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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
The exploration, settlement, exploitation, and conflicts of the "American Old West" form a unique tapestry of events, which has been celebrated by Americans and foreigners alike—in art, music, dance, novels, magazines, short stories, poetry, theater, video games, movies, radio, television, song, and oral tradition. Many historians of the American West have written about the mythic West; the west of western literature, art and of people's shared memories. But Frederic Paxson's book takes us through the era when the American frontier was undergoing a massive transformation and when the decades old struggles of the Native Americans were finally beginning to make a dent in the old white American history... Frederic Logan Paxson was a Pulitzer Prize winning American historian and an authority on the American frontier.
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THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
Table of Contents
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.
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 Osage1 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.
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.
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.
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.
