Читать книгу The Last American Frontier - Frederic L. Paxson - Страница 7

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.