Читать книгу The Last American Frontier - Frederic L. Paxson - Страница 8

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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.