The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Last American Frontier, by Frederic L. (Frederic Logan) Paxson

STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
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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]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 manœuvre. 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.

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 by a line starting at the mouth of the Columbia and running east to the Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its northern side. The Utah territory which figured in the compromise of 1850, and which Mormon migration had made necessary, extended between California and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42° to New Mexico at 37°. New Mexico, also of the compromise year, reached from Texas to California, south of 37°, and possessed at its northeast corner a panhandle which carried it north to 38° in order to leave in it certain old Mexican settlements.

These divisions of the West embraced in 1854 the whole of the country between California and the states. As yet their boundaries were arbitrary and temporary, but they presaged movements of population which during the next quarter century should break them up still further and provide real colonies in place of the desert and the Indian Country. Congress had no formative part in the work. Population broke down barriers and showed the way, while laws followed and legalized what had been done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains no prophecy of the four states which were shortly to appear.

The West in 1854

Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.

For several decades the area of Kansas territory, and the southern part of Nebraska, had been well known as the range of the plains Indians,—Pawnee and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche and Apache. Through this range the caravans had gone. Here had been constant military expeditions as well. It was a common summer's campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort Leavenworth to the mountains by either the Arkansas or Platte route, to skirt the eastern slopes along the southern fork of the Platte, and return home by the other trail. Those military demonstrations, which were believed to be needed to impress the tribes, had made this march a regular performance. Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner and Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous others in between. A well-known trail had been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on the north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte at Cherry Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and on to Bent's Fort and the New Mexican towns. Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end. Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling over slavery, but they had scarcely scratched the soil for one-fourth of the length of the territory.

The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme west of Kansas, lay between the great trails, so that it was off the course of the chief migrations, and none visited it for its own sake. The deviating trails, which commenced at the Missouri bend, were some 250 miles apart at the one hundred and third meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose the hills around Pike's Peak, which rumor came in three years more to tip with gold.

The discovery of gold in California prepared the public for similar finds in other parts of the West. With many of the emigrants prospecting had become a habit that sent small bands into the mountain valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories of success in various regions arose repeatedly during the fifties and are so reasonable that it is not possible to determine with certainty the first finds in many localities. Any mountain stream in the whole system might be expected to contain some gold, but deposits large enough to justify a boom were slow in coming.

In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to Omaha from the mountains, confirmed the rumors of a new discovery that had been persistent for several months. The previous summer had seen organized attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region the deposits whose existence had been believed in, more or less, since 1850. Parties from the gold fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton are known to have been in the field and to have started various mushroom settlements. El Paso, near the present site of Colorado Springs, appeared, as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the South Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry Creek,—Montana, Auraria, Highland, and St. Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by trifling finds, remained to occupy their flimsy cabins or to jump the claims of the absentees. In the sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold the finders and to start a small migration thither in the autumn. In the early winter the groups on Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the name of Denver City.

The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri Valley at the strategic moment when the newness of Kansas had worn off, and the depression of 1857 had brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier. The adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to move, had been reënforced by individuals down on their luck and reduced to any sort of extremity. The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration to the new diggings which started in the fall of 1858 and assumed great volume in the spring of 1859.