, hopeful of a great
commerce that might rival the possessions of Chicago. Madison and its
vicinity had been developed. The lead country in Wisconsin had grown
in population. Across the river, Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington
gave evidence of a growing community in the country still farther west.
Nearly the whole area intended for white occupation by the Indian
policy had been settled, so that any further extension must be at the
expense of the Indians' guaranteed lands.
On the eve of the panic, which depopulated many of the villages of the
new strip, Michigan had been admitted. Her possessions west of Lake
Michigan had been reorganized as a new territory of Wisconsin, with
a capital temporarily at Belmont, where Henry Dodge, first governor,
took possession in the fall of 1836. A territorial census showed that
Wisconsin had a population of 22,214 in 1836, divided nearly equally by
the Mississippi. Most of the population was on the banks of the great
river, near the lead mines and the Black Hawk purchase, while only a
fourth could be found near the new cities along the lake. The outlying
settlements were already pressing against the Indian neighbors, so that
the new governor soon was obliged to conduct negotiations for further
cessions. The Chippewa, Menominee, and Sioux all came into council
within two years, the Sioux agreeing to retire west of the Mississippi,
while the others receded far into the north, leaving most of the
present Wisconsin open to development. These treaties completed the
line of the Indian frontier as it was established in the thirties.
The Mississippi divided the population of Wisconsin nearly equally in
1836, but subsequent years witnessed greater growth upon her western
bank. Never in the westward movement had more attractive farms been
made available than those on the right bank now reached by the river
steamers and the ferries from northern Illinois. Two years after the
erection of Wisconsin the western towns received their independent
establishment, when in 1838 Iowa Territory was organized by Congress,
including everything between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and
north of the state of Missouri. Burlington, a village of log houses
with perhaps five hundred inhabitants, became the seat of government
of the new territory, while Wisconsin retired east of the river to a
new capital at Madison. At Burlington a first legislature met in the
autumn, to choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it could for
a community still suffering from the results of the panic.
The only Iowa lands open to lawful settlement were those of the Black
Hawk purchase, many of which were themselves not surveyed and on the
market. But the pioneers paid little heed to this. Leaving titles to
the future, they cleared their farms, broke the sod, and built their
houses.
[Illustration: IOWA SOD PLOW]
The heavy sod of the Iowa prairies was beyond the strength of the
individual settler. In the years of first development the professional
sod breaker was on hand, a most important member of his community, with
his great plough, and large teams of from six to twelve oxen, making
the ground ready for the first crop. In the frontier mind the land
belonged to him who broke it, regardless of mere title. The quarrel
between the squatter and the speculator was perennial. Congress in its
laws sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest bidder,--a
scheme through which the sturdy impecunious farmer saw his clearing
in danger of being bought over his modest bid by an undeserving
speculator. Accordingly the history of Iowa and Wisconsin is full of
the claims associations by which the squatters endeavored to protect
their rights and succeeded well. By voluntary association they agreed
upon their claims and bounds. Transfers and sales were recorded on
their books. When at last the advertised day came for the formal sale
of the township by the federal land officer the population attended the
auction in a body, while their chosen delegate bid off the whole area
for them at the minimum price, and without competition. At times it
happened that the speculator or the casual purchaser tried to bid, but
the squatters present with their cudgels and air of anticipation were
usually able to prevent what they believed to be unfair interference
with their rights. The claims associations were entirely illegal; yet
they reveal, as few American institutions do, the orderly tendencies
of an American community even when its organization is in defiance of
existing law.
The development of the new territories of Iowa and Wisconsin in the
decade after their erection carried both far towards statehood.
Burlington, the earliest capital of Iowa, was in 1840 "the largest,
wealthiest, most business-doing and most fashionable city, on or in
the neighborhood of the Upper Mississippi.... We have three or four
churches," said one of its papers, "a theatre, and a dancing school in
full blast." As early as 1843 the Black Hawk purchase was overrun. The
Sauk and Foxes had ceded provisionally all their Iowa lands and the
Potawatomi were in danger. "Although it is but ten years to-day," said
their agent, speaking of their Chicago treaty of 1833, "the tide of
emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until the whites are now
crowded closely along the southern side of these lands, and will soon
swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the very worst traits of the
white man's character, and destroy, by fraud and illicit intercourse,
the remnant of a powerful people, now exposed to their influence." Iowa
was admitted to the Union in 1846, after bickering over her northern
boundary; Wisconsin followed in 1848; the remnant of both, now known as
Minnesota, was erected as a territory in its own right in the next year.
Fort Snelling was nearly twenty years old before it came to be more
than a distant military outpost. Until the treaties of 1837 it was
in the midst of the Sioux with no white neighbors save the agents of
the fur companies, a few refugees from the Red River country, and a
group of more or less disreputable hangers-on. An enlargement of the
military reserve in 1837 led to the eviction by the troops of its
near-by squatters, with the result that one of these took up his grog
shop, left the peninsula between the Mississippi and St. Peter's, and
erected the first permanent settlement across the former, where St.
Paul now stands. Iowa had desired a northern boundary which should
touch the St. Peter's River, but when she was admitted without it and
Wisconsin followed with the St. Croix as her western limit, Minnesota
was temporarily without a government.
The Minnesota territorial act of 1849 preceded the active colonization
of the country around St. Paul. Mendota, Fort Snelling, St. Anthony's,
and Stillwater all came into active being, while the most enterprising
settlers began to push up the Minnesota River, as the St. Peter's now
came to be called. As usual the Indians were in the way. As usual the
claims associations were resorted to. And finally, as usual the Indians
yielded. At Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, in the autumn of 1851, the
magnates of the young territory witnessed great treaties by which the
Sioux, surrendering their portion of the permanent Indian frontier,
gave up most of their vast hunting grounds to accept valley reserves
along the Minnesota. And still more rapidly population came in after
the cession.
The new Northwest was settled after the great day of the keelboat on
western waters. Iowa and the lead country had been reached by the
steamboats of the Mississippi. The Milwaukee district was reached by
the steamboats from the lakes. The upper Mississippi frontier was
now even more thoroughly dependent on the river navigation than its
neighbors had been, while its first period was over before any railroad
played an immediate part in its development.
The boom period between the panics of 1837 and 1857 thus added another
concentric band along the northwest border, disregarding the Indian
frontier and introducing a large population where the prophet of the
early thirties had declared that civilization could never go. The
Potawatomi of Iowa had yielded in 1846, the Sioux in 1851. The future
of the other tribes in their so-called permanent homes was in grave
question by the middle of the decade. The new frontier by 1857 touched
the tip of Lake Superior, included St. Paul and the lower Minnesota
valley, passed around Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, and reached the
Missouri near Sioux City. In a few more years the right wing of the
frontier would run due north from the bend of the Missouri.
The hopeful life of the fifties surpassed that of the thirties in
its speculative zeal. The home seeker had to struggle against the
occasional Indian and the unscrupulous land agent as well as his own
too sanguine disposition. Fictitious town sites had to be distinguished
from the real. Fraudulent dealers more than once sold imaginary lots
and farms from beautifully lithographed maps to eastern investors.
Occasionally whole colonies of migrants would appear on the steamboat
wharves bound for non-existent towns. And when the settler had escaped
fraud, and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever or
cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.
Iowa had advanced her northwest frontier up the Des Moines River, past
the old frontier fort, until in 1856 a couple of trading houses and a
few families had reached the vicinity of Spirit Lake. Here, in March,
1857, one of the settlers quarrelled with a wandering Indian over a
dog. The Indian belonged to Inkpaduta's band of Sioux, one not included
in the treaty of 1851. Forty-seven dead settlers slaughtered by the
band were found a few days later by a visitor to the village. A hard
winter campaign by regulars from Fort Ridgely resulted in the rescue
of some of the captives, but the indignant demand of the frontier for
retaliation was never granted.
In spite of fraud and danger the population grew. For the first time
the railroad played a material part in its advance. The great eastern
trunk lines had crossed the Alleghanies into the Ohio valley. Chicago
had received connection with the East in 1852. The Mississippi had been
reached by 1854. In the spring of 1856 all Iowa celebrated the opening
of a railway bridge at Davenport.
The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own
ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837.
Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development
that chartered railways and even built them between points that
scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild
with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money
finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about
to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the
railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer,
who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town
lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating
population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak
gold.
But a new Northwest had come into life in spite of the vicissitudes of
1837 and 1857. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa had in 1860 ten times
the population of Illinois at the opening of the Black Hawk War. More
than a million and a half of pioneers had settled within these three
new states, building their towns and churches and schools, pushing back
the right flank of the Indian frontier, and reiterating their perennial
demand that the Indian must go. This was the first departure from the
policy laid down by Monroe and carried out by Adams and Jackson. Before
this movement had ended, that policy had been attacked from another
side, and was once more shown to be impracticable. The Indian had too
little strength to compel adherence to the contract, and hence suffered
from this encroachment by the new Northwest. His final destruction
came from the overland traffic, which already by 1857 had destroyed
the fiction of the American desert, and introduced into his domain
thousands of pioneers lured by the call of the West and the lust for
gold.
CHAPTER IV
THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL
England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior
provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio
Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred miles above Vera
Cruz. Before the English seaboard had received its earliest colonists,
the hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters of the Rio
Grande, where her outposts had been planted around the little adobe
village of Santa Fé. For more than two hundred years this life had gone
on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened by contact with
the world or admixture of foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility
characteristic of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions and
restrictions of the law, communication with these villages of Chihuahua
and New Mexico had been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills
by the pack-trains of the king.
It was no stately procession that wound up into the hills yearly to
supply the Mexican frontier. From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through
Mexico City, and thence north along the highlands through San Luis
Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and thence to Chihuahua, and up the
valley of the Rio Grande to Santa Fé climbed the long pack-trains and
the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the provinces their whole supply
from outside. The civilization of the provincial life might fairly be
measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of this transportation
route. Nearly two thousand miles, as the road meandered, of river,
mountain gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the mule-drivers
of the caravans. What their pack-animals could not carry, could not go.
What had large bulk in proportion to its value must stay behind. The
ancient commerce of the Orient, carried on camels across the Arabian
desert, could afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and
precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree, the world's
contribution to these remote towns was confined largely to textiles,
drugs, and trinkets of adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population
of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for more than two
centuries without an effort to improve upon them. Their resignation
gives some credit to the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which
restricted their importation to the defined route and the single port.
It is due as much, however, to the hard geographic fact which made Vera
Cruz and Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors, until
in the nineteenth century another civilization came within hailing
distance, at its frontier in the bend of the Missouri.
The Spanish provincials were at once willing to endure the rigors of
the commercial system and to smuggle when they had a chance. So long as
it was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan than to develop
other sources of supply the caravans flourished without competition.
It was not until after the expulsion of Spain and the independence
of Mexico that a rival supply became important, but there are enough
isolated events before this time to show what had to occur just so soon
as the United States frontier came within range.
The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish captivity did
something to reveal the existence of a possible market in Santa Fé.
He had been engaged in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana
purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the Rio Grande while
searching for the head waters of the Red River. Here he was arrested,
in 1807, by Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.
After a short detention he was escorted to the limits of the United
States, where he was released. He carried home the news of high prices
and profitable markets existing among the Mexicans.
In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify the statements of
Pike. Rumor had come to the States of an insurrection in upper Mexico,
which might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the revolt had
been suppressed before the dozen or so of reckless Americans who
crossed the plains had arrived at their destination. The Spanish
authorities, restored to power and renewed vigor, received them with
open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua, some for ten years,
while the traffic which they had hoped to inaugurate remained still in
the future. Their release came only with the independence of Mexico,
which quickly broke down the barrier against importation and the
foreigner.
The Santa Fé trade commenced when the news of the Mexican revolution
reached the border. Late in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell,
chancing a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took a
small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in what proved to be a
profitable speculation. He returned to the States in time to lead
out a large party in the following summer. So long as the United
States frontier lay east of the Missouri River there could have been
no western traffic, but now that settlement had reached the Indian
Country, and river steamers had made easy freighting from Pittsburg
to Franklin or Independence, Santa Fé was nearer to the United States
seaboard markets than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the American
desert and the Indian frontier made by this earliest of the overland
trails.
[Illustration: OVERLAND TRAILS
The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California
appeared about 1845; the Santa Fé trail had been used since 1821. The
overland mail of 1858 followed the southern route.]
The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the Santa Fé trade, but it
saw the first wagons taken across the plains. The freight capacity
of the mule-train placed a narrow limit upon the profits and extent
of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled over the rough trails was
a matter of considerable doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper
attempted it in this year. The experiment was so successful that within
two years the pack-train was generally abandoned for the wagons by the
Santa Fé traders. The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton
goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics, calicoes, domestic,
shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom shirtings, and cotton hose," were in
high demand. There were also "a few woollen goods, consisting of super
blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths, and shawls, crapes, bombazettes,
some light articles of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses."
Backward bound their freights were lighter. Many of the wagons, indeed,
were sold as part of the cargo. The returning merchants brought some
beaver skins and mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and
silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.
Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings, could not escape the
public eye. The patron of the West came early to its aid. Senator
Thomas Hart Benton had taken his seat from the new state of Missouri
just in time to notice and report upon the traffic. No public man was
more confirmed in his friendship for the frontier trade than Senator
Benton. The fur companies found him always on hand to get them favors
or to "turn aside the whip of calamity." Because of his influence his
son-in-law, Frémont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness. Now,
in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement. A large policy in the
building of public roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.
In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided $30,000 to mark
and build a wagon road from Missouri to the United States border on the
Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road reported some annoyance
from the Indians, whose hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around
their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and Kansa treaties of 1825
these tribes agreed to let the traders traverse the country in peace.
Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the Santa Fé trade.
The long journey from the fringe of settlement to the Spanish towns
eight hundred miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican
soil, crossing the international boundary on the Arkansas near the
hundredth meridian. The Indians of the route knew no national lines,
and found a convenient refuge against pursuers from either nation in
crossing the border. There was no military protection to the frontier
at the American end of the trail until in 1827 the war department
erected a new post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it Fort
Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were stationed to guard the
border and protect the traders. The post was due as much to the new
Indian concentration policy as to the Santa Fé trade. Its significance
was double. Yet no one seems to have foreseen that the development of
the trade through the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment
of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.
From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of regulars convoyed the
caravans to the Southwest. In 1829 four companies of the sixth
infantry, under Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan at
the usual place of organization, Council Grove, a few days west of
the Missouri line, and marched with it to the confines of the United
States. Along the march there had been some worry from the Indians.
After the caravan and escort had separated at the Arkansas the former,
going on alone into Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard
before it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose promptly to the
occasion. He immediately crossed the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the
consequences of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the
Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican authorities furnished an
escort of troops which marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who
had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all summer, met them. He
entertained the Mexican officers with drill while they responded with
a parade, chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report declares,
and then he brought the traders back to the States by the beginning of
November.
There was some criticism in the United States of this costly use of
troops to protect a private trade. Hezekiah Niles, who was always
pleading for high protection to manufactures and receiving less than
he wanted, complained that the use of four companies during a whole
season was extravagant protection for a trade whose annual profits
were not over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely repeated after
1829. Fort Leavenworth and the troops gave moral rather than direct
support. Colonel Dodge, with his dragoons,--for infantry were soon
seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,--made long expeditions
and demonstrations in the thirties, reaching even to the slopes of
the Rockies. And the Santa Fé caravans continued until the forties in
relative safety.
Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an event of great
consequence in the history of the Santa Fé trail. Josiah Gregg,
impelled by ill health to seek a change of climate, made his first trip
to Santa Fé in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg would call for no
more comment than would any one who crossed the plains eight times in a
single decade. But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was watching
and thinking during his entire career, examining into the details of
Mexican life and history and tabulating the figures of the traffic.
When he finally retired from the plains life which he had come to love
so well, he produced, in two small volumes, the great classic of the
trade: "The Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé
Trader." It is still possible to check up details and add small bits
of fact to supplement the history and description of this commerce
given by Gregg, but his book remains, and is likely to remain, the
fullest and best source of information. Gregg had power of scientific
observation and historical imagination, which, added to unusual
literary ability, produced a masterpiece.
The Santa Fé trade, begun in 1822, continued with moderate growth until
1843. This was its period of pioneer development. After the Mexican War
the commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its greatest volume
in the sixties, just before the construction of the Pacific railways.
But in its later years it was a matter of greater routine and less
general interest than in those years of commencement during which it
was educating the United States to a more complete knowledge of the
southern portion of the American desert. Gregg gives a table in which
he shows the approximate value of the trade for its first twenty-two
years. To-day it seems strange that so trifling a commerce should have
been national in its character and influence. In only one year, 1843,
does he find that the eastern value of the goods sent to Santa Fé was
above a quarter of a million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,
but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter million mark. In
nine years it was under $100,000. The men involved were a mere handful.
At the start nearly every one of the seventy men in the caravan was
himself a proprietor. The total number increased more rapidly than the
number of independent owners. Three hundred and fifty were the most
employed in any one year. The twenty-six wagons of 1824 became two
hundred and thirty in 1843, but only four times in the interval were
there so many as a hundred.
Yet the Santa Fé trade was national in its importance. Its romance
contained a constant appeal to a public that was reading the Indian
tales of James Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship
and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country with quaint people
and strange habitations. The American desert, not much more than a
chartless sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must have
confirmation of the truth that frontier causes have produced results
far beyond their normal measure, such confirmation may be found here.
The traders to Santa Fé commonly travelled together in a single
caravan for safety. In the earlier years they started overland from
some Missouri town--Franklin most often--to a rendezvous at Council
Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth and an increasing navigation
of the Missouri River made possible a starting-point further west than
Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the Missouri in 1828
its place was taken by the new settlement of Independence, further
up the river and only twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at
Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties.
For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few
weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the
frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and
oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening
drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the
Southwest,--all these gave to Independence its name and place. From
Independence to Council Grove, some one hundred and fifty miles, across
the border, the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove they
halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a general company for
self-defence. Here in ordinary years the assembled traders elected
a captain whose responsibility was complete, and whose authority
was as great as he could make it by his own force. Under him were
lieutenants, and under the command of these the whole company was
organized in guards and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company
was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal vigilance was the
price of safety.
The unit of the caravan was the wagon,--the same Pittsburg or Conestoga
wagon that moved frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to
travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve mules or oxen,
and carried from three to five thousand pounds of cargo. Over the
wagon were large arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn water
and protect the contents. The careful freighter used two thicknesses
of sheetings, while the canny one slipped in between them a pair of
blankets, which might thus increase his comfort outward bound, and
be in an inconspicuous place to elude the vigilance of the customs
officials at Santa Fé. Arms, mounts, and general equipment were
innumerable in variation, but the prairie schooner, as its white canopy
soon named it, survived through its own superiority.
At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey now became one
across a treeless prairie, with water all too rare, and habitations
entirely lacking. The first stage of the trail crossed the country,
nearly west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two hundred
and seventy miles from Independence. Up the Arkansas it ran on, past
Chouteau's Island, to Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur
traders had established a post. Water was most scarce. Whether the
caravan crossed the river at the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's
Fort to follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader and on
stock. His oxen often reached Santa Fé with scarcely enough strength
left to stand alone. But with reasonable success and skilful guidance
the caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties and at last
enter Santa Fé, seven hundred and eighty miles away, in from six to
seven weeks from Independence.
When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri frontier was familiar
with all of the long trail to Santa Fé. Even in the East there had come
to be some real interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert
and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the
war was the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth,
with orders to march overland against Mexico and Upper California.
Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command of the invading army, which
he recruited largely from the frontier and into which he incorporated a
battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the summer of 1846, near
Council Bluffs, on their way to the Rocky Mountains and the country
beyond. Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken him in
1845 all the way to the mountains and back in the interest of policing
the trails. By the end of June he was ready to begin the march towards
Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was to be a common
rendezvous. To this point the army marched in separate columns, far
enough apart to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder
from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was little more than a
pleasure jaunt. The trail was well known, and Indians, never likely
to run heedlessly into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's Fort
the advance assumed more of a military aspect, for the enemy's country
had been entered and resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the
mountain passes north of Santa Fé. But the resistance came to naught,
while the army, footsore and hot, marched easily into Santa Fé on
August 18, 1846. In the palace of the governor the conquering officers
were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the provinces would
permit. "We were too thirsty to judge of its merits," wrote one of
them of the native wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything
liquid and cool was palatable." With little more than the formality of
taking possession New Mexico thus fell into the hands of the United
States, while the war of conquest advanced further to the West. In the
end of September Kearny started out from Santa Fé for California, where
he arrived early in the following January.
The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary of the United
States to the Gila and the Pacific, broadening the area of the desert
within the United States and raising new problems of long-distance
government in connection with the populations of New Mexico and
California. The Santa Fé trail, with its continuance west of the Rio
Grande, became the attenuated bond between the East and the West. From
the Missouri frontier to California the way was through the desert and
the Indian Country, with regular settlements in only one region along
the route. The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit trade
disappeared with the conquest, so that the traffic with the Southwest
and California boomed during the fifties.
The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions which had never been
dreamed of before the conquest. Kearny's baggage-trains started a new
era in plains freighting. The armies had continuously to be supplied.
Regular communication had to be maintained for the new Southwest.
But the freighting was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the
Santa Fé traders. It became a matter of business, running smoothly
along familiar channels. It ceased to have to do with the extension
of geographic knowledge and came to have significance chiefly in
connection with the organization of overland commerce. Between the
Mexican and Civil wars was its new period of life. Finally, in the
seventies, it gradually receded into history as the tentacles of the
continental railway system advanced into the desert.
The Santa Fé trail was the first beaten path thrust in advance of the
western frontier. Even to-day its course may be followed by the wheel
ruts for much of the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa
Fé. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind it at the start,
not touching it again until the end was reached. For nearly fifty
years after the trade began, this character of the desert remained
substantially unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which had rushed
west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped at the bend, and though the
trail continued, settlement would not follow it. The Indian country
and the American desert remained intact, while the Santa Fé trail, in
advance of settlement, pointed the way of manifest destiny, as no one
of the eastern trails had ever done. When the new states grew up on the
Pacific, the desert became as an ocean traversed only by the prairie
schooners in their beaten paths. Islands of settlement served but to
accentuate the unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain West.
The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the statesmen of the
twenties as the limit of American advance. It might have continued thus
had there really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of the trade
to Santa Fé created a new interest and a connecting road. In nearly
the same years the call of the fur trade led to the tracing of another
path in the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and the fur trade
had stirred up so much interest beyond the Rockies that before Kearny
marched his army into Santa Fé another trail of importance equal to his
had been run to Oregon.
The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended upon the ability of
the United States to keep whites out of the Indian Country. But with
Oregon and Santa Fé beyond, this could never be. The trails had already
shown the fallacy of the frontier policy before it had become a fact in
1840.
CHAPTER V
THE OREGON TRAIL
The Santa Fé trade had just been started upon its long career when
trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the
forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy
crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper
Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage
through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon.
As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the
Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over
the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for
new states. The Santa Fé trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The
Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.
In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those
nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of
every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the
surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded
facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden,
has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that
carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they
first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the
period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of
Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That
they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite
as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were
generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence
upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history
is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the
thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean
at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat
earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the
fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct
the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted,
they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the
century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the
British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so
confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up
the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and
allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.
In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of
the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading
prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies.
Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated
the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a
body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter
year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable
Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had
become a household word through the combined reports of traders and
missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the
lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden
might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an
added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was
approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when
Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The
thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis
of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided
an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the
farthest West.
A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government
to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were
in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the
trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been
ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task
of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the
father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the
mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new
son-in-law, John C. Frémont, a detail in command of an exploring party
to the South Pass.
The career of Frémont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great
publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of
this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from
Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He
shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte,
and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in
northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's
he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the
Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8,
just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at
Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially
over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range,
climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was
back in St. Louis with his party.
In the spring of 1843, Frémont started upon a second and more extended
governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail
along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence
he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the
Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon
for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending
part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while
he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine
Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before
reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another
detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked
upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18,
he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles
of the Columbia.
Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia
and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with
the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the
trappers, had not yet received scientific record when Frémont started
south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His
march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under
difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a
stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento
Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march
carried him into southern California and around the sources of the
Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of
the country between the mountains and the Pacific.
In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two
expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of
resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work
turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems
far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his
earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English
traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed
over by Colonel Frémont was perfectly well known to the old trappers
and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese
pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man
who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through
these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the
American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the _Platte
(Missouri) Eagle_ in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser
[_sic_] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific.
Destiny has willed it."
The year in which Frémont made his first expedition to the mountains
was also the year of the first formal, conducted emigration to
Oregon. Missionaries beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress
the appointment of an American representative and magistrate for
the country, with such effect that Dr. Elijah White, who had some
acquaintance with Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the
spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration of homeseekers
that peopled Oregon during the next ten years. His emigration was not
large, perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons; but it
seems to have been larger than he expected, and large enough to raise
doubt as to the practicability of taking so many persons across the
plains at once. In the decade following, every May, when pasturage was
fresh and green, saw pioneers gathering, with or without premeditation,
at the bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence and its
neighbor villages continued to be the posts of outfit. How many in
the aggregate crossed the plains can never be determined, in spite of
the efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record their names.
The distinguishing feature of the emigration was its spontaneous
individualistic character. Small parties, too late for the caravan,
frequently set forth alone. Single families tried it often enough to
have their wanderings recorded in the border papers. In the spring
following the crossing of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds
at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand in all is
probably not too high. In 1844 the tide subsided a little, but in
1845 it established a new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and
in 1847 ran between four and five thousand. These were the highest
figures, yet throughout the decade the current flowed unceasingly.
The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years, may be taken as
typical of the Oregon movement. Early in the year faces turned toward
the Missouri rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and young, with
wagons and cattle, household equipment, primitive sawmills, and all
the impedimenta of civilization were to be found in the hopeful crowd.
For some days after departure the unwieldy party, a thousand strong,
with twice as many cattle and beasts of burden, held together under
Burnett, their chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control soon
split the company. In addition to the general fear that the number was
dangerously high, the poorer emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some
of the latter had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,
and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian thieves during his
long night watches he felt the injustice which compelled him to protect
the property of another. Hence the party broke early in June. A "cow
column" was formed of those who had many cattle and heavy belongings;
the lighter body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting
distance; and under two captains the procession moved on. The way was
tedious rather than difficult, but habit soon developed in the trains
a life that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the migrants of 1842
had written, was a "great country for unmarried gals." Courtship and
marriage began almost before the States were out of sight. Death and
burial, crime and punishment, filled out the round of human experience,
while Dr. Whitman was more than once called upon in his professional
capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.
[Illustration: FORT LARAMIE IN 1842
From a sketch made to illustrate Frémont's report.]
The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed in the
United States. It started from the Missouri River anywhere between
Independence and Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence was
the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural frontier advanced
through Iowa in the forties numerous new crossings and ferries were
made further up the stream. From the various ferries the start began,
as did the Santa Fé trade, sometime in May. By many roads the wagons
moved westward towards the point from which the single trail extended
to the mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte River reaches
its most southerly point, these routes from the border were nearly
as numerous as the caravans, but here began the single highway along
the river valley, on its southern side. At this point, in the years
immediately after the Mexican War, the United States founded a military
post to protect the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W. Kearny,
commander of the Army of the West. From Fort Kearney (custom soon
changed the spelling of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie
Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork. Fort Laramie
itself was bought from the fur company and converted into a military
post which became a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.
Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the trail to South Pass,
where, through a gap twenty miles in width, the main commerce between
the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go. Beyond
South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the next post of importance on
the road. From Fort Hall to Fort Boisé the trail continued down the
Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to meet the Columbia
near Walla Walla.
The journey to Oregon took about five months. Its deliberate,
domesticated progress was as different as might be from the commercial
rush to Santa Fé. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily get
caught in the early mountain winter, but with a prompt start and a wise
guide, or pilot, winter always found the homeseeker in his promised
land. "This is the right manner to settle the Oregon question," wrote
Niles, after he had counted over the emigrants of 1844.
Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already
there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional
government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under
the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable
uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for
future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed
to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the
British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early
migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful
also lest future American emigration might carry political control out
of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance
among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In
May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon
blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary
association for government and adopted a code of laws.
Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this
newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White,
"at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of
Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of
any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events.
"During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened,
and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves
during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost
all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the
measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts,
securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse
among the whites."
A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension
of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His
journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,
who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from
abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called
the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost,
however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government
settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws
were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order
prevailed.
Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and
annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners
of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink
was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier.
"A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread,
sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as
corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present
at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches,
corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where
two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent
intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of
the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of
the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal
right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to
crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass
meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of
his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the
distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock
P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus
well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were
standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses.
No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having
resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset
the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my
measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the
kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and
every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and
utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where
our presence and report gave general joy."
The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair
degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional
governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its
courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was
long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title
to the country and could pass laws for it.
The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly
in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with
deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with
absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The
stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the
erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an
intimate study of the Oregon trail.
In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in
practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the
annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of
slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern
senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and
Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive
under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to
cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern
states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape
with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could
emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers,
and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence,
in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people,
of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With
a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was
closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.
Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish
Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´.
Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in
British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of
1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great
Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should
justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting
countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim
for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was
entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness
that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party
was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with
respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders
of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the
Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a
westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with
his British adversary quickly.
Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's
notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more
pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of
State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division
instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the
change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty
which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49° from the
Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater part
of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to such
legislation as Congress should prescribe.
A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the
establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All
that the United States had secured in the division was given the
popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,
popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached
American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country.
The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined
by wheel ruts and débris along the sides that even the blind could
scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient
for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way
for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and
morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were
prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A
second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American
desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that
was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.
CHAPTER VI
OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS
The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon is but a small
portion of the whole history of the Oregon trail. The trail was
not only the road to Oregon, but it was the chief road across the
continent. Santa Fé dominated a southern route that was important in
commerce and conquest, and that could be extended west to the Pacific.
But the deep ravine of the Colorado River splits the United States into
sections with little chance of intercourse below the fortieth parallel.
To-day, in only two places south of Colorado do railroads bridge it;
only one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The southern trail
could not be compared in its traffic or significance with the great
middle highway by South Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri
River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to California and Great
Salt Lake.
Of the waves of influence that drew population along the trail, the
Oregon fever came first; but while it was still raging, there came
the Mormon trek that is without any parallel in American history.
Throughout the lifetime of the trails the American desert extended
almost unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to California and
Oregon. The Mormon settlement in Utah became at once the most
considerable colony within this area, and by its own fertility
emphasized the barren nature of the rest.
Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet, but it would be fair to
ascribe the parentage of the sect to that emotional upheaval of the
twenties and thirties which broke down barriers of caste and politics,
ruptured many of the ordinary Christian churches, and produced new
revelations and new prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely
one of these, more astute perhaps than the others, having much of
the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed had had before him, and able
to direct and hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet might
have been able to arouse. History teaches that it is easy to provoke
religious enthusiasm, however improbable or fraudulent the guides or
revelations may be; but that the founding of a church upon it is a task
for greatest statesmanship.
The discovery of the golden plates and the magic spectacles, and
the building upon them of a militant church has little part in the
conquest of the frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for
the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other than as a joke,
and its perpetrator as a successful charlatan. Mormon apologists and
their enemies have gone over the details of its production without
establishing much sure evidence on either side. The theological
teaching of the church seems to put less stress upon it than its
supposed miraculous origin would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain,
with his light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome to
read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of
morals is unobjectionable--it is 'smouched' from the New Testament
and no credit given." Converts came slowly to the new prophet at the
start, for he was but one of many teachers crying in the wilderness,
and those who had known him best in his youth were least ready to
see in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring of 1830 it was
possible to organize, in western New York, the body which Rigdon was
later to christen the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where
proselyting had proved to be successful in both religion and finance.
Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new sect. Revelations came
in upon the prophet rapidly, pointing out the details of organization
and administration, the duty of missionary activity among the Indians
and gentiles, and the future home further to the west. Scouts were sent
to the Indian Country at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland
the leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts who, by
1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in hopeful numbers. The frontier of
this decade was equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,
banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates possessed the germ
of leadership to take advantage of every chance. Until the panic
of 1837 they flourished, apparently not always beyond reproach in
financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had the right to throw
the stone. Antagonism, already appearing against the church, was due
partly to an essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors
and partly to the whole-souled union between church and life which
distinguished the Mormons from the other sects. Their political
complexion was identical with their religion,--a combination which
always has aroused resentment in America.
For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract in Missouri, not far
from Independence, close to the Indians whose conversion was a part of
the Mormon duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa Fé were by-words
along the Missouri, the Mormons were getting a precarious foothold near
the commencement of the trails. The population around Independence was
distinctly inhospitable, with the result that petty violence appeared,
in which it is hard to place the blame. There was a calm assurance
among the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit the earth.
Their neighbors maintained that poultry and stock were unsafe in their
vicinity because of this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges of
well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all the bickerings the
sources of information are partisan and cloudy with prejudice, so that
it is easier to see the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit.
From the south side of the Missouri around Independence the Saints
were finally driven across the river by armed mobs; a transaction in
which the Missourians spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the
peace. North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached in a few
miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell County, they settled down at
last, to build their tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of
1838 their corner-stone was laid.
Far West remained their goal in belief longer than in fact. Before
1838 ended they had been forced to agree to leave Missouri; yet they
returned in secret to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and
continued to dream of this as their future home. Up to the time of
their expulsion from Missouri in 1838 they are not proved to have been
guilty of any crime that could extenuate the gross intolerance which
turned them out. As individuals they could live among Gentiles in
peace. It seems to have been the collective soul of the church that
was unbearable to the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had
facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled it from Missouri,
in a few more years drove them again on their migrations. The cohesion
of the church in politics, economics, and religion explains the
opposition which it cannot well excuse.
In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old Fort Madison ferry
which led into the half-breed country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered
a village of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement
from which the business genius of Smith now purchased it on easy
terms. It was occupied in 1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a
new tabernacle was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken young
clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet had now developed
into a successful man of affairs, with ambitions that reached even to
the presidency at Washington. With a strong sect behind him, money at
his disposal, and supernatural powers in which all faithful saints
believed, Joseph could go far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen
thousand by the end of 1840.
Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely contested presidential
election, at a time when the state feared to lose its population in
an emigration to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to
be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the Mormons insured
for themselves a hearty welcome from both Democrats and Whigs. A
complaisant legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of
privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so that the ideal
of the Mormons of a state within the state was fully realized. The
town council was emancipated from state control, its courts were
independent, and its militia was substantially at the beck of Smith.
Proselyting and good management built up the town rapidly. To an
importunate creditor Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but
to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of milk and honey.
Here it began to be noticed that desertions from the church were not
uncommon; that conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks. It
was noised about that the wealthy convert had the warmest reception,
but was led on to let his religious passion work his impoverishment for
the good of the cause.
Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the church took the decisive
step that carried Mormonism beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable,
religious sects. Rumors of immorality circulated among the Gentile
neighbors. It was bad enough, they thought, to have the Mormons chronic
petty thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail among the
leaders was more than could be endured by a community that did not
count this form of iniquity among its own excesses. The Mormons were in
general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen until they took
to this. At the time, all immorality was denounced and denied by the
prophet and his friends, but in later years the church made public a
revelation concerning celestial or plural marriage, with the admission
that Joseph Smith had received it in the summer of 1843. Never does
Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent as its enemies have
charged. But no church countenancing the practice could hope to be
endured by an American community. The odium of practising it was
increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It was only a matter of
time until the Mormons should resume their march.
The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated by the murder of
Joseph Smith, and Hyrum his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the
summer of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an attack upon the
Saints similar to that in Missouri. Under promise of protection the
Smiths had surrendered themselves. Their martyrdom at once disgraced
the state in which it could be possible, and gave to Mormonism in a
murdered prophet a mighty bond of union. The reins of government fell
into hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young succeeded Joseph
Smith.
Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a formal way president
of the church, but his authority was complete in fact after the death
of Joseph. A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain knew him, and
has left an estimate of him which must be close to truth. He was "a man
of great ability. Apparently deficient in education and refinement,
he was fair and honest in his dealings, and seemed extremely liberal
in conversation upon religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so
Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates, "as anything but a
religious fanatic or even enthusiast; but he knew how to make use of
the fanaticism of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly after
the murder of Joseph it became clear that Nauvoo must be abandoned, and
Brigham began to consider an exodus across the plains so familiar by
hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky Mountains beyond the limits
of the United States. Persecution, for the persecuted can never see
two sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened eviction came in the
autumn of 1845. In 1846 the last great trek began.
The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at Nauvoo as early as
February, 1846. By the hundred, in the spring of the year, the wagons
of the persecuted sect were ferried across the river. Five hundred and
thirty-nine teams within a single week in May is the report of one
observer. Property which could be commuted into the outfit for the
march was carefully preserved and used. The rest, the tidy houses, the
simple furniture, the careful farms (for the backbone of the church was
its well-to-do middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced sale
to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full of real estate vultures
hoping to thrive upon the Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more
abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple within the year.
Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as Brigham Young liked to
call his headquarters, advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer
allowed. To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railway follows
the Mormon road for many miles, but in 1846 the western half of Iowa
territory was Indian Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and
Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over, but who were in
possession at this time. Along the line of march camps were built by
advance parties to be used in succession by the following thousands.
The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri River, near Council
Bluffs, where as yet no city stood, to plant a crop of grain, since
manna could not be relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of the
population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter quarters not far above
the present site of Omaha, preserving the orderly life of the society,
and enduring hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate by gaiety
and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi country of Iowa, opposite
their winter quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all the
way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the Platte Mormon detachments
were scattered along the roads. The destination was yet in doubt.
Westward it surely was, but it is improbable that even Brigham knew
just where.
The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted and driven westward
like themselves, kindly at first, but discontent came as the winter
residence was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha, west of the
Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit Mormon settlement, but
east, in the abandoned Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain
Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several years. A permanent
residence here was not desired even by the Mormons themselves. Spring
in 1847 found them preparing to resume the march.
In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance of no less a person
than Brigham Young started out the Platte trail in search of Zion.
One hundred and forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred and
seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they took along, if
the figures of one of their historians may be accepted. Under strict
military order, the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is one of
the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no sooner selected their abode
beyond the line of the United States in their flight from persecution
than conquest from Mexico extended the United States beyond them to the
Pacific. They themselves aided in this defeat of their plan, since from
among them Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army of
invasion.
Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and beyond, the
prospectors followed the well-beaten trail. Oregon homeseekers had been
cutting it deep in the prairie sod for five years. West of South Pass
they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on the 24th of July, 1847,
Brigham gazed upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious
premeditation, so far as is known, and against the advice of one of the
most experienced of mountain guides, this valley by a later-day Dead
Sea was chosen for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground
was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were commenced at
once, and within a month the town site was baptized the City of the
Great Salt Lake.
Behind the advance guard the main body remained in winter quarters,
making ready for their difficult search for the promised land; moving
at last in the late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere
would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph relied but little
upon supernatural aid in keeping his flock under control. Commonly he
depended upon human wisdom and executive direction. But upon the eve
of his own departure from winter quarters he had made public, for the
direction of the main body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will
of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their Journeyings to the
West." Such revelations as this, had they been repeated, might well
have created or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration of
the leader. The order given was such as a wise source of inspiration
might have formed after constant intercourse with emigrants and traders
upon the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers of the way.
"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, and those who journey with them," read the revelation, "be
organized into companies, with a covenant and a promise to keep all
the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God. Let the companies
be organized with captains of hundreds, and captains of fifties, and
captains of tens, with a president and counsellor at their head, under
direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be our covenant, that
we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord.
"Let each company provide itself with all the teams, wagons,
provisions, and all other necessaries for the journey that they can.
When the companies are organized, let them go with all their might,
to prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company, with their
captains and presidents, decide how many can go next spring; then
choose out a sufficient number of able-bodied and expert men to take
teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers to prepare for
putting in the spring crops. Let each company bear an equal proportion,
according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the
widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone
with the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not
up into the ears of the Lord against his people.
"Let each company prepare houses and fields for raising grain for those
who are to remain behind this season; and this is the will of the Lord
concerning this people.
"Let every man use all his influence and property to remove this people
to the place where the Lord shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do
this with a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed in
your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields, and in your houses,
and in your families...."
The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk Horn River, whence the
head of the procession moved late in June and early in July. In careful
organization, with camps under guard and wagons always in corral at
night, detachments moved on in quick succession. Kanesville and a
large body remained behind for another year or longer, but before
Brigham had laid out his city and started east the emigration of
1847 was well upon its way. The foremost began to come into the city
by September. By October the new city in the desert had nearly four
thousand inhabitants. The march had been made with little suffering and
slight mortality. No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the
trail.
The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to become an oasis in the
American desert, supporting the only agricultural community existing
therein during nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the Mormons at
the start. In Illinois and Missouri they were used to wood and water;
here they found neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to
carry their water to their crops in a way in which their leader had
more confidence than themselves. The urgency of Brigham in setting his
first detachment to work on fields and crops was not unwise, since for
two years there was a real question of food to keep the colony alive.
Inexperience in irrigating agriculture and plagues of crickets kept
down the early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its maintenance
does still more credit to its skilful leadership. Its people, apart
from foreign converts who came in later years, were of the stuff that
had colonized the middle West and won a foothold in Oregon; but nowhere
did an emigration so nearly create a land which it enjoyed as here.
A paternal government dictated every effort, outlined the streets and
farms, detailed parties to explore the vicinity and start new centres
of life. Little was left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical
success and a high state of general welfare rewarded the Saints for
their implicit obedience to authority.
Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became as common as that to
Oregon in the years following 1847, but, except in the disastrous
hand-cart episode of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial
increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living in the West, who,
walking all the way, with their own hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled
carts from the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad
management in handling proselytes the hand-cart catastrophe was chiefly
due. From the beginning missionary activity had been pressed throughout
the United States and even in Europe. In England and Scandinavia the
lower classes took kindly to the promises, too often impracticable, it
must be believed, of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon
success abroad. The convert with property could pay his way to the
Missouri border and join the ordinary annual procession. But the poor,
whose wealth was not equal to the moderately costly emigration, were
a problem until the emigration society determined to cut expenses by
reducing equipment and substituting pushcarts and human power for the
prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.
In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants left Liverpool, at
contract rates, for Iowa City, where the parties were to be organized
and ample equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised
to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found that slovenly
management had not built enough of the carts. Delayed by the necessary
construction of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the
trail until late in the summer,--too late for a successful trip, as a
few of their more cautious advisers had said. The earliest company got
through to Salt Lake City in September with considerable success. It
was hard and toilsome to push the carts; women and children suffered
badly, but the task was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains
broke down the last company. A friendly historian speaks of a loss of
sixty-seven out of a party of four hundred and twenty. Throughout the
United States the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling
against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom, with
clothing going and food quite gone, increased the conviction that the
Mormon hierarchy was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.
That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of the whole United States
came to be believed as well. In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement
three years old, Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending
from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°, and the President
had made Brigham Young its governor. The close association of the
Mormon church and politics had prevented peaceful relations from
existing between its people and the federal officers of the territory,
while Washington prejudiced a situation already difficult by sending
to Utah officers and judges, some of whom could not have commanded
respect even where the sway of United States authority was complete.
The vicious influence of politics in territorial appointments, which
the territories always resented, was specially dangerous in the case
of a territory already feeling itself persecuted for conscience' sake.
Yet it was not impossible for a tactful and respectable federal officer
to do business in Utah. For several years relations increased in bad
temper, both sides appealing constantly to President and Congress,
until it appeared, as was the fact, that the United States authority
had become as nothing in Utah and with the church. Among the earliest
of President Buchanan's acts was the preparation of an army which
should reëstablish United States prestige among the Mormons. Large
wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1857,
with an army under Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and
again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.
The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base, and operating in a
desert against plainsmen of remarkable skill, the army was helpless.
At will, the Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply trains,
confining their attacks to property rather than to armed forces. When
the army reached Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his
people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned. With difficulty
could the army of invasion have lived through the winter without aid.
In the spring of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons, being
invulnerable, were forgiven. The army marched down the trail again.
The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the
heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence.
What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd
leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving
population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as
the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold
followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then
in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West.
The Mormons would have fared much worse had their leader not located
his stake of Zion near the point where the trail to the Southwest
deviated from the Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay
tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through his oasis on
their way to California.
CHAPTER VII
CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS
On his second exploring trip, John C. Frémont had worked his way south
over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found
himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in 1844 a small group
of Americans had already been established for several years. Mexican
California was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient
central government that the province had almost fallen away of its
own weight. John A. Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was
the magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed a liberal
hospitality to the Pathfinder's party.
In 1845, Frémont started on his third trip, this time entering
California by a southern route and finding himself at Sutter's early in
1846. In some respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance
of a filibustering party from the start. When it crossed the Rockies,
it began to trespass upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with
whom the United States was yet at peace. Whether the explorer was
actually instructed to detach California from Mexico, or whether he
only imagined that such action would be approved at home, is likely
never to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were already under
orders in the event of war to seize California at once; and Polk was
from the start ambitious to round out the American territory on the
Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were at variance with their
Mexican neighbors, who resented the steady influx of foreign blood.
Between 1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased. And in June,
1846, certain of them, professing to believe that they were to be
attacked, seized the Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors
of what they called their Bear Flag Republic. Frémont, near at hand,
countenanced and supported their act, if he did not suggest it.
The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly after the American
population in California had begun its little revolution. Frémont was
in his glory for a time as the responsible head of American power
in the province. Naval commanders under their own orders coöperated
along the coast so effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,
learned that the conquest was substantially complete, soon after
he left Santa Fé, and was able to send most of his own force back.
California fell into American hands almost without a struggle, leaving
the invaders in possession early in 1847. In January of that year the
little village of Yerba Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the
American occupants began the sale of lots along the water front and the
construction of a great seaport.
The relations of Oregon and California to the occupation of the West
were much the same in 1847. Both had been coveted by the United States.
Both had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come first because
it was most easily reached by the great trail, and because it had
no considerable body of foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It
was, under the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field for
colonization. But California had been the territory of Mexico and was
occupied by a strange population. In the early forties there were from
4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province, living the easy
agricultural life of the Spanish colonist. The missions and the Indians
had decayed during the past generation. The population was light
hearted and generous. It quarrelled loudly, but had the Latin-American
knack for bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized by long
association with those trappers who had visited it since the twenties,
and the settlers who had begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied
foreign territory it had not invited American colonization as Oregon
had done. Hence the Oregon movement had been going on three or four
years before any considerable bodies of emigrants broke away from the
trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out homes in California. If war had
not come, American immigration into California would have progressed
after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities would have
allowed. As it was, the actual conquest removed the barrier, so that
California migration in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon under
the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement. The settlement of the
Mormons at Salt Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at the
head of the most perilous section of the California trail. Both Mormons
and Californians profited by its traffic.
With respect to California, the treaty which closed the Mexican War
merely recognized an accomplished fact. By right of conquest California
had changed hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid the penalty
under that organic law of politics which forbids a nation to sit still
when others are moving. In no conceivable way could the occupation
of California have been prevented, and if the war over Texas had not
come in 1846, a war over California must shortly have occurred. By the
treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory which she
had never been able to develop, and made way for the erection of the
new America on the Pacific.
Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in California was John
A. Sutter, whose establishment on the Sacramento had been a centre
of the new life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government he
had erected his adobe buildings in the usual semi-fortified style
that distinguished the isolated ranch. He was ready for trade, or
agriculture, or war if need be, possessing within his own domain
equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and supplies. As his
ranch prospered, and as Americans increased in San Francisco and on the
Sacramento, the prospects of Sutter steadily improved. In 1847 he made
ready to reap an additional share of profit from the boom by building a
sawmill on his estate. Among his men there had been for some months a
shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W. Marshall, who had been chiefly
carpenter while in Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall was
sent out to find a place where timber and water-power should be near
enough together to make a profitable mill site. He found his spot on
the south bank of the American, which is a tributary of the Sacramento,
some forty-five miles northeast of Sacramento.
In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall came to their agreement
by which the former was to furnish all supplies and the latter was to
build the mill and operate it on shares. Construction was begun before
the year ended, and was substantially completed in January, 1848.
Experience showed the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too
shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of turning the river
into it by night to wash out earth and deepen the channel. Here it was
that after one of these flushings, toward the end of January, he picked
up glittering flakes which looked to him like gold.
With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter, at the ranch.
Together they tested the flakes in the apothecary's shop, proving the
reality of the discovery before returning to the mill to prospect more
fully.
For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None could tell how large the
field might be, but he saw clearly that once the news of the find got
abroad, the whole population would rush madly to the diggings. His
ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under way, all needed labor.
But none would work for hire with free gold to be had for the taking.
The discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks, but the news
leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands in a few days, and reached
even to San Francisco in the form of rumor before February was over. A
new force had appeared to change the balance of the West and to excite
the whole United States.
The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two parts: the earlier
including the population of California, near enough to hear of the find
and get to the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the world, but
could not start until the news had percolated by devious and tedious
courses to centres of population thousands of miles away. The movement
within California started in March and April.
Further prospecting showed that over large areas around the American
and Sacramento rivers free gold could be obtained by the simple
processes of placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six or eight
men was the most profitable tool, but a tin dishpan would do in an
emergency. San Francisco was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and
was not excited even by the first of April, but as nuggets and bags
of dust appeared in quantity, the doubters turned to enthusiasts.
Farms were abandoned, town houses were deserted, stores were closed,
while every able-bodied man tramped off to the north to try his luck.
The city which had flourished and expanded since the beginning of
1847 became an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper is mute
witness of the desertion, lapsing into silence for a month after May
29th because its hands had disappeared. Farther south in California
the news spread as spring advanced, turning by June nearly every face
toward Sacramento.
The public authorities took cognizance of the find during the summer.
It was forced upon them by the wholesale desertions of troops who
could not stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor Mason, who
represented the sovereignty of the United States, visited the scenes in
person and described the situation in their official letters home. The
former got his news off to the Secretary of State by the 1st of June;
the latter wrote on August 17; together they became the authoritative
messengers that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk published
some of their documents in his message to Congress in December, 1848.
The rumors had reached the East as early as September, but now, writes
Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."
How to get to California became a great popular question in the winter
of 1848-1849. The public mind was well prepared for long migrations
through the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the journals
for at least six years. Route, time, method, and cost were all to be
considered. Migration, of a sort, began at once.
Land and water offered a choice of ways to California. The former
route was now closed for the winter and could not be used until spring
should produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the impetuous and
the well-to-do could start immediately by sea. All along the seaboard
enterprising ship-owners announced sailings for California, by the Horn
or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired hulks were called again into
commission for the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many were
willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery, Congress had arranged
for a postal service, _via_ Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship
Company had been organized to work the contracts. The _California_
had left New York in the fall of 1848 to run on the western end of
the route. It had sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news
of gold on the South American coast, had begun to load up at Latin
ports. When it reached Panama, a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many
times beyond its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled over its
accommodations. On February 28, 1849, it reached San Francisco at last,
starting the influx from the world at large.
The water route was too costly for most of the gold-seekers, who were
forced to wait for spring, when the trails would be open. Various
routes then guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most of all they
crowded once more the great Platte trail. Oregon migration and the
Mormon flight had familiarized this route to all the world. For its
first stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any turnpike in
our country."
The usual crowd, which every May for several years had brought to
the Missouri River crossings around Fort Leavenworth, was reënforced
in 1849 and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle regiment of
regulars was there, bound for Forts Laramie and Hall to erect new
frontier posts. Lieutenant Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying
party which was to prospect for a railway route to Salt Lake. By
thousands and tens of thousands others came, tempted by the call of
gold. This was the cheap and popular route. Every western farmer was
ready to start, with his own wagons and his own stock. The townsman
could easily buy the simple equipment of the plains. The poor could
work their way, driving cattle for the better-off. Through inexperience
and congestion the journey was likely to be hard, but any one might
undertake it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850 wagons
had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and 1500 more at the other ferries.
Familiarity had done much to divest the overland journey of its
terrors. We hear in this, and even in earlier years, of a sort of
plains travel de luxe, of wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from
the weather and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the world
as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury, hurrying out in June
and overtaking the trains, was impressed with the picturesque character
of the emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in company with
multitudes of emigrants the whole day," he wrote on June 12. "The road
has been lined to a long extent with their wagons, whose white covers,
glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a distance, ships upon the
ocean.... We passed also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon, drawn
by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household furniture. Behind
followed a covered cart containing the wife, driving herself, and a
host of babies--the whole bound to the land of promise, of the distance
to which, however, they seemed to have not the most remote idea. To the
tail of the cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls; two
milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare, upon the back of which
was perched a little, brown-faced, barefooted girl, not more than seven
years old, while a small sucking colt brought up the rear." Travellers
eastward bound, meeting the procession, reported the hundreds and
thousands whom they met.
The organization of the trains was not unlike that of the Oregonians
and the Mormons, though generally less formal than either of these.
The wagons were commonly grouped in companies for protection, little
needed, since the Indians were at peace during most of 1849. At
nightfall the long columns came to rest and worked their wagons into
the corral which was the typical plains encampment. To form this the
wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with its tongue overlapping
the vehicle ahead, and each fastened to the next with the brake or yoke
chains. An opening at one end allowed for driving in the stock, which
could here be protected from stampede or Indian theft. In emergency
the circle of wagons formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside
ordinary Indian attacks. When the companies had been on the road for a
few weeks the forming of the corral became an easy military manoeuvre.
The itinerant circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of prairie
schooners.
The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by worse sufferings
than the trail had yet known. Cholera broke out among the trains at the
start. It stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five thousand
graves, until they reached the hills beyond Fort Laramie. The price
of inexperience, too, had to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock
died. The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this. On July 27,
Stansbury observed: "To-day we find additional and melancholy evidence
of the difficulties encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before
halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had been broken up, the
spokes of the wheels taken to make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or
otherwise destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with articles
that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and steel, large blacksmiths'
anvils and bellows, crowbars, drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels,
axes, lead, trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,
cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels, harness, clothing, bacon,
and beans, were found along the road in pretty much the order in which
they have been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen, lying
in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained a part of the
trouble." In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and
twenty-seven dead oxen.
Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In
the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away,
so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were
forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.
The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy.
Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian
who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached
the gold fields.
It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California after July,
1849, when the overland folk began to arrive. All countries and all
stations in society had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000
or more whites who were there in the end of the year. The farmer, the
amateur prospector, and the professional gambler mingled in the crowd.
Loose women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who had come by
sea contained an over-share of the undesirable element that proposed
to live upon the recklessness and vices of the miners. The overland
emigrants were largely of farmer stock; whether they had possessed
frontier experience or not before the start, the 3000-mile journey
toughened and seasoned all who reached California. Nearly all possessed
the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.
The experience of Oregon might point to the future of California when
its strenuous population arrived upon the unprepared community. The
Mexican government had been ejected by war. A military government
erected by the United States still held its temporary sway, but
felt out of place as the controlling power over a civilian American
population. The new inhabitants were much in need of law, and had
the American dislike for military authority. Immediately Congress
was petitioned to form a territorial government for the new El
Dorado. But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of slavery
and freedom in the Southwest during its session of 1848-1849. It
adjourned with nothing done for California. The mining population was
irritated but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It had already
organized its miners' courts and begun to execute summary justice in
emergencies. It was quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion
of its administrative officers and erect its state government without
the consent of Congress. The military governor called the popular
convention; the constitution framed during September, 1849, was
ratified by popular vote on November 13; a few days later Governor
Riley surrendered his authority into the hands of the elected governor,
Burnett, and the officials of the new state. All this was done
spontaneously and easily. There was no sanction in law for California
until Congress admitted it in September, 1850, receiving as one of its
first senators, John C. Frémont.
The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon slavery in the Southwest,
a compromise made necessary by the appearance on the Pacific of a new
America. The "call of the West and the lust for gold" had done their
work in creating a new centre of life beyond the quondam desert.
The census of 1850 revealed something of the nature of this population.
Probably 125,000 whites, though it was difficult to count them and
impossible to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon and
California. Nine-tenths of these were in the latter colony. More than
11,000 were found in the settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many
more than 3000 Americans were scattered among the Mexican population
along the Rio Grande. The great trails had seen most of these
home-seekers marching westward over the desert and across the Indian
frontier which in the blindness of statecraft had been completed for
all time in 1840.
CHAPTER VIII
KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER
The long line separating the Indian and agricultural frontiers was
in 1850 but little farther west than the point which it had reached
by 1820. Then it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it
remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung out during this
generation, including Arkansas on the south and Iowa, Minnesota, and
Wisconsin on the north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War the
line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri at its bend. West
of this spot it had been kept from going by the tradition of the desert
and the pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind had filled up
with population, Oregon and California had appeared across the desert,
but the barrier had not been pushed away.
Through the great trails which penetrated the desert accurate knowledge
of the Far West had begun to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike
and Long had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and covetous
eyes had been cast upon the Indian lands across the border,--lands from
which the tribes were never to be removed without their consent, and
which were never to be included in any organized territory or state.
Most of the traffic over the trails and through this country had been
in defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes had granted
rights of transit, but such privileges as were needed and used by the
Oregon, and California, and Utah hordes were far in excess of these.
Most of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon Indian lands as
well as violators of treaty provisions. Trouble with the Indians had
begun early in the migrations.
[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1849
Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The
Southwest acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.]
At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the Indian office had
foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties have occurred during the
spring of the last and present year [1845] from the passing of
emigrants for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country. Large
companies have frequently rendezvoused on the Indian lands for months
previous to the period of their starting. The emigrants have two
advantages in crossing into the Indian Country at an early period of
the spring; one, the facility of grazing their stock on the rushes with
which the lands abound; and the other, that they cross the Missouri
River at their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be forced
by the military to put back. This passing of the emigrants through
the Indian Country without their permission must, I fear, result in
an unpleasant collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the
whites have no right to be in their country without their consent;
and the upper tribes, who subsist on game, complain that the buffalo
are wantonly killed and scared off, which renders their only means of
subsistence every year more precarious." Frémont had seen, in 1842,
that this invasion of the Indian Country could not be kept up safely
without a show of military force, and had recommended a post at the
point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.
The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated the relations
with the tribes, while the Indian agents continually called upon
Congress to redress or stop the wrongs being done as often by
panic-stricken emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate persuasion
and force," wrote the Commissioner in 1854, "some of these tribes have
been removed, step by step, from mountain to valley, and from river
to plain, until they have been pushed halfway across the continent.
They can go no further; on the ground they now occupy the crisis must
be met, and their future determined.... [There] they are, and as they
are, with outstanding obligations in their behalf of the most solemn
and imperative character, voluntarily assumed by the government." But a
relentless westward movement that had no regard for rights of Mexico in
either Texas or California could not be expected to notice the rights
of savages even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens rights
not inferior to those conceded by the government "to wandering nations
of savages." A shrewd and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who
had the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in 1853. "But
one course remains," he wrote, "which promises any permanent relief
to them, or any lasting benefit to the country in which they dwell.
That is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse laws' as
will invite the residence of traders amongst them, and _open the whole
Indian territory to settlement_. In this manner will be introduced
amongst them those who will set the example of developing the resources
of the soil, of which the Indians have not now the most distant idea;
who will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial to their
nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly, to those modes
of life which can alone secure them from the miseries of penury.
Trade is the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor
of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of all hereafter....
The present 'intercourse laws' too, so far as they are calculated to
protect the Indians from the evils of civilized life--from the sale of
ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals--are nothing more than a
dead letter; while, so far as they contribute to exclude the benefits
of civilization from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly
enforced."
In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress from the War
Department to the Interior, with the idea that the Indians would be
better off under civilian than military control, and shortly after
this negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements with the
tribes. The Sioux were persuaded in the summer of 1851 to make way for
increasing population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the same
year the tribes of the western plains were induced to make concessions.
The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte agency at Fort Laramie in
1851 were in the interest of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had
spent the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho
to the conference. Shoshoni were brought in from the West. From the
north of the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara, Grosventres,
and Crows. The treaties here concluded were never ratified in full,
but for fifteen years Congress paid various annuities provided by
them, and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right of the
United States to make roads across the plains and to fortify them
with military posts was fully agreed to, while the Indians pledged
themselves to commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two years later,
at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a conference with the plains Indians
of the south, Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of faith, which
the Indians did not have in the Government, nor the Government in them."
Overland traffic was made more safe for several years by these
treaties. Such friction and fighting as occurred in the fifties were
due chiefly to the excesses and the fears of the emigrants themselves.
But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern tribes
along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were in constant danger of
dispossession by the advance of the frontier itself.
The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in the early fifties,
was the impending danger threatening the peace of the border. There
was not as yet any special need to extend colonization across the
Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota were but
sparsely inhabited. Settlers for years might be accommodated farther
to the east. But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and aroused
passions in both North and South. Motives were so thoroughly mixed
that participants were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of
themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge, political ambition,
all mingled with pure philanthropy and a reasonable fear of outside
interference with domestic institutions. The compromise had settled
the future of the new lands, but between Missouri and the mountains
lay the residue of the Louisiana purchase, divided truly by the
Missouri compromise line of 36° 30', but not yet settled. Ambition to
possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for freedom was
stimulated by the debate and the fears of outside interference. The
nearest part of the unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence it
was that Kansas came within the public vision first.
It is possible to trace a movement for territorial organization in
the Indian Country back to 1850 or even earlier. Certain of the more
intelligent of the Indian colonists had been able to read the signs
of the times, with the result that organized effort for a territory
of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot country and had besieged
Congress between 1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment
were the Indians and the laws. Experience had long demonstrated the
unwisdom of permitting Indians and emigrants to live in the same
districts. The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties based
upon them, had guaranteed in particular that no territory or state
should ever be organized in this country. Good faith and the physical
presence of the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory could
appear.
The guarantee of permanency was based upon treaty, and in the eye of
Congress was not so sacred that it could not be modified by treaty.
As it became clear that the demand for the opening of these lands
would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared for the inevitable
by ordering, in March, 1853, a series of negotiations with the tribes
west of Missouri with a view to the cession of more country. The
Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, who later wrote a
book on "Our Indian Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to the
Indians the hard news that they were expected once more to vacate. He
found the tribes uneasy and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering
over their lands, had set them thinking. There had been no actual white
settlement up to October, 1853, so Manypenny declared, but the chiefs
feared that he was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The Indian
mind had some difficulty in comprehending the difference between ceding
their land by treaty and losing it by force.
At a long series of council fires the Commissioner soothed away some of
the apprehensions, but found a stubborn resistance when he came to talk
of ceding all the reserves and moving to new homes. The tribes, under
pressure, were ready to part with some of their lands, but wanted to
retain enough to live on. When he talked to them of the Great Father
in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony of the situation; the
guarantee of permanency had been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged
for a series of treaties in the following year.
In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with most of the tribes
fronting on Missouri between 37° and 42° 40'. Some of these had been
persuaded to move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of
the thirties. Others, always resident there, had accepted curtailed
reserves. The Omaha faced the Missouri, north of the Platte. South of
the Platte were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes of Missouri,
the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas,
and around Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization of a
high order. The Shawnee, immediately south of the Kansas, were also
well advanced in agriculture in the permanent home they had accepted.
The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea and Piankashaw, and the
Miami were further south. From those tribes more than thirteen million
acres of land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered and
reduced reserves the Indians retained for themselves about one-tenth
of what they ceded. Generally, when the final signing came, under
the persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the strange
surroundings of Washington, the chiefs surrendered the lands outright
and with no condition.
Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to give title at once
and held out for conditions of sale. The Iowa, the confederated minor
tribes, and notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust to the
United States, with the treaty pledge that the lands so yielded should
be sold at public auction to the highest bidder, the remainders should
then be offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre, and the
final remnants should be disposed of by the United States, the accruing
funds being held in trust by the United States for the Indians. By
the end of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In July, 1854,
Congress provided a land office for the territory of Kansas.
While the Indian negotiations were in progress, Senator Douglas was
forcing his Kansas-Nebraska bill at Washington. The bill had failed in
1853, partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of the Indian
agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the Democratic party carried it
along relentlessly. With words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as
Rhodes has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed by the
westward movement, subversive of the national pledge, and, blind as he
was, destructive as well of his party and his own political future.
The support of President Pierce and the coöperation of Jefferson Davis
were his in the struggle. It was not his intent, he declared, to
legislate slavery into or out of the territories; he proposed to leave
that to the people themselves. To this principle he gave the name of
"popular sovereignty," "and the name was a far greater invention than
the doctrine." With rising opposition all about him, he repealed the
Missouri compromise which in 1820 had divided the Indian Country by
the line of 36° 30' into free and slave areas, and created within these
limits the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was signed
by the President on May 30, 1854. In later years this day has been
observed as a memorial to those who lost their lives in fighting the
battle which he provoked.
With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri compromise repealed,
eager partisans prepared in the spring of 1854 to colonize the new
territories in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the slavery
side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the
leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves
and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these
for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the
future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of
voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas,
and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing
the erection of a free state on her western boundary. The northern
states had been stirred by the act as deeply as the South. In New
England the bill was not yet passed when leaders of the abolition
movement prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer, of Worcester, urged
during the spring that friends of freedom could do no better work than
aid in the colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own state, in
April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, through
which he proposed to aid suitable men to move into the debatable
land. Churches and schools were to be provided for them. A stern New
England abolition spirit was to be fostered by them. And they were
not to be left without the usual border means of defence. Amos A.
Lawrence, of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made Thayer's scheme
financially possible. Dr. Charles Robinson was their choice for leader
of emigration and local representative in Kansas.
The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated little by the
ordinary westward impulse but greatly by political ambition and
sectional rivalry. As late as October, 1853, there had been almost no
whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they began to come in,
in increasing numbers. The Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at
once, before the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before
land offices had been opened. The approach was by the Missouri River
steamers to Kansas City and Westport, near the bend of the river, where
was the gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north of the Kansas
River, was not yet open to legal occupation, but the Shawnee lands
had been ceded completely and would soon be ready. So the New England
companies worked their way on foot, or in hired wagons, up the right
bank of the Kansas, hunting for eligible sites. About thirty miles west
of the Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they picked their
spot late in July. The town of Lawrence grew out of their cluster of
tents and cabins.
It was more than two months after the arrival of the squatters at
Lawrence before the first governor of the new territory, Andrew H.
Reeder, made his appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established civil
government in Kansas. One of his first experiences was with the attempt
of United States officers at the post to secure for themselves pieces
of the Delaware lands which surrounded it. "While lying at the fort,"
wrote a surveyor who left early in September to run the Nebraska
boundary line, "we heard a great deal about those d--d squatters who
were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None of the Delaware lands
were open to settlement, since the United States had pledged itself to
sell them all at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But certain
speculators, including officers of the regular army, organized a town
company to preëmpt a site near the fort, where they thought they
foresaw the great city of the West. They relied on the immunity which
usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands, and seem even to have
used United States soldiers to build their shanties. They had begun to
dispose of their building lots "in this discreditable business" four
weeks before the first of the Delaware trust lands were put on sale.
However bitter toward each other, the settlers were agreed in their
attitude toward the Indians, and squatted regardless of Indian
rights or United States laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his
legislature, first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort Riley ejected it;
then at the Shawnee mission, close to Kansas City, where his presence
and its were equally without authority of law. He established election
precincts in unceded lands, and voting places at spots where no white
man could go without violating the law. The legal snarl into which the
settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the Indian policy. It
is even intimated that Governor Reeder was interested in a land scheme
at Pawnee similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.
The fight for Kansas began immediately after the arrival of Governor
Reeder and the earliest immigrants. The settlers actually in residence
at the commencement of 1855 seem to have been about 8500. Propinquity
gave Missouri an advantage at the start, when the North was not yet
fully aroused. At an election for territorial legislature held on
March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was revealed in all
its fulness when more than 6000 votes were counted among a population
which had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men had ridden over
in organized bands to colonize the precincts and carry the election.
The whole area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride of the
Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that Governor Reeder disavowed
certain of the results, yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July,
1855, was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members, while the
rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri code of law, thus laying the
foundations for a slave state.
The political struggle over Kansas became more intense on the border
and more absorbing in the nation in the next four years. The free-state
men, as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known, disavowed the
first legislature on the ground of its fraudulent election, while
President Pierce steadily supported it from Washington. Governor
Reeder was removed during its session, seemingly because he had thrown
doubts upon its validity. Protesting against it, the northerners held
a series of meetings in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some
twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and crystallized their
opposition under Dr. Robinson. Their efforts culminated at Topeka
in October in a spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary,
convention which framed a free-state constitution for Kansas and
provided for erecting a rival administration. Dr. Robinson became its
governor.
Before the first legislature under the Topeka constitution assembled,
Kansas had still further trouble. Private violence and mob attacks
began during the fall of 1855. What is known as the Wakarusa War
occurred in November, when Sheriff Jones of Douglas County tried to
arrest some free-state men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance
reënforced with Sharpe rifles from New England. Governor Wilson
Shannon, who had succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility
continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly the centre of
northern settlement and the object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri
mob visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving presence, it is
said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel and printing shop, and burned
the residence of Dr. Robinson.
In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river and attacked
Lecompton, but within a week of the sacking of Lawrence retribution
was visited upon the pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were
murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by a group of fanatical
free-state men. Just what provocation John Brown and his family had
received which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In many instances
individual anti-slavery men retaliated lawlessly upon their enemies.
But the leaders of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring Brown
and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts. It is certain that
in this struggle the free-state party, in general, wanted peaceful
settlement of the country, and were staking their fortunes and families
upon it. They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression was no
part of their platform.
The course of Governor Shannon reached its end in the summer of 1856.
He was disliked by the free-state faction, while his personal habits
gave no respectability to the pro-slave cause. At the end of his
régime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka constitution was
prevented by federal troops from convening in session at Topeka. A few
weeks later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and established his
seat of government in Lecompton, by this time a village of some twenty
houses. It took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only six weeks to
fall out with the pro-slave element and the federal land officers. He
resigned in March, 1857.
Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed Geary, the first official
attempt at a constitution was entered upon. The legislature had already
summoned a convention which sat at Lecompton during September and
October. Its constitution, which was essentially pro-slavery, however
it was read, was ratified before the end of the year and submitted to
Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which called the convention had
fallen into free-state hands, disavowed the constitution, and summoned
another convention. At Leavenworth this convention framed a free-state
constitution in March, which was ratified by popular vote in May,
1858. Governor Walker had already resigned in December, 1857. Through
holding an honest election and purging the returns of slave-state
frauds he had enabled the free-state party to secure the legislature.
Southerner though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty of the
administration in Kansas. He had yielded to the evidence of his eyes,
that the population of Kansas possessed a large free-state majority.
But so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington. Even Senator
Douglas, the patron of the popular sovereignty doctrine, had now broken
with President Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to form
their own institutions. No attention was ever paid by Congress to
this Leavenworth constitution, but when the Lecompton constitution
was finally submitted to the people by Congress, in August, 1858, it
was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a total of 13,000. Kansas
was henceforth in the hands of the actual settlers. A year later,
at Wyandotte, it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last
entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the Wyandotte Convention,"
says one of the local historians, "there were a few Democrats and one
or two cranks, and probably both were of some use in their way."
There had been no white population in Kansas in 1853, and no special
desire to create one. But the political struggle had advertised
the territory on a large scale, while the whole West was under the
influence of the agricultural boom that was extending settlement into
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found
that about 8500 had come in since the erection of the territory. The
rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles and the stories of
Lawrence and Potawatomi, instead of frightening settlers away, drew
them there in increasing thousands. Some few came from the South, but
the northern majority was overwhelming before the panic of 1857 laid
its heavy hand upon expansion. There was a white population of 106,390
in 1860.
The westward movement, under its normal influences, had extended the
range of prosperous agricultural settlement into the Northwest in this
past decade. It had coöperated in the extension into that part of the
old desert now known as Kansas. But chiefly politics, and secondly the
call of the West, is the order of causes which must explain the first
westward advance of the agricultural frontier since 1820. Even in 1860
the population of Kansas was almost exclusively within a three days'
journey of the Missouri bend.
CHAPTER IX
"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"[2]
[2] This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The
Territory of Colorado" which was published in _The
American Historical Review_ in October, 1906.
The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of
the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land
beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without any semblance of
organization or law. Indeed within the area whites had been forbidden
to enter, since here was the final abode of the Indians. But with the
Kansas-Nebraska act all this was changed. In five years a series of
amorphous territories had been provided for by law.
Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct divisions.
From the Canadian border to the fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended.
Kansas lay between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the old Indian
Country, now much reduced by partition, embraced the rest. The whole
plains country, east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial
projects. Indian Territory was without the government which its name
implied, but popular parlance regarded it as the others and refused to
see any difference among them.
Beyond the mountain wall which formed the western boundary of Kansas
and Nebraska lay four other territories equally without particular
reason for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in 1846, had been
divided in 1853 b
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