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-The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Last American Frontier, by Frederic L.

-(Frederic Logan) Paxson

-

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

-

-

-

-

-

-Title: The Last American Frontier

-

-

-Author: Frederic L. (Frederic Logan) Paxson

-

-

-

-Release Date: May 19, 2014  [eBook #45699]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

-

-

-***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER***

-

-

-E-text prepared by Melissa McDaniel, Charlie Howard, and the Online

-Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images

-generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

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-

-Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this

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-      Images of the original pages are available through

-      Internet Archive. See

-      https://archive.org/details/fronlastamerican00paxsrich

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-

-

-

-THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

-

-Stories from American History

-

-

-      *      *      *      *      *      *

-

-[Illustration]

-

-  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

-  NEW YORK ˇ BOSTON ˇ CHICAGO

-  ATLANTA ˇ SAN FRANCISCO

-

-  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

-  LONDON ˇ BOMBAY ˇ CALCUTTA

-  MELBOURNE

-

-  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

-  TORONTO

-

-      *      *      *      *      *      *

-

-

-[Illustration]

-

-

-THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

-

-by

-

-FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON

-

-Junior Professor of American History in the University of Michigan

-

-Illustrated

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-New York

-The Macmillan Company

-1910

-

-All rights reserved

-

-Copyright, 1910,

-By the Macmillan Company.

-

-Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.

-

-Norwood Press

-J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.

-Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

-

-

-

-

-PREFACE

-

-

-I have told here the story of the last frontier within the United

-States, trying at once to preserve the picturesque atmosphere which

-has given to the "Far West" a definite and well-understood meaning,

-and to indicate those forces which have shaped the history of the

-country beyond the Mississippi. In doing it I have had to rely largely

-upon my own investigations among sources little used and relatively

-inaccessible. The exact citations of authority, with which I might have

-crowded my pages, would have been out of place in a book not primarily

-intended for the use of scholars. But I hope, before many years, to

-exploit in a larger and more elaborate form the mass of detailed

-information upon which this sketch is based.

-

-My greatest debts are to the owners of the originals from which the

-illustrations for this book have been made; to Claude H. Van Tyne, who

-has repeatedly aided me with his friendly criticism; and to my wife,

-whose careful readings have saved me from many blunders in my text.

-

-              FREDERIC L. PAXSON.

-

-ANN ARBOR, August 7, 1909.

-

-

-

-

-CONTENTS

-

-

-  CHAPTER I

-                                                              PAGE

-  THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT                                          1

-

-

-  CHAPTER II

-

-  THE INDIAN FRONTIER                                           14

-

-

-  CHAPTER III

-

-  IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST                                    33

-

-

-  CHAPTER IV

-

-  THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL                                            53

-

-

-  CHAPTER V

-

-  THE OREGON TRAIL                                              70

-

-

-  CHAPTER VI

-

-  OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS                                     86

-

-

-  CHAPTER VII

-

-  CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS                              104

-

-

-  CHAPTER VIII

-

-  KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER                               119

-

-

-  CHAPTER IX

-

-  "PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST!"                                       138

-

-

-  CHAPTER X

-

-  FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA                                      156

-

-

-  CHAPTER XI

-

-  THE OVERLAND MAIL                                            174

-

-

-  CHAPTER XII

-

-  THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER                                      192

-

-

-  CHAPTER XIII

-

-  THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD                                   211

-

-

-  CHAPTER XIV

-

-  THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR                                  225

-

-

-  CHAPTER XV

-

-  THE CHEYENNE WAR                                             243

-

-

-  CHAPTER XVI

-

-  THE SIOUX WAR                                                264

-

-

-  CHAPTER XVII

-

-  THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY                        284

-

-

-  CHAPTER XVIII

-

-  BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID                                     304

-

-

-  CHAPTER XIX

-

-  THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS                                    324

-

-

-  CHAPTER XX

-

-  THE NEW INDIAN POLICY                                        340

-

-

-  CHAPTER XXI

-

-  THE LAST STAND: CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL                358

-

-

-  CHAPTER XXII

-

-  LETTING IN THE POPULATION                                    372

-

-

-  CHAPTER XXIII

-

-  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                                         387

-

-

-

-

-LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

-

-

-  THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER                              _Frontispiece_

-

-                                                              PAGE

-  MAP: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841      22

-

-  CHIEF KEOKUK                                        _facing_  30

-

-  IOWA SOD PLOW. (From a Cut belonging to the Historical

-  Department of Iowa.)                                          46

-

-  MAP: OVERLAND TRAILS                                          57

-

-  FORT LARAMIE, 1842                                  _facing_  78

-

-  MAP: THE WEST IN 1849                                        120

-

-  MAP: THE WEST IN 1854                                        140

-

-  "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"                          _facing_  144

-

-  THE MINING CAMP                                        "     158

-

-  FORT SNELLING                                          "     204

-

-  RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH                          "     274

-

-  MAP: THE WEST IN 1863                                        300

-

-  POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN            _facing_  360

-

-  MAP: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884                             380

-

-

-

-

-THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER I

-

-THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

-

-

-The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which

-the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which

-courage and foresight have gradually transformed from desert waste to

-virile commonwealth. It is the story of one long struggle, fought over

-different lands and by different generations, yet ever repeating the

-conditions and episodes of the last period in the next. The winning of

-the first frontier established in America its first white settlements.

-Later struggles added the frontiers of the Alleghanies and the Ohio,

-of the Mississippi and the Missouri. The winning of the last frontier

-completed the conquest of the continent.

-

-The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West.

-For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas

-of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to

-migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness

-stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.

-Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails

-and clearing in the valleys. The advance line of the farmsteads was

-never far behind it. And out of this shifting frontier between man and

-nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American

-governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved

-them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has

-always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled

-the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic

-development and social organization, have in most instances originated

-near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier

-interest.

-

-The controlling influence of the frontier in shaping American problems

-has been possible because of the construction of civilized governments

-in a new area, unhampered by institutions of the past or conservative

-prejudices of the present. Each commonwealth has built from the

-foundation. An institution, to exist, has had to justify itself again

-and again. No force of tradition has kept the outlawed fact alive. The

-settled lands behind have in each generation been forced to remodel

-their older selves upon the newer growths beyond.

-

-Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the

-frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with

-the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have

-counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive

-courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings

-or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a

-picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements,

-but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad

-man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both

-have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and

-initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted

-an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their

-strength in numbers.

-

-The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor

-in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the

-earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century,

-when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous

-in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose

-characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New

-England were not too early for its shaping.

-

-The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier,

-separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness

-in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the

-successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations

-and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended.

-The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at

-once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and

-translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments

-of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious

-and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a

-melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a

-generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made

-a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which

-by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the

-middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking

-distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always,

-determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line

-of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating

-link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along

-its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The

-extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the

-contour of the seaboard along which it lay.

-

-Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic

-rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems

-in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the

-neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the

-settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on

-the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the

-various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river

-mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into

-the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.

-

-For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are

-navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge

-upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the

-foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a

-line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once

-the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second

-frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was

-reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.

-

-Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began.

-English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in

-growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the

-needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English

-in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of

-Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly

-to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the

-similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier.

-Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached,

-the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism

-plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.

-

-The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an

-end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing,

-up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they

-approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind,

-the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the

-combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley

-routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run

-parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge

-among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every

-reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the

-pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and

-meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause

-against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where

-the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the

-Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have

-common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in

-which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with

-talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was

-already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union

-than had been known before.

-

-The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700.

-By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing

-down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping

-backward to north and south. The French war of 1756-1763 saw the

-apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the

-Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and

-Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river

-valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and

-population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both

-sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested

-the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian

-strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was

-the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by

-all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the

-three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.

-

-The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started

-down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed

-by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the

-boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed

-it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi

-itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The

-new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations

-which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties

-felt the frontier pressure from the start.

-

-Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states

-appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its

-advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony

-Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge

-to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio

-entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet

-the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to

-till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern

-communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation;

-but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines

-were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or

-interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes,

-through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as

-state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war

-with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.

-

-The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad

-investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military

-reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was

-signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern

-population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt

-too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result

-of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was

-the western accompaniment.

-

-The westward movement has been continuous in America since the

-beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have

-never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession

-of pioneers has marched up the slopes of the Appalachians, across

-the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the

-Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream

-has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed

-the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever

-before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years

-following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in

-the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.

-

-Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement

-down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its

-junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with

-states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north

-and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more

-apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended

-the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including

-New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north.

-The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as

-yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than

-to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the

-convenience of the natural route.

-

-For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit

-of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio

-facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred

-and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to

-afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the

-Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and

-it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend

-an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas

-all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The

-emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed

-by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission

-of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend

-of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease.

-Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was

-simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out

-to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge

-began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of

-population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up.

-The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the

-northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and

-Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the

-apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in

-1821.

-

-There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri

-than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers

-were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major

-of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a

-tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty,

-steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew

-longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.

-

-Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from

-the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American

-desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their

-maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara

-or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded

-upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the slopes approach

-the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who

-traversed the country in 1819-1820. Long reported that it could never

-support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of

-the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc."

-A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber,

-the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point

-the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are

-annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no

-farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many

-years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from

-Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy

-desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the

-states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the

-western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had

-reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.

-

-By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward

-march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the

-Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn.

-Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached

-nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the

-nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert

-and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which

-had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War,

-even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier

-scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of

-life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired

-an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its

-doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,

-threatened to become a constant quantity.

-

-From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for

-the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard

-continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are

-filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains

-in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear

-the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian

-tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility

-of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once.

-A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of

-the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the

-continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and

-intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the

-control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out

-the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian

-policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period,

-the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating

-the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is

-larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such,

-before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American

-history has been closed.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER II

-

-THE INDIAN FRONTIER

-

-

-A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly

-relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the

-continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its

-advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands,

-concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating

-their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed

-had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly

-enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements

-and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every

-twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never

-more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it

-until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt

-that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual

-members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable

-as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the

-part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and

-contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the

-danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not

-responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries,

-real or imaginary,--and too often they were real,--made him the most

-dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier.

-The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and

-endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached

-a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but

-never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had

-been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.

-

-The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have

-ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful

-of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade

-among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land,

-possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase,

-could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a

-higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against

-the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against

-self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian

-must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with

-progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever

-have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for

-him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss

-of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that

-invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national

-honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed

-maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older

-ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all

-these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government

-has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to

-administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade,

-punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct

-not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.

-

-The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its

-responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In

-theory the disposition of the government was generally benevolent, but

-the scheme was badly conceived, while human frailty among officers of

-the law and citizens as well rendered execution short of such ideal as

-there was.

-

-For thirty years the government under the Constitution had no Indian

-policy. In these years it acquired the habit of dealing with the tribes

-as independent--"domestic dependent nations," Justice Marshall later

-called them--by means of formal treaties. Europe thought of chiefs as

-kings and tribes as nations. The practice of making treaties was based

-on this delusion. After a century of practice it was finally learned

-that nomadic savages have no idea of sovereign government or legal

-obligation, and that the assumption of the existence of such knowledge

-can lead only to misconception and disappointment.

-

-As the frontier moved down the Ohio, individual wars were fought and

-individual treaties were made as occasion offered. At times the tribes

-yielded readily to white occupation; occasionally they struggled

-bitterly to save their lands; but the result was always the same. The

-right bank of the river, long known as the Indian Shore, was contested

-in a series of wars lasting nearly until 1800, and became available for

-white colonization only after John Jay had, through his treaty of 1794,

-removed the British encouragement to the Indians, and General Wayne had

-administered to them a decisive defeat. Isolated attacks were frequent,

-but Tecumseh's war of 1811 was the next serious conflict, while, after

-General Harrison brought this war to an end at Tippecanoe, there was

-comparative peace along the northwest frontier until the time of Black

-Hawk and his uprising of 1832.

-

-The left bank of the river was opened with less formal resistance,

-admitting Kentucky and Tennessee before the Indian Shore was a safe

-habitation for whites. South of Tennessee lay the great southern

-confederacies, somewhat out of the line of early western progress, and

-hence not plunged into struggles until the War of 1812 was over. But

-as Wayne and Harrison had opened the Northwest, so Jackson cleared

-the way for white advance into Alabama and Mississippi. By 1821 new

-states touched the Mississippi River along its whole course between New

-Orleans and the lead mines of upper Illinois.

-

-In the advance of the frontier to the bend of the Missouri some of the

-tribes were pushed back, while others were passed and swallowed up by

-the invading population. Experience showed that the two races could

-not well live in adjacent lands. The conditions which made for Indian

-welfare could not be kept up in the neighborhood of white settlements,

-for the more lawless of the whites were ever ready, through illicit

-trade, deceit, and worse, to provoke the most dangerous excesses of

-the savage. The Indian was demoralized, the white became steadily more

-intolerant.

-

-Although the ingenious Jefferson had anticipated him in the idea,

-the first positive policy which looked toward giving to the Indian

-a permanent home and the sort of guardianship which he needed until

-he could become reconciled to civilized life was the suggestion of

-President Monroe. At the end of his presidency, Georgia was angrily

-demanding the removal of the Cherokee from her limits, and was ready to

-violate law and the Constitution in her desire to accomplish her end.

-Monroe was prepared to meet the demand. He submitted to Congress, on

-January 27, 1825, a report from Calhoun, then Secretary of War, upon

-the numbers of the tribes, the area of their lands, and the area of

-available destinations for them. He recommended that as rapidly as

-agreements could be made with them they be removed to country lying

-westward and northwestward,--to the further limits of the Louisiana

-Purchase, which lay beyond the line of the western frontier.

-

-Already, when this message was sent to Congress, individual steps

-had been taken in the direction which it pointed out. A few tribes

-had agreed to cross the Mississippi, and had been allotted lands in

-Missouri and Arkansas. But Missouri, just admitted, and Arkansas, now

-opening up, were no more hospitable to Indian wards than Georgia and

-Ohio had been. The Indian frontier must be at some point still farther

-west, towards the vast plains overrun by the Osage[1] and Kansa tribes,

-the Pawnee and the Sioux. There had been few dealings with the Indians

-beyond the Mississippi before Monroe advanced his policy. Lieutenant

-Pike had visited the head of the Mississippi in 1805 and had treated

-with the Sioux for a reserve at St. Paul. Subsequent agreements farther

-south brought the Osage tribes within the treaty arrangements. The year

-1825 saw the notable treaties which prepared the way for peace among

-the western tribes, and the reception by these tribes of the eastern

-nations.

-

-    [1] My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed

-        upon by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American

-        Ethnology, and printed in C. J. Kappler, Indian Affairs,

-        Laws and Treaties, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452,

-        Serial 4253, p. 1021.

-

-Five weeks after the special message Congress authorized a negotiation

-with the Kansa and Osage nations. These tribes roamed over a vast

-country extending from the Platte River to the Red, and west as far as

-the lower slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Their limits had never been

-definitely stated, although the Osage had already surrendered claim to

-lands fronting on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Missouri

-and the Arkansas. Not only was it now desirable to limit them more

-closely in order to make room for Indian immigrants, but these tribes

-had already begun to worry traders going overland to the Southwest. As

-soon as the frontier reached the bend of the Missouri, the profits of

-the Santa Fé trade had begun to tempt caravans up the Arkansas valley

-and across the plains. To preserve peace along the Santa Fé trail was

-now as important as to acquire grounds. Governor Clark negotiated the

-treaties at St. Louis. On June 2, 1825, he persuaded the Osage chiefs

-to surrender all their lands except a strip fifty miles wide, beginning

-at White Hair's village on the Neosho, and running indefinitely west.

-The Kaw or Kansa tribe was a day later in its agreement, and reserved a

-thirty-mile strip running west along the Kansas River. The two treaties

-at once secured rights of transit and pledges of peace for traders to

-Santa Fé, and gave the United States title to ample lands west of the

-frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.

-

-The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien the first step

-towards peace and condensation along the northern frontier. The Erie

-Canal, not yet opened, had not begun to drain the population of the

-East into the Northwest, and Indians were in peaceful possession of

-the lake shores nearly to Fort Wayne. West of Lake Michigan were

-constant tribal wars. The Potawatomi, Menominee, and Chippewa, first,

-then Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes, and finally the various bands of

-Sioux around the Mississippi and upper Missouri, enjoyed still their

-traditional hostility and the chase. Governor Clark again, and Lewis

-Cass, met the tribes at the old trading post on the Mississippi to

-persuade them to bury the tomahawk among themselves. The treaty, signed

-August 19, 1825, defined the boundaries of the different nations by

-lines of which the most important was between the Sioux and Sauk and

-Foxes, which was later to be known as the Neutral Line, across northern

-Iowa. The basis of this treaty of Prairie du Chien was temporary at

-best. Before it was much more than ratified the white influx began,

-Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake Michigan blossomed out into Chicago,

-and squatters penetrating to Rock Island in the Mississippi had

-provoked the war of 1832, in which Black Hawk made the last stand of

-the Indians in the old Northwest. In the thirties the policy of removal

-completed the opening of Illinois and Wisconsin to the whites.

-

-[Illustration: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841

-

-Showing the solid line of reservation lands extending from the Red

-River to Green Bay, and the agricultural frontier of more than six

-inhabitants per square mile.]

-

-The policy of removal and colonization urged by Monroe and Calhoun was

-supported by Congress and succeeding Presidents, and carried out during

-the next fifteen years. It required two transactions, the acquisition

-by the United States of western titles, and the persuasion of eastern

-tribes to accept the new lands thus available. It was based upon an

-assumption that the frontier had reached its final resting place.

-Beyond Missouri, which had been admitted in 1821, lay a narrow strip of

-good lands, merging soon into the American desert. Few sane Americans

-thought of converting this land into states as had been the process

-farther east. At the bend of the Missouri the frontier had arrived;

-there it was to stay, and along the lines of its receding flanks the

-Indians could be settled with pledges of permanent security and growth.

-Here they could never again impede the western movement in its creation

-of new communities and states. Here it would be possible, in the words

-of Lewis Cass, to "leave their fate to the common God of the white man

-and the Indian."

-

-The five years following the treaty of Prairie du Chien were filled

-with active negotiation and migration in the lands beyond the Missouri.

-First came the Shawnee to what was promised as a final residence.

-From Pennsylvania, into Ohio, and on into Missouri, this tribe had

-already been pushed by the advancing frontier. Now its ever shrinking

-lands were cut down to a strip with a twenty-five-mile frontage on the

-Missouri line and an extension west for one hundred and twenty-five

-miles along the south bank of the Kansas River and the south line of

-the Kaw reserve. Its old neighbors, the Delawares, became its new

-neighbors in 1829, accepting the north bank of the Kansas, with a

-Missouri River frontage as far north as the new Fort Leavenworth, and a

-ten-mile outlet to the buffalo country, along the northern line of the

-Kaw reserve. Later the Kickapoo and other minor tribes were colonized

-yet farther to the north. The chase was still to be the chief reliance

-of the Indian population. Unlimited supplies of game along the plains

-were to supply his larder, with only occasional aid from presents of

-other food supplies. In the long run agriculture was to be encouraged.

-Farmers and blacksmiths and teachers were to be provided in various

-ways, but until the longed-for civilization should arrive, the red man

-must hunt to live. The new Indian frontier was thus started by the

-colonization of the Shawnee and Delawares just beyond the bend of the

-Missouri on the old possessions of the Kaw.

-

-The northern flank of the Indian frontier, as it came to be

-established, ran along the line of the frontier of white settlements,

-from the bend of the Missouri, northeasterly towards the upper lakes.

-Before the final line of the reservations could be determined the

-Erie Canal had begun to shape the Northwest. Its stream of population

-was filling the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and

-working up into Michigan and Wisconsin. Black Hawk's War marked the

-last struggle for the fertile plains of upper Illinois, and made

-possible an Indian line which should leave most of Wisconsin and part

-of Iowa open to the whites.

-

-Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie

-du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same

-place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reënforced the

-guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the

-Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto

-and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the

-Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became

-a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the

-Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had

-threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the

-frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along

-the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond

-the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had

-clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might

-have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois,

-and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the

-pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike

-promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought

-over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the

-frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger

-threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from

-eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a

-campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a

-new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their

-resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the

-Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to

-the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west

-bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and

-Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this

-time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the

-Neutral Strip.

-

-The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work

-of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the

-line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west

-line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black

-Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter

-acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the

-Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established

-a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others

-forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more

-correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the

-tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these

-three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago

-to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to

-cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and

-east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors

-to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River,

-gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live

-on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of

-the Wisconsin River.

-

-The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies,

-they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the

-old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made

-further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion

-of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future

-eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the

-Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St.

-Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country.

-With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had

-been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white

-occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to

-Green Bay.

-

-While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established

-beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was

-extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the

-Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine

-River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of

-the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians

-roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo,

-in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into

-Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the

-country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way

-for the colonizing policy.

-

-The southern part of the Indian Country was early set aside as the new

-home of the eastern confederacies lying near the Gulf of Mexico. The

-Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had in the twenties

-begun to feel the pressure of the southern states. Jackson's campaigns

-had weakened them even before the cession of Florida to the United

-States removed their place of refuge. Georgia was demanding their

-removal when Monroe announced his policy.

-

-A new home for the Choctaw was provided in the extreme Southwest in

-1830. Ten years before, this nation had been given a home in Arkansas

-territory, but now, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, it received a new eastern

-limit in a line drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas due south to the

-Red River. Arkansas had originally reached from the Mississippi to the

-hundredth meridian, but it was, after this Choctaw cession, cut down

-to the new Choctaw line, which remains its boundary to-day. From Fort

-Smith the new boundary was run northerly to the southwest corner of

-Missouri.

-

-The Creeks and Cherokee promised in 1833 to go into the Indian Country,

-west of Arkansas and north of the Choctaw. The Creeks became the

-neighbors of the Choctaw, separated from them by the Canadian River,

-while the Cherokee adjoined the Creeks on the north and east. With

-small exceptions the whole of the present state of Oklahoma was thus

-assigned to these three nations. The migrations from their old homes

-came deliberately in the thirties and forties. The Chickasaw in 1837

-purchased from the Choctaw the right to occupy the western end of their

-strip between the Red and Canadian. The Seminole had acquired similar

-rights among the Creeks, but were so reluctant to keep the pledge to

-emigrate that their removal taxed the ability of the United States army

-for several years.

-

-Between the southern portion of the Indian Country and the Missouri

-bend minor tribes were colonized in profusion. The Quapaw and United

-Seneca and Shawnee nations were put into the triangle between the

-Neosho and Missouri. The Cherokee received an extra grant in the

-"Cherokee Neutral Strip," between the Osage line of 1825 and the

-Missouri line. Next to the north was made a reserve for the New York

-Indians, which they refused to occupy. The new Miami home came next,

-along the Missouri line; while north of this were little reserves for

-individual bands of Ottawa and Chippewa, for the Piankashaw and Wea,

-the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the last of which adjoined the Shawnee line

-of 1825 upon the south.

-

-The Indian frontier, determined upon in 1825, had by 1840 been carried

-into fact, and existed unbroken from the Red River and Texas to the

-Lakes. The exodus from the old homes to the new had in many instances

-been nearly completed. The tribes were more easily persuaded to promise

-than to act, and the wrench was often hard enough to produce sullenness

-or even war when the moment of departure arrived. A few isolated bands

-had not even agreed to go. But the figures of the migrations, published

-from year to year during the thirties, show that all of the more

-important nations east of the new frontier had ceded their lands, and

-that by 1840 the migration was substantially over.

-

-[Illustration: CHIEF KEOKUK

-

-From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C. F.

-Davis. Reproduced by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.]

-

-President Monroe had urged as an essential part of the removal policy

-that when the Indians had been transferred and colonized they should be

-carefully educated into civilization, and guarded from contamination by

-the whites. Congress, in various laws, tried to do these things. The

-policy of removal, which had been only administrative at the start,

-was confirmed by law in 1830. A formal Bureau of Indian Affairs was

-created in 1832, under the supervision of a commissioner. In 1834 was

-passed the Indian Intercourse Act, which remained the fundamental law

-for half a century.

-

-The various treaties of migration had contained the pledge that never

-again should the Indians be removed without their consent, that

-whites should be excluded from the Indian Country, and that their

-lands should never be included within the limits of any organized

-territory or state. To these guarantees the Intercourse Act attempted

-to give force. The Indian Country was divided into superintendencies,

-agencies, and sub-agencies, into which white entry, without license,

-was prohibited by law. As the tribes were colonized, agents and schools

-and blacksmiths were furnished to them in what was a real attempt to

-fulfil the terms of the pledge. The tribes had gone beyond the limits

-of probable extension of the United States, and there they were to

-settle down and stay. By 1835 it was possible for President Jackson to

-announce to Congress that the plan approached its consummation: "All

-preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians" had failed;

-but now "no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the

-United States to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the

-scattered remnants of this race which are left within our borders....

-The pledge of the United States," he continued, "has been given by

-Congress that the country destined for the residence of this people

-shall be forever 'secured and guaranteed to them.' ... No political

-communities can be formed in that extensive region.... A barrier has

-thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of

-our citizens." And now, he concluded, "they ought to be left to the

-progress of events."

-

-The policy of the United States towards the wards was generally

-benevolent. Here, it was sincere, whether wise or not. As it turned

-out, however, the new Indian frontier had to contend with movements

-of population, resistless and unforeseen. No Joshua, no Canute, could

-hold it back. The result was inevitable. The Indian, wrote one of the

-frontiersmen in a later day, speaking in the language of the West, "is

-a savage, noxious animal, and his actions are those of a ferocious

-beast of prey, unsoftened by any touch of pity or mercy. For them he

-is to be blamed exactly as the wolf or tiger is blamed." But by 1840

-an Indian frontier had been erected, coterminous with the agricultural

-frontier, and beyond what was believed to be the limit of expansion.

-The American desert and the Indian frontier, beyond the bend of the

-Missouri, were forever to be the western boundary of the United States.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER III

-

-IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST

-

-

-In the end of the thirties the "right wing" of the frontier, as a

-colonel of dragoons described it, extended northeasterly from the bend

-of the Missouri to Green Bay. It was an irregular line beyond which

-lay the Indian tribes, and behind which was a population constantly

-becoming more restless and aggressive. That it should have been a

-permanent boundary is not conceivable; yet Congress professed to regard

-it as such, and had in 1836 ordered the survey and construction of

-a military road from the mouth of the St. Peter's to the Red River.

-The maintenance of the southern half of the frontier was perhaps

-practicable, since the tradition of the American desert was long to

-block migration beyond the limits of Missouri and Arkansas, but north

-and east of Fort Leavenworth were lands too alluring to be safe in the

-control of the new Indian Bureau. And already before the thirties were

-over the upper Mississippi country had become a factor in the westward

-movement.

-

-A few years after the English war the United States had erected a

-fort at the junction of the St. Peter's and the Mississippi, near the

-present city of St. Paul. In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike had treated

-with the Sioux tribes at this point, and by 1824 the new post had

-received the name Fort Snelling, which it was to retain until after the

-admission of Minnesota as a state. Pike and his followers had worked

-their way up the Mississippi from St. Louis or Prairie du Chien in

-skiffs or keelboats, and had found little of consequence in the way of

-white occupation save a few fur-trading posts and the lead mines of

-Du Buque. Until after the English war, indeed, and the admission of

-Illinois, there had been little interest in the country up the river;

-but during the early twenties the lead deposits around Du Buque's

-old claim became the centre of a business that soon made new treaty

-negotiations with the northern Indians necessary.

-

-On both sides of the Mississippi, between the mouths of the Wisconsin

-and the Rock, lie the extensive lead fields which attracted Du Buque

-in the days of the Spanish rule, and which now in the twenties induced

-an American immigration. The ease with which these diggings could

-be worked and the demand of a growing frontier population for lead,

-brought miners into the borderland of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa

-long before either of the last states had acquired name or boundary

-or the Indian possessors of the soil had been satisfied and removed.

-The nations of Winnebago, Sauk and Foxes, and Potawatomi were most

-interested in this new white invasion, while all were reluctant to

-yield the lands to the incoming pioneers. The Sauk and Foxes had given

-up their claim to nearly all the lead country in 1804; the Potawatomi

-ceded portions of it in 1829; and the Winnebago in the same year made

-agreements covering the mines within the present state of Wisconsin.

-

-Gradually in the later twenties the pioneer miners came in, one

-by one. From St. Louis they came up the great river, or from Lake

-Michigan they crossed the old portage of the Fox and Wisconsin. The

-southern reënforcements looked much to Fort Armstrong on Rock Island

-for protection. The northern, after they had left Fort Howard at Green

-Bay, were out of touch until they arrived near the old trading post at

-Prairie du Chien. War with the Winnebago in 1827 was followed in 1828

-by the erection of another United States fort,--at the portage, and

-known as Fort Winnebago. Thus the United States built forts to defend a

-colonization which it prohibited by law and treaty.

-

-The individual pioneers differed much in their morals and their

-cultural antecedents, but were uniform in their determination to enjoy

-the profits for which they had risked the dangers of the wilderness.

-Notable among them, and typical of their highest virtues, was Henry

-Dodge, later governor of Wisconsin, and representative and senator for

-his state in Congress, but now merely one of the first in the frontier

-movement. It is related of him that in 1806 he had been interested in

-the filibustering expedition of Aaron Burr, and had gone as far as

-New Madrid, to join the party, before he learned that it was called

-treason. He turned back in disgust. "On reaching St. Genevieve," his

-chronicler continues, "they found themselves indicted for treason by

-the grand jury then in session. Dodge surrendered himself, and gave

-bail for his appearance; but feeling outraged by the action of the

-grand jury he pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and whipt

-nine of the jurors; and would have whipt the rest, if they had not run

-away." With such men to deal with, it was always difficult to enforce

-unpopular laws upon the frontier. Dodge had no hesitation in settling

-upon his lead diggings in the mineral country and in defying the Indian

-agents, who did their best to persuade him to leave the forbidden

-country. On the west bank of the Mississippi federal authority was

-successful in holding off the miners, but the east bank was settled

-between Galena and Mineral Point before either the Indian title had

-been fully quieted, or the lands had been surveyed and opened to

-purchase by the United States.

-

-The Indian war of 1827, the erection of Fort Winnebago in 1828, the

-cession of their mineral lands by the Winnebago Indians in 1829, are

-the events most important in the development of the first settlements

-in the new Northwest. In 1829 and 1830 pioneers came up the Mississippi

-to the diggings in increasing numbers, while farmers began to cast

-covetous eyes upon the prairies lying between Lake Michigan and the

-Mississippi. These were the lands which the Sauk and Fox tribes had

-surrendered in 1804, but over which they still retained rights of

-occupation and the chase until Congress should sell them. The entry of

-every American farmer was a violation of good faith and law, and so

-the Indians regarded it. Their largest city and the graves of their

-ancestors were in the peninsula between the Rock and the Mississippi,

-and as the invaders seized the lands, their resentment passed beyond

-control. The Black Hawk War was the forlorn attempt to save the lands.

-When it ended in crushing defeat, the United States exercised its

-rights of conquest to compel a revision of the treaty limits.

-

-The great treaties of 1832 and 1833 not only removed all Indian

-obstruction from Illinois, but prepared the way for further settlement

-in both Wisconsin and Iowa. The Winnebago agreed to migrate to the

-Neutral Strip in Iowa, the Potawatomi accepted a reserve near the

-Missouri River, while the Black Hawk purchase from the offending Sauk

-and Foxes opened a strip some forty miles wide along the west bank of

-the Mississippi. These Indian movements were a part of the general

-concentrating policy made in the belief that a permanent Indian

-frontier could be established. After the Black Hawk War came the

-creation of the Indian Bureau, the ordering of the great western road,

-and the erection of a frontier police. Henry Dodge was one of the few

-individuals to emerge from the war with real glory. His reward came

-when Congress formed a regiment of dragoons for frontier police, and

-made him its colonel. In his regiment he operated up and down the long

-frontier for three years, making expeditions beyond the line to hold

-Pawnee conferences and meetings with the tribes of the great plains,

-and resigning his command only in time to be the first governor of the

-new territory of Wisconsin, in 1836. He knew how little dependence

-could be placed on the permanency of the right wing of the frontier.

-"Nor let gentlemen forget," he reminded his colleagues in Congress a

-few years later, "that we are to have continually the same course of

-settlements going on upon our border. They are perpetually advancing

-westward. They will reach, they will cross, the Rocky Mountains, and

-never stop till they have reached the shores of the Pacific. Distance

-is nothing to our people.... [They will] turn the whole region into the

-happy dwellings of a free and enlightened people."

-

-The Black Hawk War and its resulting treaties at once quieted the

-Indian title and gave ample advertisement to the new Northwest. As yet

-there had been no large migration to the West beyond Lake Michigan.

-The pioneers who had provoked the war had been few in number and far

-from their base upon the frontier. Mere access to the country had been

-difficult until after the opening of the Erie Canal, and even then

-steamships did not run regularly on Lake Michigan until after 1832.

-But notoriety now tempted an increasing wave of settlers. Congress woke

-up to the need of some territorial adjustment for the new country.

-

-Ever since Illinois had been admitted in 1818, Michigan had been the

-one remaining territory of the old Northwest, including the whole area

-north of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and extending from Lake Huron

-to the Mississippi River. Her huge size was admittedly temporary, but

-as no large centre of population existed outside of Detroit, it was

-convenient to simplify the federal jurisdiction in this fashion. The

-lead mines on the Mississippi produced a secondary centre of population

-in the late twenties and pointed to an early division of Michigan. But

-before this could be accomplished the Black Hawk purchase had carried

-the Mississippi centre of population to the right bank of the river.

-The American possessions on this bank, west of the river, had been cast

-adrift without political organization on the admission of Missouri in

-1821. Now the appearance of a vigorous population in an unorganized

-region compelled Congress to take some action, and thus, for temporary

-purposes, Michigan was enlarged in 1834. Her new boundary extended

-west to the Missouri River, between the state of Missouri and Canada.

-The new Northwest, which may be held to include Iowa, Wisconsin, and

-Minnesota, started its political history as a remote settlement in a

-vast territory of Michigan, with its seat of government at Detroit.

-Before it was cut off as the territory of Wisconsin in 1836 much had

-been done in the way of populating it.

-

-The boom of the thirties brought Arkansas and Michigan into the Union

-as states, and started the growth of the new Northwest. The industrial

-activity of the period was based on speculation in public lands and

-routes of transportation. America was transportation mad. New railways

-were building in the East and being projected West. Canals were

-turning the western portage paths into water highways. The speculative

-excitement touched the field of religion as well as economics,

-producing new sects by the dozen, and bringing schisms into the old.

-And population moving already in its inherent restlessness was made

-more active in migration by the hard times of the East in 1833 and 1834.

-

-The immigrants brought to the Black Hawk purchase and its vicinity,

-in the boom of the thirties, came chiefly by the river route. The

-lake route was just beginning to be used; not until the Civil War did

-the traffic of the upper Mississippi naturally and generally seek its

-outlet by Lake Michigan. The Mississippi now carried more than its

-share of the home seekers.

-

-Steamboats had been plying on western waters in increasing numbers

-since 1811. By 1823, one had gone as far north on the Mississippi as

-Fort Snelling, while by 1832 the Missouri had been ascended to Fort

-Union. In the thirties an extensive packet service gathered its

-passengers and freight at Pittsburg and other points on the Ohio,

-carrying them by a devious voyage of 1400 miles to Keokuk, near the

-southeast corner of the new Black Hawk lands. Wagons and cattle,

-children and furniture, crowded the decks of the boats. The aristocrats

-of emigration rode in the cabins provided for them, but the great

-majority of home seekers lived on deck and braved the elements upon the

-voyage. Explosions, groundings, and collisions enlivened the reckless

-river traffic. But in 1836 Governor Dodge found more than 22,000

-inhabitants in his new territory of Wisconsin, most of whom had reached

-the promised land by way of the river.

-

-For those whom the long river journey did not please, or who lived

-inland in Ohio or Indiana, the national road was a help. In 1825 the

-continuation of the Cumberland Road through Ohio had been begun. By

-1836 enough of it was done to direct the overland course of migration

-through Indianapolis towards central Illinois. The Conestoga wagon,

-which had already done its share in crossing the Alleghanies, now

-carried a second generation to the Mississippi. At Dubuque and Buffalo

-and Burlington ferries were established before 1836 to take the

-immigrants across the Mississippi into the new West.

-

-By the terms of its treaty, the Black Hawk purchase was to be vacated

-by the Indians in the summer of 1833. Before that year closed, its

-settlement had begun, despite the fact that the government surveys had

-not yet been made. Here, as elsewhere, the frontier farmer paid little

-regard to the legal basis of his life. He settled upon unoccupied lands

-as he needed them, trusting to the public opinion of the future to

-secure his title.

-

-The legislature of Michigan watched the migration of 1833 and 1834, and

-in the latter year created the two counties of Dubuque and Demoine,

-beyond the Mississippi, embracing these settlements. At the old claim

-a town of miners appeared by magic, able shortly to boast "that the

-first white man hung in Iowa in a Christian-like manner was Patrick

-O'Conner, at Dubuque, in June, 1834." Dubuque was a mining camp,

-differing from the other villages in possessing a larger proportion

-of the lawless element. Generally, however, this Iowa frontier was

-peaceful in comparison with other frontiers. Life and property were

-safe, and except for its dealings with the Indians and the United

-States government, in which frontiers have rarely recognized a law,

-the community was law-abiding. It stands in some contrast with another

-frontier building at the same time up the valley of the Arkansas. "Fent

-Noland of Batesville," wrote a contemporary of one of the heroes of

-this frontier, "is in every way one of the most remarkable men of the

-West; for such is the versatility of his genius that he seems equally

-adapted to every species of effort, intellectual or physical. With

-a like unerring aim he shoots a bullet or a _bon mot_; and wields

-the pen or the Bowie knife with the same thought, swift rapidity

-of motion, and energetic fury of manner. Sunday he will write an

-eloquent dissertation on religion; Monday he rawhides a rogue; Tuesday

-he composes a sonnet, set in silver stars and breathing the perfume

-of roses to some fair maid's eyebrows; Wednesday he fights a duel;

-Thursday he does up brown the personal character of Senators Sevier

-and Ashley; Friday he goes to the ball dressed in the most finical

-superfluity of fashion and shines the soul of wit and the sun of merry

-badinage among all the gay gentlemen; and to close the triumphs of the

-week, on Saturday night he is off thirty miles to a country dance in

-the Ozark Mountains, where they trip it on the light fantastic toe in

-the famous jig of the double-shuffle around a roaring log heap fire in

-the woods all night long, while between the dances Fent Noland sings

-some beautiful wild song, as 'Lucy Neal' or 'Juliana Johnson.' Thus

-Fent is a myriad-minded Proteus of contradictory characters, many-hued

-as the chameleon fed on the dews and suckled at the breast of the

-rainbow." Much of this luxuriant imagery was lacking farther north.

-

-The first phase of this development of the new Northwest was ended

-in 1837, when the general panic brought confusion to speculation

-throughout the United States. For four years the sanguine hopes of the

-frontier had led to large purchases of public lands, to banking schemes

-of wildest extravagance, and to railroad promotion without reason or

-demand. The specie circular of 1836 so deranged the currency of the

-whole United States that the effort to distribute the surplus in 1837

-was fatal to the speculative boom. The new communities suffered for

-their hopeful attempts. When the panic broke, the line of agricultural

-settlement had been pushed considerably beyond the northern and western

-limits of Illinois. The new line ran near to the Fox and Wisconsin

-portage route and the west line of the Black Hawk purchase. Milwaukee

-and Southport had been founded on the lake shore, hopeful of a great

-commerce that might rival the possessions of Chicago. Madison and its

-vicinity had been developed. The lead country in Wisconsin had grown

-in population. Across the river, Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington

-gave evidence of a growing community in the country still farther west.

-Nearly the whole area intended for white occupation by the Indian

-policy had been settled, so that any further extension must be at the

-expense of the Indians' guaranteed lands.

-

-On the eve of the panic, which depopulated many of the villages of the

-new strip, Michigan had been admitted. Her possessions west of Lake

-Michigan had been reorganized as a new territory of Wisconsin, with

-a capital temporarily at Belmont, where Henry Dodge, first governor,

-took possession in the fall of 1836. A territorial census showed that

-Wisconsin had a population of 22,214 in 1836, divided nearly equally by

-the Mississippi. Most of the population was on the banks of the great

-river, near the lead mines and the Black Hawk purchase, while only a

-fourth could be found near the new cities along the lake. The outlying

-settlements were already pressing against the Indian neighbors, so that

-the new governor soon was obliged to conduct negotiations for further

-cessions. The Chippewa, Menominee, and Sioux all came into council

-within two years, the Sioux agreeing to retire west of the Mississippi,

-while the others receded far into the north, leaving most of the

-present Wisconsin open to development. These treaties completed the

-line of the Indian frontier as it was established in the thirties.

-

-The Mississippi divided the population of Wisconsin nearly equally in

-1836, but subsequent years witnessed greater growth upon her western

-bank. Never in the westward movement had more attractive farms been

-made available than those on the right bank now reached by the river

-steamers and the ferries from northern Illinois. Two years after the

-erection of Wisconsin the western towns received their independent

-establishment, when in 1838 Iowa Territory was organized by Congress,

-including everything between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and

-north of the state of Missouri. Burlington, a village of log houses

-with perhaps five hundred inhabitants, became the seat of government

-of the new territory, while Wisconsin retired east of the river to a

-new capital at Madison. At Burlington a first legislature met in the

-autumn, to choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it could for

-a community still suffering from the results of the panic.

-

-The only Iowa lands open to lawful settlement were those of the Black

-Hawk purchase, many of which were themselves not surveyed and on the

-market. But the pioneers paid little heed to this. Leaving titles to

-the future, they cleared their farms, broke the sod, and built their

-houses.

-

-[Illustration: IOWA SOD PLOW]

-

-The heavy sod of the Iowa prairies was beyond the strength of the

-individual settler. In the years of first development the professional

-sod breaker was on hand, a most important member of his community, with

-his great plough, and large teams of from six to twelve oxen, making

-the ground ready for the first crop. In the frontier mind the land

-belonged to him who broke it, regardless of mere title. The quarrel

-between the squatter and the speculator was perennial. Congress in its

-laws sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest bidder,--a

-scheme through which the sturdy impecunious farmer saw his clearing

-in danger of being bought over his modest bid by an undeserving

-speculator. Accordingly the history of Iowa and Wisconsin is full of

-the claims associations by which the squatters endeavored to protect

-their rights and succeeded well. By voluntary association they agreed

-upon their claims and bounds. Transfers and sales were recorded on

-their books. When at last the advertised day came for the formal sale

-of the township by the federal land officer the population attended the

-auction in a body, while their chosen delegate bid off the whole area

-for them at the minimum price, and without competition. At times it

-happened that the speculator or the casual purchaser tried to bid, but

-the squatters present with their cudgels and air of anticipation were

-usually able to prevent what they believed to be unfair interference

-with their rights. The claims associations were entirely illegal; yet

-they reveal, as few American institutions do, the orderly tendencies

-of an American community even when its organization is in defiance of

-existing law.

-

-The development of the new territories of Iowa and Wisconsin in the

-decade after their erection carried both far towards statehood.

-Burlington, the earliest capital of Iowa, was in 1840 "the largest,

-wealthiest, most business-doing and most fashionable city, on or in

-the neighborhood of the Upper Mississippi.... We have three or four

-churches," said one of its papers, "a theatre, and a dancing school in

-full blast." As early as 1843 the Black Hawk purchase was overrun. The

-Sauk and Foxes had ceded provisionally all their Iowa lands and the

-Potawatomi were in danger. "Although it is but ten years to-day," said

-their agent, speaking of their Chicago treaty of 1833, "the tide of

-emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until the whites are now

-crowded closely along the southern side of these lands, and will soon

-swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the very worst traits of the

-white man's character, and destroy, by fraud and illicit intercourse,

-the remnant of a powerful people, now exposed to their influence." Iowa

-was admitted to the Union in 1846, after bickering over her northern

-boundary; Wisconsin followed in 1848; the remnant of both, now known as

-Minnesota, was erected as a territory in its own right in the next year.

-

-Fort Snelling was nearly twenty years old before it came to be more

-than a distant military outpost. Until the treaties of 1837 it was

-in the midst of the Sioux with no white neighbors save the agents of

-the fur companies, a few refugees from the Red River country, and a

-group of more or less disreputable hangers-on. An enlargement of the

-military reserve in 1837 led to the eviction by the troops of its

-near-by squatters, with the result that one of these took up his grog

-shop, left the peninsula between the Mississippi and St. Peter's, and

-erected the first permanent settlement across the former, where St.

-Paul now stands. Iowa had desired a northern boundary which should

-touch the St. Peter's River, but when she was admitted without it and

-Wisconsin followed with the St. Croix as her western limit, Minnesota

-was temporarily without a government.

-

-The Minnesota territorial act of 1849 preceded the active colonization

-of the country around St. Paul. Mendota, Fort Snelling, St. Anthony's,

-and Stillwater all came into active being, while the most enterprising

-settlers began to push up the Minnesota River, as the St. Peter's now

-came to be called. As usual the Indians were in the way. As usual the

-claims associations were resorted to. And finally, as usual the Indians

-yielded. At Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, in the autumn of 1851, the

-magnates of the young territory witnessed great treaties by which the

-Sioux, surrendering their portion of the permanent Indian frontier,

-gave up most of their vast hunting grounds to accept valley reserves

-along the Minnesota. And still more rapidly population came in after

-the cession.

-

-The new Northwest was settled after the great day of the keelboat on

-western waters. Iowa and the lead country had been reached by the

-steamboats of the Mississippi. The Milwaukee district was reached by

-the steamboats from the lakes. The upper Mississippi frontier was

-now even more thoroughly dependent on the river navigation than its

-neighbors had been, while its first period was over before any railroad

-played an immediate part in its development.

-

-The boom period between the panics of 1837 and 1857 thus added another

-concentric band along the northwest border, disregarding the Indian

-frontier and introducing a large population where the prophet of the

-early thirties had declared that civilization could never go. The

-Potawatomi of Iowa had yielded in 1846, the Sioux in 1851. The future

-of the other tribes in their so-called permanent homes was in grave

-question by the middle of the decade. The new frontier by 1857 touched

-the tip of Lake Superior, included St. Paul and the lower Minnesota

-valley, passed around Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, and reached the

-Missouri near Sioux City. In a few more years the right wing of the

-frontier would run due north from the bend of the Missouri.

-

-The hopeful life of the fifties surpassed that of the thirties in

-its speculative zeal. The home seeker had to struggle against the

-occasional Indian and the unscrupulous land agent as well as his own

-too sanguine disposition. Fictitious town sites had to be distinguished

-from the real. Fraudulent dealers more than once sold imaginary lots

-and farms from beautifully lithographed maps to eastern investors.

-Occasionally whole colonies of migrants would appear on the steamboat

-wharves bound for non-existent towns. And when the settler had escaped

-fraud, and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever or

-cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.

-

-Iowa had advanced her northwest frontier up the Des Moines River, past

-the old frontier fort, until in 1856 a couple of trading houses and a

-few families had reached the vicinity of Spirit Lake. Here, in March,

-1857, one of the settlers quarrelled with a wandering Indian over a

-dog. The Indian belonged to Inkpaduta's band of Sioux, one not included

-in the treaty of 1851. Forty-seven dead settlers slaughtered by the

-band were found a few days later by a visitor to the village. A hard

-winter campaign by regulars from Fort Ridgely resulted in the rescue

-of some of the captives, but the indignant demand of the frontier for

-retaliation was never granted.

-

-In spite of fraud and danger the population grew. For the first time

-the railroad played a material part in its advance. The great eastern

-trunk lines had crossed the Alleghanies into the Ohio valley. Chicago

-had received connection with the East in 1852. The Mississippi had been

-reached by 1854. In the spring of 1856 all Iowa celebrated the opening

-of a railway bridge at Davenport.

-

-The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own

-ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837.

-Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development

-that chartered railways and even built them between points that

-scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild

-with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money

-finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about

-to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the

-railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer,

-who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town

-lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating

-population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak

-gold.

-

-But a new Northwest had come into life in spite of the vicissitudes of

-1837 and 1857. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa had in 1860 ten times

-the population of Illinois at the opening of the Black Hawk War. More

-than a million and a half of pioneers had settled within these three

-new states, building their towns and churches and schools, pushing back

-the right flank of the Indian frontier, and reiterating their perennial

-demand that the Indian must go. This was the first departure from the

-policy laid down by Monroe and carried out by Adams and Jackson. Before

-this movement had ended, that policy had been attacked from another

-side, and was once more shown to be impracticable. The Indian had too

-little strength to compel adherence to the contract, and hence suffered

-from this encroachment by the new Northwest. His final destruction

-came from the overland traffic, which already by 1857 had destroyed

-the fiction of the American desert, and introduced into his domain

-thousands of pioneers lured by the call of the West and the lust for

-gold.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER IV

-

-THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL

-

-

-England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior

-provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio

-Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred miles above Vera

-Cruz. Before the English seaboard had received its earliest colonists,

-the hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters of the Rio

-Grande, where her outposts had been planted around the little adobe

-village of Santa Fé. For more than two hundred years this life had gone

-on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened by contact with

-the world or admixture of foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility

-characteristic of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions and

-restrictions of the law, communication with these villages of Chihuahua

-and New Mexico had been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills

-by the pack-trains of the king.

-

-It was no stately procession that wound up into the hills yearly to

-supply the Mexican frontier. From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through

-Mexico City, and thence north along the highlands through San Luis

-Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and thence to Chihuahua, and up the

-valley of the Rio Grande to Santa Fé climbed the long pack-trains and

-the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the provinces their whole supply

-from outside. The civilization of the provincial life might fairly be

-measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of this transportation

-route. Nearly two thousand miles, as the road meandered, of river,

-mountain gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the mule-drivers

-of the caravans. What their pack-animals could not carry, could not go.

-What had large bulk in proportion to its value must stay behind. The

-ancient commerce of the Orient, carried on camels across the Arabian

-desert, could afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and

-precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree, the world's

-contribution to these remote towns was confined largely to textiles,

-drugs, and trinkets of adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population

-of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for more than two

-centuries without an effort to improve upon them. Their resignation

-gives some credit to the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which

-restricted their importation to the defined route and the single port.

-It is due as much, however, to the hard geographic fact which made Vera

-Cruz and Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors, until

-in the nineteenth century another civilization came within hailing

-distance, at its frontier in the bend of the Missouri.

-

-The Spanish provincials were at once willing to endure the rigors of

-the commercial system and to smuggle when they had a chance. So long as

-it was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan than to develop

-other sources of supply the caravans flourished without competition.

-It was not until after the expulsion of Spain and the independence

-of Mexico that a rival supply became important, but there are enough

-isolated events before this time to show what had to occur just so soon

-as the United States frontier came within range.

-

-The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish captivity did

-something to reveal the existence of a possible market in Santa Fé.

-He had been engaged in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana

-purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the Rio Grande while

-searching for the head waters of the Red River. Here he was arrested,

-in 1807, by Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.

-After a short detention he was escorted to the limits of the United

-States, where he was released. He carried home the news of high prices

-and profitable markets existing among the Mexicans.

-

-In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify the statements of

-Pike. Rumor had come to the States of an insurrection in upper Mexico,

-which might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the revolt had

-been suppressed before the dozen or so of reckless Americans who

-crossed the plains had arrived at their destination. The Spanish

-authorities, restored to power and renewed vigor, received them with

-open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua, some for ten years,

-while the traffic which they had hoped to inaugurate remained still in

-the future. Their release came only with the independence of Mexico,

-which quickly broke down the barrier against importation and the

-foreigner.

-

-The Santa Fé trade commenced when the news of the Mexican revolution

-reached the border. Late in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell,

-chancing a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took a

-small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in what proved to be a

-profitable speculation. He returned to the States in time to lead

-out a large party in the following summer. So long as the United

-States frontier lay east of the Missouri River there could have been

-no western traffic, but now that settlement had reached the Indian

-Country, and river steamers had made easy freighting from Pittsburg

-to Franklin or Independence, Santa Fé was nearer to the United States

-seaboard markets than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the American

-desert and the Indian frontier made by this earliest of the overland

-trails.

-

-[Illustration: OVERLAND TRAILS

-

-The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California

-appeared about 1845; the Santa Fé trail had been used since 1821. The

-overland mail of 1858 followed the southern route.]

-

-The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the Santa Fé trade, but it

-saw the first wagons taken across the plains. The freight capacity

-of the mule-train placed a narrow limit upon the profits and extent

-of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled over the rough trails was

-a matter of considerable doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper

-attempted it in this year. The experiment was so successful that within

-two years the pack-train was generally abandoned for the wagons by the

-Santa Fé traders. The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton

-goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics, calicoes, domestic,

-shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom shirtings, and cotton hose," were in

-high demand. There were also "a few woollen goods, consisting of super

-blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths, and shawls, crapes, bombazettes,

-some light articles of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses."

-Backward bound their freights were lighter. Many of the wagons, indeed,

-were sold as part of the cargo. The returning merchants brought some

-beaver skins and mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and

-silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.

-

-Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings, could not escape the

-public eye. The patron of the West came early to its aid. Senator

-Thomas Hart Benton had taken his seat from the new state of Missouri

-just in time to notice and report upon the traffic. No public man was

-more confirmed in his friendship for the frontier trade than Senator

-Benton. The fur companies found him always on hand to get them favors

-or to "turn aside the whip of calamity." Because of his influence his

-son-in-law, Frémont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness. Now,

-in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement. A large policy in the

-building of public roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.

-In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided $30,000 to mark

-and build a wagon road from Missouri to the United States border on the

-Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road reported some annoyance

-from the Indians, whose hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around

-their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and Kansa treaties of 1825

-these tribes agreed to let the traders traverse the country in peace.

-

-Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the Santa Fé trade.

-The long journey from the fringe of settlement to the Spanish towns

-eight hundred miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican

-soil, crossing the international boundary on the Arkansas near the

-hundredth meridian. The Indians of the route knew no national lines,

-and found a convenient refuge against pursuers from either nation in

-crossing the border. There was no military protection to the frontier

-at the American end of the trail until in 1827 the war department

-erected a new post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it Fort

-Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were stationed to guard the

-border and protect the traders. The post was due as much to the new

-Indian concentration policy as to the Santa Fé trade. Its significance

-was double. Yet no one seems to have foreseen that the development of

-the trade through the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment

-of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.

-

-From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of regulars convoyed the

-caravans to the Southwest. In 1829 four companies of the sixth

-infantry, under Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan at

-the usual place of organization, Council Grove, a few days west of

-the Missouri line, and marched with it to the confines of the United

-States. Along the march there had been some worry from the Indians.

-After the caravan and escort had separated at the Arkansas the former,

-going on alone into Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard

-before it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose promptly to the

-occasion. He immediately crossed the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the

-consequences of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the

-Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican authorities furnished an

-escort of troops which marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who

-had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all summer, met them. He

-entertained the Mexican officers with drill while they responded with

-a parade, chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report declares,

-and then he brought the traders back to the States by the beginning of

-November.

-

-There was some criticism in the United States of this costly use of

-troops to protect a private trade. Hezekiah Niles, who was always

-pleading for high protection to manufactures and receiving less than

-he wanted, complained that the use of four companies during a whole

-season was extravagant protection for a trade whose annual profits

-were not over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely repeated after

-1829. Fort Leavenworth and the troops gave moral rather than direct

-support. Colonel Dodge, with his dragoons,--for infantry were soon

-seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,--made long expeditions

-and demonstrations in the thirties, reaching even to the slopes of

-the Rockies. And the Santa Fé caravans continued until the forties in

-relative safety.

-

-Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an event of great

-consequence in the history of the Santa Fé trail. Josiah Gregg,

-impelled by ill health to seek a change of climate, made his first trip

-to Santa Fé in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg would call for no

-more comment than would any one who crossed the plains eight times in a

-single decade. But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was watching

-and thinking during his entire career, examining into the details of

-Mexican life and history and tabulating the figures of the traffic.

-When he finally retired from the plains life which he had come to love

-so well, he produced, in two small volumes, the great classic of the

-trade: "The Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé

-Trader." It is still possible to check up details and add small bits

-of fact to supplement the history and description of this commerce

-given by Gregg, but his book remains, and is likely to remain, the

-fullest and best source of information. Gregg had power of scientific

-observation and historical imagination, which, added to unusual

-literary ability, produced a masterpiece.

-

-The Santa Fé trade, begun in 1822, continued with moderate growth until

-1843. This was its period of pioneer development. After the Mexican War

-the commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its greatest volume

-in the sixties, just before the construction of the Pacific railways.

-But in its later years it was a matter of greater routine and less

-general interest than in those years of commencement during which it

-was educating the United States to a more complete knowledge of the

-southern portion of the American desert. Gregg gives a table in which

-he shows the approximate value of the trade for its first twenty-two

-years. To-day it seems strange that so trifling a commerce should have

-been national in its character and influence. In only one year, 1843,

-does he find that the eastern value of the goods sent to Santa Fé was

-above a quarter of a million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,

-but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter million mark. In

-nine years it was under $100,000. The men involved were a mere handful.

-At the start nearly every one of the seventy men in the caravan was

-himself a proprietor. The total number increased more rapidly than the

-number of independent owners. Three hundred and fifty were the most

-employed in any one year. The twenty-six wagons of 1824 became two

-hundred and thirty in 1843, but only four times in the interval were

-there so many as a hundred.

-

-Yet the Santa Fé trade was national in its importance. Its romance

-contained a constant appeal to a public that was reading the Indian

-tales of James Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship

-and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country with quaint people

-and strange habitations. The American desert, not much more than a

-chartless sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must have

-confirmation of the truth that frontier causes have produced results

-far beyond their normal measure, such confirmation may be found here.

-

-The traders to Santa Fé commonly travelled together in a single

-caravan for safety. In the earlier years they started overland from

-some Missouri town--Franklin most often--to a rendezvous at Council

-Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth and an increasing navigation

-of the Missouri River made possible a starting-point further west than

-Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the Missouri in 1828

-its place was taken by the new settlement of Independence, further

-up the river and only twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at

-Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties.

-For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few

-weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the

-frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and

-oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening

-drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the

-Southwest,--all these gave to Independence its name and place. From

-Independence to Council Grove, some one hundred and fifty miles, across

-the border, the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove they

-halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a general company for

-self-defence. Here in ordinary years the assembled traders elected

-a captain whose responsibility was complete, and whose authority

-was as great as he could make it by his own force. Under him were

-lieutenants, and under the command of these the whole company was

-organized in guards and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company

-was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal vigilance was the

-price of safety.

-

-The unit of the caravan was the wagon,--the same Pittsburg or Conestoga

-wagon that moved frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to

-travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve mules or oxen,

-and carried from three to five thousand pounds of cargo. Over the

-wagon were large arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn water

-and protect the contents. The careful freighter used two thicknesses

-of sheetings, while the canny one slipped in between them a pair of

-blankets, which might thus increase his comfort outward bound, and

-be in an inconspicuous place to elude the vigilance of the customs

-officials at Santa Fé. Arms, mounts, and general equipment were

-innumerable in variation, but the prairie schooner, as its white canopy

-soon named it, survived through its own superiority.

-

-At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey now became one

-across a treeless prairie, with water all too rare, and habitations

-entirely lacking. The first stage of the trail crossed the country,

-nearly west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two hundred

-and seventy miles from Independence. Up the Arkansas it ran on, past

-Chouteau's Island, to Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur

-traders had established a post. Water was most scarce. Whether the

-caravan crossed the river at the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's

-Fort to follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader and on

-stock. His oxen often reached Santa Fé with scarcely enough strength

-left to stand alone. But with reasonable success and skilful guidance

-the caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties and at last

-enter Santa Fé, seven hundred and eighty miles away, in from six to

-seven weeks from Independence.

-

-When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri frontier was familiar

-with all of the long trail to Santa Fé. Even in the East there had come

-to be some real interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert

-and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the

-war was the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth,

-with orders to march overland against Mexico and Upper California.

-

-Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command of the invading army, which

-he recruited largely from the frontier and into which he incorporated a

-battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the summer of 1846, near

-Council Bluffs, on their way to the Rocky Mountains and the country

-beyond. Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken him in

-1845 all the way to the mountains and back in the interest of policing

-the trails. By the end of June he was ready to begin the march towards

-Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was to be a common

-rendezvous. To this point the army marched in separate columns, far

-enough apart to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder

-from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was little more than a

-pleasure jaunt. The trail was well known, and Indians, never likely

-to run heedlessly into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's Fort

-the advance assumed more of a military aspect, for the enemy's country

-had been entered and resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the

-mountain passes north of Santa Fé. But the resistance came to naught,

-while the army, footsore and hot, marched easily into Santa Fé on

-August 18, 1846. In the palace of the governor the conquering officers

-were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the provinces would

-permit. "We were too thirsty to judge of its merits," wrote one of

-them of the native wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything

-liquid and cool was palatable." With little more than the formality of

-taking possession New Mexico thus fell into the hands of the United

-States, while the war of conquest advanced further to the West. In the

-end of September Kearny started out from Santa Fé for California, where

-he arrived early in the following January.

-

-The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary of the United

-States to the Gila and the Pacific, broadening the area of the desert

-within the United States and raising new problems of long-distance

-government in connection with the populations of New Mexico and

-California. The Santa Fé trail, with its continuance west of the Rio

-Grande, became the attenuated bond between the East and the West. From

-the Missouri frontier to California the way was through the desert and

-the Indian Country, with regular settlements in only one region along

-the route. The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit trade

-disappeared with the conquest, so that the traffic with the Southwest

-and California boomed during the fifties.

-

-The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions which had never been

-dreamed of before the conquest. Kearny's baggage-trains started a new

-era in plains freighting. The armies had continuously to be supplied.

-Regular communication had to be maintained for the new Southwest.

-But the freighting was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the

-Santa Fé traders. It became a matter of business, running smoothly

-along familiar channels. It ceased to have to do with the extension

-of geographic knowledge and came to have significance chiefly in

-connection with the organization of overland commerce. Between the

-Mexican and Civil wars was its new period of life. Finally, in the

-seventies, it gradually receded into history as the tentacles of the

-continental railway system advanced into the desert.

-

-The Santa Fé trail was the first beaten path thrust in advance of the

-western frontier. Even to-day its course may be followed by the wheel

-ruts for much of the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa

-Fé. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind it at the start,

-not touching it again until the end was reached. For nearly fifty

-years after the trade began, this character of the desert remained

-substantially unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which had rushed

-west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped at the bend, and though the

-trail continued, settlement would not follow it. The Indian country

-and the American desert remained intact, while the Santa Fé trail, in

-advance of settlement, pointed the way of manifest destiny, as no one

-of the eastern trails had ever done. When the new states grew up on the

-Pacific, the desert became as an ocean traversed only by the prairie

-schooners in their beaten paths. Islands of settlement served but to

-accentuate the unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain West.

-

-The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the statesmen of the

-twenties as the limit of American advance. It might have continued thus

-had there really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of the trade

-to Santa Fé created a new interest and a connecting road. In nearly

-the same years the call of the fur trade led to the tracing of another

-path in the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and the fur trade

-had stirred up so much interest beyond the Rockies that before Kearny

-marched his army into Santa Fé another trail of importance equal to his

-had been run to Oregon.

-

-The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended upon the ability of

-the United States to keep whites out of the Indian Country. But with

-Oregon and Santa Fé beyond, this could never be. The trails had already

-shown the fallacy of the frontier policy before it had become a fact in

-1840.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER V

-

-THE OREGON TRAIL

-

-

-The Santa Fé trade had just been started upon its long career when

-trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the

-forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy

-crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper

-Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage

-through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon.

-As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the

-Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over

-the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for

-new states. The Santa Fé trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The

-Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.

-

-In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those

-nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of

-every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the

-surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded

-facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden,

-has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that

-carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they

-first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the

-period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of

-Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That

-they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite

-as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were

-generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence

-upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history

-is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the

-thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean

-at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat

-earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the

-fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct

-the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted,

-they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the

-century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the

-British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so

-confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up

-the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and

-allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.

-

-In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of

-the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading

-prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies.

-Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated

-the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a

-body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter

-year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable

-Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had

-become a household word through the combined reports of traders and

-missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the

-lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden

-might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an

-added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was

-approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when

-Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The

-thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis

-of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided

-an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the

-farthest West.

-

-A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government

-to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were

-in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the

-trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been

-ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task

-of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the

-father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the

-mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new

-son-in-law, John C. Frémont, a detail in command of an exploring party

-to the South Pass.

-

-The career of Frémont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great

-publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of

-this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from

-Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He

-shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte,

-and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in

-northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's

-he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the

-Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8,

-just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at

-Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially

-over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range,

-climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was

-back in St. Louis with his party.

-

-In the spring of 1843, Frémont started upon a second and more extended

-governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail

-along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence

-he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the

-Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon

-for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending

-part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while

-he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine

-Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before

-reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another

-detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked

-upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18,

-he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles

-of the Columbia.

-

-Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia

-and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with

-the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the

-trappers, had not yet received scientific record when Frémont started

-south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His

-march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under

-difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a

-stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento

-Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march

-carried him into southern California and around the sources of the

-Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of

-the country between the mountains and the Pacific.

-

-In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two

-expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of

-resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work

-turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems

-far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his

-earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English

-traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed

-over by Colonel Frémont was perfectly well known to the old trappers

-and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese

-pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man

-who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through

-these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the

-American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the _Platte

-(Missouri) Eagle_ in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser

-[_sic_] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific.

-Destiny has willed it."

-

-The year in which Frémont made his first expedition to the mountains

-was also the year of the first formal, conducted emigration to

-Oregon. Missionaries beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress

-the appointment of an American representative and magistrate for

-the country, with such effect that Dr. Elijah White, who had some

-acquaintance with Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the

-spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration of homeseekers

-that peopled Oregon during the next ten years. His emigration was not

-large, perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons; but it

-seems to have been larger than he expected, and large enough to raise

-doubt as to the practicability of taking so many persons across the

-plains at once. In the decade following, every May, when pasturage was

-fresh and green, saw pioneers gathering, with or without premeditation,

-at the bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence and its

-neighbor villages continued to be the posts of outfit. How many in

-the aggregate crossed the plains can never be determined, in spite of

-the efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record their names.

-The distinguishing feature of the emigration was its spontaneous

-individualistic character. Small parties, too late for the caravan,

-frequently set forth alone. Single families tried it often enough to

-have their wanderings recorded in the border papers. In the spring

-following the crossing of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds

-at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand in all is

-probably not too high. In 1844 the tide subsided a little, but in

-1845 it established a new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and

-in 1847 ran between four and five thousand. These were the highest

-figures, yet throughout the decade the current flowed unceasingly.

-

-The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years, may be taken as

-typical of the Oregon movement. Early in the year faces turned toward

-the Missouri rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and young, with

-wagons and cattle, household equipment, primitive sawmills, and all

-the impedimenta of civilization were to be found in the hopeful crowd.

-For some days after departure the unwieldy party, a thousand strong,

-with twice as many cattle and beasts of burden, held together under

-Burnett, their chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control soon

-split the company. In addition to the general fear that the number was

-dangerously high, the poorer emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some

-of the latter had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,

-and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian thieves during his

-long night watches he felt the injustice which compelled him to protect

-the property of another. Hence the party broke early in June. A "cow

-column" was formed of those who had many cattle and heavy belongings;

-the lighter body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting

-distance; and under two captains the procession moved on. The way was

-tedious rather than difficult, but habit soon developed in the trains

-a life that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the migrants of 1842

-had written, was a "great country for unmarried gals." Courtship and

-marriage began almost before the States were out of sight. Death and

-burial, crime and punishment, filled out the round of human experience,

-while Dr. Whitman was more than once called upon in his professional

-capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.

-

-[Illustration: FORT LARAMIE IN 1842

-

-From a sketch made to illustrate Frémont's report.]

-

-The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed in the

-United States. It started from the Missouri River anywhere between

-Independence and Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence was

-the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural frontier advanced

-through Iowa in the forties numerous new crossings and ferries were

-made further up the stream. From the various ferries the start began,

-as did the Santa Fé trade, sometime in May. By many roads the wagons

-moved westward towards the point from which the single trail extended

-to the mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte River reaches

-its most southerly point, these routes from the border were nearly

-as numerous as the caravans, but here began the single highway along

-the river valley, on its southern side. At this point, in the years

-immediately after the Mexican War, the United States founded a military

-post to protect the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W. Kearny,

-commander of the Army of the West. From Fort Kearney (custom soon

-changed the spelling of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie

-Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork. Fort Laramie

-itself was bought from the fur company and converted into a military

-post which became a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.

-Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the trail to South Pass,

-where, through a gap twenty miles in width, the main commerce between

-the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go. Beyond

-South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the next post of importance on

-the road. From Fort Hall to Fort Boisé the trail continued down the

-Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to meet the Columbia

-near Walla Walla.

-

-The journey to Oregon took about five months. Its deliberate,

-domesticated progress was as different as might be from the commercial

-rush to Santa Fé. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily get

-caught in the early mountain winter, but with a prompt start and a wise

-guide, or pilot, winter always found the homeseeker in his promised

-land. "This is the right manner to settle the Oregon question," wrote

-Niles, after he had counted over the emigrants of 1844.

-

-Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already

-there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional

-government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under

-the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable

-uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for

-future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed

-to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the

-British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early

-migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful

-also lest future American emigration might carry political control out

-of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance

-among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In

-May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon

-blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary

-association for government and adopted a code of laws.

-

-Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this

-newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White,

-"at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of

-Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of

-any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of

-Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events.

-"During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened,

-and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves

-during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost

-all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the

-measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts,

-securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse

-among the whites."

-

-A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension

-of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His

-journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,

-who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from

-abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called

-the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost,

-however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government

-settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws

-were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order

-prevailed.

-

-Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and

-annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners

-of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink

-was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier.

-"A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread,

-sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as

-corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present

-at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches,

-corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where

-two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent

-intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of

-the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of

-the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal

-right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to

-crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass

-meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of

-his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the

-distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock

-P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus

-well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were

-standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses.

-No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having

-resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset

-the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my

-measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the

-kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and

-every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and

-utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where

-our presence and report gave general joy."

-

-The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair

-degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional

-governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its

-courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was

-long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title

-to the country and could pass laws for it.

-

-The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly

-in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with

-deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with

-absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The

-stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the

-erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an

-intimate study of the Oregon trail.

-

-In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in

-practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the

-annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of

-slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern

-senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and

-Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive

-under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to

-cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern

-states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape

-with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could

-emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers,

-and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence,

-in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people,

-of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With

-a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was

-closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.

-

-Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish

-Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´.

-Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in

-British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of

-1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great

-Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should

-justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting

-countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim

-for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was

-entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness

-that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party

-was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with

-respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders

-of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the

-Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a

-westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with

-his British adversary quickly.

-

-Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's

-notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more

-pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of

-State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division

-instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the

-change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty

-which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49° from the

-Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater part

-of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to such

-legislation as Congress should prescribe.

-

-A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the

-establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All

-that the United States had secured in the division was given the

-popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,

-popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached

-American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country.

-The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined

-by wheel ruts and débris along the sides that even the blind could

-scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient

-for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way

-for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and

-morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were

-prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A

-second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American

-desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that

-was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VI

-

-OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS

-

-

-The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon is but a small

-portion of the whole history of the Oregon trail. The trail was

-not only the road to Oregon, but it was the chief road across the

-continent. Santa Fé dominated a southern route that was important in

-commerce and conquest, and that could be extended west to the Pacific.

-But the deep ravine of the Colorado River splits the United States into

-sections with little chance of intercourse below the fortieth parallel.

-To-day, in only two places south of Colorado do railroads bridge it;

-only one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The southern trail

-could not be compared in its traffic or significance with the great

-middle highway by South Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri

-River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to California and Great

-Salt Lake.

-

-Of the waves of influence that drew population along the trail, the

-Oregon fever came first; but while it was still raging, there came

-the Mormon trek that is without any parallel in American history.

-Throughout the lifetime of the trails the American desert extended

-almost unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to California and

-Oregon. The Mormon settlement in Utah became at once the most

-considerable colony within this area, and by its own fertility

-emphasized the barren nature of the rest.

-

-Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet, but it would be fair to

-ascribe the parentage of the sect to that emotional upheaval of the

-twenties and thirties which broke down barriers of caste and politics,

-ruptured many of the ordinary Christian churches, and produced new

-revelations and new prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely

-one of these, more astute perhaps than the others, having much of

-the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed had had before him, and able

-to direct and hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet might

-have been able to arouse. History teaches that it is easy to provoke

-religious enthusiasm, however improbable or fraudulent the guides or

-revelations may be; but that the founding of a church upon it is a task

-for greatest statesmanship.

-

-The discovery of the golden plates and the magic spectacles, and

-the building upon them of a militant church has little part in the

-conquest of the frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for

-the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other than as a joke,

-and its perpetrator as a successful charlatan. Mormon apologists and

-their enemies have gone over the details of its production without

-establishing much sure evidence on either side. The theological

-teaching of the church seems to put less stress upon it than its

-supposed miraculous origin would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain,

-with his light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome to

-read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of

-morals is unobjectionable--it is 'smouched' from the New Testament

-and no credit given." Converts came slowly to the new prophet at the

-start, for he was but one of many teachers crying in the wilderness,

-and those who had known him best in his youth were least ready to

-see in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring of 1830 it was

-possible to organize, in western New York, the body which Rigdon was

-later to christen the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

-By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where

-proselyting had proved to be successful in both religion and finance.

-

-Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new sect. Revelations came

-in upon the prophet rapidly, pointing out the details of organization

-and administration, the duty of missionary activity among the Indians

-and gentiles, and the future home further to the west. Scouts were sent

-to the Indian Country at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland

-the leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts who, by

-1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in hopeful numbers. The frontier of

-this decade was equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,

-banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates possessed the germ

-of leadership to take advantage of every chance. Until the panic

-of 1837 they flourished, apparently not always beyond reproach in

-financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had the right to throw

-the stone. Antagonism, already appearing against the church, was due

-partly to an essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors

-and partly to the whole-souled union between church and life which

-distinguished the Mormons from the other sects. Their political

-complexion was identical with their religion,--a combination which

-always has aroused resentment in America.

-

-For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract in Missouri, not far

-from Independence, close to the Indians whose conversion was a part of

-the Mormon duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa Fé were by-words

-along the Missouri, the Mormons were getting a precarious foothold near

-the commencement of the trails. The population around Independence was

-distinctly inhospitable, with the result that petty violence appeared,

-in which it is hard to place the blame. There was a calm assurance

-among the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit the earth.

-Their neighbors maintained that poultry and stock were unsafe in their

-vicinity because of this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges of

-well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all the bickerings the

-sources of information are partisan and cloudy with prejudice, so that

-it is easier to see the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit.

-From the south side of the Missouri around Independence the Saints

-were finally driven across the river by armed mobs; a transaction in

-which the Missourians spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the

-peace. North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached in a few

-miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell County, they settled down at

-last, to build their tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of

-1838 their corner-stone was laid.

-

-Far West remained their goal in belief longer than in fact. Before

-1838 ended they had been forced to agree to leave Missouri; yet they

-returned in secret to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and

-continued to dream of this as their future home. Up to the time of

-their expulsion from Missouri in 1838 they are not proved to have been

-guilty of any crime that could extenuate the gross intolerance which

-turned them out. As individuals they could live among Gentiles in

-peace. It seems to have been the collective soul of the church that

-was unbearable to the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had

-facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled it from Missouri,

-in a few more years drove them again on their migrations. The cohesion

-of the church in politics, economics, and religion explains the

-opposition which it cannot well excuse.

-

-In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old Fort Madison ferry

-which led into the half-breed country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered

-a village of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement

-from which the business genius of Smith now purchased it on easy

-terms. It was occupied in 1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a

-new tabernacle was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken young

-clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet had now developed

-into a successful man of affairs, with ambitions that reached even to

-the presidency at Washington. With a strong sect behind him, money at

-his disposal, and supernatural powers in which all faithful saints

-believed, Joseph could go far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen

-thousand by the end of 1840.

-

-Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely contested presidential

-election, at a time when the state feared to lose its population in

-an emigration to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to

-be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the Mormons insured

-for themselves a hearty welcome from both Democrats and Whigs. A

-complaisant legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of

-privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so that the ideal

-of the Mormons of a state within the state was fully realized. The

-town council was emancipated from state control, its courts were

-independent, and its militia was substantially at the beck of Smith.

-Proselyting and good management built up the town rapidly. To an

-importunate creditor Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but

-to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of milk and honey.

-Here it began to be noticed that desertions from the church were not

-uncommon; that conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks. It

-was noised about that the wealthy convert had the warmest reception,

-but was led on to let his religious passion work his impoverishment for

-the good of the cause.

-

-Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the church took the decisive

-step that carried Mormonism beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable,

-religious sects. Rumors of immorality circulated among the Gentile

-neighbors. It was bad enough, they thought, to have the Mormons chronic

-petty thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail among the

-leaders was more than could be endured by a community that did not

-count this form of iniquity among its own excesses. The Mormons were in

-general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen until they took

-to this. At the time, all immorality was denounced and denied by the

-prophet and his friends, but in later years the church made public a

-revelation concerning celestial or plural marriage, with the admission

-that Joseph Smith had received it in the summer of 1843. Never does

-Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent as its enemies have

-charged. But no church countenancing the practice could hope to be

-endured by an American community. The odium of practising it was

-increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It was only a matter of

-time until the Mormons should resume their march.

-

-The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated by the murder of

-Joseph Smith, and Hyrum his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the

-summer of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an attack upon the

-Saints similar to that in Missouri. Under promise of protection the

-Smiths had surrendered themselves. Their martyrdom at once disgraced

-the state in which it could be possible, and gave to Mormonism in a

-murdered prophet a mighty bond of union. The reins of government fell

-into hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young succeeded Joseph

-Smith.

-

-Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a formal way president

-of the church, but his authority was complete in fact after the death

-of Joseph. A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain knew him, and

-has left an estimate of him which must be close to truth. He was "a man

-of great ability. Apparently deficient in education and refinement,

-he was fair and honest in his dealings, and seemed extremely liberal

-in conversation upon religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so

-Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates, "as anything but a

-religious fanatic or even enthusiast; but he knew how to make use of

-the fanaticism of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly after

-the murder of Joseph it became clear that Nauvoo must be abandoned, and

-Brigham began to consider an exodus across the plains so familiar by

-hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky Mountains beyond the limits

-of the United States. Persecution, for the persecuted can never see

-two sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened eviction came in the

-autumn of 1845. In 1846 the last great trek began.

-

-The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at Nauvoo as early as

-February, 1846. By the hundred, in the spring of the year, the wagons

-of the persecuted sect were ferried across the river. Five hundred and

-thirty-nine teams within a single week in May is the report of one

-observer. Property which could be commuted into the outfit for the

-march was carefully preserved and used. The rest, the tidy houses, the

-simple furniture, the careful farms (for the backbone of the church was

-its well-to-do middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced sale

-to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full of real estate vultures

-hoping to thrive upon the Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more

-abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple within the year.

-

-Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as Brigham Young liked to

-call his headquarters, advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer

-allowed. To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railway follows

-the Mormon road for many miles, but in 1846 the western half of Iowa

-territory was Indian Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and

-Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over, but who were in

-possession at this time. Along the line of march camps were built by

-advance parties to be used in succession by the following thousands.

-The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri River, near Council

-Bluffs, where as yet no city stood, to plant a crop of grain, since

-manna could not be relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of the

-population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter quarters not far above

-the present site of Omaha, preserving the orderly life of the society,

-and enduring hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate by gaiety

-and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi country of Iowa, opposite

-their winter quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all the

-way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the Platte Mormon detachments

-were scattered along the roads. The destination was yet in doubt.

-Westward it surely was, but it is improbable that even Brigham knew

-just where.

-

-The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted and driven westward

-like themselves, kindly at first, but discontent came as the winter

-residence was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha, west of the

-Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit Mormon settlement, but

-east, in the abandoned Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain

-Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several years. A permanent

-residence here was not desired even by the Mormons themselves. Spring

-in 1847 found them preparing to resume the march.

-

-In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance of no less a person

-than Brigham Young started out the Platte trail in search of Zion.

-One hundred and forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred and

-seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they took along, if

-the figures of one of their historians may be accepted. Under strict

-military order, the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is one of

-the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no sooner selected their abode

-beyond the line of the United States in their flight from persecution

-than conquest from Mexico extended the United States beyond them to the

-Pacific. They themselves aided in this defeat of their plan, since from

-among them Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army of

-invasion.

-

-Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and beyond, the

-prospectors followed the well-beaten trail. Oregon homeseekers had been

-cutting it deep in the prairie sod for five years. West of South Pass

-they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on the 24th of July, 1847,

-Brigham gazed upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious

-premeditation, so far as is known, and against the advice of one of the

-most experienced of mountain guides, this valley by a later-day Dead

-Sea was chosen for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground

-was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were commenced at

-once, and within a month the town site was baptized the City of the

-Great Salt Lake.

-

-Behind the advance guard the main body remained in winter quarters,

-making ready for their difficult search for the promised land; moving

-at last in the late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere

-would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph relied but little

-upon supernatural aid in keeping his flock under control. Commonly he

-depended upon human wisdom and executive direction. But upon the eve

-of his own departure from winter quarters he had made public, for the

-direction of the main body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will

-of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their Journeyings to the

-West." Such revelations as this, had they been repeated, might well

-have created or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration of

-the leader. The order given was such as a wise source of inspiration

-might have formed after constant intercourse with emigrants and traders

-upon the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers of the way.

-

-"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

-Saints, and those who journey with them," read the revelation, "be

-organized into companies, with a covenant and a promise to keep all

-the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God. Let the companies

-be organized with captains of hundreds, and captains of fifties, and

-captains of tens, with a president and counsellor at their head, under

-direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be our covenant, that

-we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord.

-

-"Let each company provide itself with all the teams, wagons,

-provisions, and all other necessaries for the journey that they can.

-When the companies are organized, let them go with all their might,

-to prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company, with their

-captains and presidents, decide how many can go next spring; then

-choose out a sufficient number of able-bodied and expert men to take

-teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers to prepare for

-putting in the spring crops. Let each company bear an equal proportion,

-according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the

-widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone

-with the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not

-up into the ears of the Lord against his people.

-

-"Let each company prepare houses and fields for raising grain for those

-who are to remain behind this season; and this is the will of the Lord

-concerning this people.

-

-"Let every man use all his influence and property to remove this people

-to the place where the Lord shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do

-this with a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed in

-your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields, and in your houses,

-and in your families...."

-

-The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk Horn River, whence the

-head of the procession moved late in June and early in July. In careful

-organization, with camps under guard and wagons always in corral at

-night, detachments moved on in quick succession. Kanesville and a

-large body remained behind for another year or longer, but before

-Brigham had laid out his city and started east the emigration of

-1847 was well upon its way. The foremost began to come into the city

-by September. By October the new city in the desert had nearly four

-thousand inhabitants. The march had been made with little suffering and

-slight mortality. No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the

-trail.

-

-The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to become an oasis in the

-American desert, supporting the only agricultural community existing

-therein during nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the Mormons at

-the start. In Illinois and Missouri they were used to wood and water;

-here they found neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to

-carry their water to their crops in a way in which their leader had

-more confidence than themselves. The urgency of Brigham in setting his

-first detachment to work on fields and crops was not unwise, since for

-two years there was a real question of food to keep the colony alive.

-Inexperience in irrigating agriculture and plagues of crickets kept

-down the early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its maintenance

-does still more credit to its skilful leadership. Its people, apart

-from foreign converts who came in later years, were of the stuff that

-had colonized the middle West and won a foothold in Oregon; but nowhere

-did an emigration so nearly create a land which it enjoyed as here.

-A paternal government dictated every effort, outlined the streets and

-farms, detailed parties to explore the vicinity and start new centres

-of life. Little was left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical

-success and a high state of general welfare rewarded the Saints for

-their implicit obedience to authority.

-

-Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became as common as that to

-Oregon in the years following 1847, but, except in the disastrous

-hand-cart episode of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial

-increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living in the West, who,

-walking all the way, with their own hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled

-carts from the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad

-management in handling proselytes the hand-cart catastrophe was chiefly

-due. From the beginning missionary activity had been pressed throughout

-the United States and even in Europe. In England and Scandinavia the

-lower classes took kindly to the promises, too often impracticable, it

-must be believed, of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon

-success abroad. The convert with property could pay his way to the

-Missouri border and join the ordinary annual procession. But the poor,

-whose wealth was not equal to the moderately costly emigration, were

-a problem until the emigration society determined to cut expenses by

-reducing equipment and substituting pushcarts and human power for the

-prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.

-

-In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants left Liverpool, at

-contract rates, for Iowa City, where the parties were to be organized

-and ample equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised

-to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found that slovenly

-management had not built enough of the carts. Delayed by the necessary

-construction of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the

-trail until late in the summer,--too late for a successful trip, as a

-few of their more cautious advisers had said. The earliest company got

-through to Salt Lake City in September with considerable success. It

-was hard and toilsome to push the carts; women and children suffered

-badly, but the task was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains

-broke down the last company. A friendly historian speaks of a loss of

-sixty-seven out of a party of four hundred and twenty. Throughout the

-United States the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling

-against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom, with

-clothing going and food quite gone, increased the conviction that the

-Mormon hierarchy was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.

-

-That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of the whole United States

-came to be believed as well. In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement

-three years old, Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending

-from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°, and the President

-had made Brigham Young its governor. The close association of the

-Mormon church and politics had prevented peaceful relations from

-existing between its people and the federal officers of the territory,

-while Washington prejudiced a situation already difficult by sending

-to Utah officers and judges, some of whom could not have commanded

-respect even where the sway of United States authority was complete.

-The vicious influence of politics in territorial appointments, which

-the territories always resented, was specially dangerous in the case

-of a territory already feeling itself persecuted for conscience' sake.

-Yet it was not impossible for a tactful and respectable federal officer

-to do business in Utah. For several years relations increased in bad

-temper, both sides appealing constantly to President and Congress,

-until it appeared, as was the fact, that the United States authority

-had become as nothing in Utah and with the church. Among the earliest

-of President Buchanan's acts was the preparation of an army which

-should reëstablish United States prestige among the Mormons. Large

-wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1857,

-with an army under Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and

-again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.

-

-The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base, and operating in a

-desert against plainsmen of remarkable skill, the army was helpless.

-At will, the Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply trains,

-confining their attacks to property rather than to armed forces. When

-the army reached Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his

-people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned. With difficulty

-could the army of invasion have lived through the winter without aid.

-In the spring of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons, being

-invulnerable, were forgiven. The army marched down the trail again.

-

-The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the

-heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence.

-What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd

-leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving

-population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as

-the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold

-followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then

-in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West.

-The Mormons would have fared much worse had their leader not located

-his stake of Zion near the point where the trail to the Southwest

-deviated from the Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay

-tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through his oasis on

-their way to California.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VII

-

-CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS

-

-

-On his second exploring trip, John C. Frémont had worked his way south

-over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found

-himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in 1844 a small group

-of Americans had already been established for several years. Mexican

-California was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient

-central government that the province had almost fallen away of its

-own weight. John A. Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was

-the magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed a liberal

-hospitality to the Pathfinder's party.

-

-In 1845, Frémont started on his third trip, this time entering

-California by a southern route and finding himself at Sutter's early in

-1846. In some respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance

-of a filibustering party from the start. When it crossed the Rockies,

-it began to trespass upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with

-whom the United States was yet at peace. Whether the explorer was

-actually instructed to detach California from Mexico, or whether he

-only imagined that such action would be approved at home, is likely

-never to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were already under

-orders in the event of war to seize California at once; and Polk was

-from the start ambitious to round out the American territory on the

-Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were at variance with their

-Mexican neighbors, who resented the steady influx of foreign blood.

-Between 1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased. And in June,

-1846, certain of them, professing to believe that they were to be

-attacked, seized the Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors

-of what they called their Bear Flag Republic. Frémont, near at hand,

-countenanced and supported their act, if he did not suggest it.

-

-The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly after the American

-population in California had begun its little revolution. Frémont was

-in his glory for a time as the responsible head of American power

-in the province. Naval commanders under their own orders coöperated

-along the coast so effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,

-learned that the conquest was substantially complete, soon after

-he left Santa Fé, and was able to send most of his own force back.

-California fell into American hands almost without a struggle, leaving

-the invaders in possession early in 1847. In January of that year the

-little village of Yerba Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the

-American occupants began the sale of lots along the water front and the

-construction of a great seaport.

-

-The relations of Oregon and California to the occupation of the West

-were much the same in 1847. Both had been coveted by the United States.

-Both had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come first because

-it was most easily reached by the great trail, and because it had

-no considerable body of foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It

-was, under the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field for

-colonization. But California had been the territory of Mexico and was

-occupied by a strange population. In the early forties there were from

-4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province, living the easy

-agricultural life of the Spanish colonist. The missions and the Indians

-had decayed during the past generation. The population was light

-hearted and generous. It quarrelled loudly, but had the Latin-American

-knack for bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized by long

-association with those trappers who had visited it since the twenties,

-and the settlers who had begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied

-foreign territory it had not invited American colonization as Oregon

-had done. Hence the Oregon movement had been going on three or four

-years before any considerable bodies of emigrants broke away from the

-trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out homes in California. If war had

-not come, American immigration into California would have progressed

-after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities would have

-allowed. As it was, the actual conquest removed the barrier, so that

-California migration in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon under

-the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement. The settlement of the

-Mormons at Salt Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at the

-head of the most perilous section of the California trail. Both Mormons

-and Californians profited by its traffic.

-

-With respect to California, the treaty which closed the Mexican War

-merely recognized an accomplished fact. By right of conquest California

-had changed hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid the penalty

-under that organic law of politics which forbids a nation to sit still

-when others are moving. In no conceivable way could the occupation

-of California have been prevented, and if the war over Texas had not

-come in 1846, a war over California must shortly have occurred. By the

-treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory which she

-had never been able to develop, and made way for the erection of the

-new America on the Pacific.

-

-Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in California was John

-A. Sutter, whose establishment on the Sacramento had been a centre

-of the new life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government he

-had erected his adobe buildings in the usual semi-fortified style

-that distinguished the isolated ranch. He was ready for trade, or

-agriculture, or war if need be, possessing within his own domain

-equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and supplies. As his

-ranch prospered, and as Americans increased in San Francisco and on the

-Sacramento, the prospects of Sutter steadily improved. In 1847 he made

-ready to reap an additional share of profit from the boom by building a

-sawmill on his estate. Among his men there had been for some months a

-shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W. Marshall, who had been chiefly

-carpenter while in Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall was

-sent out to find a place where timber and water-power should be near

-enough together to make a profitable mill site. He found his spot on

-the south bank of the American, which is a tributary of the Sacramento,

-some forty-five miles northeast of Sacramento.

-

-In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall came to their agreement

-by which the former was to furnish all supplies and the latter was to

-build the mill and operate it on shares. Construction was begun before

-the year ended, and was substantially completed in January, 1848.

-Experience showed the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too

-shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of turning the river

-into it by night to wash out earth and deepen the channel. Here it was

-that after one of these flushings, toward the end of January, he picked

-up glittering flakes which looked to him like gold.

-

-With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter, at the ranch.

-Together they tested the flakes in the apothecary's shop, proving the

-reality of the discovery before returning to the mill to prospect more

-fully.

-

-For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None could tell how large the

-field might be, but he saw clearly that once the news of the find got

-abroad, the whole population would rush madly to the diggings. His

-ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under way, all needed labor.

-But none would work for hire with free gold to be had for the taking.

-The discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks, but the news

-leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands in a few days, and reached

-even to San Francisco in the form of rumor before February was over. A

-new force had appeared to change the balance of the West and to excite

-the whole United States.

-

-The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two parts: the earlier

-including the population of California, near enough to hear of the find

-and get to the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the world, but

-could not start until the news had percolated by devious and tedious

-courses to centres of population thousands of miles away. The movement

-within California started in March and April.

-

-Further prospecting showed that over large areas around the American

-and Sacramento rivers free gold could be obtained by the simple

-processes of placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six or eight

-men was the most profitable tool, but a tin dishpan would do in an

-emergency. San Francisco was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and

-was not excited even by the first of April, but as nuggets and bags

-of dust appeared in quantity, the doubters turned to enthusiasts.

-Farms were abandoned, town houses were deserted, stores were closed,

-while every able-bodied man tramped off to the north to try his luck.

-The city which had flourished and expanded since the beginning of

-1847 became an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper is mute

-witness of the desertion, lapsing into silence for a month after May

-29th because its hands had disappeared. Farther south in California

-the news spread as spring advanced, turning by June nearly every face

-toward Sacramento.

-

-The public authorities took cognizance of the find during the summer.

-It was forced upon them by the wholesale desertions of troops who

-could not stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor Mason, who

-represented the sovereignty of the United States, visited the scenes in

-person and described the situation in their official letters home. The

-former got his news off to the Secretary of State by the 1st of June;

-the latter wrote on August 17; together they became the authoritative

-messengers that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk published

-some of their documents in his message to Congress in December, 1848.

-The rumors had reached the East as early as September, but now, writes

-Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."

-

-How to get to California became a great popular question in the winter

-of 1848-1849. The public mind was well prepared for long migrations

-through the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the journals

-for at least six years. Route, time, method, and cost were all to be

-considered. Migration, of a sort, began at once.

-

-Land and water offered a choice of ways to California. The former

-route was now closed for the winter and could not be used until spring

-should produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the impetuous and

-the well-to-do could start immediately by sea. All along the seaboard

-enterprising ship-owners announced sailings for California, by the Horn

-or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired hulks were called again into

-commission for the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many were

-willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery, Congress had arranged

-for a postal service, _via_ Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship

-Company had been organized to work the contracts. The _California_

-had left New York in the fall of 1848 to run on the western end of

-the route. It had sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news

-of gold on the South American coast, had begun to load up at Latin

-ports. When it reached Panama, a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many

-times beyond its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled over its

-accommodations. On February 28, 1849, it reached San Francisco at last,

-starting the influx from the world at large.

-

-The water route was too costly for most of the gold-seekers, who were

-forced to wait for spring, when the trails would be open. Various

-routes then guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most of all they

-crowded once more the great Platte trail. Oregon migration and the

-Mormon flight had familiarized this route to all the world. For its

-first stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any turnpike in

-our country."

-

-The usual crowd, which every May for several years had brought to

-the Missouri River crossings around Fort Leavenworth, was reënforced

-in 1849 and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle regiment of

-regulars was there, bound for Forts Laramie and Hall to erect new

-frontier posts. Lieutenant Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying

-party which was to prospect for a railway route to Salt Lake. By

-thousands and tens of thousands others came, tempted by the call of

-gold. This was the cheap and popular route. Every western farmer was

-ready to start, with his own wagons and his own stock. The townsman

-could easily buy the simple equipment of the plains. The poor could

-work their way, driving cattle for the better-off. Through inexperience

-and congestion the journey was likely to be hard, but any one might

-undertake it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850 wagons

-had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and 1500 more at the other ferries.

-

-Familiarity had done much to divest the overland journey of its

-terrors. We hear in this, and even in earlier years, of a sort of

-plains travel de luxe, of wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from

-the weather and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the world

-as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury, hurrying out in June

-and overtaking the trains, was impressed with the picturesque character

-of the emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in company with

-multitudes of emigrants the whole day," he wrote on June 12. "The road

-has been lined to a long extent with their wagons, whose white covers,

-glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a distance, ships upon the

-ocean.... We passed also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon, drawn

-by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household furniture. Behind

-followed a covered cart containing the wife, driving herself, and a

-host of babies--the whole bound to the land of promise, of the distance

-to which, however, they seemed to have not the most remote idea. To the

-tail of the cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls; two

-milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare, upon the back of which

-was perched a little, brown-faced, barefooted girl, not more than seven

-years old, while a small sucking colt brought up the rear." Travellers

-eastward bound, meeting the procession, reported the hundreds and

-thousands whom they met.

-

-The organization of the trains was not unlike that of the Oregonians

-and the Mormons, though generally less formal than either of these.

-The wagons were commonly grouped in companies for protection, little

-needed, since the Indians were at peace during most of 1849. At

-nightfall the long columns came to rest and worked their wagons into

-the corral which was the typical plains encampment. To form this the

-wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with its tongue overlapping

-the vehicle ahead, and each fastened to the next with the brake or yoke

-chains. An opening at one end allowed for driving in the stock, which

-could here be protected from stampede or Indian theft. In emergency

-the circle of wagons formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside

-ordinary Indian attacks. When the companies had been on the road for a

-few weeks the forming of the corral became an easy military manoeuvre.

-The itinerant circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of prairie

-schooners.

-

-The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by worse sufferings

-than the trail had yet known. Cholera broke out among the trains at the

-start. It stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five thousand

-graves, until they reached the hills beyond Fort Laramie. The price

-of inexperience, too, had to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock

-died. The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this. On July 27,

-Stansbury observed: "To-day we find additional and melancholy evidence

-of the difficulties encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before

-halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had been broken up, the

-spokes of the wheels taken to make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or

-otherwise destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with articles

-that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and steel, large blacksmiths'

-anvils and bellows, crowbars, drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels,

-axes, lead, trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,

-cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels, harness, clothing, bacon,

-and beans, were found along the road in pretty much the order in which

-they have been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen, lying

-in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained a part of the

-trouble." In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and

-twenty-seven dead oxen.

-

-Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In

-the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away,

-so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were

-forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.

-

-The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy.

-Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian

-who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached

-the gold fields.

-

-It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California after July,

-1849, when the overland folk began to arrive. All countries and all

-stations in society had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000

-or more whites who were there in the end of the year. The farmer, the

-amateur prospector, and the professional gambler mingled in the crowd.

-Loose women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who had come by

-sea contained an over-share of the undesirable element that proposed

-to live upon the recklessness and vices of the miners. The overland

-emigrants were largely of farmer stock; whether they had possessed

-frontier experience or not before the start, the 3000-mile journey

-toughened and seasoned all who reached California. Nearly all possessed

-the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.

-

-The experience of Oregon might point to the future of California when

-its strenuous population arrived upon the unprepared community. The

-Mexican government had been ejected by war. A military government

-erected by the United States still held its temporary sway, but

-felt out of place as the controlling power over a civilian American

-population. The new inhabitants were much in need of law, and had

-the American dislike for military authority. Immediately Congress

-was petitioned to form a territorial government for the new El

-Dorado. But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of slavery

-and freedom in the Southwest during its session of 1848-1849. It

-adjourned with nothing done for California. The mining population was

-irritated but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It had already

-organized its miners' courts and begun to execute summary justice in

-emergencies. It was quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion

-of its administrative officers and erect its state government without

-the consent of Congress. The military governor called the popular

-convention; the constitution framed during September, 1849, was

-ratified by popular vote on November 13; a few days later Governor

-Riley surrendered his authority into the hands of the elected governor,

-Burnett, and the officials of the new state. All this was done

-spontaneously and easily. There was no sanction in law for California

-until Congress admitted it in September, 1850, receiving as one of its

-first senators, John C. Frémont.

-

-The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon slavery in the Southwest,

-a compromise made necessary by the appearance on the Pacific of a new

-America. The "call of the West and the lust for gold" had done their

-work in creating a new centre of life beyond the quondam desert.

-

-The census of 1850 revealed something of the nature of this population.

-Probably 125,000 whites, though it was difficult to count them and

-impossible to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon and

-California. Nine-tenths of these were in the latter colony. More than

-11,000 were found in the settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many

-more than 3000 Americans were scattered among the Mexican population

-along the Rio Grande. The great trails had seen most of these

-home-seekers marching westward over the desert and across the Indian

-frontier which in the blindness of statecraft had been completed for

-all time in 1840.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VIII

-

-KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER

-

-

-The long line separating the Indian and agricultural frontiers was

-in 1850 but little farther west than the point which it had reached

-by 1820. Then it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it

-remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung out during this

-generation, including Arkansas on the south and Iowa, Minnesota, and

-Wisconsin on the north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War the

-line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri at its bend. West

-of this spot it had been kept from going by the tradition of the desert

-and the pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind had filled up

-with population, Oregon and California had appeared across the desert,

-but the barrier had not been pushed away.

-

-Through the great trails which penetrated the desert accurate knowledge

-of the Far West had begun to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike

-and Long had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and covetous

-eyes had been cast upon the Indian lands across the border,--lands from

-which the tribes were never to be removed without their consent, and

-which were never to be included in any organized territory or state.

-Most of the traffic over the trails and through this country had been

-in defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes had granted

-rights of transit, but such privileges as were needed and used by the

-Oregon, and California, and Utah hordes were far in excess of these.

-Most of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon Indian lands as

-well as violators of treaty provisions. Trouble with the Indians had

-begun early in the migrations.

-

-[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1849

-

-Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The

-Southwest acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.]

-

-At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the Indian office had

-foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties have occurred during the

-spring of the last and present year [1845] from the passing of

-emigrants for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country. Large

-companies have frequently rendezvoused on the Indian lands for months

-previous to the period of their starting. The emigrants have two

-advantages in crossing into the Indian Country at an early period of

-the spring; one, the facility of grazing their stock on the rushes with

-which the lands abound; and the other, that they cross the Missouri

-River at their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be forced

-by the military to put back. This passing of the emigrants through

-the Indian Country without their permission must, I fear, result in

-an unpleasant collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the

-whites have no right to be in their country without their consent;

-and the upper tribes, who subsist on game, complain that the buffalo

-are wantonly killed and scared off, which renders their only means of

-subsistence every year more precarious." Frémont had seen, in 1842,

-that this invasion of the Indian Country could not be kept up safely

-without a show of military force, and had recommended a post at the

-point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.

-

-The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated the relations

-with the tribes, while the Indian agents continually called upon

-Congress to redress or stop the wrongs being done as often by

-panic-stricken emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate persuasion

-and force," wrote the Commissioner in 1854, "some of these tribes have

-been removed, step by step, from mountain to valley, and from river

-to plain, until they have been pushed halfway across the continent.

-They can go no further; on the ground they now occupy the crisis must

-be met, and their future determined.... [There] they are, and as they

-are, with outstanding obligations in their behalf of the most solemn

-and imperative character, voluntarily assumed by the government." But a

-relentless westward movement that had no regard for rights of Mexico in

-either Texas or California could not be expected to notice the rights

-of savages even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens rights

-not inferior to those conceded by the government "to wandering nations

-of savages." A shrewd and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who

-had the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in 1853. "But

-one course remains," he wrote, "which promises any permanent relief

-to them, or any lasting benefit to the country in which they dwell.

-That is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse laws' as

-will invite the residence of traders amongst them, and _open the whole

-Indian territory to settlement_. In this manner will be introduced

-amongst them those who will set the example of developing the resources

-of the soil, of which the Indians have not now the most distant idea;

-who will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial to their

-nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly, to those modes

-of life which can alone secure them from the miseries of penury.

-Trade is the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor

-of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of all hereafter....

-The present 'intercourse laws' too, so far as they are calculated to

-protect the Indians from the evils of civilized life--from the sale of

-ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals--are nothing more than a

-dead letter; while, so far as they contribute to exclude the benefits

-of civilization from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly

-enforced."

-

-In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress from the War

-Department to the Interior, with the idea that the Indians would be

-better off under civilian than military control, and shortly after

-this negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements with the

-tribes. The Sioux were persuaded in the summer of 1851 to make way for

-increasing population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the same

-year the tribes of the western plains were induced to make concessions.

-

-The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte agency at Fort Laramie in

-1851 were in the interest of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had

-spent the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho

-to the conference. Shoshoni were brought in from the West. From the

-north of the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara, Grosventres,

-and Crows. The treaties here concluded were never ratified in full,

-but for fifteen years Congress paid various annuities provided by

-them, and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right of the

-United States to make roads across the plains and to fortify them

-with military posts was fully agreed to, while the Indians pledged

-themselves to commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two years later,

-at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a conference with the plains Indians

-of the south, Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of faith, which

-the Indians did not have in the Government, nor the Government in them."

-

-Overland traffic was made more safe for several years by these

-treaties. Such friction and fighting as occurred in the fifties were

-due chiefly to the excesses and the fears of the emigrants themselves.

-But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern tribes

-along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were in constant danger of

-dispossession by the advance of the frontier itself.

-

-The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in the early fifties,

-was the impending danger threatening the peace of the border. There

-was not as yet any special need to extend colonization across the

-Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota were but

-sparsely inhabited. Settlers for years might be accommodated farther

-to the east. But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and aroused

-passions in both North and South. Motives were so thoroughly mixed

-that participants were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of

-themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge, political ambition,

-all mingled with pure philanthropy and a reasonable fear of outside

-interference with domestic institutions. The compromise had settled

-the future of the new lands, but between Missouri and the mountains

-lay the residue of the Louisiana purchase, divided truly by the

-Missouri compromise line of 36° 30', but not yet settled. Ambition to

-possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for freedom was

-stimulated by the debate and the fears of outside interference. The

-nearest part of the unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence it

-was that Kansas came within the public vision first.

-

-It is possible to trace a movement for territorial organization in

-the Indian Country back to 1850 or even earlier. Certain of the more

-intelligent of the Indian colonists had been able to read the signs

-of the times, with the result that organized effort for a territory

-of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot country and had besieged

-Congress between 1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment

-were the Indians and the laws. Experience had long demonstrated the

-unwisdom of permitting Indians and emigrants to live in the same

-districts. The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties based

-upon them, had guaranteed in particular that no territory or state

-should ever be organized in this country. Good faith and the physical

-presence of the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory could

-appear.

-

-The guarantee of permanency was based upon treaty, and in the eye of

-Congress was not so sacred that it could not be modified by treaty.

-As it became clear that the demand for the opening of these lands

-would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared for the inevitable

-by ordering, in March, 1853, a series of negotiations with the tribes

-west of Missouri with a view to the cession of more country. The

-Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, who later wrote a

-book on "Our Indian Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to the

-Indians the hard news that they were expected once more to vacate. He

-found the tribes uneasy and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering

-over their lands, had set them thinking. There had been no actual white

-settlement up to October, 1853, so Manypenny declared, but the chiefs

-feared that he was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The Indian

-mind had some difficulty in comprehending the difference between ceding

-their land by treaty and losing it by force.

-

-At a long series of council fires the Commissioner soothed away some of

-the apprehensions, but found a stubborn resistance when he came to talk

-of ceding all the reserves and moving to new homes. The tribes, under

-pressure, were ready to part with some of their lands, but wanted to

-retain enough to live on. When he talked to them of the Great Father

-in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony of the situation; the

-guarantee of permanency had been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged

-for a series of treaties in the following year.

-

-In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with most of the tribes

-fronting on Missouri between 37° and 42° 40'. Some of these had been

-persuaded to move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of

-the thirties. Others, always resident there, had accepted curtailed

-reserves. The Omaha faced the Missouri, north of the Platte. South of

-the Platte were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes of Missouri,

-the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas,

-and around Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization of a

-high order. The Shawnee, immediately south of the Kansas, were also

-well advanced in agriculture in the permanent home they had accepted.

-The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea and Piankashaw, and the

-Miami were further south. From those tribes more than thirteen million

-acres of land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered and

-reduced reserves the Indians retained for themselves about one-tenth

-of what they ceded. Generally, when the final signing came, under

-the persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the strange

-surroundings of Washington, the chiefs surrendered the lands outright

-and with no condition.

-

-Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to give title at once

-and held out for conditions of sale. The Iowa, the confederated minor

-tribes, and notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust to the

-United States, with the treaty pledge that the lands so yielded should

-be sold at public auction to the highest bidder, the remainders should

-then be offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre, and the

-final remnants should be disposed of by the United States, the accruing

-funds being held in trust by the United States for the Indians. By

-the end of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In July, 1854,

-Congress provided a land office for the territory of Kansas.

-

-While the Indian negotiations were in progress, Senator Douglas was

-forcing his Kansas-Nebraska bill at Washington. The bill had failed in

-1853, partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of the Indian

-agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the Democratic party carried it

-along relentlessly. With words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as

-Rhodes has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed by the

-westward movement, subversive of the national pledge, and, blind as he

-was, destructive as well of his party and his own political future.

-The support of President Pierce and the coöperation of Jefferson Davis

-were his in the struggle. It was not his intent, he declared, to

-legislate slavery into or out of the territories; he proposed to leave

-that to the people themselves. To this principle he gave the name of

-"popular sovereignty," "and the name was a far greater invention than

-the doctrine." With rising opposition all about him, he repealed the

-Missouri compromise which in 1820 had divided the Indian Country by

-the line of 36° 30' into free and slave areas, and created within these

-limits the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was signed

-by the President on May 30, 1854. In later years this day has been

-observed as a memorial to those who lost their lives in fighting the

-battle which he provoked.

-

-With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri compromise repealed,

-eager partisans prepared in the spring of 1854 to colonize the new

-territories in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the slavery

-side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the

-leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves

-and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these

-for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the

-future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of

-voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas,

-and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing

-the erection of a free state on her western boundary. The northern

-states had been stirred by the act as deeply as the South. In New

-England the bill was not yet passed when leaders of the abolition

-movement prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer, of Worcester, urged

-during the spring that friends of freedom could do no better work than

-aid in the colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own state, in

-April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, through

-which he proposed to aid suitable men to move into the debatable

-land. Churches and schools were to be provided for them. A stern New

-England abolition spirit was to be fostered by them. And they were

-not to be left without the usual border means of defence. Amos A.

-Lawrence, of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made Thayer's scheme

-financially possible. Dr. Charles Robinson was their choice for leader

-of emigration and local representative in Kansas.

-

-The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated little by the

-ordinary westward impulse but greatly by political ambition and

-sectional rivalry. As late as October, 1853, there had been almost no

-whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they began to come in,

-in increasing numbers. The Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at

-once, before the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before

-land offices had been opened. The approach was by the Missouri River

-steamers to Kansas City and Westport, near the bend of the river, where

-was the gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north of the Kansas

-River, was not yet open to legal occupation, but the Shawnee lands

-had been ceded completely and would soon be ready. So the New England

-companies worked their way on foot, or in hired wagons, up the right

-bank of the Kansas, hunting for eligible sites. About thirty miles west

-of the Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they picked their

-spot late in July. The town of Lawrence grew out of their cluster of

-tents and cabins.

-

-It was more than two months after the arrival of the squatters at

-Lawrence before the first governor of the new territory, Andrew H.

-Reeder, made his appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established civil

-government in Kansas. One of his first experiences was with the attempt

-of United States officers at the post to secure for themselves pieces

-of the Delaware lands which surrounded it. "While lying at the fort,"

-wrote a surveyor who left early in September to run the Nebraska

-boundary line, "we heard a great deal about those d--d squatters who

-were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None of the Delaware lands

-were open to settlement, since the United States had pledged itself to

-sell them all at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But certain

-speculators, including officers of the regular army, organized a town

-company to preëmpt a site near the fort, where they thought they

-foresaw the great city of the West. They relied on the immunity which

-usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands, and seem even to have

-used United States soldiers to build their shanties. They had begun to

-dispose of their building lots "in this discreditable business" four

-weeks before the first of the Delaware trust lands were put on sale.

-

-However bitter toward each other, the settlers were agreed in their

-attitude toward the Indians, and squatted regardless of Indian

-rights or United States laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his

-legislature, first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort Riley ejected it;

-then at the Shawnee mission, close to Kansas City, where his presence

-and its were equally without authority of law. He established election

-precincts in unceded lands, and voting places at spots where no white

-man could go without violating the law. The legal snarl into which the

-settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the Indian policy. It

-is even intimated that Governor Reeder was interested in a land scheme

-at Pawnee similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.

-

-The fight for Kansas began immediately after the arrival of Governor

-Reeder and the earliest immigrants. The settlers actually in residence

-at the commencement of 1855 seem to have been about 8500. Propinquity

-gave Missouri an advantage at the start, when the North was not yet

-fully aroused. At an election for territorial legislature held on

-March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was revealed in all

-its fulness when more than 6000 votes were counted among a population

-which had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men had ridden over

-in organized bands to colonize the precincts and carry the election.

-The whole area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride of the

-Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that Governor Reeder disavowed

-certain of the results, yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July,

-1855, was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members, while the

-rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri code of law, thus laying the

-foundations for a slave state.

-

-The political struggle over Kansas became more intense on the border

-and more absorbing in the nation in the next four years. The free-state

-men, as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known, disavowed the

-first legislature on the ground of its fraudulent election, while

-President Pierce steadily supported it from Washington. Governor

-Reeder was removed during its session, seemingly because he had thrown

-doubts upon its validity. Protesting against it, the northerners held

-a series of meetings in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some

-twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and crystallized their

-opposition under Dr. Robinson. Their efforts culminated at Topeka

-in October in a spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary,

-convention which framed a free-state constitution for Kansas and

-provided for erecting a rival administration. Dr. Robinson became its

-governor.

-

-Before the first legislature under the Topeka constitution assembled,

-Kansas had still further trouble. Private violence and mob attacks

-began during the fall of 1855. What is known as the Wakarusa War

-occurred in November, when Sheriff Jones of Douglas County tried to

-arrest some free-state men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance

-reënforced with Sharpe rifles from New England. Governor Wilson

-Shannon, who had succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility

-continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly the centre of

-northern settlement and the object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri

-mob visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving presence, it is

-said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel and printing shop, and burned

-the residence of Dr. Robinson.

-

-In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river and attacked

-Lecompton, but within a week of the sacking of Lawrence retribution

-was visited upon the pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were

-murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by a group of fanatical

-free-state men. Just what provocation John Brown and his family had

-received which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In many instances

-individual anti-slavery men retaliated lawlessly upon their enemies.

-But the leaders of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring Brown

-and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts. It is certain that

-in this struggle the free-state party, in general, wanted peaceful

-settlement of the country, and were staking their fortunes and families

-upon it. They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression was no

-part of their platform.

-

-The course of Governor Shannon reached its end in the summer of 1856.

-He was disliked by the free-state faction, while his personal habits

-gave no respectability to the pro-slave cause. At the end of his

-régime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka constitution was

-prevented by federal troops from convening in session at Topeka. A few

-weeks later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and established his

-seat of government in Lecompton, by this time a village of some twenty

-houses. It took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only six weeks to

-fall out with the pro-slave element and the federal land officers. He

-resigned in March, 1857.

-

-Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed Geary, the first official

-attempt at a constitution was entered upon. The legislature had already

-summoned a convention which sat at Lecompton during September and

-October. Its constitution, which was essentially pro-slavery, however

-it was read, was ratified before the end of the year and submitted to

-Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which called the convention had

-fallen into free-state hands, disavowed the constitution, and summoned

-another convention. At Leavenworth this convention framed a free-state

-constitution in March, which was ratified by popular vote in May,

-1858. Governor Walker had already resigned in December, 1857. Through

-holding an honest election and purging the returns of slave-state

-frauds he had enabled the free-state party to secure the legislature.

-Southerner though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty of the

-administration in Kansas. He had yielded to the evidence of his eyes,

-that the population of Kansas possessed a large free-state majority.

-But so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington. Even Senator

-Douglas, the patron of the popular sovereignty doctrine, had now broken

-with President Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to form

-their own institutions. No attention was ever paid by Congress to

-this Leavenworth constitution, but when the Lecompton constitution

-was finally submitted to the people by Congress, in August, 1858, it

-was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a total of 13,000. Kansas

-was henceforth in the hands of the actual settlers. A year later,

-at Wyandotte, it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last

-entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the Wyandotte Convention,"

-says one of the local historians, "there were a few Democrats and one

-or two cranks, and probably both were of some use in their way."

-

-There had been no white population in Kansas in 1853, and no special

-desire to create one. But the political struggle had advertised

-the territory on a large scale, while the whole West was under the

-influence of the agricultural boom that was extending settlement into

-Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found

-that about 8500 had come in since the erection of the territory. The

-rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles and the stories of

-Lawrence and Potawatomi, instead of frightening settlers away, drew

-them there in increasing thousands. Some few came from the South, but

-the northern majority was overwhelming before the panic of 1857 laid

-its heavy hand upon expansion. There was a white population of 106,390

-in 1860.

-

-The westward movement, under its normal influences, had extended the

-range of prosperous agricultural settlement into the Northwest in this

-past decade. It had coöperated in the extension into that part of the

-old desert now known as Kansas. But chiefly politics, and secondly the

-call of the West, is the order of causes which must explain the first

-westward advance of the agricultural frontier since 1820. Even in 1860

-the population of Kansas was almost exclusively within a three days'

-journey of the Missouri bend.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER IX

-

-"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"[2]

-

-    [2] This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The

-        Territory of Colorado" which was published in _The

-        American Historical Review_ in October, 1906.

-

-

-The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of

-the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land

-beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without any semblance of

-organization or law. Indeed within the area whites had been forbidden

-to enter, since here was the final abode of the Indians. But with the

-Kansas-Nebraska act all this was changed. In five years a series of

-amorphous territories had been provided for by law.

-

-Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct divisions.

-From the Canadian border to the fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended.

-Kansas lay between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the old Indian

-Country, now much reduced by partition, embraced the rest. The whole

-plains country, east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial

-projects. Indian Territory was without the government which its name

-implied, but popular parlance regarded it as the others and refused to

-see any difference among them.

-

-Beyond the mountain wall which formed the western boundary of Kansas

-and Nebraska lay four other territories equally without particular

-reason for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in 1846, had been

-divided in 1853 by a line starting at the mouth of the Columbia and

-running east to the Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its

-northern side. The Utah territory which figured in the compromise

-of 1850, and which Mormon migration had made necessary, extended

-between California and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42° to New Mexico

-at 37°. New Mexico, also of the compromise year, reached from Texas

-to California, south of 37°, and possessed at its northeast corner a

-panhandle which carried it north to 38° in order to leave in it certain

-old Mexican settlements.

-

-These divisions of the West embraced in 1854 the whole of the country

-between California and the states. As yet their boundaries were

-arbitrary and temporary, but they presaged movements of population

-which during the next quarter century should break them up still

-further and provide real colonies in place of the desert and the Indian

-Country. Congress had no formative part in the work. Population broke

-down barriers and showed the way, while laws followed and legalized

-what had been done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the

-mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains no prophecy of the four

-states which were shortly to appear.

-

-[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1854

-

-Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky

-Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.]

-

-For several decades the area of Kansas territory, and the southern

-part of Nebraska, had been well known as the range of the plains

-Indians,--Pawnee and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche

-and Apache. Through this range the caravans had gone. Here had been

-constant military expeditions as well. It was a common summer's

-campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort Leavenworth to

-the mountains by either the Arkansas or Platte route, to skirt the

-eastern slopes along the southern fork of the Platte, and return home

-by the other trail. Those military demonstrations, which were believed

-to be needed to impress the tribes, had made this march a regular

-performance. Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner and

-Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous others in between.

-A well-known trail had been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on

-the north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte at Cherry

-Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and on to Bent's Fort and the

-New Mexican towns. Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end.

-Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling over slavery, but they

-had scarcely scratched the soil for one-fourth of the length of the

-territory.

-

-The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme west of Kansas, lay

-between the great trails, so that it was off the course of the chief

-migrations, and none visited it for its own sake. The deviating trails,

-which commenced at the Missouri bend, were some 250 miles apart at the

-one hundred and third meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized

-in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose the hills around

-Pike's Peak, which rumor came in three years more to tip with gold.

-

-The discovery of gold in California prepared the public for similar

-finds in other parts of the West. With many of the emigrants

-prospecting had become a habit that sent small bands into the mountain

-valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories of success in various

-regions arose repeatedly during the fifties and are so reasonable that

-it is not possible to determine with certainty the first finds in many

-localities. Any mountain stream in the whole system might be expected

-to contain some gold, but deposits large enough to justify a boom were

-slow in coming.

-

-In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to Omaha from the

-mountains, confirmed the rumors of a new discovery that had been

-persistent for several months. The previous summer had seen organized

-attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region the deposits whose

-existence had been believed in, more or less, since 1850. Parties from

-the gold fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton are

-known to have been in the field and to have started various mushroom

-settlements. El Paso, near the present site of Colorado Springs,

-appeared, as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the South

-Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry Creek,--Montana, Auraria,

-Highland, and St. Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the

-States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by trifling finds,

-remained to occupy their flimsy cabins or to jump the claims of the

-absentees. In the sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold

-the finders and to start a small migration thither in the autumn. In

-the early winter the groups on Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the

-name of Denver City.

-

-The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri Valley at the

-strategic moment when the newness of Kansas had worn off, and the

-depression of 1857 had brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier.

-The adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to move, had been

-reënforced by individuals down on their luck and reduced to any sort of

-extremity. The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration to the new

-diggings which started in the fall of 1858 and assumed great volume in

-the spring of 1859.

-

-The edge of the border for these emigrants was not much farther west

-than it had been for emigrants of the preceding decade. A few miles

-from the Missouri River all traces of Kansas or Nebraska disappeared,

-whether one advanced by the Platte or the Arkansas, or by the

-intermediate routes of the Smoky Hill and Republican. The destination

-was less than half as far away as California had been. No mountains and

-no terrible deserts were to be crossed. The costs and hardships of the

-journey were less than any that had heretofore separated the frontier

-from a western goal. There is a glimpse of the bustling life around the

-head of the trails in a letter which General W. T. Sherman wrote to his

-brother John from Leavenworth City, on April 30, 1859: "At this moment

-we are in the midst of a rush to Pike's Peak. Steamboats arrive in twos

-and threes each day, loaded with people for the new gold region. The

-streets are full of people buying flour, bacon, and groceries, with

-wagons and outfits, and all around the town are little camps preparing

-to go west. A daily stage goes west to Fort Riley, 135 miles, and every

-morning two spring wagons, drawn by four mules and capable of carrying

-six passengers, start for the Peak, distance six hundred miles, the

-journey to be made in twelve days. As yet the stages all go out and

-don't return, according to the plan for distributing the carriages;

-but as soon as they are distributed, there will be two going and two

-returning, making a good line of stages to Pike's Peak. Strange to say,

-even yet, although probably 25,000 people have actually gone, we are

-without authentic advices of gold. Accounts are generally favorable

-as to words and descriptions, but no positive physical evidence comes

-in the shape of gold, and I will be incredulous until I know some

-considerable quantity comes in in way of trade."

-

-[Illustration: "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"

-

-Reproduced by permission of the Montana Historical Society, from the

-original handbill in its possession.]

-

-Throughout the United States newspapers gave full notice to the new

-boom, while a "Pike's Peak Guide," based on a journal kept by one of

-the early parties, found a ready sale. No single movement had ever

-carried so heavy a migration upon the plains as this, which in one

-year must have taken nearly 100,000 pioneers to the mountains. "Pike's

-Peak or Bust!" was a common motto blazoned on their wagon covers. The

-sawmill, the press, and the stage-coach were all early on the field.

-Byers, long a great editor in Denver, arrived in April to distribute

-an edition of his _Rocky Mountain News_, which he had printed on one

-side before leaving Omaha. Thenceforth the diggings were consistently

-advertised by a resident enthusiast. Early in May the first coach of

-the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company brought Henry Villard

-into Denver. In June came no less a personage than Horace Greeley to

-see for himself the new wonder. "Mine eyes have never yet been blessed

-with the sight of any floor whatever in either Denver or Auraria,"

-he could write of the village of huts which he inspected. The seal

-of approval which his letters set upon the enterprise did much to

-encourage it.

-

-With the rush of prospectors to the hills, numerous new camps quickly

-appeared. Thirty miles north along the foothills and mesas Boulder

-marked the exit of a mountain creek upon the plains. Behind Denver,

-in Clear Creek Valley, were Golden, at the mouth, and Black Hawk and

-Central City upon the north fork of the stream. Idaho Springs and

-Georgetown were on its south fork. Here in the Gregory district was the

-active life of the diggings. The great extent of the gold belt to the

-southwest was not yet fully known. Farther south was Pueblo, on the

-Arkansas, and a line of little settlements working up the valley, by

-Canyon City to Oro, where Leadville now stands.

-

-Reaction followed close upon the heels of the boom, beginning its work

-before the last of the outward bound had reached the diggings. Gold

-was to be found in trifling quantities in many places, but the mob of

-inexperienced miners had little chance for fortune. The great deposits,

-which were some months in being discovered, were in refractory quartz

-lodes, calling for heavy stamp mills, chemical processes, and, above

-all, great capital for their working. Even for laborers there was no

-demand commensurate with the number of the fifty-niners. Hence, more

-than half of these found their way back to the border before the year

-was over, bitter, disgusted, and poor, scrawling on deserted wagons, in

-answer to the outward motto, "Busted! By Gosh!"

-

-The problem of government was born when the first squatters ran the

-lines of Denver City. Here was a new settlement far away from the seat

-of territorial government, while the government itself was impotent.

-Kansas had no legislature competent to administer law at home--far less

-in outlying colonies. But spontaneous self-government came easily to

-the new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers in his diary,

-"that within two weeks of the arrival of a few dozen Americans in a

-wilderness, they set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States

-Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory! But we are of

-a fast race and in a fast age and must prod along." An early snow in

-November, 1858, had confined the miners to their cabins and started

-politics. The result had been the election of two delegates, one to

-Congress and one to Kansas legislature, both to ask for governmental

-direction. Kansas responded in a few weeks, creating five new counties

-west of 104°, and chartering a city of St. Charles, long after St.

-Charles had been merged into Denver. Congress did nothing.

-

-The prospective immigration of 1859 inspired further and more

-comprehensive attempts at local government. It was well understood

-that the news of gold would send in upon Denver a wave of population

-and perhaps a reign of lawlessness. The adjournment of Congress

-without action in their behalf made it certain that there could

-be no aid from this quarter for at least a year, and became the

-occasion for a caucus in Denver over which William Larimer presided

-on April 11, 1859. As a result of this caucus, a call was issued for

-a convention of representatives of the neighboring mining camps to

-meet in the same place four days later. On April 15, six camps met

-through their delegates, "being fully impressed with the belief, from

-early and recent precedents, of the power and benefits and duty of

-self-government," and feeling an imperative necessity "for an immediate

-and adequate government, for the large population now here and soon to

-be among us ... and also believing that a territorial government is not

-such as our large and peculiarly situated population demands."

-

-The deliberations thus informally started ended in a formal call for

-a constitutional convention to meet in Denver on the first Monday in

-June, for the purpose, as an address to the people stated, of framing

-a constitution for a new "state of Jefferson." "Shall it be," the

-address demanded, "the government of the knife and the revolver, or

-shall we unite in forming here in our golden country, among the ravines

-and gulches of the Rocky Mountains, and the fertile valleys of the

-Arkansas and the Platte, a new and independent State?" The boundaries

-of the prospective state were named in the call as the one hundred

-and second and one hundred and tenth meridians of longitude, and the

-thirty-seventh and forty-third parallels of north latitude--including

-with true frontier amplitude large portions of Utah and Nebraska and

-nearly half of Wyoming, in addition to the present state of Colorado.

-

-When the statehood convention met in Denver on June 6, the time was

-inopportune for concluding the movement, since the reaction had set in.

-The height of the gold boom was over, and the return migration left it

-somewhat doubtful whether any permanent population would remain in the

-country to need a state. So the convention met on the 6th, appointed

-some eight drafting committees, and adjourned, to await developments,

-until August 1. By this later date, the line had been drawn between

-the confident and the discouraged elements in the population, and for

-six days the convention worked upon the question of statehood. As to

-permanency there was now no doubt; but the body divided into two nearly

-equal groups, one advocating immediate statehood, the other shrinking

-from the heavy taxation incident to a state establishment and so

-preferring a territorial government with a federal treasury behind it.

-The body, too badly split to reach a conclusion itself, compromised by

-preparing the way for either development and leaving the choice to

-a public vote. A state constitution was drawn up on one hand; on the

-other, was prepared a memorial to Congress praying for a territorial

-government, and both documents were submitted to a vote on September

-5. Pursuant to the memorial, which was adopted, another election was

-held on October 3, at which the local agent of the new Leavenworth

-and Pike's Peak Express Company, Beverly D. Williams, was chosen as

-delegate to Congress.

-

-The adoption of the territorial memorial failed to meet the need for

-immediate government or to prevent the advocates of such government

-from working out a provisional arrangement pending the action of

-Congress. On the day that Williams was elected, these advocates chose

-delegates for a preliminary territorial constitutional convention

-which met a week later. "Here we go," commented Byers, "a regular

-triple-headed government machine; south of 40 deg. we hang on to the

-skirts of Kansas; north of 40 deg. to those of Nebraska; straddling

-the line, we have just elected a Delegate to the United States

-Congress from the 'Territory of Jefferson,' and ere long we will have

-in full blast a provisional government of Rocky Mountain growth and

-manufacture." In this convention of October 10, 1859, the name of

-Jefferson was retained for the new territory; the boundaries of April

-15 were retained, and a government similar to the highest type of

-territorial establishment was provided for. If the convention had met

-on the authority of an enabling act, its career could not have been

-more dignified. Its constitution was readily adopted, while officers

-under it were chosen in an orderly election on October 24. Robert

-W. Steele, of Ohio, became its governor. On November 7 he met his

-legislature and delivered his first inaugural address.

-

-The territory of Jefferson which thus came into existence in the Pike's

-Peak region illustrates well the spirit of the American frontier. The

-fundamental principle of American government which Byers expressed in

-connection with it is applicable at all times in similar situations.

-"We claim," he wrote in his _Rocky Mountain News_, "that any body,

-or community of American citizens, which from any cause or under

-any circumstance is cut off from, or from isolation is so situated

-as not to be under, any active and protecting branch of the central

-government, have a right, if on American soil, to frame a government,

-and enact such laws and regulations as may be necessary for their own

-safety, protection, and happiness, always with the condition precedent,

-that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central government

-shall extend an _effective_ organization and laws over them, give it

-their unqualified support and obedience." The life of the spontaneous

-commonwealth thus called into existence is a creditable witness to the

-American instinct for orderly government.

-

-When Congress met in December, 1859, the provisional territory of

-Jefferson was in operation, while its delegates in Washington were

-urging the need for governmental action. To their influence, President

-Buchanan added, on February 20, 1860, a message transmitting the

-petition from the Pike's Peak country. The Senate, upon April 3,

-received a report from the Committee on Territories introducing Senate

-Bill No. 366, for the erection of Colorado territory, while Grow of

-Pennsylvania reported to the House on May 10 a bill to erect in the

-same region a territory of Idaho. The name of Jefferson disappeared

-from the project in the spring of 1860, its place being taken by sundry

-other names for the same mountain area. Several weeks were given,

-in part, to debate over this Colorado-Idaho scheme, though as usual

-the debate turned less upon the need for this territorial government

-than upon the attitude which the bill should take toward the slavery

-issue. The slavery controversy prevented territorial legislation in

-this session, but the reasonableness of the Colorado demand was well

-established.

-

-The territory of Jefferson, as organized in November, 1859, had

-been from the first recognized as merely a temporary expedient. The

-movement for it had gained weight in the summer of that year from

-the probability that it need not be maintained for many months. When

-Congress, however, failed in the ensuing session of 1859-1860 to grant

-the relief for which the pioneers had prayed, the wisdom of continuing

-for a second year the life of a government admitted to be illegal came

-into question. The first session of its legislature had lasted from

-November 7, 1859, to January 25, 1860. It had passed comprehensive

-laws for the regulation of titles in lands, water, and mines, and had

-adopted civil and criminal codes. Its courts had been established

-and had operated with some show of authority. But the service and

-obedience to the government had been voluntary, no funds being on

-hand for the payment of salaries and expenses. One of the pioneers

-from Vermont wrote home, "There is no hopes [_sic_] of perfect quiet

-in our governmental matters until we are securely under the wing of

-our National Eagle." In his proclamation calling the second election

-Governor Steele announced that "all persons who expect to be elected

-to any of the above offices should bear in mind that there will be no

-salaries or per diem allowed from this territory, but that the General

-Government will be memorialized to aid us in our adversity."

-

-Upon this question of revenue the territory of Jefferson was wrecked.

-Taxes could not be collected, since citizens had only to plead grave

-doubts as to the legality in order to evade payment. "We have tried a

-Provisional Government, and how has it worked," asked William Larimer

-in announcing his candidacy for the office of territorial delegate.

-"It did well enough until an attempt was made to tax the people to

-support it." More than this, the real need for the government became

-less apparent as 1860 advanced, for the scattered communities learned

-how to obtain a reasonable peace without it. American mining camps

-are peculiarly free from the need for superimposed government. The

-new camp at once organizes itself on a democratic basis, and in mass

-meeting registers claims, hears and decides suits, and administers

-summary justice. Since the Pike's Peak country was only a group of

-mining camps, there proved to be little immediate need for a central

-government, for in the local mining-district organizations all of

-the most pressing needs of the communities could be satisfied. So

-loyalty to the territory of Jefferson, in the districts outside

-of Denver, waned during 1860, and in the summer of that year had

-virtually disappeared. Its administration, however, held together.

-Governor Steele made efforts to rehabilitate its authority, was himself

-reëlected, and met another legislature in November.

-

-When the thirty-sixth Congress met for its second session in December,

-1860, the Jefferson organization was in the second year of its life,

-yet in Congress there was no better prospect of quick action than there

-had been since 1857. Indeed the election of Lincoln brought out the

-eloquence of the slavery question with a renewed vigor that monopolized

-the time and strength of Congress until the end of January. Had not

-the departure of the southern members to their states cleared the way

-for action, it is highly improbable that even this session would have

-produced results of importance.

-

-Grow had announced in the beginning of the session a territorial

-platform similar to that which had been under debate for three

-years. Until the close of January the southern valedictories held

-the floor, but at last the admission of Kansas, on January 29, 1861,

-revealed the fact that pro-slavery opposition had departed and that

-the long-deferred territorial scheme could have a fair chance. On the

-very day that Kansas was admitted, with its western boundary at the

-twenty-fifth meridian from Washington, the Senate revived its bill No.

-366 of the last session and took up its deliberation upon a territory

-for Pike's Peak. Only by chance did the name Colorado remain attached

-to the bill. Idaho was at one time adopted, but was amended out in

-favor of the original name when the bill at last passed the Senate. The

-boundaries were cut down from those which the territory had provided

-for itself. Two degrees were taken from the north of the territory, and

-three from the west. In this shape, between 37° and 41° north latitude,

-and 25° and 32° of longitude west of Washington, the bill received the

-signature of President Buchanan on February 28. The absence of serious

-debate in the passage of this Colorado act is excellent evidence of the

-merit of the scheme and the reasons for its being so long deferred.

-

-President Buchanan, content with approving the bill, left the

-appointment of the first officials for Colorado to his successor. In

-the multitude of greater problems facing President Lincoln, this

-was neglected for several weeks, but he finally commissioned General

-William Gilpin as the first governor of the territory. Gilpin had long

-known the mountain frontier; he had commanded a detachment on the

-Santa Fé trail in the forties, and he had written prophetic books upon

-the future of the country to which he was now sent. His loyalty was

-unquestioned and his readiness to assume responsibility went so far as

-perhaps to cease to be a virtue. He arrived in Denver on May 29, 1861,

-and within a few days was ready to take charge of the government and to

-receive from the hands of Governor Steele such authority as remained in

-the provisional territory of Jefferson.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER X

-

-FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA

-

-

-The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of mining episodes which,

-within fifteen years of the discoveries in California, let in the

-light of exploration and settlement upon hundreds of valleys scattered

-over the whole of the Rocky Mountain West. The men who exploited

-California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by

-bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class,

-mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which

-permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced

-before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for

-gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana.

-Activity was constant during these years all along the continental

-divide. New camps were being born overnight, old ones were abandoned by

-magic. Here and there cities rose and remained to mark success in the

-search. Abandoned huts and half-worked diggings were scars covering a

-fourth of the continent.

-

-Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the largest of migrations,

-but while Denver was being settled there began, farther west, a boom

-which for the present outdid it in significance. The old California

-trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada desert and entered California

-by various passes through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts had

-been planted along this trail by Mormons and others during the fifties,

-until in 1854 the legislature of Utah had created a Carson County in

-the west end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements along

-the river of the same name. Small discoveries of gold were enough to

-draw to this district a floating population which founded a Carson City

-as early as 1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement

-until after the finding of a marvellously rich vein of silver near Gold

-Hill in the spring of 1859. Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a

-few miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the famous Comstock

-lode, upon which it was possible within five years to build a state.

-

-The California population, already rushing about from one boom to

-another in perpetual prospecting, seized eagerly upon this new district

-in western Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and Placerville

-was crowded beyond capacity, while hundreds marched over the mountains

-on foot. "There was no difficulty in reaching the newly discovered

-region of boundless wealth," asserted a journalistic visitor. "It lay

-on the public highway to California, on the borders of the state. From

-Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake,

-the tide of emigration poured in. Transportation from San Francisco was

-easy. I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead of winter, when

-the mountains were covered with snow." Carson City had existed before

-the great discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade southerner,

-nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed it, while the typical population of

-the mining camps piled in around the two.

-

-In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The new pony express ran

-through the heart of the fields and aided in advertising them east and

-west. Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye. Both camps

-obtained their territorial acts within the same week, that of Nevada

-receiving Buchanan's signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west of

-the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became the new territory

-which, through the need of the union for loyal votes, gained its

-admission as a state in three more years.

-

-[Illustration: THE MINING CAMP

-

-From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the

-Montana Historical Society.]

-

-The rush to Carson valley drew attention away from another mining

-enterprise further south. In the western half of New Mexico, between

-the Rio Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful mining ever

-since the acquisition of the territory. The southwest boundary of the

-United States after the Mexican War was defined in words that could

-not possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This fact, together

-with knowledge that an easy railway grade ran south of the Gila River,

-had led in 1853 to the purchase of additional land from Mexico and

-the definition of a better boundary in the Gadsden treaty. In these

-lands of the Gadsden purchase old mines came to light in the years

-immediately following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles D. Poston were most

-active in promoting the mining companies which revived abandoned claims

-and developed new ones near the old Spanish towns of Tubac and Tucson.

-The region was too remote and life too hard for the individual miner

-to have much chance. Organized mining companies here took the place of

-the detached prospector of Colorado and Nevada. Disappointed miners

-from California came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee of San

-Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines.

-Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.... It

-was literally a paradise of devils." Excessive dryness, long distances,

-and Apache depredation discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys of the

-early fifties and the passage of the overland mail through the camps in

-1858 advertised the Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.

-

-The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the time the Mowry

-mines and others in the Santa Cruz Valley, holding them in check till

-a second mineral area in western New Mexico should be found. United

-States army posts were abandoned, confederate agents moved in, and

-Indians became bold. The federal authority was not reëstablished until

-Colonel J. H. Carleton led his California column across the Colorado

-and through New Mexico to Tucson early in 1862. During the next two

-years he maintained his headquarters at Santa Fé, carried on punitive

-campaigns against the Navaho and the Apache, and encouraged mining.

-

-The Indian campaigns of Carleton and his aides in New Mexico have

-aroused much controversy. There were no treaty rights by which the

-United States had privileges of colonization and development. It

-was forcible entry and retention, maintained in the face of bitter

-opposition. Carleton, with Kit Carson's assistance, waged a war

-of scarcely concealed extermination. They understood, he reported

-to Washington, "the direct application of force as a law. If its

-application be removed, that moment they become lawless. This has been

-tried over and over and over again, and at great expense. The purpose

-now is never to relax the application of force with a people that can

-no more be trusted than you can trust the wolves that run through

-their mountains; to gather them together little by little, on to a

-reservation, away from the haunts, and hills, and hiding-places of

-their country, and then to be kind to them; there teach their children

-how to read and write, teach them the arts of peace; teach them the

-truths of Christianity. Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas,

-new modes of life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them

-all the latent longings for murdering and robbing; the young ones will

-take their places without these longings; and thus, little by little,

-they will become a happy and contented people."

-

-Mowry's mines had been seized by Carleton at the start, as tainted with

-treason. The whole Tucson district was believed to be so thoroughly

-in sympathy with the confederacy that the commanding officer was much

-relieved when rumors came of a new placer gold field along the left

-bank of the Colorado River, around Bill Williams Creek. Thither the

-population of the territory moved as fast as it could. Teamsters and

-other army employees deserted freely. Carleton deliberately encouraged

-surveying and prospecting, and wrote personally to General Halleck and

-Postmaster-general Blair, congratulating them because his California

-column had found the gold with which to suppress the confederacy. "One

-of the richest gold countries in the world," he described it to be,

-destined to be the centre of a new territorial life, and to throw into

-the shade "the insignificant village of Tucson."

-

-The population of the silver camp had begun to urge Congress to

-provide a territory independent of New Mexico, immediately after the

-development of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had been sent

-to Washington in the usual style. But congressional indifference to

-new territories had blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened the

-case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian wards and their rights,

-the Superintendent of Indian Affairs had told of the sad peril of the

-"unprotected miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear title.

-They would offer to the "numerous and warlike tribes" an irresistible

-opportunity. The territorial act was finally passed on February 24,

-1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart of the new gold

-field, at Fort Whipple, near which the city of Prescott soon appeared.

-

-The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by the erection of a

-territorial government. There never came in a population large enough

-to intimidate the tribes, while bad management from the start provoked

-needless wars. Most serious were the Apache troubles which began in

-1861 and ceased only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies.

-In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp Grant in 1871, when

-citizens of Tucson, with careful premeditation, murdered in cold

-blood more than eighty Apache, men, women, and children. The degree

-of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry

-has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice

-of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache.

-A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their

-haunts--hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be

-surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled--by white

-flags, or any other method, human or divine--and then put to death.

-If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual who thinks himself

-a philanthropist, I can only say that I pity without respecting his

-mistaken sympathy. A man might as well have sympathy for a rattlesnake

-or a tiger."

-

-The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by climate and

-inaccessibility, brought life into the extreme Southwest. Those of

-Nevada worked the partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old

-Oregon country gave out its gold in these same years as miners opened

-up the valleys of the Snake and the head waters of the Missouri River.

-Right on the crest of the continental divide appeared the northern

-group of mining camps.

-

-The territory of Washington had been cut away from Oregon at its own

-request and with Oregon's consent in 1853. It had no great population

-and was the subject of no agricultural boom as Oregon had been, but

-the small settlements on Puget Sound and around Olympia were too far

-from the Willamette country for convenient government. When Oregon was

-admitted in 1859, Washington was made to include all the Oregon country

-outside the state, embracing the present Washington and Idaho, portions

-of Montana and Wyoming, and extending to the continental divide.

-Through it ran the overland trail from Fort Hall almost to Walla Walla.

-Because of its urging Congress built a new wagon road that was passable

-by 1860 from Fort Benton, on the upper Missouri, to the junction of the

-Columbia and Snake. Farther east the active business of the American

-Fur Company had by 1859 established steamboat communication from St.

-Louis to Fort Benton, so that an overland route to rival the old Platte

-trail was now available.

-

-In eastern Washington the most important of the Indians were the Nez

-Percés, whose peaceful habits and friendly disposition had been noted

-since the days of Lewis and Clark, and who had permitted their valley

-of the Snake to become a main route to Oregon. Treaties with these had

-been made in 1855 by Governor Stevens, in accordance with which most of

-the tribe were in 1860 living on their reserve at the junction of the

-Clearwater and Snake, and were fairly prosperous. Here as elsewhere was

-the specific agreement that no whites save government employees should

-be allowed in the Indian Country; but in the summer of 1861 the news

-that gold had been found along the Clearwater brought the agreement to

-naught. Gold had actually been discovered the summer before. In the

-spring of 1861 pack trains from Walla Walla brought a horde of miners

-east over the range, while steamboats soon found their way up the

-Snake. In the fork between the Clearwater and Snake was a good landing

-where, in the autumn of 1861, sprang up the new Lewiston, named in

-honor of the great explorer, acting as centre of life for five thousand

-miners in the district, and showing by its very existence on the Indian

-reserve the futility of treaty restrictions in the face of the gold

-fever. The troubles of the Indian department were great. "To attempt

-to restrain miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to restrain

-the whirlwind," reported Superintendent Kendall. "The history of

-California, Australia, Frazer river, and even of the country of which I

-am now writing, furnishes abundant evidence of the attractive power of

-even only reported gold discoveries.

-

-"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed fact, and are equalled

-in richness by few recorded discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility

-of preventing miners from going to the mines, I have refrained from

-taking any steps which, by certain want of success, would tend to

-weaken the force of the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided

-giving any consent to unauthorized statements, and verbally instructed

-the agent in charge that, while he might not be able to enforce the

-laws for want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt to lay

-out a town at the juncture of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, as he

-had expressed a desire of doing."

-

-Continued developments proved that Lewiston was in the centre of a

-region of unusual mineral wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed

-closely by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary of the

-Snake, a little farther south. The Boisé mines came on the heels of

-this boom, being followed by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of

-the great bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured the usual

-flood of miners from the whole West. Before 1862 was over eastern

-Washington had outgrown the bounds of the territorial government on

-Puget Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the placers of the

-Colorado Valley, and the Carson and Virginia City camps, these called

-for and received a new territorial establishment.

-

-In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska had met along a

-common boundary at the top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington

-was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape under the pressure

-of a small but active population north of its seat of government. The

-centres of population in Nebraska north of the Platte River represented

-chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota. Emigrating from these

-states farmers had by 1860 opened the country on the left bank of the

-Missouri, in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri traffic had

-developed both shores of the river past Fort Pierre and Fort Union

-to Fort Benton, by 1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people

-here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along the line of the

-Missouri and the forty-third parallel. Dakota had been created out of

-the country thus cut loose and in two years more shared in the fate

-of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in 1863 to provide home

-rule for the miners of the new mineral region. It included a great

-rectangle, on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah and

-Nebraska, west to its present western boundary at Oregon and 117°,

-east to 104°, the present eastern line of Montana and Wyoming. Dakota

-and Washington were cut down for its sake.

-

-It seemed, in 1862 and 1863, as though every little rivulet in the

-whole mountain country possessed its treasures to be given up to the

-first prospector with the hardihood to tickle its soil. Four important

-districts along the upper course of the Snake, not to mention hundreds

-of minor ones, lent substance to this appearance. Almost before Idaho

-could be organized its area of settlement had broadened enough to make

-its own division in the near future a certainty. East of the Bitter

-Root Mountains, in the head waters of the Missouri tributaries, came a

-long series of new booms.

-

-When the American Fur Company pushed its little steamer _Chippewa_ up

-to the vicinity of Fort Benton in 1859, none realized that a new era

-for the upper Missouri had nearly arrived. For half a century the fur

-trade had been followed in this region and had dotted the country with

-tiny forts and palisades, but there had been no immigration, and no

-reason for any. The Mullan road, which Congress had authorized in 1855,

-was in course of construction from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, but as

-yet there were few immigrants to follow the new route. Considerably

-before the territory of Idaho was created, however, the active

-prospectors of the Snake Valley had crossed the range and inspected

-most of the Blackfoot country in the direction of Fort Benton. They

-had organized for themselves a Missoula County, Washington territory,

-in July, 1862, an act which may be taken as the beginning of an

-entirely new movement.

-

-Two brothers, James and Granville Stuart, were the leaders in

-developing new mineral areas east of the main range. After experience

-in California and several years of life along the trails, they settled

-down in the Deer Lodge Valley, and began to open up their mines in

-1861. They accomplished little this year since the steamboat to Fort

-Benton, carrying supplies, was burned, and their trip to Walla Walla

-for shovels and picks took up the rest of the season. But early in

-1862 they were hard and successfully at work. Reënforcements, destined

-for the Salmon River mines farther west, came to them in June; one

-party from Fort Benton, the other from the Colorado diggings, and both

-were easily persuaded to stay and join in organizing Missoula County.

-Bannack City became the centre of their operations.

-

-Alder Gulch and Virginia City were, in 1863, a second focus for the

-mines of eastern Idaho. Their deposits had been found by accident

-by a prospecting party which was returning to Bannack City after an

-unsuccessful trip. The party, which had been investigating the Big

-Horn Mountains, discovered Alder Gulch between the Beaver Head and

-Madison rivers, early in June. With an accurate knowledge of the

-mining population, the discoverers organized the mining district and

-registered their own claims before revealing the location of the new

-diggings. Then came a stampede from Bannack City which gave to Virginia

-City a population of 10,000 by 1864.

-

-Another mining district, in Last Chance Gulch, gave rise in 1864 to

-Helena, the last of the great boom towns of this period. Its situation

-as well as its resources aided in the growth of Helena, which lay a

-little west of the Madison fork of the Missouri, and in the direct line

-from Bannack and Virginia City to Fort Benton. Only 142 miles of easy

-staging above the head of Missouri River navigation, it was a natural

-post on the main line of travel to the northwest fields.

-

-The excitement over Bannack and Virginia and Helena overlapped in years

-the period of similar boom in Idaho. It had begun even before Idaho had

-been created. When this was once organized, the same inconveniences

-which had justified it, justified as well its division to provide home

-rule for the miners east of the Bitter Root range. An act of 1864

-created Montana territory with the boundaries which the state possesses

-to-day, while that part of Idaho south of Montana, now Wyoming, was

-temporarily reattached to Dakota. Idaho assumed its present form. The

-simultaneous development in all portions of the great West of rich

-mining camps did much to attract public attention as well as population.

-

-In 1863 nearly all of the camps were flourishing. The mountains were

-occupied for the whole distance from Mexico to Canada, while the trails

-were crowded with emigrants hunting for fortune. The old trails bore

-much of the burden of migration as usual, but new spurs were opened

-to meet new needs. In the north, the Mullan road had made easy travel

-from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, and had been completed since 1862.

-Congress authorized in 1864 a new road from eastern Nebraska, which

-should run north of the Platte trail, and the war department had sent

-out personally conducted parties of emigrants from the vicinity of St.

-Paul. The Idaho and Montana mines were accessible from Fort Hall, the

-former by the old emigrant road, the latter by a new northeast road to

-Virginia City. The Carson mines were on the main line of the California

-road. The Arizona fields were commonly reached from California, by way

-of Fort Yuma.

-

-The shifting population which inhabited the new territories invites

-and at the same time defies description. It was made up chiefly of

-young men. Respectable women were not unknown, but were so few in

-number as to have little measurable influence upon social life. In

-many towns they were in the minority, even among their sex, since the

-easily won wealth of the camps attracted dissolute women who cannot

-be numbered but who must be imagined. The social tone of the various

-camps was determined by the preponderance of men, the absence of

-regular labor, and the speculative fever which was the justification

-of their existence. The political tone was determined by the nature

-of the population, the character of the industry, and the remoteness

-from a seat of government. Combined, these factors produced a type of

-life the like of which America had never known, and whose picturesque

-qualities have blinded the thoughtless into believing that it was

-romantic. It was at best a hard bitter struggle with the dark places

-only accentuated by the tinsel of gambling and adventure.

-

-A single street meandering along a valley, with one-story huts

-flanking it in irregular rows, was the typical mining camp. The saloon

-and the general store, sometimes combined, were its representative

-institutions. Deep ruts along the street bore witness to the heavy

-wheels of the freighters, while horses loosely tied to all available

-posts at once revealed the regular means of locomotion, and by the

-careless way they were left about showed that this sort of property

-was not likely to be stolen. The mining population centring here lived

-a life of contrasts. The desolation and loneliness of prospecting and

-working claims alternated with the excitement of coming to town. Few

-decent beings habitually lived in the towns. The resident population

-expected to live off the miners, either in way of trade, or worse.

-The bar, the gambling-house, the dance-hall have been made too common

-in description to need further account. In the reaction against

-loneliness, the extremes of drunkenness, debauchery, and murder were

-only too frequent in these places of amusement.

-

-That the camps did not destroy themselves in their own frenzy is a

-tribute to the solid qualities which underlay the recklessness and

-shiftlessness of much of the population. In most of the camps there

-came a time when decency finally asserted itself in the only possible

-way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity with which these camps had

-drawn their hundreds and their thousands into the fastnesses of the

-territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary law and regular

-institutions. Law and the politician followed fast enough, but there

-was generally an interval after the discovery during which such peace

-prevailed as the community itself demanded. In absence of sheriff and

-constable, and jail in which to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance

-committee was the only protection of the new camp. Such summary justice

-as these committees commonly executed is evidence of innate tendency

-toward law and order, not of their defiance. The typical camp passed

-through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start, then came

-an era of invasion by hordes of miners and disreputable hangers-on,

-with accompanying violence and crime. Following this, the vigilance

-committee, in its stern repression of a few of the crudest sins, marks

-the beginning of a reign of law.

-

-The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized the United

-States with the whole area of the nation, and dispelled most of the

-remaining tradition of desert which hung over the mountain West. They

-attracted a large floating population, they secured the completion of

-the political map through the erection of new territories, and they

-emphasized loudly the need for national transportation on a larger

-scale than the trail and the stage coach could permit. But they did

-not directly secure the presence of permanent population in the new

-territories. Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants as soon

-as the first flush of discovery was over. Montana, Idaho, and Colorado

-declined rapidly to a fraction of their largest size. None of them was

-successful in securing a large permanent population until agriculture

-had gained firm foothold. Many indeed who came to mine remained to

-plough, but the permanent populating of the Far West was the work

-of railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the mining camps

-had served their purpose in revealing the nature of the whole of the

-national domain.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XI

-

-THE OVERLAND MAIL

-

-

-Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized

-traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all

-the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri

-border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and

-left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not

-self-supporting for a decade or more; few of them were independent

-within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand for necessities

-and luxuries which must be hauled from the states to the new market

-by the routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled. Greater

-than their need for material supplies was that for intellectual

-stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and the regular carriage of the mails

-were constantly demanded of the express companies and the post-office

-department. To meet this pressure there was organized in the fifties

-a great system of wagon traffic. In the years from 1858 to 1869 it

-reached its mighty culmination; while its possibilities of speed,

-order, and convenience had only just come to be realized when the

-continental railways brought this agency of transportation to an end.

-

-The individual emigrant who had gathered together his family, his

-flocks, and his household goods, who had cut away from the life at

-home and staked everything on his new venture, was the unit in the

-great migrations. There was no regular provision for going unless one

-could form his own self-contained and self-supporting party. Various

-bands grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence, but the

-characteristic feature of the emigration was private initiative. The

-home-seekers had no power in themselves to maintain communication

-with the old country, yet they had no disposition to be forgotten or

-to forget. Professional freighting companies and carriers of mails

-appeared just as soon as the traffic promised a profit.

-

-A water mail to California had been arranged even before the gold

-discovery lent a new interest to the Pacific Coast. From New York

-to the Isthmus, and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be

-carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which sent the

-nucleus of its fleet around Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The

-arrival of the first mail in San Francisco in February, 1849, commenced

-the regular public communication between the United States and the

-new colonies. For the places lying away from the coast, mails were

-hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and

-California were given a measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.

-

-There is little interest in the earlier phases of the overland mail

-service save in that they foreshadowed greater things. A stage line

-was started from Independence to Santa Fé in the summer of 1849;

-another contract was let to a man named Woodson for a monthly carriage

-to Salt Lake City. Neither of the carriers made a serious attempt to

-stock his route or open stations. Their stages advanced under the same

-conditions, and with little more rapidity than the ordinary emigrant

-or freighter. Mormon interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley

-Carrying Company at about this time. For four or five years both

-government and private industry were experimenting with the problems of

-long-distance wagon traffic,--the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the

-stations, the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort made in 1856,

-by the War Department, to acclimate the Saharan camel on the American

-desert as a beast of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the

-experiment, in execution of which Secretary Davis sent Lieutenant H. C.

-Wayne to the Levant to purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels

-were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio. There is a long

-congressional document filled with the correspondence of this attempt

-and embellished with cuts of types of camels and equipment.

-

-While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas plains, Congress made

-a more definite movement towards supplying the Pacific Slope with

-adequate service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in 1857 to call

-for bids for an overland mail which, in a single organization, should

-join the Missouri to Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run

-at a high scheduled speed. The service which the Postmaster-general

-invited in his advertisement was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or

-semi-monthly at his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years;

-it was to carry through the mails in four-horse wagons in not more

-than twenty-five days. A long list of bidders, including most of the

-firms engaged in plains freighting, responded with their bids and

-itineraries; from them the department selected the offer of a company

-headed by one John Butterfield, and explained to the public in 1857 the

-reasons for its choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract

-was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made a junction near the

-western border of Arkansas, and proceeded thence through Preston,

-Texas, El Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails the company was

-to receive $600,000 a year. The choice of the most southern of routes

-required considerable explanation, since the best-known road ran

-by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this latter route the

-Postmaster-general pointed out the cold and snow of winter, and claimed

-that the experience of the department during seven years proved the

-impossibility of maintaining a regular service here. A second available

-road had been revealed by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across

-northern Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but this was

-likewise too long and too severe. The best route, in his mind--the one

-open all the year, through a temperate climate, suitable for migration

-as well as traffic--was this southern route, via El Paso. It is well to

-remember that the administration which made this choice was democratic

-and of strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific railway was

-expected to follow the course of the overland mail.

-

-The first overland coaches left the opposite ends of the line on

-September 15, 1858. The east-bound stage carried an agent of the

-Post-office Department, whose report states that the through trip to

-Tipton, Missouri, and thence by rail to St. Louis, was made in 20 days,

-18 hours, 26 minutes, actual time. "I cordially congratulate you upon

-the result," wired President Buchanan to Butterfield. "It is a glorious

-triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon follow

-the course of the road, and the East and West will be bound together

-by a chain of living Americans which can never be broken." The route

-was 2795 miles long. For nearly all the way there was no settlement

-upon which the stages could rely. The company built such stations as it

-needed.

-

-The vehicle of the overland mail, the most interesting vehicle of

-the plains, was the coach manufactured by the Abbott-Downing Company

-of Concord, New Hampshire. No better wagon for the purpose has been

-devised. Its heavy wheels, with wide, thick tires, were set far apart

-to prevent capsizing. Its body, braced with iron bands, and built of

-stout white oak, was slung on leather thoroughbraces which took the

-strain better and were more nearly unbreakable than any other springs.

-Inside were generally three seats, for three passengers each, though

-at times as many as fourteen besides the driver and messenger were

-carried. Adjustable curtains kept out part of the rain and cold. High

-up in front sat the driver, with a passenger or two on the box and a

-large assortment of packages tucked away beneath his seat. Behind the

-body was the triangular "boot" in which were stowed the passengers'

-boxes and the mail sacks. The overflow of mail went inside under the

-seats. Mr. Clemens tells of filling the whole body three feet deep with

-mail, and of the passengers being forced to sprawl out on the irregular

-bed thus made for them. Complaining letter-writers tell of sacks

-carried between the axles and the body, under the coach, and of the

-disasters to letters and contents resulting from fording streams. Drawn

-by four galloping mules and painted a gaudy red or green, the coach

-was a visible emblem of spectacular western advance. Horace Greeley's

-coach, bright red, was once charged by a herd of enraged buffaloes and

-overturned, to the discomfort and injury of the venerable editor.

-

-It was no comfortable or luxurious trip that the overland passenger

-had, with all the sumptuous equipment of the new route. The time

-limit was twenty-five days, reduced in practice to twenty-two or

-twenty-three, at the price of constant travel day and night, regardless

-of weather or convenience. One passenger who declined to follow this

-route has left his reason why. The "Southern, known as the Butterfield

-or American Express, offered to start me in an ambulance from St.

-Louis, and to pass me through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on the

-Gila River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate portion

-of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and nights--twenty-five being

-schedule time--must be spent in that ambulance; passengers becoming

-crazy by whiskey, mixed with want of sleep, are often obliged to be

-strapped to their seats; their meals, despatched during the ten-minute

-halts, are simply abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate

-malarious; lamps may not be used at night for fear of non-existent

-Indians: briefly there is no end to this Via Mala's miseries." But the

-alternative which confronted this traveller in 1860 was scarcely more

-pleasant. "You may start by stage to the gold regions about Denver City

-or Pike's Peak, and thence, if not accidentally or purposely shot, you

-may proceed by an uncertain ox train to Great Salt Lake City, which

-latter part cannot take less than thirty-five days."

-

-Once upon the road, the passenger might nearly as well have been at

-sea. There was no turning back. His discomforts and dangers became

-inevitable. The stations erected along the trail were chiefly for the

-benefit of the live stock. Horses and mules must be kept in good shape,

-whatever happened to passengers. Some of the depots, "home stations,"

-had a family in residence, a dwelling of logs, adobe, or sod, and

-offered bacon, potatoes, bread, and coffee of a sort, to those who were

-not too squeamish. The others, or "swing" stations, had little but a

-corral and a haystack, with a few stock tenders. The drivers were often

-drunk and commonly profane. The overseers and division superintendents

-differed from them only in being a little more resolute and dangerous.

-Freighting and coaching were not child's play for either passengers or

-employees.

-

-The Butterfield Overland Express began to work its six year contract

-in September, 1858. Other coach and mail services increased the number

-of continental routes to three by 1860. From New Orleans, by way of

-San Antonio and El Paso, a weekly service had been organized, but its

-importance was far less than that of the great route, and not equal to

-that by way of the Great Salt Lake.

-

-Staging over the Platte trail began on a large scale with the discovery

-of gold near Pike's Peak in 1858. The Mormon mails, interrupted by the

-Mormon War, had been revived; but a new concern had sprung up under the

-name of the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company. The firm of

-Jones and Russell, soon to give way to Russell, Majors, and Waddell,

-had seen the possibilities of the new boom camps, and had inaugurated

-regular stage service in May, 1859. Henry Villard rode out in the

-first coach. Horace Greeley followed in June. After some experimenting

-in routes, the line accepted a considerable part of the Platte trail,

-leaving the road at the forks of the river. Here Julesburg came into

-existence as the most picturesque home station on the plains. It was

-at this station that Jack Slade, whom Mark Twain found to be a mild,

-hospitable, coffee-sharing man, cut off the ears of old Jules, after

-the latter had emptied two barrels of bird-shot into him. It was

-"celebrated for its desperadoes," wrote General Dodge. "No twenty-four

-hours passed without its contribution to Boots Hill (the cemetery whose

-every occupant was buried in his boots), and homicide was performed in

-the most genial and whole-souled way."

-

-Before the Denver coach had been running for a year another enterprise

-had brought the central route into greater prominence. Butterfield had

-given California news in less than twenty-five days from the Missouri,

-but California wanted more even than this, until the electric telegraph

-should come. Senator Gwin urged upon the great freight concern the

-starting of a faster service for light mails only. It was William H.

-Russell who, to meet this supposed demand, organized a pony express,

-which he announced to a startled public in the end of March. Across the

-continent from Placerville to St. Joseph he built his stations from

-nine to fifteen miles apart, nearly two hundred in all. He supplied

-these with tenders and riders, stocked them with fodder and fleet

-American horses, and started his first riders at both ends on the 3d of

-April, 1860.

-

-Only letters of great commercial importance could be carried by the

-new express. They were written on tissue paper, packed into a small,

-light saddlebag, and passed from rider to rider along the route. The

-time announced in the schedule was ten days,--two weeks better than

-Butterfield's best. To make it called for constant motion at top

-speed, with horses trained to the work and changed every few miles.

-The carriers were slight men of 135 pounds or under, whose nerve and

-endurance could stand the strain. Often mere boys were employed in the

-dangerous service. Rain or snow or death made no difference to the

-express. Dangers of falling at night, of missing precipitous mountain

-roads where advance at a walk was perilous, had to be faced. When

-Indians were hostile, this new risk had to be run. But for eighteen

-months the service was continued as announced. It ceased only when the

-overland telegraph, in October, 1861, declared its readiness to handle

-through business.

-

-In the pony express was the spectacular perfection of overland service.

-Its best record was some hours under eight days. It was conducted along

-the well-known trail from St. Joseph to Forts Kearney, Laramie, and

-Bridger; thence to Great Salt Lake City, and by way of Carson City to

-Placerville and Sacramento. It carried the news in a time when every

-day brought new rumors of war and disunion, in the pregnant campaign

-of 1860 and through the opening of the Civil War. The records of its

-riders at times approached the marvellous. One lad, William F. Cody,

-who has since lived to become the personal embodiment of the Far West

-as Buffalo Bill, rode more than 320 consecutive miles on a single

-tour. The literature of the plains is full of instances of courage and

-endurance shown in carrying through the despatches.

-

-The Butterfield mail was transferred to the central route of the pony

-express in the summer of 1861. For two and a half years it had run

-steadily along its southern route, proving the entire practicability

-of carrying on such a service. But its expense had been out of all

-proportion to its revenue. In 1859 the Postmaster-general reported

-that its total receipts from mails had been $27,229.94, as against a

-cost of $600,000. It is not unlikely that the fast service would have

-been dropped had not the new military necessity of 1861 forbidden any

-act which might loosen the bonds between the Pacific and the Atlantic

-states. Congress contemplated the approach of war and authorized early

-in 1861 the abandonment of the southern route through the confederate

-territory, and the transfer of the service to the line of the pony

-express. To secure additional safety the mails were sent by way of

-Davenport, Iowa, and Omaha, to Fort Kearney a few times, but Atchison

-became the starting-point at last, while military force was used to

-keep the route free from interference. The transfer worked a shortening

-of from five to seven days over the southern route.

-

-In the autumn of 1861, when the overland mail and the pony express were

-both running at top speed along the Platte trail, the overland service

-reached its highest point. In October the telegraph brought an end to

-the express. "The Pacific to the Atlantic sends greeting," ran the

-first message over the new wire, "and may both oceans be dry before a

-foot of all the land that lies between them shall belong to any other

-than one united country." Probably the pony express had done its share

-in keeping touch between California and the Union. Certainly only its

-national purpose justified its existence, since it was run at a loss

-that brought ruin to Russell, its backer, and to Majors and Waddell,

-his partners.

-

-Russell, Majors, and Waddell, with the biggest freighting business of

-the plains, had gone heavily into passenger and express service in

-1859-1860. Russell had forced through the pony express against the

-wishes of his partners, carried away from practical considerations

-by the magnitude of the idea. The transfer of the southern overland

-to their route increased their business and responsibility. The

-future of the route steadily looked larger. "Every day," wrote the

-Postmaster-general, "brings intelligence of the discovery of new

-mines of gold and silver in the region traversed by this mail route,

-which gives assurance that it will not be many years before it will

-be protected and supported throughout the greater part of the route

-by a civilized population." Under the name of the Central Overland,

-California, and Pike's Peak Express the firm tried to keep up a

-struggle too great for them. "Clean out of Cash and Poor Pay" is said

-to have been an irreverent nickname coined by one of their drivers.

-As their embarrassments steadily increased, their notes were given to

-a rival contractor who was already beginning local routes to reach

-the mining camps of eastern Washington. Ben Holladay had been the

-power behind the company for several months before the courts gave him

-control of their overland stage line in 1862. The greatest names in

-this overland business are first Butterfield, then Russell, Majors, and

-Waddell, and then Ben Holladay, whose power lasted until he sold out

-to Wells, Fargo, and Company in 1866. Ben Holladay was the magnate of

-the plains during the early sixties. A hostile critic, Henry Villard,

-has written that he was "a genuine specimen of the successful Western

-pioneer of former days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful,

-false, and cunning." In later days he carried his speculation into

-railways and navigation, but already his was the name most often heard

-in the West. Mark Twain, who has left in "Roughing It" the best picture

-of life in the Far West in this decade, speaks lightly of him when he

-tells of a youth travelling in the Holy Land with a reverend preceptor

-who was impressing upon him the greatness of Moses, "'the great guide,

-soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot where

-we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in

-extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children

-of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over

-the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and

-landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot. It

-was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack. Think of it!"

-

-"'Forty years? Only three hundred miles?'" replied Jack. "'Humph! Ben

-Holladay would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!'"

-

-Under Holladay's control the passenger and express service were

-developed into what was probably the greatest one-man institution in

-America. He directed not only the central overland, but spur lines with

-government contracts to upper California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

-He travelled up and down the line constantly himself, attending in

-person to business in Washington and on the Pacific. The greatest

-difficulties in his service were the Indians and progress as stated in

-the railway. Man and nature could be fought off and overcome, but the

-life of the stage-coach was limited before it was begun.

-

-The Indian danger along the trails had steadily increased since the

-commencement of the migrations. For many years it had not been large,

-since there was room for all and the emigrants held well to the beaten

-track. But the gold camps had introduced settlers into new sections,

-and had sent prospectors into all the Indian Country. The opening of

-new roads to the Pacific increased the pressure, until the Indians

-began to believe that the end was at hand unless they should bestir

-themselves. The last years of the overland service, between 1862 and

-1868, were hence filled with Indian attacks. Often for weeks no coach

-could go through. Once, by premeditation, every station for nearly two

-hundred miles was destroyed overnight, Julesburg, the greatest of them

-all, being in the list. The presence of troops to defend seemed only to

-increase the zeal of the red men to destroy.

-

-Besides these losses, which lessened his profits and threatened ruin,

-Holladay had to meet competition in his own trade, and detraction as

-well. Captain James L. Fiske, who had broken a new road through from

-Minnesota to Montana, came east in 1863, "by the 'overland stage,'

-travelling over the saline plains of Laramie and Colorado Territory

-and the sand deserts of Nebraska and Kansas. The country was strewed

-with the skeletons and carcases of cattle, and the graves of the early

-Mormon and California pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst

-emigrant route that I have ever travelled; much of the road is through

-deep sand, feed is very scanty, a great deal of the water is alkaline,

-and the snows in winter render it impassable for trains. The stage line

-is wretchedly managed. The company undertake to furnish travellers with

-meals, (at a dollar a meal,) but very frequently on arriving at a

-station there was nothing to eat, the supplies had not been sent on. On

-one occasion we fasted for thirty-six hours. The stages were sometimes

-in a miserable condition. We were put into a coach one night with only

-two boards left in the bottom. On remonstrating with the driver, we

-were told to hold on by the sides."

-

-At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay controlled a monopoly

-in stage service between the Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The

-express companies and railways met him at the ends of his link, but had

-to accept his terms for intermediate traffic. In the summer of 1865

-a competing firm started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on

-the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that Indian dangers here

-were greater than along the Platte, and it learned how near it was to

-bankruptcy when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had sent

-his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand a more detailed

-statement of resources and conditions than the Overland Despatch itself

-possessed. He purchased easily at his own price and so ended this

-danger of competition.

-

-Such was the character of the overland traffic that any day might

-bring a successful rival, or loss by accident. Holladay seems to have

-realized that the advantages secured by priority were over, and that

-the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866 he sold out his

-lines to the greatest of his competitors, Wells, Fargo, and Company.

-He sold out wisely. The new concern lost on its purchase through the

-rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the Pacific railway had

-advanced so far that the end of the mail route was moved to Fort

-Kearney in November. By May, 1869, some years earlier than Wells, Fargo

-had estimated, the road was done. And on the completion of the Union

-and Central Pacific railways the great period of the overland mail was

-ended.

-

-Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland freight that lacked

-the seeming romance of the former, but possessed quite as much of

-real significance. No one has numbered the trains of wagons that

-supplied the Far West. Santa Fé wagons they were now; Pennsylvania

-or Pittsburg wagons they had been called in the early days of the

-Santa Fé trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the remoter time

-of the trans-Alleghany migrations. But whatever their name, they

-retained the characteristics of the wagons and caravans of the earlier

-period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons, organized in trains

-of twenty-six, from the Butterfield Overland Despatch in 1866. Six

-thousand were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in 1865. One

-of the drivers on the overland mail, Frank Root, relates that Russell,

-Majors, and Waddell owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height of

-their business. The long trains, crawling along half hidden in their

-clouds of dust, with the noises of the animals and the profanity of

-the drivers, were the physical bond between the sections. The mail and

-express served politics and intellect; the freighters provided the

-comforts and decencies of life.

-

-The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the first migrations.

-Its growth during the fifties and its triumphant period in the sixties

-were great arguments in favor of the construction of railways to take

-its place. It came to an end when the first continental railroad

-was completed in 1869. For decades after this time the stages still

-found useful service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional

-exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the railways were following

-them closely, for a new period of American history had begun.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XII

-

-THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER

-

-

-In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented

-the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the

-Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus

-and had advocates throughout its section of the country. The list of

-claimants is a catalogue of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans,

-Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Duluth were all

-entered in the competition. By 1860 the idea had received general

-acceptance; no one in the future need urge its adoption, but the

-greatest part of the work remained to be done.

-

-Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway was of

-uncertain origin and parentage. Just so soon as there was a railroad

-anywhere, it was inevitable that some enterprising visionary should

-project one in imagination to the extremity of the continent. The

-railway speculation, with which the East was seething during the

-administrations of Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West,

-so that the group of men advocating a railway to connect the oceans

-were but the product of their time.

-

-Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant

-interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the

-Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be

-possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none

-had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted

-a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that

-"the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate

-nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned

-Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that

-the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated

-persistently for his project.

-

-The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest, coming in the years

-immediately after the commencement of Whitney's advocacy, gave new

-point to arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional

-element. So long as Oregon constituted the whole American frontage on

-the Pacific it was idle to debate railway routes south of South Pass.

-This was the only known, practicable route, and it was the course

-recommended by all the projectors, down to Whitney. But with California

-won, the other trails by El Paso and Santa Fé came into consideration

-and at once tempted the South to make the railway tributary to its own

-interests.

-

-Chief among the politicians who fell in with the growing railway

-movement was Senator Benton, who tried to place himself at its

-head. "The man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I

-say (without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October, 1844,

-"who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific

-Ocean--entering the Oregon River--climbing the western slopes of the

-Rocky Mountains--issuing from its gorges--and spreading its fertilizing

-streams over our wide-extended Union!" After this date there was no

-subject closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy

-was constant. His last word in the Senate was concerning it. In 1849

-he carried off its feet the St. Louis railroad convention with his

-eloquent appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron road, and

-make it from sea to sea--States and individuals making it east of

-the Mississippi, the nation making it west. Let us ... rise above

-everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ... build the great

-road ... which shall be adorned with ... the colossal statue of the

-great Columbus--whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass

-of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road ... pointing

-with outstretched arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying

-passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"

-

-By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad could be built along

-the Platte route, and it was believed that the mountains could be

-penetrated in several other places, but the process of surveying

-with reference to a particular railway had not yet been begun. It

-is possible and perhaps instructive to make a rough grouping, in two

-classes divided by the year 1842, of the explorations before 1853.

-So late as Frémont's day it was not generally known whether a great

-river entered the Pacific between the Columbia and the Colorado.

-Prior to 1842 the explorations are to be regarded as "incidents"

-and "adventures" in more or less unknown countries. The narratives

-were popular rather than scientific, representing the experiences of

-parties surveying boundary lines or locating wagon roads, of troops

-marching to remote posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and

-casual explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed a large mass

-of detailed but unorganized information concerning the country where

-the continental railway must run. But Lieutenant Frémont, in 1842,

-commenced the effort by the United States to acquire accurate and

-comprehensive knowledge of the West. In 1842, 1843, and 1845 Frémont

-conducted the three Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him

-for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by Charles Preuss for his

-second expedition, confined itself in strict scientific fashion to the

-facts actually observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the best

-map made before 1853. The individual expeditions which in the later

-forties filled in the details of portions of the Frémont map are too

-numerous for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before 1853, all

-serving to extend both general and particular knowledge of the West. To

-these was added a great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants

-and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific knowledge of

-nearly all the West, and accurate information concerning some portions

-of it. The railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction in

-which the roads must run, but no road could well be located without a

-more comprehensive survey than had yet been made.

-

-The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was founded almost

-exclusively upon general and inaccurate knowledge of the West. The

-exact location of the line was naturally left for the professional

-civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself with general

-principles. Frequently these were sufficient, yet, as in the case

-of Benton, misinformation led to the waste of strength upon routes

-unquestionably bad. But there was slight danger of the United States

-being led into an unwise route, since in the diversity of routes

-suggested there was deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as

-the idea was received with unanimity, the routes were fought with

-increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved in 1852 when the choice of

-routes had become more important than the method of construction.

-

-In 1852-1853 Congress worked upon one of the many bills to construct

-the much-desired railway to the Pacific. It was discovered that an

-absolute majority in favor of the work existed, but the enemies of the

-measure, virulent in proportion as they were in the minority, were

-able to sow well-fertilized dissent. They admitted and gloried in

-the intrigue which enabled them to command through the time-honored

-method of division. They defeated the road in this Congress. But when

-the army appropriation bill came along in February, 1853, Senator

-Gwin asked for an amendment for a survey. He doubted the wisdom of a

-survey, since, "if any route is reported to this body as the best,

-those that may be rejected will always go against the one selected."

-But he admitted himself to be as a drowning man who "will catch at

-straws," and begged that $150,000 be allowed to the President for a

-survey of the best routes from the Mississippi to the Pacific, the

-survey to be conducted by the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the

-regular army. To a non-committal measure like this the opposition could

-make slight resistance. The Senate, by a vote of 31 to 16, added this

-amendment to the army appropriation bill, while the House concurred in

-nearly the same proportion. The first positive official act towards the

-construction of the road was here taken.

-

-Under the orders of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, well-organized

-exploring parties took to the field in the spring of 1853. Farthest

-north, Isaac I. Stevens, bound for his post as first governor of

-Washington territory, conducted a line of survey to the Pacific between

-the parallels of 47° and 49°, north latitude. South of the Stevens

-survey, four other lines were worked out. Near the parallels of 41° and

-42°, the old South Pass route was again examined. Frémont's favorite

-line, between 38° and 39°, received consideration. A thirty-fifth

-parallel route was examined in great detail, while on this and another

-along the thirty-second parallel the most friendly attentions of the

-War Department were lavished. The second and third routes had few

-important friends. Governor Stevens, because he was a first-rate

-fighter, secured full space for the survey in his charge. But the

-thirty-second and thirty-fifth parallel routes were those which were

-expected to make good.

-

-Governor Stevens left Washington on May 9, 1853, for St. Louis, where

-he made arrangements with the American Fur Company to transport a large

-part of his supplies by river to Fort Union. From St. Louis he ascended

-the Mississippi by steamer to St. Paul, near which city Camp Pierce,

-his first organized camp, had been established. Here he issued his

-instructions and worked into shape his party,--to say nothing of his

-172 half-broken mules. "Not a single full team of broken animals could

-be selected, and well broken riding animals were essential, for most of

-the gentlemen of the scientific corps were unaccustomed to riding." One

-of the engineers dislocated a shoulder before he conquered his steed.

-

-The party assigned to Governor Stevens's command was recruited with

-reference to the varied demands of a general exploring and scientific

-reconnaissance. Besides enlisted men and laborers, it included

-engineers, a topographer, an artist, a surgeon and naturalist, an

-astronomer, a meteorologist, and a geologist. Its two large volumes of

-report include elaborate illustrations and appendices on botany and

-seven different varieties of zoölogy in addition to the geographical

-details required for the railway.

-

-The expedition, in its various branches, attacked the northernmost

-route simultaneously in several places. Governor Stevens led the

-eastern division from St. Paul. A small body of his men, with much of

-the supplies, were sent up the Missouri in the American Fur Company's

-boat to Fort Union, there to make local observations and await the

-arrival of the governor. United there the party continued overland

-to Fort Benton and the mountains. Six years later than this it would

-have been possible to ascend by boat all the way to Fort Benton, but

-as yet no steamer had gone much above Fort Union. From the Pacific end

-the second main division operated. Governor Stevens secured the recall

-of Captain George B. McClellan from duty in Texas, and his detail in

-command of a corps which was to proceed to the mouth of the Columbia

-River and start an eastward survey. In advance of McClellan, Lieutenant

-Saxton was to hurry on to erect a supply depot in the Bitter Root

-Valley, and then to cross the divide and make a junction with the main

-party.

-

-From Governor Stevens's reports it would seem that his survey was a

-triumphal progress. To his threefold capacities as commander, governor,

-and Indian superintendent, nature had added a magnifying eye and

-an unrestrained enthusiasm. No formal expedition had traversed his

-route since the day of Lewis and Clark. The Indians could still be

-impressed by the physical appearance of the whites. His vanity led him

-at each success or escape from accident to congratulate himself on the

-antecedent wisdom which had warded off the danger. But withal, his

-report was thorough and his party was loyal. The _voyageurs_ whom he

-had engaged received his special praise. "They are thorough woodsmen

-and just the men for prairie life also, going into the water as

-pleasantly as a spaniel, and remaining there as long as needed."

-

-Across the undulating fertile plains the party advanced from St. Paul

-with little difficulty. Its draught animals steadily improved in health

-and strength. The Indians were friendly and honest. "My father," said

-Old Crane of the Assiniboin, "our hearts are good; we are poor and have

-not much.... Our good father has told us about this road. I do not

-see how it will benefit us, and I fear my people will be driven from

-these plains before the white men." In fifty-five days Fort Union was

-reached. Here the American Fur Company maintained an extensive post

-in a stockade 250 feet square, and carried on a large trade with "the

-Assiniboines, the Gros Ventres, the Crows, and other migratory bands

-of Indians." At Fort Union, Alexander Culbertson, the agent, became

-the guide of the party, which proceeded west on August 10. From Fort

-Union it was nearly 400 miles to Fort Benton, which then stood on the

-left bank of the Missouri, some eighteen miles below the falls. The

-country, though less friendly than that east of the Missouri, offered

-little difficulty to the party, which covered the distance in three

-weeks. A week later, September 8, a party sent on from Fort Benton met

-Lieutenant Saxton coming east.

-

-The chief problems of the Stevens survey lay west of Fort Benton,

-in the passes of the continental divide. Lieutenant Saxton had left

-Vancouver early in July, crossed the Cascades with difficulty, and

-started up the Columbia from the Dalles on July 18. He reached Fort

-Walla Walla on the 27th, and proceeded thence with a half-breed guide

-through the country of the Spokan and the Coeur d'Alene. Crossing the

-Snake, he broke his only mercurial barometer and was forced thereafter

-to rely on his aneroid. Deviating to the north, he crossed Lake Pend

-d'Oreille on August 10, and reached St. Mary's village, in the Bitter

-Root Valley, on August 28. St. Mary's village, among the Flatheads, had

-been established by the Jesuit fathers, and had advanced considerably,

-as Indian civilization went. Here Saxton erected his supply depot,

-from which he advanced with a smaller escort to join the main party.

-Always, even in the heart of the mountains, the country exceeded his

-expectations. "Nature seemed to have intended it for the great highway

-across the continent, and it appeared to offer but little obstruction

-to the passage of a railroad."

-

-Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced his party at Fort

-Benton, stored much of his government property there, and started

-west with a pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved on

-September 22, anxious lest snow should catch him in the mountains. At

-Fort Benton he left a detachment to make meteorological observations

-during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left another under Lieutenant

-Mullan. On October 7 he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley

-for Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's party, which had been

-spending a difficult season in the passes of the Cascade range. Because

-of overcautious advice which McClellan here gave him, and since his

-animals were tired out with the summer's hardships, he practically

-ended his survey for 1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia

-to Olympia and his new territory.

-

-The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to make one of the first

-of the Pacific railway reports. His was the only survey from the

-Mississippi to the ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30, 1854,

-it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled reports. In 1859 he

-submitted his "narrative and final report" which the Senate ordered

-Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February of

-that year. This document is printed as supplement to Volume I, but

-really consists of two large volumes which are commonly bound together

-as Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes of the reports,

-his are filled with lithographs and engravings of fauna, flora, and

-topography.

-

-The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by Lieutenant E. G.

-Beckwith, of the third artillery, in the summer of 1854. East of Fort

-Bridger, the War Department felt it unnecessary to make a special

-survey, since Frémont had traversed and described the country several

-times and Stansbury had surveyed it carefully as recently as 1849-1850.

-At the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt Lake. During

-April he visited the Green River Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by

-his surveys the entire practicability of railway construction here.

-In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake and passed along

-the Humboldt to the Sacramento Valley. He had no important adventures

-and was impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians, whose

-grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups" were frequently seen. As

-his band approached the Indians would fearfully cache their belongings

-in the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed a novel and ludicrous

-sight of wretchedness to see them approach their bush and attempt,

-slyly (for they still tried to conceal from me what they were about),

-to repossess themselves of their treasures, one bringing out a piece

-of old buckskin, a couple of feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn;

-another a half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition,

-sewed together, which he would swing over his shoulders by a

-string--his only blanket or clothing; while a third brought out a blue

-string, which he girded about him and walked away in full dress--one

-of the lords of the soil." It needed no special emphasis in Beckwith's

-report to prove that a railway could follow this middle route, since

-thousands of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.

-

-[Illustration: FORT SNELLING

-

-From an old photograph, loaned by Horace B. Hudson, of Minneapolis.]

-

-Beckwith, who started his forty-second parallel survey from Salt Lake

-City, had reached that point as one of the officers in Gunnison's

-unfortunate party. Captain J. W. Gunnison had followed Governor Stevens

-into St. Louis in 1853. His field of exploration, the route of 38°-39°,

-was by no means new to him since he had been to Utah with Stansbury

-in 1849 and 1850, and had already written one of the best books upon

-the Mormon settlement. He carried his party up the Missouri to a

-fitting-out camp just below the mouth of the Kansas River, five miles

-from Westport. Like other commanders he spent much time at the start

-in "breaking in wild mules," with which he advanced in rain and mud on

-June 23. For more than two weeks his party moved in parallel columns

-along the Santa Fé road and the Smoky Hill fork of the Kansas. Near

-Walnut creek on the Santa Fé road they united, and soon were following

-the Arkansas River towards the mountains. At Fort Atkinson they found a

-horde of the plains Indians waiting for Major Fitzpatrick to make a

-treaty with them. Always their observations were taken with regularity.

-One day Captain Gunnison spent in vain efforts to secure specimens of

-the elusive prairie dog. On August 1, when they were ready to leave the

-Arkansas and plunge southwest into the Sangre de Cristo range, they

-were gratified "by a clear and beautiful view of the Spanish Peaks."

-

-This thirty-ninth parallel route, which had been a favorite with

-Frémont, crossed the divide near the head of the Rio Grande. Its

-grades, which were difficult and steep at best, followed the Huerfano

-Valley and Cochetopa Pass. Across the pass, Gunnison began his descent

-of the arid alkali valley of the Uncompahgre,--a valley to-day about

-to blossom as the rose because of the irrigation canal and tunnel

-bringing to it the waters of the neighboring Gunnison River. With

-heavy labor, intense heat, and weakening teams, Gunnison struggled on

-through September and October towards Salt Lake in Utah territory. Near

-Sevier Lake he lost his life. Before daybreak, on October 26, he and a

-small detachment of men were surprised by a band of young Paiute. When

-the rest of his party hurried up to the rescue, they found his body

-"pierced with fifteen arrows," and seven of his men lying dead around

-him. Beckwith, who succeeded to the command, led the remainder of the

-party to Salt Lake City, where public opinion was ready to charge the

-Mormons with the murder. Beckwith believed this to be entirely false,

-and made use of the friendly assistance of Brigham Young, who persuaded

-the chiefs of the tribe to return the instruments and records which had

-been stolen from the party.

-

-The route surveyed by Captain Gunnison passed around the northern end

-of the ravine of the Colorado River, which almost completely separates

-the Southwest from the United States. Farther south, within the United

-States, were only two available points at which railways could cross

-the cańon, at Fort Yuma and near the Mojave River. Towards these

-crossings the thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallel surveys were

-directed.

-

-Second only to Governor Stevens's in its extent was the exploration

-conducted by Lieutenant A. W. Whipple from Fort Smith on the Arkansas

-to Los Angeles along the thirty-fifth parallel. Like that of Governor

-Stevens this route was not the channel of any regular traffic, although

-later it was to have some share in the organized overland commerce.

-Here also was found a line that contained only two or three serious

-obstacles to be overcome. Whipple's instructions planned for him to

-begin his observations at the Mississippi, but he believed that the

-navigable Arkansas River and the railways already projected in that

-state made it needless to commence farther east than Fort Smith, on the

-edge of the Indian Country. He began his survey on July 14, 1853. His

-westward march was for two months up the right bank of the Canadian

-River, as it traversed the Choctaw and Chickasaw reserves, to the

-hundredth meridian, where it emerged from the panhandle of Texas, and

-across the panhandle into New Mexico. After crossing the upper waters

-of the Rio Pecos he reached the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, where his

-party tarried for a month or more, working over their observations,

-making local explorations, and sending back to Washington an account

-of their proceedings thus far. Towards the middle of November they

-started on toward the Colorado Chiquita and the Bill Williams Fork,

-through "a region over which no white man is supposed to have passed."

-The severest difficulties of the trip were found near the valley of the

-Colorado River, which was entered at the junction of the Bill Williams

-Fork and followed north for several days. A crossing here was made near

-the supposed mouth of the Mojave River at a place where porphyritic

-and trap dykes, outcropping, gave rise to the name of the Needles.

-The river was crossed February 27, 1854, three weeks before the party

-reached Los Angeles.

-

-South of the route of Lieutenant Whipple, the thirty-second parallel

-survey was run to the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. No

-attempt was made in this case at a comprehensive survey under a single

-leader. Instead, the section from the Rio Grande at El Paso to the

-Red River at Preston, Texas, was run by John Pope, brevet captain in

-the topographical engineers, in the spring of 1854. Lieutenant J. G.

-Parke carried the line at the same time from the Pimas villages on the

-Gila to the Rio Grande. West of the Pimas villages to the Colorado,

-a reconnoissance made by Lieutenant-colonel Emory in 1847 was drawn

-upon. The lines in California were surveyed by yet a different party.

-Here again an easy route was discovered to exist. Within the states of

-California and Oregon various connecting lines were surveyed by parties

-under Lieutenant R. S. Williamson in 1855.

-

-The evidence accumulated by the Pacific railway surveys began to pour

-in upon the War Department in the spring of 1854. Partial reports

-at first, elaborate and minute scientific articles following later,

-made up a series which by the close of the decade filled the twelve

-enormous volumes of the published papers. Rarely have efforts so great

-accomplished so little in the way of actual contribution to knowledge.

-The chief importance of the surveys was in proving by scientific

-observation what was already a commonplace among laymen--that the

-continent was traversable in many places, and that the incidental

-problems of railway construction were in finance rather than in

-engineering. The engineers stood ready to build the road any time and

-almost anywhere.

-

-The Secretary of War submitted to Congress the first instalment of his

-report under the resolution of March 3, 1853, on February 27, 1855. As

-yet the labors of compilation and examination of the field manuscripts

-were by no means completed, but he was able to make general statements

-about the probability of success. At five points the continental

-divide had been crossed; over four of these railways were entirely

-practicable, although the shortest of the routes to San Francisco ran

-by the one pass, Cochetopa, where it would be unreasonable to construct

-a road.

-

-From the routes surveyed, Secretary Davis recommended one as "the most

-practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi

-River to the Pacific Ocean." In all cases cost, speed of construction,

-and ease in operation needed to be ascertained and compared. The

-estimates guessed at by the parties in the field, and revised by the

-War Department, pointed to the southernmost as the most desirable

-route. To reach this conclusion it was necessary to accuse Governor

-Stevens of underestimating the cost of labor along his northern line;

-but the figures as taken were conclusive. On this thirty-second

-parallel route, declared the Secretary of War, "the progress of the

-work will be regulated chiefly by the speed with which cross-ties

-and rails can be delivered and laid.... The few difficult points ...

-would delay the work but an inconsiderable period.... The climate on

-this route is such as to cause less interruption to the work than on

-any other route. Not only is this the shortest and least costly route

-to the Pacific, but it is the shortest and cheapest route to San

-Francisco, the greatest commercial city on our western coast; while

-the aggregate length of railroad lines connecting it at its eastern

-terminus with the Atlantic and Gulf seaports is less than the aggregate

-connection with any other route."

-

-The Pacific railway surveys had been ordered as the only step which

-Congress in its situation of deadlock could take. Senator Gwin had long

-ago told his fears that the advocates of the disappointed routes would

-unite to hinder the fortunate one. To the South, as to Jefferson Davis,

-Secretary of War, the thirty-second parallel route was satisfactory;

-but there was as little chance of building a railway as there had been

-in 1850. In days to come, discussion of railways might be founded upon

-facts rather than hopes and fears, but either unanimity or compromise

-was in a fairly remote future. The overland traffic, which was assuming

-great volume as the surveys progressed, had yet nearly fifteen years

-before the railway should drive it out of existence. And no railway

-could even be started before war had removed one of the contesting

-sections from the floor of Congress.

-

-Yet in the years since Asa Whitney had begun his agitation the railways

-of the East had constantly expanded. The first bridge to cross the

-Mississippi was under construction when Davis reported in 1855. The

-Illinois Central was opened in 1856. When the Civil War began, the

-railway frontier had become coterminous with the agricultural frontier,

-and both were ready to span the gap which separated them from the

-Pacific.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIII

-

-THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD

-

-

-It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of the Union Pacific

-Railroad that the period of agitation was approaching probable success

-when the latter was deferred because of the rivalry of sections and

-localities into which the scheme was thrown. From about 1850 until 1853

-it indeed seemed likely that the road would be built just so soon as

-the terminus could be agreed upon. To be sure, there was keen rivalry

-over this; yet the rivalry did not go beyond local jealousies and might

-readily be compromised. After the reports of the surveys were completed

-and presented to Congress the problem took on a new aspect which

-promised postponement until a far greater question could be solved.

-Slavery and the Pacific railroad are concrete illustrations of the two

-horns of the national dilemma.

-

-As a national project, the railway raised the problem of its

-construction under national auspices. Was the United States, or

-should it become, a nation competent to undertake the work? With no

-hesitation, many of the advocates of the measure answered yes. Yet

-even among the friends of the road the query frequently evoked the

-other answer. Slavery had already taken its place as an institution

-peculiar to a single section. Its defence and perpetuation depended

-largely upon proving the contrary of the proposition that the Pacific

-railroad demanded. For the purposes of slavery defence the United

-States must remain a mere federation, limited in powers and lacking in

-the attributes of sovereignty and nationality. Looking back upon this

-struggle, with half a century gone by, it becomes clear that the final

-answer upon both questions, slavery and railway, had to be postponed

-until the more fundamental question of federal character had been

-worked out. The antitheses were clear, even as Lincoln saw them in

-1858. Slavery and localism on the one hand, railway and nationalism on

-the other, were engaged in a vital struggle for recognition. Together

-they were incompatible. One or the other must survive alone. Lincoln

-saw a portion of the problem, and he sketched the answer: "I do not

-expect the Union to be dissolved,--I do not expect the house to fall,

-but I do expect it will cease to be divided."

-

-The stages of the Pacific railroad movement are clearly marked

-through all these squabbles. Agitation came first, until conviction

-and acceptance were general. This was the era of Asa Whitney.

-Reconnoissance and survey followed, in a decade covering approximately

-1847-1857. Organization came last, beginning in tentative schemes which

-counted for little, passing through a long series of intricate debates

-in Congress, and being merged in the larger question of nationality,

-but culminating finally in the first Pacific railroad bills of 1862 and

-1864.

-

-When Congress began its session of 1853-1854, most of the surveying

-parties contemplated by the act of the previous March were still in

-the field. The reports ordered were not yet available, and Congress

-recognized the inexpediency of proceeding farther without the facts.

-It is notable, however, that both houses at this time created select

-committees to consider propositions for a railway. Both of these

-committees reported bills, but neither received sanction even in the

-house of its friends. The next session, 1854-1855, saw the great

-struggle between Douglas and Benton.

-

-Stephen A. Douglas, who had triumphantly carried through his

-Kansas-Nebraska bill in the preceding May, started a railway bill in

-the Senate in 1855. As finally considered and passed by the Senate,

-his bill provided for three railroads: a Northern Pacific, from the

-western border of Wisconsin to Puget Sound; a Southern Pacific, from

-the western border of Texas to the Pacific; and a Central Pacific,

-from Missouri or Iowa to San Francisco. They were to be constructed by

-private parties under contracts to be let jointly by the Secretaries

-of War and Interior and the Postmaster-general. Ultimately they were

-to become the property of the United States and the states through

-which they passed. The House of Representatives, led by Benton in the

-interests of a central road, declined to pass the Douglas measure.

-Before its final rejection, it was amended to please Benton and his

-allies by the restriction to a single trunk line from San Francisco,

-with eastern branches diverging to Lake Superior, Missouri or Iowa, and

-Memphis.

-

-During the two years following the rejection of the Douglas scheme

-by the allied malcontents, the select committees on the Pacific

-railways had few propositions to consider, while Congress paid little

-attention to the general matter. Absorbing interest in politics,

-the new Republican party, and the campaign of 1856 were responsible

-for part of the neglect. The conviction of the dominant Democrats

-that the nation had no power to perform the task was responsible

-for more. The transition from a question of selfish localism to one

-of national policy which should require the whole strength of the

-nation for its solution was under way. The northern friends of the

-railway were disheartened by the southern tendencies of the Democratic

-administration which lasted till 1861. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary

-of War, was followed by Floyd, of Virginia, who believed with his

-predecessor that the southern was the most eligible route. At the same

-time, Aaron V. Brown, of Tennessee, Postmaster-general, was awarding

-the postal contract for an overland mail to Butterfield's southern

-route in spite of the fact that Congress had probably intended the

-central route to be employed.

-

-Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress show the difficulties

-under which the railroad labored. Many bills were started, but few

-could get through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed a bill. In

-1860 the House passed one which the Senate amended to death. In the

-session of 1860-1861 its serious consideration was crowded out by the

-incipiency of war.

-

-Through the long years of debate over the organization of the road, the

-nature of its management and the nature of its governmental aid were

-much in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the United States had

-undertaken no such scheme, while the Cumberland road, vastly less in

-magnitude than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties to

-last a generation. That there must be some connection between the road

-and the public lands had been seen even before Whitney commenced his

-advocacy. The nature of that connection was worked out incidentally to

-other movements while the Whitney scheme was under fire.

-

-The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements in transportation

-had been hinted at as far back as the admission of Ohio, but it had not

-received its full development until the railroad period began. To some

-extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands had been allotted to

-the states to aid in canal building, but when the railroad promoters

-started their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the history

-of the public domain was commenced. The definitive fight over the

-issue of land grants for railways took place in connection with the

-Illinois Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years from 1847 to

-1850.

-

-The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made its appearance

-before the panic of 1837. The northwest states were now building their

-own railroads, and this enterprise was designed to connect the Galena

-lead country with the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi by a road

-running parallel to the Mississippi through the whole length of the

-state of Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran naturally from

-east to west, seeking termini on the Mississippi and at the Alleghany

-crossings. This one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making

-useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a country where yet

-the prairie hen held uncontested sway. There was little population

-or freight to justify it, and hence the project, though it guised

-itself in at least three different corporate garments before 1845,

-failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse railways, on

-whose junctions it had counted, crossed its right-of-way before 1850.

-La Salle, Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its line

-worth marking on a large-scale map, while Chicago was yet under forty

-thousand in population.

-

-Men who in the following decade led the Pacific railway agitation

-promoted the Illinois Central idea in the years immediately preceding

-1850. Both Breese and Douglas of Illinois claimed the parentage of the

-bill which eventually passed Congress in 1850, and by opening the way

-to public aid for railway transportation commenced the period of the

-land-grant railroads. Already in some of the canal grants the method

-of aid had been outlined, alternate sections of land along the line

-of the canal being conveyed to the company to aid it in its work. The

-theory underlying the granting of alternate sections in the familiar

-checker-board fashion was that the public lands, while inaccessible,

-had slight value, but once reached by communication the alternate

-sections reserved by the United States would bring a higher price than

-the whole would have done without the canal, while the construction

-company would be aided without expense to any one. The application of

-this principle to railroads came rather slowly in a Congress somewhat

-disturbed by a doubt as to its power to devote the public resources to

-internal improvements. The sectional character of the Illinois Central

-railway was against it until its promoters enlarged the scheme into a

-Lake-to-Gulf railway by including plans for a continuation to Mobile

-from the Ohio. With southern aid thus enticed to its support, the bill

-became a law in 1850. By its terms, the alternate sections of land in

-a strip ten miles wide were given to the interested states to be used

-for the construction of the Illinois Central and the Mobile and Ohio.

-The grants were made directly to the states because of constitutional

-objections to construction within a state without its consent and

-approval. It was twelve years before Congress was ready to give the

-lands directly to the railroad company.

-

-The decade following the Illinois Central grant was crowded with

-applications from other states for grants upon the same terms. In this

-period of speculative construction before the panic of 1857, every

-western state wanted all the aid it could get. In a single session

-seven states asked for nearly fourteen million acres of land, while

-before 1857 some five thousand miles of railway had been aided by land

-grants.

-

-When Asa Whitney began his agitation for the Pacific railway, he asked

-for a huge land grant, but the machinery and methods of the grants had

-not yet become familiar to Congress. During the subsequent fifteen

-years of agitation and survey the method was worked out, so that when

-political conditions made it possible to build the road, there had

-ceased to be great difficulty in connection with its subsidy.

-

-The sectional problem, which had reached its full development in

-Congress by 1857, prevented any action in the interest of a Pacific

-railway so long as it should remain unchanged. As the bickerings

-widened into war, the railway still remained a practical impossibility.

-But after war had removed from Congress the representatives of the

-southern states the way was cleared for action. When Congress met in

-its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in favor of southern

-routes was silenced by disunion. It remained only to choose among the

-routes lying north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize the

-construction along one of them of the railway which all admitted to be

-possible of construction, and to which military need in preservation of

-the union had now added an imperative quality.

-

-The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a Pacific railway,

-and handed them over to the regular session of 1861-1862 as unfinished

-business. In the lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah, a

-young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave powerful aid to the

-final settlement of route and means. Judah had come east in the autumn

-in company with one of the newly elected California representatives.

-During the long sea voyage he had drilled into his companion, who

-happily was later appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of

-the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem which he had acquired

-in his advocacy of the railway on the Pacific Coast. California had

-begun the construction of local railways several years before the war

-broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant need and prayer. Her own

-corporations were planned with reference to the time when tracks from

-the East should cross her border and find her local creations waiting

-for connections with them.

-

-When the advent of war promised an early maturity for the scheme, a few

-Californians organized the most significant of the California railways,

-the Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company was incorporated,

-having for its leading spirits Judah, its chief engineer, and Collis

-Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford,

-soon to be governor of the state. Its founders were all men of moderate

-means, but they had the best of that foresight and initiative in which

-the frontier was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861 Judah

-prospected for routes across the mountains into Utah territory, where

-the new silver fields around Carson indicated the probable course of a

-route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on to Washington in the

-fall to aid in the quick settlement of the long-debated question.

-

-Judah's interest in a special California road coincided well with the

-needs and desires of Congress. Already various bills were in the hands

-of the select committees of both houses. The southern interest was

-gone. The only remaining rivalries were among St. Louis, Chicago, and

-the new Minnesota; while the first of these was tainted by the doubtful

-loyalty of Missouri, and the last was embarrassed by the newness of its

-territory and its lack of population. The Sioux were yet in control of

-much of the country beyond St. Paul. Out of this rivalry Chicago and a

-central route could emerge triumphant.

-

-The spring of 1862 witnessed a long debate over a Union Pacific

-railroad to meet the new military needs of the United States as well

-as to satisfy the old economic necessities. Why it was called "Union"

-is somewhat in doubt. Bancroft thinks its name was descriptive of the

-various local roads which were bound together in the single continental

-scheme. Davis, on the contrary, is inclined to believe that the name

-was in contrast to the "Disunion" route of the thirty-second parallel,

-since the route chosen was to run entirely through loyal territory.

-Whatever the reason, however, the Union Pacific Railroad Company was

-incorporated on the 1st of July, 1862.

-

-Under the act of incorporation a continental railway was to be

-constructed by several companies. Within the limits of California, the

-Central Pacific of California, already organized and well managed,

-was to have the privilege. Between the boundary line of California

-and Nevada and the hundredth meridian, the new Union Pacific was

-to be the constructing company. On the hundredth meridian, at some

-point between the Republican River in Kansas and the Platte River in

-Nebraska, radiating lines were to advance to various eastern frontier

-points, somewhat after the fashion of Benton's bill of 1855. Thus

-the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western of Kansas was authorized to

-connect this point with the Missouri River, south of the mouth of the

-Kansas, with a branch to Atchison and St. Joseph in connection with

-the Hannibal and St. Joseph of Missouri. The Union Pacific itself was

-required to build two more connections; one to run from the hundredth

-meridian to some point on the west boundary of Iowa, to be fixed by

-the President of the United States, and another to Sioux City, Iowa,

-whenever a line from the east should reach that place.

-

-The aid offered for the construction of these lines was more generous

-than any previously provided by Congress. In the first place, the

-roads were entitled to a right-of-way four hundred feet wide, with

-permission to take material for construction from adjacent parts of the

-public domain. Secondly, the roads were to receive ten sections of land

-for each mile of track on the familiar alternate section principle.

-Finally, the United States was to lend to the roads bonds to the

-amount of $16,000 per mile, on the level, $32,000 in the foothills,

-and $48,000 in the mountains, to facilitate construction. If not

-completed and open by 1876, the whole line was to be forfeited to the

-United States. If completed, the loan of bonds was to be repaid out of

-subsequent earnings.

-

-The Central Pacific of California was prompt in its acceptance of the

-terms of the act of July 1, 1862. It proceeded with its organization,

-broke ground at Sacramento on February 22, 1863, and had a few miles of

-track in operation before the next year closed. But the Union Pacific

-was slow. "While fighting to retain eleven refractory states," wrote

-one irritated critic of the act, "the nation permitted itself to be

-cozened out of territory sufficient to form twelve new republics." Yet

-great as were the offered grants, eastern capital was reluctant to put

-life into the new route across the plains. That it could ever pay, was

-seriously doubted. Chances for more certain and profitable investment

-in the East were frequent in the years of war-time prosperity. Although

-the railroad organized according to the terms of the law, subscribers

-to the stock of the Union Pacific were hard to find, and the road

-lay dormant for two more years until Congress revised its offer and

-increased its terms.

-

-In the session of 1863-1864 the general subject was again approached.

-Writes Davis, "The opinion was almost universal that additional

-legislation was needed to make the Act of 1862 effective, but the

-point where the limit of aid to patriotic capitalists should be set

-was difficult to determine." It was, and remained, the belief of the

-opponents of the bill now passed that "lobbyists, male and female,

-... shysters and adventurers" had much to do with the success of the

-measure. In its most essential parts, the new bill of 1864 increased

-the degree of government aid to the companies. The land grant was

-doubled from ten sections per mile of track to twenty, and the road

-was allowed to borrow of the general public, on first mortgage bonds,

-money to the amount of the United States loan, which was reduced by a

-self-denying ordinance to the status of a second mortgage. With these

-added inducements, the Union Pacific was finally begun.

-

-The project at last under way in 1864-1865, as Davis graphically

-pictures it, "was thoroughly saturated and fairly dripping with the

-elements of adventure and romance." But he overstates his case when he

-goes on to remark that, "Before the building of the Pacific railway

-most of the wide expanse of territory west of the Missouri was _terra

-incognita_ to the mass of Americans." For twenty years the railway had

-been under agitation; during the whole period population had crossed

-the great desert in increasing thousands; new states had banked up

-around its circumference, east, west, and south, while Kansas had been

-thrust into its middle; new camps had dotted its interior. The great

-West was by no means unknown, but with the construction of the railway

-the American frontier entered upon its final phase.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIV

-

-THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR

-

-

-That the fate of the outlying colonies of the United States should

-have aroused grave concerns at the beginning of the Civil War is not

-surprising. California and Oregon, Carson City, Denver, and the other

-mining camps were indeed on the same continent with the contending

-factions, but the degree of their isolation was so great that they

-might as well have been separated by an ocean. Their inhabitants were

-more mixed than those of any portion of the older states, while in

-several of the communities the parties were so evenly divided as to

-raise doubts of the loyalty of the whole. "The malignant secession

-element of this Territory," wrote Governor Gilpin of Colorado, in

-October, 1861, "has numbered 7,500. It has been ably and secretly

-organized from November last, and requires extreme and extraordinary

-measures to meet and control its onslaught." At best, the western

-population was scanty and scattered over a frontier that still

-possessed its virgin character in most respects, though hovering at

-the edge of a period of transition. An English observer, hopeful for

-the worst, announced in the middle of the war that "When that 'late

-lamented institution,' the once United States, shall have passed

-away, and when, after this detestable and fratricidal war--the most

-disgraceful to human nature that civilization ever witnessed--the New

-World shall be restored to order and tranquility, our shikaris will

-not forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel suffices to

-transport them from fallow deer and pheasant shooting to the haunts of

-the bison and the grizzly bear. There is little chance of these animals

-being 'improved off' the Prairies, or even of their becoming rare

-during the lifetime of the present generation." The factors of most

-consequence in shaping the course of the great plains during the Civil

-War were those of mixed population, of ever present Indian danger, and

-of isolation. Though the plains had no effect upon the outcome of the

-war, the war furthered the work already under way of making known the

-West, clearing off the Indians, and preparing for future settlement.

-

-Like the rest of the United States the West was organized into

-military divisions for whose good order commanding officers were made

-responsible. At times the burden of military control fell chiefly upon

-the shoulders of territorial governors; again, special divisions were

-organized to meet particular needs, and generals of experience were

-detached from the main armies to direct movements in the West.

-

-Among the earliest of the episodes which drew attention to the western

-departments was the resignation of Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding

-the Department of the Pacific, and his rather spectacular flight

-across New Mexico, to join the confederate forces. From various

-directions, federal troops were sent to head him off, but he succeeded

-in evading all these and reaching safety at the Rio Grande by August

-1. Here he could take an overland stage for the rest of his journey.

-The department which he abandoned included the whole West beyond the

-Rockies except Utah and present New Mexico. The country between the

-mountains and Missouri constituted the Department of the West. As the

-war advanced, new departments were created and boundaries were shifted

-at convenience. The Department of the Pacific remained an almost

-constant quantity throughout. A Department of the Northwest, covering

-the territory of the Sioux Indians, was created in September, 1862, for

-the better defence of Minnesota and Wisconsin. To this command Pope was

-assigned after his removal from the command of the Army of Virginia.

-Until the close of the war, when the great leaders were distributed and

-Sheridan received the Department of the Southwest, no detail of equal

-importance was made to a western department.

-

-The fighting on the plains was rarely important enough to receive

-the dignified name of battle. There were plenty of marching and

-reconnoitring, much police duty along the trails, occasional skirmishes

-with organized troops or guerrillas, aggressive campaigns against

-the Indians, and campaigns in defence of the agricultural frontier.

-But the armies so occupied were small and inexperienced. Commonly

-regiments of local volunteers were used in these movements, or returned

-captives who were on parole to serve no more against the confederacy.

-Disciplined veterans were rarely to be found. As a consequence of the

-spasmodic character of the plains warfare and the inferior quality

-of the troops available, western movements were often hampered and

-occasionally made useless.

-

-The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important as any of the military

-operations on the plains. At the beginning of the war the confederate

-forces seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear the way

-for Johnston as he hurried east. The Tucson country was occupied about

-the same time, so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts

-were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the Rio Grande, with New

-Mexico, Utah, and Colorado threatened. In December General Henry

-Hopkins Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops in the upper

-Rio Grande, while Colonel E. R. S. Canby, from Fort Craig, organized

-the resistance against further extension of the confederate power.

-

-Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio Grande country,

-around Santa Fé and Albuquerque, aroused federal apprehensions in the

-winter of 1862. Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened at

-the danger within his own territory, and scarcely needed the order

-which came from Fort Leavenworth through General Hunter to reënforce

-Canby and look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility easily,

-drew upon the federal treasury for funds which had not been allowed

-him, and shortly had the first Colorado, and a part of the second

-Colorado volunteers marching south to join the defensive columns. It is

-difficult to define this march in terms applicable to movements of war.

-At least one soldier in the second Colorado took with him two children

-and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the regiment and

-praising the chivalry of the soldiers, apparently oblivious of the fact

-that it is not a soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's

-family. But with wife and children, and the degree of individualism and

-insubordination which these imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched

-south to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was sure.

-

-As Sibley pushed up the river, passing Fort Craig and brushing aside

-a small force at Valverde, the Colorado forces reached Fort Union.

-Between Fort Union and Albuquerque, which Sibley entered easily, was

-the turning-point in the campaign. On March 26, 1862, Major J. M.

-Chivington had a successful skirmish at Johnson's ranch in Apache

-Cańon, about twenty miles southeast of Santa Fé. Two days later, at

-Pigeon's ranch, a more decisive check was given to the confederates,

-but Colonel John P. Slough, senior volunteer in command, fell back upon

-Fort Union after the engagement, while the confederates were left

-free to occupy Santa Fé. A few days later Slough was deposed in the

-Colorado regiment, Chivington made colonel, and the advance on Santa Fé

-begun again. Sibley, now caught between Canby advancing from Fort Craig

-and Chivington coming through Apache Cańon from Fort Union, evacuated

-Santa Fé on April 7, falling back to Albuquerque. The union troops,

-taking Santa Fé on April 12, hurried down the Rio Grande after Sibley

-in his final retreat. New Mexico was saved, and its security brought

-tranquillity to Colorado. The Colorado volunteers were back in Denver

-for the winter of 1862-1863, but Gilpin, whose vigorous and independent

-support had made possible their campaign, had been dismissed from his

-post as governor.

-

-Along the frontier of struggle campaigns of this sort occurred from

-time to time, receiving little attention from the authorities who were

-directing weightier movements at the centre. Less formal than these,

-and more provocative of bitter feeling, were the attacks of guerrillas

-along the central frontier,--chiefly the Missouri border and eastern

-Kansas. Here the passions of the struggle for Kansas had not entirely

-cooled down, southern sympathizers were easily found, and communities

-divided among themselves were the more intense in their animosities.

-

-The Department of Kansas, where the most aggravated of these

-guerrilla conflicts occurred, was organized in November, 1861, under

-Major-general Hunter. From his headquarters at Leavenworth the

-commanding officer directed the affairs of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota,

-Colorado, and "the Indian Territory west of Arkansas." The department

-was often shifted and reshaped to meet the needs of the frontier. A

-year later the Department of the Northwest was cut away from it, after

-the Sioux outbreak, its own name was changed to Missouri, and the

-states of Missouri and Arkansas were added to it. Still later it was

-modified again. But here throughout the war continued the troubles

-produced by the mixture of frontier and farm-lands, partisan whites and

-Indians.

-

-Bushwhacking, a composite of private murder and public attack, troubled

-the Kansas frontier from an early period of the war. It was easily

-aroused because of public animosities, and difficult to suppress

-because its participating parties retired quickly into the body of

-peace-professing citizens. In it, asserted General Order No. 13, of

-June 26, 1862, "rebel fiends lay in wait for their prey to assassinate

-Union soldiers and citizens; it is therefore ... especially directed

-that whenever any of this class of offenders shall be captured, they

-shall not be treated as prisoners of war but be summarily tried by

-drumhead court-martial, and if proved guilty, be executed ... on the

-spot."

-

-In August, 1863, occurred Quantrill's notable raid into Kansas to

-terrify the border which was already harassed enough. The old border

-hatred between Kansas and Missouri had been intensified by the

-"murders, robberies, and arson" which had characterized the irregular

-warfare carried on by both sides. In western Missouri, loyal unionists

-were not safe outside the federal lines; here the guerrillas came and

-went at pleasure; and here, about August 18, Quantrill assembled a

-band of some three hundred men for a foray into Kansas. On the 20th he

-entered Kansas, heading at once for Lawrence, which he surprised on the

-21st. Although the city arsenal contained plenty of arms and the town

-could have mustered 500 men on "half an hour's notice," the guerrilla

-band met no resistance. It "robbed most of the stores and banks, and

-burned one hundred and eighty-five buildings, including one-fourth

-of the private residences and nearly all of the business houses of

-the town, and, with circumstances of the most fiendish atrocity,

-murdered 140 unarmed men." The retreat of Quantrill was followed by

-a vigorous federal pursuit and a partial devastation of the adjacent

-Missouri counties. Kansas, indignant, was in arms at once, protesting

-directly to President Lincoln of the "imbecility and incapacity" of

-Major-general John M. Schofield, commanding the Department of the

-Missouri, "whose policy has opened Kansas to invasion and butchery."

-Instead of carrying out an unimpeded pursuit of the guerrillas,

-Schofield had to devote his strength to keeping the state of Kansas

-from declaring war against and wreaking indiscriminate vengeance upon

-the state of Missouri. A year after Quantrill's raid came Price's

-Missouri expedition, with its pitched battles near Kansas City and

-Westport, and its pursuit through southern Missouri, where confederate

-sympathizers and the partisan politics of this presidential year made

-punitive campaigns anything but easy.

-

-Carleton's march into New Mexico has already been described in

-connection with the mining boom of Arizona. The silver mines of the

-Santa Cruz Valley had drawn American population to Tubac and Tucson

-several years before the war; while the confederate successes in the

-upper Rio Grande in the summer of 1861 had compelled federal evacuation

-of the district. Colonel E. R. S. Canby devoted the small force at his

-command to regaining the country around Albuquerque and Santa Fé, while

-the relief of the forts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado was

-intrusted to Carleton's California Column. After May, 1862, Carleton

-was firmly established in Tucson, and later he was given command of

-the whole Department of New Mexico. Of fighting with the confederates

-there was almost none. He prosecuted, instead, Apache and Navaho wars,

-and exploited the new gold fields which were now found. In much of

-the West, as in his New Mexico, occasional ebullitions of confederate

-sympathizers occurred, but the military task of the commanders was easy.

-

-The military problem of the plains was one of police, with the

-extinction of guerrilla warfare and the pacification of Indians as its

-chief elements. The careers of Canby, Carleton, and Gilpin indicate

-the nature of the western strategic warfare, Schofield's illustrates

-that of guerrilla fighting, the Minnesota outbreak that of the Indian

-relations.

-

-In the Northwest, where the agricultural expansion of the fifties

-had worked so great changes, the pressure on the tribes had steadily

-increased. In 1851 the Sioux bands had ceded most of their territory in

-Minnesota, and had agreed upon a reduced reserve in the St. Peter's,

-or Minnesota, Valley. But the terms of this treaty had been delayed

-in enforcement, while bad management on the part of the United States

-and the habitual frontier disregard of Indian rights created tense

-feelings, which might break loose at any time. No single grievance

-of the Indians caused more trouble than that over traders' claims.

-The improvident savages bought largely of the traders, on credit, at

-extortionate prices. The traders could afford the risk because when

-treaties of cession were made, their influence was generally able to

-get inserted in the treaty a clause for satisfying claims against

-individuals out of the tribal funds before these were handed over to

-the savages. The memory of the savage was short, and when he found that

-his allowance, the price for his lands, had gone into the traders'

-pockets, he could not realize that it had gone to pay his debts, but

-felt, somehow, defrauded. The answer would have been to prevent trade

-with the Indians on credit. But the traders' influence at Washington

-was great. It would be an interesting study to investigate the

-connection between traders' bills and agitation for new cessions, since

-the latter generally meant satisfaction of the former.

-

-Among the Sioux there were factional feelings that had aroused the

-apprehensions of their agents before the war broke out. The "blanket"

-Indians continually mocked at the "farmers" who took kindly to the

-efforts of the United States for their agricultural civilization. There

-was civil strife among the progressives and irreconcilables which made

-it difficult to say what was the disposition of the whole nation. The

-condition was so unstable that an accidental row, culminating in the

-murder of five whites at Acton, in Meeker County, brought down the most

-serious Indian massacre the frontier had yet seen.

-

-There was no more occasion for a general uprising in 1862 than there

-had been for several years. The wiser Indians realized the futility

-of such a course. Yet Little Crow, inclined though he was to peace,

-fell in with the radicals as the tribe discussed their policy; and

-he determined that since a massacre had been commenced they had best

-make it as thorough as possible. Retribution was certain whether they

-continued war or not, and the farmer Indians were unlikely to be

-distinguished from the blankets by angry frontiersmen. The attack fell

-first upon the stores at the lower agency, twenty miles above Fort

-Ridgely, whence refugee whites fled to Fort Ridgely with news of the

-outbreak. All day, on the 18th of August, massacres occurred along

-the St. Peter's, from near New Ulm to the Yellow Medicine River. The

-incidents of Indian war were all there, in surprise, slaughter of women

-and children, mutilation and torture.

-

-The next day, Tuesday the 19th, the increasing bands fell upon the

-rambling village of New Ulm, twenty-eight miles above Mankato, where

-fugitives had gathered and where Judge Charles E. Flandrau hastily

-organized a garrison for defence. He had been at St. Peter's when

-the news arrived, and had led a relief band through the drenching

-rain, reaching New Ulm in the evening. On Wednesday afternoon Little

-Crow, his band still growing--the Sioux could muster some 1300

-warriors--surprised Fort Ridgely, though with no success. On Thursday

-he renewed the attack with a force now dwindling because of individual

-plundering expeditions which drew his men to various parts of the

-neighboring country. On Friday he attacked once more.

-

-On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the river again to renew

-his fight upon New Ulm, which, unmolested since Tuesday, had been

-increasing its defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites in

-a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen, cool and

-determined, of unerring aim; but most were German settlers, recently

-arrived, and often terrified by their new experiences. During the week

-of horrors the depredations covered the Minnesota frontier and lapped

-over into Iowa and Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated,

-or led captive into the wilderness, were common. Stories of those who

-survived these dangers form a large part of the local literature of

-this section of the Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become so

-desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the town and led its

-whole remaining population to safety at Mankato.

-

-Long before the week of suffering was over, aid had been started to

-the harassed frontier. Governor Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to

-Mendota, and there organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota

-Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from him of Rio Grande

-fame, commanded the column and reached St. Peter's with his advance

-on Friday. By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the panic

-and restore peace and repopulate the deserted country. He was now

-joined by Ignatius Donnelly, Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater

-speed. The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th, they had reached

-Fort Ridgely, passing through country "abandoned by the inhabitants;

-the houses, in many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture

-undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors or through the

-cultivated fields." The country had been settled up to the very edge

-of the Fort Ridgely reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only

-partially devastated. Donnelly commented in his report upon the

-prayer-books and old German trunks of "Johann Schwartz," strewn upon

-the ground in one place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored,

-and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent, Thomas J. Galbraith,

-who was at Fort Ridgely during the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737

-whites were known to have been massacred.

-

-Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at first to reconnoitre

-and bury the dead, then to follow the Indians and rescue the captives.

-More than once the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off

-prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify or prevent

-punishment for the original outbreak. Early in September there were

-pitched battles at Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake.

-At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was able not only

-to defeat the tribes and take nearly 2000 prisoners, but to release

-227 women and children, who had been the "prime object," from whose

-"pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The Indians were handed

-over under arrest to Agent Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower

-Agency, and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.

-

-The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's massacre at Spirit

-Lake was still remembered and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in

-battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders escaped. In 1863,

-Pope, who had been called to command a new department in the Northwest,

-organized a general campaign against the tribes, sending Sibley up the

-Minnesota River to drive them west, and Sully up the Missouri to head

-them off, planning to catch and crush them between the two columns.

-The manoeuvre was badly timed and failed, while punishment drifted

-gradually into a prolonged war.

-

-Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with judicial irony, on

-the farmer Sioux who had been drawn reluctantly into the struggle.

-At the Lower Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while

-more than four hundred of their men were singled out for trial for

-murder. Nothing is more significant of the anomalous nature of the

-Indian relation than this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The

-United States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt free to

-punish individuals as though they were citizens of the United States.

-The military commission sat at Redwood for several weeks with the

-missionary and linguist, Rev. S. R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand Jury

-of the court." Three hundred and three were condemned to death by

-the court for murder, rape, and arson, their condemnation starting a

-wave of protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner,

-W. P. Dole. To the indignation of the frontier, naturally revengeful

-and never impartial, President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the

-case of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of them were hanged on

-a single scaffold at Mankato on December 26, 1862. The innocent and

-uncondemned were punished also, when Congress confiscated all their

-Minnesota reserve in 1863, and transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson

-on the Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found for them.

-

-All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota to the Rio Grande,

-were problems that drew the West into the movement of the Civil War.

-The situation was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere did

-the Indians suffer between the millstones as they did in the Indian

-Territory, where the Cherokee and Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and

-Seminole, had been colonized in the years of creation of the Indian

-frontier. For a generation these nations had resided in comparative

-peace and advancing civilization, but they were undone by causes which

-they could not control.

-

-The confederacy was no sooner organized than its commissioners demanded

-of the tribes colonized west of Arkansas their allegiance and support,

-professing to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the

-United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized and better, this

-demand raised difficulties which would have been a strain on any

-diplomacy. If they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate

-forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and already coveting their

-lands, would cut them to pieces. If they adhered to the confederacy and

-the latter lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the United

-States. Yet they were too weak to stand alone and were forced to go

-one way or other. The resulting policy was temporizing and brought to

-them a large measure of punishment from both sides, and the heavy

-subsequent wrath of the United States.

-

-John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation, tried to maintain

-his neutrality at the commencement of the conflict, but the fiction

-of Indian nationality was too slight for his effort to be successful.

-During the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against the

-confederate control to which he succumbed by August, when confederate

-troops had overrun most of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents

-had surrendered United States property to the enemy. The war which

-followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts of Kansas, with the addition

-of the Indian element.

-

-By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate control. When

-the Indian Territory forts--Gibson, Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb--fell

-into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their homes and sought

-protection within the United States lines. Almost the only way to

-fight a war in which a population is generally divided, is by means of

-depopulation and concentration. Along the Verdigris River, in southeast

-Kansas, these Indian refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number

-of 6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as best he could, and

-organized them to fight when that was possible. With the return of

-federal success in the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas

-during the next two years, the natives began to return to their homes.

-But the relation of their tribes to the United States was tainted. The

-compulsory cession of their western lands which came at the close of

-the conflict belongs to a later chapter and the beginnings of Oklahoma.

-Here, as elsewhere, the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.

-

-The great plains and the Far West were only the outskirts of the Civil

-War. At no time did they shape its course, for the Civil War was, from

-their point of view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East,

-and merely an episode in the grander development of the United States.

-The way is opening ever wider for the historian who shall see in this

-material development and progress of civilization the central thread

-of American history, and in accordance with it, retail the story.

-But during the years of sectional strife the West was occasionally

-connected with the struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly

-into a period in which it came to be the admitted centre of interest.

-The last stand of the Indians against the onrush of settlement is a

-warfare with an identity of its own.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XV

-

-THE CHEYENNE WAR

-

-

-It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous restlessness of

-the Indians during and after the Civil War to the evil machinations of

-the Confederacy. It has been plausible to charge that agents of the

-South passed among the tribes, inciting them to outbreak by pointing

-out the preoccupation of the United States and the defencelessness of

-the frontier. Popular narratives often repeat this charge when dealing

-with the wars and depredations, whether among the Sioux of Minnesota,

-or the Northwest tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians of

-the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus to harass the enemy it

-is not improbable that it would have done it. It is not impossible that

-it actually did it. But at least the charge has not been proved. No one

-has produced direct evidence to show the existence of agents or their

-connection with the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general

-belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs have admitted,

-regretfully, their inability to add incitement of Indians to the

-charges against the South. If such a cause were needed to explain the

-increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth while to search

-further in the hope of establishing it, but nothing occurred in these

-wars which cannot be accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and

-well authenticated.

-

-Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly on friendly terms

-with the United States. Occasional wars broke this friendship, and

-frequent massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another,

-for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the frontiersman was

-reckless and inconsiderate. But the outbreaks were exceptional, they

-were easily put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By 1865

-this condition had changed over most of the West. Warfare had become

-systematic and widely spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks

-in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or at least similar

-reactions from similar provocations. From 1865, for nearly five years,

-these wars continued with only intervals of truce, or professed peace;

-while during a long period after 1870, when most of the tribes were

-suppressed and well policed, upheavals occurred which were clearly to

-be connected with the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from

-peace to war has caused many to charge it to the South. It is, however,

-connected with the culmination of the westward movement, which more

-than explains it.

-

-For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement of the events before

-1861 is needed. By 1840 the agricultural frontier of the United States

-had reached the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes, with

-plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains. In the generation

-following appeared the heavy traffic along the overland trails, the

-advance of the frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific railway

-surveys. Each of these served to compress the Indians and restrict

-their range. Accompanying these came curtailing of reserves, shifting

-of residences to less desirable grounds, and individual maltreatment to

-a degree which makes marvellous the incapacity, weakness, and patience

-of the Indians. Occasionally they struggled, but always they lost. The

-scalped and mutilated pioneer, with his haystacks burning and his stock

-run off, is a vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic

-than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable, and moving to

-let the white man in.

-

-The necessary results of white encroachment were destruction of game

-and education of the Indian to the luxuries and vices of the white man.

-At a time when starvation was threatening because of the disappearance

-of the buffalo and other food animals, he became aware of the

-superior diet of the whites and the ease with which robbery could be

-accomplished. In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier than ever.

-The railway surveys reached nearly every corner of the Indian Country.

-In the next few years came the prospectors who started hundreds of

-mining camps beyond the line of settlements, while the engineers

-began to stick the advancing heads of railways out from the Missouri

-frontier and into the buffalo range.

-

-Even the Indian could see the approaching end. It needed no confederate

-envoy to assure him that the United States could be attacked. His

-own hunger and the white peril were persuading him to defend his

-hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the widespread Indian wars of the

-later sixties, uniformity of action came without much previous

-coöperation. A general Indian league against the whites was never

-raised. The general war, upon dissection and analysis, breaks up into a

-multitude of little wars, each having its own particular causes, which,

-in many instances, if the word of the most expert frontiersmen is to be

-believed, ran back into cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.

-

-The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of the general wars,

-with causes rising from the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux

-in 1851. The plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly

-stated in this year. "We are constrained to say," wrote the men who

-made these treaties, "that in our opinion _the time has come_ when the

-extinguishment of the Indian title to this region should no longer

-be delayed, if government would not have the mortification, on the

-one hand, of confessing its inability to protect the Indian from

-encroachment; or be subject to the painful necessity, upon the other,

-of ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a land which they

-desire to make their homes, and which, without their occupancy and

-labor, will be comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties

-concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie were equally the fountains

-of discontent which boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at

-last to one of the most horrible incidents of the plains war.

-

-In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt to partition the

-plains among the tribes was made. The lines agreed upon recognized

-existing conditions to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in

-consideration of which the savages agreed to stay at peace, to allow

-free migration along the trails, and to keep within their boundaries.

-The Sioux here agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The

-Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as lying between the Platte

-and the Arkansas, the mountains and, roughly, the hundred and first

-meridian. For ten years after these treaties the last-named tribes kept

-the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon settlers or emigrants. They

-even allowed the Senate in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the

-term of the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.

-

-In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians lay off the beaten tracks

-and apart from contact with the whites. Their home was in the triangle

-between the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them that

-offered almost insuperable obstacles to those who would cross the

-continent through their domain. The Gunnison railroad survey, which

-was run along the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa

-Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range at this point.

-Accordingly, a decade which built up Oregon and California made little

-impression on this section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry

-Creek. Then came the deluge.

-

-Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on crossed the plains to

-the Pike's Peak country in 1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst

-of the Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than the right of

-transit over these lands," admitted the Peace Commissioners in 1868.

-Yet they "took possession of them for the purpose of mining, and,

-against the protest of the Indians, founded cities, established farms,

-and opened roads. Before 1861 the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven

-from the mountain regions down upon the waters of the Arkansas, and

-were becoming sullen and discontented because of this violation of

-their rights." The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in their

-possession, pledging the United States to prevent depredations by the

-whites, but here, as in most similar cases, the guarantees had no

-weight in the face of a population under way. The Indians were brushed

-aside, the United States agents made no real attempts to enforce the

-treaty, and within a few months the settlers were demanding protection

-against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw their former homes and

-hunting grounds overrun by a greedy population, thirsting for gold,"

-continued the Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east to the

-plains, and soon found themselves the objects of jealousy and hatred.

-They too must go. The presence of the injured is too often painful to

-the wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of guilt. It now

-became apparent that what had been taken by force must be retained

-by the ravisher, and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a

-treaty consecrating the act."

-

-Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho and Cheyenne strove to

-defend their lands and to drive out the intruders, a war in which the

-United States ought to have coöperated with the Indians, a treaty of

-cession followed. On February 18, 1861, at Fort Wise, which was the new

-name for Bent's old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed by

-which these tribes gave up much of the great range reserved for them in

-1851, and accepted in its place, with what were believed to be greater

-guarantees, a triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by Sand

-Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by the Arkansas and Purgatory

-rivers; and extending west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand

-Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the Ute on the other

-side of the range, not long after this, are another part of the same

-story of mining aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed to

-remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from under the feet of the restless

-prospectors. For years they had kept the peace in the face of great

-provocation. For three years more they put up with white encroachment

-before their war began.

-

-The Colorado miners, like those of the other boom camps, had been loud

-in their demand for transportation. To satisfy this, overland traffic

-had been organized on a large scale, while during 1862 the stage and

-freight service of the plains fell under the control of Ben Holladay.

-Early in August, 1864, Holladay was nearly driven out of business.

-About the 10th of the month, simultaneous attacks were made along

-his mail line from the Little Blue River to within eighty miles of

-Denver. In the forays, stations were sacked and burned, isolated farms

-were wiped out, small parties on the trails were destroyed. At Ewbank

-Station, a family of ten "was massacred and scalped, and one of the

-females, besides having suffered the latter inhuman barbarity, was

-pinned to the earth by a stake thrust through her person, in a most

-revolting manner; ... at Plum Creek ... nine persons were murdered,

-their train, consisting of ten wagons, burnt, and two women and two

-children captured.... The old Indian traders ... and the settlers ...

-abandoned their habitations." For a distance of 370 miles, Holladay's

-general superintendent declared, every ranch but one was "deserted and

-the property abandoned to the Indians."

-

-Fifteen years after the destruction of his stations, Holladay was still

-claiming damages from the United States and presenting affidavits from

-his men which revealed the character of the attacks. George H. Carlyle

-told how his stage was chased by Indians for twenty miles, how he had

-helped to bury the mutilated bodies of the Plum Creek victims, and how

-within a week the route had to be abandoned, and every ranch from Fort

-Kearney to Julesburg was deserted. The division agent told how property

-had been lost in the hurried flight. To save some of the stock, fodder

-and supplies had to be sacrificed,--hundreds of sacks of corn, scores

-of tons of hay, besides the buildings and their equipment. Nowhere

-were the Indians overbold in their attacks. In small bands they waited

-their time to take the stations by surprise. Well-armed coaches might

-expect to get through with little more than a few random shots, but

-along the hilltops they could often see the savages waiting in safety

-for them to pass. Indian warfare was not one of organized bodies and

-formal manoeuvres. Only when cornered did the Indian stand to fight.

-But in wild, unexpected descents the tribes fell upon the lines of

-communication, reducing the frontier to an abject terror overnight.

-

-The destruction of the stage route was not the first, though it was the

-most general hostility which marked the commencement of a new Indian

-war. Since the spring of 1864 events had occurred which in the absence

-of a more rigorous control than the Indian Department possessed, were

-likely to lead to trouble. The Cheyenne had been dissatisfied with the

-Fort Wise treaty ever since its conclusion. The Sioux were carrying on

-a prolonged war. The Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were ready to be

-started on the war-path. It was the old story of too much compression

-and isolated attacks going unpunished. Whatever the merits of an

-original controversy, the only way to keep the savages under control

-was to make fair retribution follow close upon the commission of an

-outrage. But the punishment needed to be fair.

-

-In April, 1864, a ranchman named Ripley came into one of the camps on

-the South Platte and declared that some Indians had stolen his stock.

-Perhaps his statement was true; but it must be remembered that the

-ranchman whose stock strayed away was prone to charge theft against

-the Indians, and that there is only Ripley's own word that he ever had

-any stock. Captain Sanborn, commanding, sent out a troop of cavalry

-to recover the animals. They came upon some Indians with horses which

-Ripley claimed as his, and in an attempt to disarm them, a fight

-occurred in which the troop was driven off. Their lieutenant thought

-the Indians were Cheyenne.

-

-A few weeks after this, Major Jacob Downing, who had been in Camp

-Sanborn inspecting troops, came into Denver and got from Colonel

-Chivington about forty men, with whom "to go against the Indians."

-Downing later swore that he found the Cheyenne village at Cedar Bluffs.

-"We commenced shooting; I ordered the men to commence killing them....

-They lost ... some twenty-six killed and thirty wounded.... I burnt up

-their lodges and everything I could get hold of.... We captured about

-one hundred head of stock, which was distributed among the boys."

-

-On the 12th of June, a family living on Box Elder Creek, twenty miles

-east of Denver, was murdered by the Indians. Hungate, his wife, and

-two children were killed, the house burned, and fifty or sixty head

-of stock run off. When the "scalped and horribly mangled bodies" were

-brought into Denver, the population, already uneasy, was thrown into

-panic by this appearance of danger so close to the city. Governor Evans

-began at once to organize the militia for home defence and to appeal to

-Washington for help.

-

-By the time of the attack upon the stage line it was clear that an

-Indian war existed, involving in varying degrees parts of the Arapaho,

-Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the causes which

-provoked it were considerably in doubt. On the frontier there was no

-hesitation in charging it all to the innate savagery of the tribes.

-Governor Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the Indians

-might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a general peace on the

-plains, until after a severe chastisement of the Indians for these

-depredations."

-

-In restoring tranquillity the frontier had to rely largely upon its own

-resources. Its own Second Colorado was away doing duty in the Missouri

-campaign, while the eastern military situation presented no probability

-of troops being available to help out the West. Colonel Chivington and

-Governor John Evans, with the long-distance aid of General Curtis,

-were forced to make their own plans and execute them.

-

-As early as June, Governor Evans began his corrective measures,

-appealing first to Washington for permission to raise extra troops,

-and then endeavoring to separate the friendly and warlike Indians in

-order that the former "should not fall victims to the impossibility

-of soldiers discriminating between them and the hostile, upon whom

-they must, to do any good, inflict the most severe chastisement." To

-this end, and with the consent of the Indian Department, he sent out

-a proclamation, addressed to "the friendly Indians of the Plains,"

-directing them to keep away from those who were at war, and as

-evidence of friendship to congregate around the agencies for safety.

-Forts Lyons, Laramie, Larned, and Camp Collins were designated as

-concentration points for the several tribes. "None but those who intend

-to be friendly with the whites must come to these places. The families

-of those who have gone to war with the whites must be kept away

-from among the friendly Indians. The war on hostile Indians will be

-continued until they are all effectually subdued." The Indians, frankly

-at war, paid no attention to this invitation. Two small bands only

-sought the cover of the agencies, and with their exception, so Governor

-Evans reported on October 15, the proclamation "met no response from

-any of the Indians of the plains."

-

-The war parties became larger and more general as the summer advanced,

-driving whites off the plains between the two trails for several

-hundred miles. But as fall approached, the tribes as usual sought

-peace. The Indians' time for war was summer. Without supplies, they

-were unable to fight through the winter, so that autumn brought them

-into a mood well disposed to peace, reservations, and government

-rations. Major Colley, the agent on the Sand Creek reserve at Fort

-Lyon, received an overture early in September. In a letter written for

-them on August 29, by a trader, Black Kettle, of the Cheyenne, and

-other chiefs declared their readiness to make a peace if all the tribes

-were included in it. As an olive branch, they offered to give up seven

-white prisoners. They admitted that five war parties, three Cheyenne

-and two Arapaho, were yet in the field.

-

-Upon receipt of Black Kettle's letter, Major E. W. Wynkoop, military

-commander at Fort Lyon, marched with 130 men to the Cheyenne camp at

-Bend of Timbers, some eighty miles northeast of Fort Lyons. Here he

-found "from six to eight hundred Indian warriors drawn up in line

-of battle and prepared to fight." He avoided fighting, demanded and

-received the prisoners, and held a council with the chiefs. Here he

-told them that he had no authority to conclude a peace, but offered to

-conduct a group of chiefs to Denver, for a conference with Governor

-Evans.

-

-On September 28, Governor Evans held a council with the Cheyenne and

-Arapaho chiefs brought in by Major Wynkoop; Black Kettle and White

-Antelope being the most important. Black Kettle opened the conference

-with an appeal to the governor in which he alluded to his delivery of

-the prisoners and Wynkoop's invitation to visit Denver. "We have come

-with our eyes shut, following his handful of men, like coming through

-the fire," Black Kettle went on. "All we ask is that we may have peace

-with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand. You are our father.

-We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever

-since the war began. These braves who are with me are all willing to do

-what I say. We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they

-may sleep in peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers

-here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace,

-that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies." To him Governor Evans

-responded that this submission was a long time coming, and that the

-nation had gone to war, refusing to listen to overtures of peace. This

-Black Kettle admitted.

-

-"So far as making a treaty now is concerned," continued Governor

-Evans, "we are in no condition to do it.... You, so far, have had the

-advantage; but the time is near at hand when the plains will swarm with

-United States soldiers. I have learned that you understand that as the

-whites are at war among themselves, you think you can now drive the

-whites from this country; but this reliance is false. The Great Father

-at Washington has men enough to drive all the Indians off the plains,

-and whip the rebels at the same time. Now the war with the whites is

-nearly through, and the Great Father will not know what to do with all

-his soldiers, except to send them after the Indians on the plains. My

-proposition to the friendly Indians has gone out; [I] shall be glad

-to have them all come in under it. I have no new proposition to make.

-Another reason that I am not in a condition to make a treaty is that

-war is begun, and the power to make a treaty of peace has passed to

-the great war chief." He further counselled them to make terms with

-the military authorities before they could hope to talk of peace.

-No prospect of an immediate treaty was given to the chiefs. Evans

-disclaimed further powers, and Colonel Chivington closed the council,

-saying: "I am not a big war chief, but all the soldiers in this

-country are at my command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians

-is to fight them until they lay down their arms and submit." The same

-evening came a despatch from Major-general Curtis, at Fort Leavenworth,

-confirming the non-committal attitude of Evans and Chivington: "I want

-no peace till the Indians suffer more.... I fear Agent of the Interior

-Department will be ready to make presents too soon.... No peace must be

-made without my directions."

-

-The chiefs were escorted home without their peace or any promise of it,

-Governor Evans believing that the great body of the tribes was still

-hostile, and that a decisive winter campaign was needed to destroy

-their lingering notion that the whites might be driven from the plains.

-Black Kettle had been advised at the council to surrender to the

-soldiers, Major Wynkoop at Fort Lyon being mentioned as most available.

-Many of his tribe acted on the suggestion, so that on October 20 Agent

-Colley, their constant friend, reported that "nearly all the Arapahoes

-are now encamped near this place and desire to remain friendly, and

-make reparation for the damages committed by them."

-

-The Indians unquestionably were ready to make peace after their fashion

-and according to their ability. There is no evidence that they were

-reconciled to their defeat, but long experience had accustomed them

-to fighting in the summer and drawing rations as peaceful in the

-winter. The young men, in part, were still upon the war-path, but the

-tribes and the head chiefs were anxious to go upon a winter basis.

-Their interpreter who had attended the conference swore that they left

-Denver, "perfectly contented, deeming that the matter was settled,"

-that upon their return to Fort Lyon, Major Wynkoop gave them permission

-to bring their families in under the fort where he could watch them

-better; and that "accordingly the chiefs went after their families and

-villages and brought them in, ... satisfied that they were in perfect

-security and safety."

-

-While the Indians gathered around the fort, Major Wynkoop sent to

-General Curtis for advice and orders respecting them. Before the

-orders arrived, however, he was relieved from command and Major Scott

-J. Anthony, of the First Colorado Cavalry, was detailed in his place.

-After holding a conference with the Indians and Anthony, in which the

-latter renewed the permission for the bands to camp near the fort, he

-left Fort Lyons on November 26. Anthony meanwhile had become convinced

-that he was exceeding his authority. First he disarmed the savages,

-receiving only a few old and worn-out weapons. Then he returned these

-and ordered the Indians away from Fort Lyons. They moved forty miles

-away and encamped on Sand Creek.

-

-The Colorado authorities had no idea of calling it a peace. Governor

-Evans had scolded Wynkoop for bringing the chiefs in to Denver. He had

-received special permission and had raised a hundred-day regiment for

-an Indian campaign. If he should now make peace, Washington would think

-he had misrepresented the situation and put the government to needless

-expense. "What shall I do with the third regiment, if I make peace?" he

-demanded of Wynkoop. They were "raised to kill Indians, and they must

-kill Indians."

-

-Acting on the supposition that the war was still on, Colonel Chivington

-led the Third Colorado, and a part of the First Colorado Cavalry, from

-900 to 1000 strong, to Fort Lyons in November, arriving two days

-after Wynkoop departed. He picketed the fort, to prevent the news of

-his arrival from getting out, and conferred on the situation with

-Major Anthony, who, swore Major Downing, wished he would attack the

-Sand Creek camp and would have done so himself had he possessed troops

-enough. Three days before, Anthony had given a present to Black Kettle

-out of his own pocket. As the result of the council of war, Chivington

-started from Fort Lyon at nine o'clock, on the night of the 28th.

-

-About daybreak on November 29 Chivington's force reached the Cheyenne

-village on Sand Creek, where Black Kettle, White Antelope, and some

-500 of their band, mostly women and children, were encamped in the

-belief that they had made their peace. They had received no pledge of

-this, but past practice explained their confidence. The village was

-surrounded by troops who began to fire as soon as it was light. "We

-killed as many as we could; the village was destroyed and burned,"

-declared Downing, who further professed, "I think and earnestly

-believe the Indians to be an obstacle to civilization, and should be

-exterminated." White Antelope was killed at the first attack, refusing

-to leave the field, stating that it was the fault of Black Kettle,

-others, and himself that occasioned the massacre, and that he would

-die. Black Kettle, refusing to leave the field, was carried off by his

-young men. The latter had raised an American flag and a white flag in

-his effort to stop the fight.

-

-The firing began, swore interpreter Smith, on the northeast side of

-Sand Creek, near Black Kettle's lodge. Driven thence, the disorderly

-horde of savages retreated to War Bonnet's lodge at the upper end of

-the village, some few of them armed but most making no resistance. Up

-the dry bottom of Sand Creek they ran, with the troops in wild charge

-close behind. In the hollows of the banks they sought refuge, but the

-soldiers dragged them out, killing seventy or eighty with the worst

-barbarities Smith had seen: "All manner of depredations were inflicted

-on their persons; they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men

-used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked

-them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated

-their bodies in every sense of the word." The affidavits of soldiers

-engaged in the attack are printed in the government documents. They are

-too disgusting to be more than referred to elsewhere.

-

-Here at last was the culmination of the plains war of 1864 in the

-"Chivington massacre," which has been the centre of bitter controversy

-ever since its heroes marched into Denver with their bloody trophies.

-It was without question Indian fighting at its worst, yet it was

-successful in that the Indian hostilities stopped and a new treaty was

-easily obtained by the whites in 1865. The East denounced Chivington,

-and the Indian Commissioner described the event in 1865 as a butchery

-"in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States."

-"Comment cannot magnify the horror," said the _Nation_. The heart of

-the question had to do with the matter of good faith. At no time did

-the military or Colorado authorities admit or even appear to admit that

-the war was over. They regarded the campaign as punitive and necessary

-for the foundation of a secure peace. The Indians, on the other hand,

-believed that they had surrendered and were anxious to be let alone.

-Too often their wish in similar cases had been gratified, to the

-prolongation of destructive wars. What here occurred was horrible from

-any standard of civilized criticism. But even among civilized nations

-war is an unpleasant thing, and war with savages is most merciful, in

-the long run, when it speaks the savages' own tongue with no uncertain

-accent. That such extreme measures could occur was the result of the

-impossible situation on the plains. "My opinion," said Agent Colley,

-"is that white men and wild Indians cannot live in the same country

-in peace." With several different and diverging authorities over

-them, with a white population wanting their reserves and anxious

-for a provocation that might justify retaliation upon them, little

-difficulties were certain to lead to big results. It was true that the

-tribes were being dispossessed of lands which they believed to belong

-to them. It was equally true that an Indian war could terrify a whole

-frontier and that stern repression was its best cure. The blame which

-was accorded to Chivington left out of account the terror in Colorado,

-which was no less real because the whites were the aggressors. The

-slaughter and mutilation of Indian women and children did much to

-embitter Eastern critics, who did not realize that the only way to

-crush an Indian war is to destroy the base of supplies,--the camp

-where the women are busy helping to keep the men in the field; and who

-overlooked also the fact that in the męlée the squaws were quite as

-dangerous as the bucks. Indiscriminate blame and equally indiscriminate

-praise have been accorded because of the Sand Creek affair. The

-terrible event was the result of the orderly working of causes over

-which individuals had little control.

-

-In October, 1865, a peace conference was held on the Little Arkansas at

-which terms were agreed upon with Apache, Kiowa and Comanche, Arapaho

-and Cheyenne, while the last named surrendered their reserve at Sand

-Creek. For four years after this, owing to delays in the Senate and

-ambiguity in the agreements, they had no fixed abode. Later they were

-given room in the Indian Territory in lands taken from the civilized

-tribes.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVI

-

-THE SIOUX WAR

-

-

-The struggle for the possession of the plains worked the displacement

-of the Indian tribes. At the beginning, the invasion of Kansas had

-undone the work accomplished in erecting the Indian frontier. The

-occupation of Minnesota led surely to the downfall and transportation

-of the Sioux of the Mississippi. Gold in Colorado attracted multitudes

-who made peace impossible for the Indians of the southern plains. The

-Sioux of the northern plains came within the influence of the overland

-march in the same years with similar results.

-

-The northern Sioux, commonly known as the Sioux of the plains, and

-distinguished from their relatives the Sioux of the Mississippi, had

-participated in the treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, had granted rights

-of transit to the whites, and had been recognized themselves as nomadic

-bands occupying the plains north of the Platte River. Heretofore they

-had had no treaty relations with the United States, being far beyond

-the frontier. Their people, 16,000 perhaps, were grouped roughly in

-various bands: Brulé, Yankton, Yanktonai, Blackfoot, Hunkpapa, Sans

-Arcs, and Miniconjou. Their dependence on the chase made them more

-dependent on the annuities provided them at Laramie. As the game

-diminished the annuity increased in relative importance, and scarcely

-made a fair equivalent for what they lost. Yet on the whole, they

-imitated their neighbors, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and kept the peace.

-

-Almost the only time that the pledge was broken was in the autumn of

-1854. Continual trains of immigrants passing through the Sioux country

-made it nearly impossible to prevent friction between the races in

-which the blame was quite likely to fall upon the timorous homeseekers.

-On August 17, 1854, a cow strayed away from a band of Mormons encamped

-a few miles from Fort Laramie. Some have it that the cow was lame, and

-therefore abandoned; but whatever the cause, the cow was found, killed,

-and eaten by a small band of hungry Miniconjou Sioux. The charge of

-theft was brought into camp at Laramie, not by the Mormons, but by The

-Bear, chief of the Brulé, and Lieutenant Grattan with an escort of

-twenty-nine men, a twelve-pounder and a mountain howitzer, was sent out

-the next day to arrest the Indian who had slaughtered the animal. At

-the Indian village the culprit was not forthcoming, Grattan's drunken

-interpreter roughened a diplomacy which at best was none too tactful,

-and at last the troops fired into the lodge which was said to contain

-the offender. No one of the troops got away from the enraged Sioux,

-who, after their anger had led them to retaliate, followed it up by

-plundering the near-by post of the fur company. Commissioner Manypenny

-believed that this action by the troops was illegal and unnecessary

-from the start, since the Mormons could legally have been reimbursed

-from the Indian funds by the agent.

-

-No general war followed this outbreak. A few braves went on the

-war-path and rumors of great things reached the East, but General

-Harney, sent out with three regiments to end the Sioux war in 1855,

-found little opposition and fought only one important battle. On the

-Little Blue Water, in September, 1855, he fell upon Little Thunder's

-band of Brulé Sioux and killed or wounded nearly a hundred of them.

-There is some doubt whether this band had anything to do with the

-Grattan episode, or whether it was even at war, but the defeat was,

-as Agent Twiss described it, "a thunderclap to them." For the first

-time they learned the mighty power of the United States, and General

-Harney made good use of this object lesson in the peace council which

-he held with them in March, 1856. The treaty here agreed upon was

-never legalized, and remained only a sort of _modus vivendi_ for the

-following years. The Sioux tribes were so loosely organized that the

-authority of the chiefs had little weight; young braves did as they

-pleased regardless of engagements supposed to bind the tribes. But the

-lesson of the defeat lasted long in the memory of the plains tribes,

-so that they gave little trouble until the wars of 1864 broke out.

-Meanwhile Chouteau's old Fort Pierre on the Missouri was bought by the

-United States and made a military post for the control of these upper

-tribes.

-

-Before the plains Sioux broke out again, the Minnesota uprising had led

-the Mississippi Sioux to their defeat. Some were executed in the fall

-of 1862, others were transported to the Missouri Valley; still others

-got away to the Northwest, there to continue a profitless war that kept

-up fighting for several years. Meanwhile came the plains war of 1864

-in which the tribes south of the Platte were chiefly concerned, and in

-which men at the centre of the line thought there were evidences of

-an alliance between northern and southern tribes. Thus Governor Evans

-wrote of "information furnished me, through various sources, of an

-alliance of the Cheyenne and a part of the Arapahoe tribes with the

-Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians of the south, and the great family

-of the Sioux Indians of the north upon the plains," and the Indian

-Commissioner accepted the notion. But, like the question of intrigue,

-this was a matter of belief rather than of proof; while local causes to

-account for the disorder are easily found. Yet it is true that during

-1864 and 1865 the northern Sioux became uneasy.

-

-During 1865, though the causes likely to lead to hostilities were in

-no wise changed, efforts were made to reach agreements with the plains

-tribes. The Cheyenne, humbled at Sand Creek, were readily handled at

-the Little Arkansas treaty in October. They there surrendered to the

-United States all their reserve in Colorado and accepted a new one,

-which they never actually received, south of the Arkansas, and bound

-themselves not to camp within ten miles of the route to Santa Fé. On

-the other side, "to heal the wounds caused by the Chivington affair,"

-special appropriations were made by the United States to the widows and

-orphans of those who had been killed. The Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche

-joined in similar treaties. During the same week, in 1865, a special

-commission made treaties of peace with nine of the Sioux tribes,

-including the remnants of the Mississippi bands. "These treaties were

-made," commented the Commissioner, "and the Indians, in spite of the

-great suffering from cold and want of food endured during the very

-severe winter of 1865-66, and consequent temptation to plunder to

-procure the absolute necessaries of life, faithfully kept the peace."

-

-In September, 1865, the steamer _Calypso_ struggled up the shallow

-Missouri River, carrying a party of commissioners to Fort Sully, there

-to make these treaties with the Sioux. Congress had provided $20,000

-for a special negotiation before adjourning in March, 1865, and General

-Sully, who was yet conducting the prolonged Sioux War, had pointed out

-the place most suitable for the conference. The first council was held

-on October 6.

-

-The military authorities were far from eager to hold this council.

-Already the breach between the military power responsible for policing

-the plains and the civilian department which managed the tribes was

-wide. Thus General Pope, commanding the Department of the Missouri,

-grumbled to Grant in June that whenever Indian hostilities occurred,

-the Indian Department, which was really responsible, blamed the

-soldiers for causing them. He complained of the divided jurisdiction

-and of the policy of buying treaties from the tribes by presents made

-at the councils. In reference to this special treaty he had "only to

-say that the Sioux Indians have been attacking everybody in their

-region of country; and only lately ... attacked in heavy force Fort

-Rice, on the upper Missouri, well fortified and garrisoned by four

-companies of infantry with artillery. If these things show any desire

-for peace, I confess I am not able to perceive it."

-

-In future years this breach was to become wider yet. At Sand Creek the

-military authorities had justified the attack against the criticism of

-the local Indian agents and Eastern philanthropists. There was indeed

-plenty of evidence of misconduct on both sides. If the troops were

-guilty on the charge of being over-ready to fight--and here the words

-of Governor Evans were prophetic, "Now the war ... is nearly through,

-and the Great Father will not know what to do with all his soldiers,

-except to send them after the Indians on the plains,"--the Indian

-agents often succumbed to the opportunity for petty thieving. The case

-of one of the agents of the Yankton Sioux illustrates this. It was his

-custom each year to have the chiefs of his tribe sign general receipts

-for everything sent to the agency. Thus at the end of the year he could

-turn in Indians' vouchers and report nothing on hand. But the receipt

-did not mean that the Indian had got the goods; although signed for,

-these were left in the hands of the agent to be given out as needed.

-The inference is strong that many of the supplies intended for and

-signed for by the Indians went into the pocket of the agent. During the

-third quarter of 1863 this agent claimed to have issued to his charges:

-"One pair of bay horses, 7 years old; ... 1 dozen 17-inch mill files;

-... 6 dozen Seidlitz powders; 6 pounds compound syrup of squills; 6

-dozen Ayer's pills; ... 3 bottles of rose water; ... 1 pound of wax;

-... 1 ream of vouchers; ... 1/2 M 6434 8-1/2-inch official envelopes;

-... 4 bottles 8-ounce mucilage." So great was this particular agent's

-power that it was nearly impossible to get evidence against him. "If

-I do, he will fix it so I'll never get anything in the world and he

-will drive me out of the country," was typical of the attitude of his

-neighbors.

-

-With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for it quarrelling, it

-is no wonder that the charges suffered. But the ill results came more

-from the impossible situation than from abuse on either side. It needs

-often to be reiterated that the heart of the Indian question was in the

-infiltration of greedy, timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who

-could not be restrained by any process known to American government. In

-the conflict between two civilizations, the lower must succumb. Neither

-the War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible for most of

-the troubles; yet of the two, the former, through readiness to fight

-and to hold the savage to a standard of warfare which he could not

-understand, was the greater offender. It was not so great an offender,

-however, as the selfish interests of those engaged in trading with the

-Indians would make it out to be.

-

-The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty signed on October

-10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory. Many of the western Sioux did

-not come at all. Even the eastern were only partially represented.

-And among tribes in which the central authority of the chiefs was

-weak, full representation was necessary to secure a binding peace. The

-commissioners, after most pacific efforts, were "unable to ascertain

-the existence of any really amicable feeling among these people towards

-the government." The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the treaty

-which resulted did little more than repeat the terms of the treaty of

-1851, binding the Indians to permit roads to be opened through their

-country and to keep away from the trails.

-

-It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were bound by the

-treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie treaty of 1851 had never had full

-force of law because the Senate had added amendments to it, which

-all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although Congress had

-appropriated the annuities specified in the treaty the binding force

-of the document was not great on savages. The Fort Sully treaty was

-deficient in that it did not represent all of the interested tribes.

-In making Indian treaties at all, the United States acted upon a

-convenient fiction that the Indians had authorities with power to bind;

-whereas the leaders had little control over their followers and after

-nearly every treaty there were many bands that could claim to have

-been left out altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed,

-and the United States proceeded in 1865 and 1866 to use its specified

-rights in opening roads through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.

-

-The mines of Montana and Idaho, which had attracted notice and

-emigration in the early sixties, were still the objective points of

-a large traffic. They were somewhat off the beaten routes, being

-accessible by the Missouri River and Fort Benton, or by the Platte

-trail and a northern branch from near Fort Hall to Virginia City. To

-bring them into more direct connection with the East an available route

-from Fort Laramie was undertaken in 1865. The new trail left the main

-road near Fort Laramie, crossed to the north side of the Platte, and

-ran off to the northwest. Shortly after leaving the Platte the road got

-into the charming foothill country where the slopes "are all covered

-with a fine growth of grass, and in every valley there is either a

-rushing stream or some quiet babbling brook of pure, clear snow-water

-filled with trout, the banks lined with trees--wild cherry, quaking

-asp, some birch, willow, and cottonwood." To the left, and not far

-distant, were the Big Horn Mountains. To the right could sometimes be

-seen in the distance the shadowy billows of the Black Hills. Running to

-the north and draining the valley were the Powder and Tongue rivers,

-both tributaries of the Yellowstone. Here were water, timber, and

-forage, coal and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the Indians,

-"the very heart of their hunting-grounds." In a single day's ride were

-seen "bear, buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens."

-With little exaggeration it was described as a "natural source of

-recuperation and supply to moving, hunting, and roving bands of all

-tribes, and their lodge trails cross it in great numbers from north to

-south." Through this land, keeping east of the Big Horn Mountains and

-running around their northern end into the Yellowstone Valley, was to

-run the new Powder River road to Montana. The Sioux treaties were to

-have their severest testing in the selection of choice hunting-grounds

-for an emigrant road, for it was one of the certainties in the opening

-of new roads that game vanished in the face of emigration.

-

-While the commissioners were negotiating their treaty at Fort Sully,

-the first Powder River expedition, in its attempt to open this new road

-by the short and direct route from Fort Laramie to Bozeman and the

-Montana mines, was undoing their work. In the summer of 1865 General

-Patrick E. Connor, with a miscellaneous force of 1600, including a

-detachment of ex-Confederate troops who had enlisted in the United

-States army to fight Indians, started from Fort Laramie for the mouth

-of the Rosebuds on the Yellowstone, by way of the Powder River. Old

-Jim Bridger, the incarnation of this country, led them, swearing

-mightily at "these damn paper-collar soldiers," who knew so little of

-the Indians. There was plenty of fighting as Connor pushed into the

-Yellowstone, but he was relieved from command in September and the

-troops were drawn back, so that there were no definitive results of the

-expedition of 1865.

-

-In 1866, in spite of the fact that the Sioux of this region, through

-their leader Red Cloud, had refused to yield the ground or even to

-treat concerning it, Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered by General

-Pope to command the Mountain District, Department of the Platte, and to

-erect and garrison posts for the control of the Powder River road. On

-December 21 of this year, Captain W. J. Fetterman, of his command, and

-seventy-eight officers and men were killed near Fort Philip Kearney in

-a fight whose merits aroused nearly as much acrimonious discussion as

-the Sand Creek massacre.

-

-[Illustration: RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH

-

-From a cut lent by Professor Warren K. Moorehead, of Andover, Mass.]

-

-The events leading up to the catastrophe at Fort Philip Kearney, a

-catastrophe so complete that none of its white participants escaped

-to tell what happened, were connected with Carrington's work in

-building forts. He had been detailed for the work in the spring, and

-after a conference at Fort Kearney, Nebraska, with General Sherman,

-had marched his men in nineteen days to Fort Laramie. He reached Fort

-Reno, which became his headquarters, on June 28. On the march, if his

-orders were obeyed, his soldiers were scrupulous in their regard for

-the Indians. His orders issued for the control of emigrants passing

-along the Powder River route were equally careful. Thirty men were

-to constitute the minimum single party; these were to travel with a

-military pass, which was to be scrutinized by the commanding officer

-of each post. The trains were ordered to hold together and were

-warned that "nearly all danger from Indians lies in the recklessness

-of travellers. A small party, when separated, either sell whiskey to

-or fire upon scattering Indians, or get into disputes with them, and

-somebody is hurt. An insult to an Indian is resented by the Indians

-against the first white men they meet, and innocent travellers suffer."

-

-Carrington's orders were to garrison Fort Reno and build new forts

-on the Powder, Big Horn, and Yellowstone rivers, and cover the road.

-The last-named fort was later cut away because of his insufficient

-force, but Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith were located

-during July and August. The former stood on a little plateau formed

-between the two Pineys as they emerge from the Big Horn Mountains.

-Its site was surveyed and occupied on July 15. Already Carrington was

-complaining that he had too few men for his work. With eight companies

-of eighty men each, and most of these new recruits, he had to garrison

-his long line, all the while building and protecting his stockades

-and fortifications. "I am my own engineer, draughtsman, and visit

-my pickets and guards nightly, with scarcely a day or night without

-attempts to steal stock." Worse than this, his military equipment was

-inadequate. Only his band, specially armed for the expedition, had

-Spencer carbines and enough ammunition. His main force, still armed

-with Springfield rifles, had under fifty rounds to the man.

-

-The Indians, Cheyenne and Sioux, were, all through the summer, showing

-no sign of accepting the invasion of the hunting-grounds without a

-fight. Yet Carrington reported on August 29 that he was holding them

-off; that Fort C. F. Smith on the Big Horn had been occupied; that

-parties of fifty well-armed men could get through safely if they were

-careful. The Indians, he said, "are bent on robbery; they only fight

-when assured of personal security and remunerative stealings; they are

-divided among themselves."

-

-With the sites for forts C. F. Smith and Philip Kearney selected,

-the work of construction proceeded during the autumn. A sawmill,

-sent out from the states, was kept hard at work. Wood was cut on the

-adjacent hills and speedily converted into cabins and palisades

-which approached completion before winter set in. It was construction

-during a state of siege, however. Instead of pacifying the valley

-the construction of the forts aggravated the Sioux hostility so that

-constant watchfulness was needed. That the trains sent out to gather

-wood were not seriously injured was due to rigorous discipline. The

-wagons moved twenty or more at a time, with guards, and in two parallel

-columns. At first sight of Indians they drove into corral and signalled

-back to the lookouts at the fort for help. Occasionally men were indeed

-cut out by the Indians, who in turn suffered considerable loss; but

-Carrington reduced his own losses to a minimum. Friendly Indians were

-rarely seen. They were allowed to come to the fort, by the main road

-and with a white flag, but few availed themselves of the privilege. The

-Sioux were up in arms, and in large numbers hung about the Tongue and

-Powder river valleys waiting for their chance.

-

-Early in December occurred an incident revealing the danger of

-annihilation which threatened Carrington's command. At one o'clock on

-the afternoon of the sixth a messenger reported to the garrison at Fort

-Philip Kearney that the wood train was attacked by Indians four miles

-away. Carrington immediately had every horse at the post mounted. For

-the main relief he sent out a column under Brevet Lieutenant-colonel

-Fetterman, who had just arrived at the fort, while he led in person a

-flanking party to cut off the Indians' retreat. The mercury was below

-zero. Carrington was thrown into the water of Peno Creek when his

-horse stumbled through breaking ice. Fetterman's party found the wood

-train in corral and standing off the attack with success. The savages

-retreated as the relief approached and were pursued for five miles,

-when they turned and offered battle. Just as the fighting began, most

-of the cavalry broke away from Fetterman, leaving him and some fourteen

-others surrounded by Indians and attacked on three sides. He held them

-off, however, until Carrington came in sight and the Indians fled.

-Why Lieutenant Bingham retreated with his cavalry and left Fetterman

-in such danger was never explained, for the Indians killed him and

-one of his non-commissioned officers, while several other privates

-were wounded. The Indians, once the fight was over, disappeared among

-the hills, and Carrington had no force with which to follow them. In

-reporting the battle that night he renewed his requests for men and

-officers. He had but six officers for the six companies at Fort Philip

-Kearney. He was totally unable to take the aggressive because of the

-defences which had constantly to be maintained.

-

-In this fashion the fall advanced in the Powder River Valley. The forts

-were finished. The Indian hostilities increased. The little, overworked

-force of Carrington, chopping, building, guarding, and fighting,

-struggled to fulfil its orders. If one should criticise Carrington,

-the attack would be chiefly that he looked to defensive measures in the

-Indian war. He did indeed ask for troops, officers, and equipment, but

-his despatches and his own vindication show little evidence that he

-realized the need for large reënforcements for the specific purpose of

-a punitive campaign. More skilful Indian fighters knew that the Indians

-could and would keep up indefinitely this sort of filibustering against

-the forts, and that a vigorous move against their own villages was the

-surest means to secure peace. In Indian warfare, even more perhaps

-than in civilized, it is advantageous to destroy the enemy's base of

-supplies.

-

-The wood train was again attacked on December 21. About eleven o'clock

-that morning the pickets reported the train "corralled and threatened

-by Indians on Sullivant Hills, a mile and a half from the fort." The

-usual relief party was at once organized and sent out under Fetterman,

-who claimed the right to command it by seniority, and who was not

-highest in the confidence of Colonel Carrington. He had but recently

-joined the command, was full of enthusiasm and desire to hunt Indians,

-and needed the admonition with which he left the fort: that he was

-"fighting brave and desperate enemies who sought to make up by cunning

-and deceit all the advantage which the white man gains by intelligence

-and better arms." He was ordered to support and bring in the wood

-train, this being all Carrington believed himself strong enough to do

-and keep on doing. Any one could have had a fight at any time, and

-Carrington was wise to issue the "peremptory and explicit" orders to

-avoid pursuit beyond the summit of Lodge Trail Ridge, as needless and

-unduly dangerous. Three times this order was given to Fetterman; and

-after that, "fearing still that the spirit of ambition might override

-prudence," says Carrington, "I crossed the parade and from a sentry

-platform halted the cavalry and again repeated my precise orders."

-

-With these admonitions, Fetterman started for the relief, leading a

-party of eighty-one officers and men, picked and all well armed. He

-crossed the Lodge Trail Ridge as soon as he was out of sight of the

-fort and disappeared. No one of his command came back alive. The wood

-train, before twelve o'clock, broke corral and moved on in safety,

-while shots were heard beyond the ridge. For half an hour there was a

-constant volleying; then all was still. Meanwhile Carrington, nervous

-at the lack of news from Fetterman, had sent a second column, and two

-wagons to relieve him, under Captain Ten Eyck. The latter, moving

-along cautiously, with large bands of Sioux retreating before him,

-came finally upon forty-nine bodies, including that of Fetterman.

-The evidence of arrows, spears, and the position of bodies was that

-they had been surrounded, surprised, and overwhelmed in their defeat.

-The next day the rest of the bodies were reached and brought back.

-Naked, dismembered, slashed, visited with indescribable indignities,

-they were buried in two great graves; seventy-nine soldiers and two

-civilians.

-

-The Fetterman massacre raised a storm in the East similar in volume

-to that following Sand Creek, two years before. Who was at fault, and

-why, were the questions indignantly asked. Judicious persons were well

-aware, wrote the _Nation_, that "our whole Indian policy is a system of

-mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse." The military

-authorities tried to place the blame on Carrington, as plausible,

-energetic, and industrious, but unable to maintain discipline or

-inspire his officers with confidence. Unquestionably a part of this

-was true, yet the letter which made the charge admitted that often the

-Indians were better armed than the troops, and the critic himself,

-General Cooke, had ordered Carrington: "You can only defend yourself

-and trains, and emigrants, the best you can." The Indian Commissioner

-charged it on the bad disposition of the troops, always anxious to

-fight.

-

-The issue broke over the number of Indians involved. Current reports

-from Fort Philip Kearney indicated from 3000 to 5000 hostile

-warriors, chiefly Sioux and led by Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe. The

-Commissioner pointed out that such a force must imply from 21,000 to

-35,000 Indians in all--a number that could not possibly have been in

-the Powder River country. It is reasonable to believe that Fetterman

-was not overwhelmed by any multitude like this, but that his own

-rash disobedience led to ambush and defeat by a force well below

-3000. Upon him fell the immediate responsibility; above him, the War

-Department was negligent in detailing so few men for so large a task;

-and ultimately there was the impossibility of expecting savage Sioux to

-give up their best hunting-grounds as a result of a treaty signed by

-others than themselves.

-

-The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of transition in Indian

-warfare. Even here the Indians were mostly armed with bows and arrows,

-and were relying upon their superior numbers for victory. Yet a change

-in Indian armament was under way, which in a few years was to convert

-the Indian from a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in

-the world." He was being armed with rifles. As the game diminished

-the tribes found that the old methods of hunting were inadequate and

-began the pressure upon the Indian Department for better weapons. The

-department justified itself in issuing rifles and ammunition, on the

-ground that the laws of the United States expected the Indians to

-live chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure by the older

-means. Hence came the anomalous situation in which one department

-of the United States armed and equipped the tribes for warfare

-against another. If arms were cut down, the tribes were in danger of

-extinction; if they were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the

-Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that the hostile Sioux

-were merely hungry, because the War Department had caused the issuing

-of guns to be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with bad

-temper and suspicion on both sides.

-

-A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud tried again to wreck

-a wood train near Fort Philip Kearney. But this time the escort erected

-a barricade with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety of army

-wagon, and though deserted by most of his men, Major James Powell, with

-one other officer, twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind

-their fortification and repelled charge after charge from some 800

-Sioux and Cheyenne. With little loss to himself he inflicted upon the

-savages a lesson that lasted many years.

-

-The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the chain of Indian outbreaks

-that stretched across the path of the westward movement, the overland

-traffic and the continental railways. The Pacific railways had been

-chartered just as the overland telegraph had been opened to the

-Pacific coast. With this last, perhaps from reverence for the nearly

-supernatural, the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway advanced,

-increasing compression and repression stirred the tribes to a series of

-hostilities. The first treaties which granted transit--meaning chiefly

-wagon transit--broke down. A new series of conferences and a new policy

-were the direct result of these wars.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVII

-

-THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY

-

-

-The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may

-fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter

-of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous

-fifteen years the causes had been shaping through the development of

-the use of the trails, the opening of the mining territories, and

-the agitation for a continental railway. Now the railway was not

-only authorized and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon its

-completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted the Union Pacific

-to build west and the Central Pacific to build east until the two

-lines should meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the roads

-were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis of the Indian problem

-was speedily reached. In the fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of

-the overland freighting and sold out. In November the terminus of the

-overland mail route was moved west to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither

-the Union Pacific had now arrived in its course of construction. No

-wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke out in protest.

-

-As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion among those who

-must handle the tribes became apparent. The question of the management

-by the War Department or the Interior was in the air, and was raised

-again and again in Congress. More fundamental was the question of

-policy, upon which the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as

-any. "I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William, in 1867,

-"that Indian wars will not cease until all the Indian tribes are

-absorbed in our population, and can be controlled by constables instead

-of soldiers." Upon another phase of management Francis A. Walker

-wrote a little later: "There can be no question of national dignity

-involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest

-Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him.... With wild men,

-as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run is a

-question merely of what is safest or easiest in the situation given."

-That responsibility for some decided action lay heavily upon the whites

-may be implied from the admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the

-frontier well--"that, during more than a third of a century passed on

-the plains and in the mountains, he has never known of a war with the

-hostile tribes that was not caused by broken faith on the part of the

-United States or its agents." A professional Indian fighter, like Kit

-Carson, declared on oath that "as a general thing, the difficulties

-arise from aggressions on the part of the whites."

-

-In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian problem found

-spokesmen. The War and Interior departments had ample representation;

-the Western members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of the

-frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian sentiment that

-saw much good in the Indian and much evil in his treatment. But withal,

-when it came to special action upon any situation, Congress felt its

-lack of information. The departments best informed were partisan and

-antagonistic. Even to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship

-to determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and responsibility

-in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak, and the Chivington or the

-Fetterman massacre. To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness

-in the midst of interested parties Congress raised a committee of

-seven, three of the Senate and four of the House, in March, 1865, to

-investigate and report on the condition of the Indian tribes. The joint

-committee was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed debate

-on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne war ended and the Sioux

-broke out; the committee reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its

-investigation it divided itself into three groups to visit the Pacific

-Slope, the southern plains, and the northern plains. Its report, with

-the accompanying testimony, fills over five hundred pages. In all the

-storm centres of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and

-questioned.

-

-The _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_ gave a doleful view

-of the future from the Indians' standpoint. General Pope was quoted

-to the effect that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars,

-cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration, "and by

-steady and resistless encroachments of the white emigration towards

-the west, which is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits,

-and driving off or killing the game, their only means of subsistence."

-To this catalogue of causes General Carleton, who must have believed

-his war of Apache and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of

-providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty originates, when in

-their appointed time He wills that one race of man--as in races of

-lower animals--shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place

-to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced out by Himself,

-which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The

-races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed

-away; the red man of America is passing away!"

-

-The committee believed that the wars with their incidents of slaughter

-and extermination by both sides, as occasion offered, were generally

-the result of white encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing

-opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed over to the War

-Department, but recommended instead a system of visiting boards, each

-including a civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner,

-for the regular inspection of the tribes. The recommendation of the

-committee came to naught in Congress, but the information it gathered,

-supplementing the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs

-and the special investigations of single wars, gave much additional

-weight to the belief that a crisis was at hand.

-

-Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne and Sioux wars dragged

-on. The Powder River country continued to be a field of battle, with

-Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867. In the spring of 1867

-General Hancock destroyed a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern

-opinion came to demand more forcefully that this fighting should stop.

-Western opinion was equally insistent that the Indian must go, while

-General Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand was due to

-a desire for "the profit resulting from military occupation." Certain

-it was that war had lasted for several years with no definite results,

-save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of the Indians, and

-the philanthropy of the East. The army had had its chance. Now the time

-had come for general, real attempts at peace.

-

-The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March 4, 1867, actually

-began its session at that time. Ordinarily it would have waited until

-December, but the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his

-reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early as the law allowed.

-Among the most significant of its measures in this extra session was

-"Mr. Henderson's bill for establishing peace with certain Indian

-tribes now at war with the United States," which, in the view of the

-_Nation_, was a "practical measure for the security of travel through

-the territories and for the selection of a new area sufficient to

-contain all the unsettled tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator

-Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect of this law, and the

-General had replied: "The fact is, this contact of the two races has

-caused universal hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered

-bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and hitting little

-parties who are off their guard. I have a much heavier force on the

-plains, but they are so large that it is impossible to guard at all

-points, and the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented our

-being able to collect a large force to go into the country where we

-believe the Indians have hid their families; viz. up on the Yellowstone

-and down on the Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than in

-treating at this time, yet he went on the commission erected by the

-act of July 20, 1867. By this law four civilians, including the Indian

-Commissioner, and three generals of the army, were appointed to collect

-and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects in view:

-to remove the existing causes of complaint, to secure the safety of

-the various continental railways and the overland routes, and to work

-out some means for promoting Indian civilization without impeding the

-advance of the United States. To this last end they were to hunt for

-permanent homes for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all

-the railways then chartered,--the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific,

-and the Atlantic and Pacific.

-

-The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for fifteen months. When

-it rose at last, it had opened the way for the railways, so far as

-treaties could avail. It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and

-more remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations the breach

-between military and civil control had widened, so that the Commission

-was at the end divided against itself.

-

-On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at St. Louis and discussed

-plans for getting into touch with the tribes with whom it had to treat.

-"The first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview with

-the chiefs and leading warriors of these hostile tribes. They were

-roaming over an immense country, thousands of miles in extent, and much

-of it unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white race. Small

-war parties constantly emerging from this vast extent of unexplored

-country would suddenly strike the border settlements, killing the men

-and carrying off into captivity the women and children. Companies of

-workmen on the railroads, at points hundreds of miles from each other,

-would be attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour. Overland

-mail coaches could not be run without military escort, and railroad

-and mail stations unguarded by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All

-safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without soldiers was

-hazardous in the extreme; to go with them forbade reasonable hope of

-securing peaceful interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace

-Commission contained within itself the most useful of assistants.

-General Sherman and Commissioner Taylor sent out word to the Indians

-through the military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the tribes

-that the Commissioners desired to confer with them near Fort Laramie in

-September and Fort Larned in October.

-

-The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during the summer of 1867.

-After inspecting conditions on the upper Missouri the Commissioners

-proceeded to Omaha in September and thence to North Platte station

-on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they met Swift Bear of the Brulé

-Sioux and learned that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them until

-November. The Powder River War was still being fought by chiefs who

-could not be reached easily and whose delegations must be delayed. When

-the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie in November, they found

-matters little better. Red Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the

-Oglala and Brulé Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne, refused even

-to see the envoys, and sent them word: "that his war against the whites

-was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground

-left to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us that whenever

-the military garrisons at Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith

-were withdrawn, the war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the

-Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no savages except a few

-non-hostile Crows, and having summoned Red Cloud to meet them during

-the following summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of hostilities

-until the council could be held."

-

-The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine Lodge Creek some eighty

-miles south of the Arkansas River. Before the Commissioners arrived

-here General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his place being taken

-by General C. C. Augur, whose name makes the eighth signature to the

-published report. For some time after the Commissioners arrived the

-Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained in their camp forty miles

-away from Medicine Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache came to

-an agreement, while the others held off. On the 21st of October these

-ceded all their rights to occupy their great claims in the Southwest,

-the whole of the two panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to

-confine themselves to a new reserve in the southwestern part of Indian

-Territory, between the Red River and the Washita, on lands taken from

-the Choctaw and Chickasaw in 1866.

-

-The Commissioners could not greatly blame the Arapaho and Cheyenne for

-their reluctance to treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular

-Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been massacred by

-Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly or not, they believed themselves

-betrayed, and the Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand

-Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in Kansas and Indian

-Territory, which was amended to nothingness when the Senate added to

-the treaty the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within the

-state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve; the new one had not

-been given them; yet for two years after 1865 they had generally kept

-the peace. Sherman travelled through this country in the autumn of 1866

-and "met no trouble whatever," although he heard rumors of Indian wars.

-In 1867, General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages on the

-Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation, the Indians believed.

-After this there had been admitted war. The Indians had been on the

-war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and dodging the military

-parties, and were unable for some weeks to realize that the Peace

-Commissioners offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded

-to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October 28, a treaty

-at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve was a bit of barren land nearly

-destitute of wood and water, and containing many streams that were

-either brackish or dry during most of the year. It was in the Cherokee

-Outlet, between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers.

-

-The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of the summer's

-negotiations. The Peace Commission returned to Fort Laramie in the

-following spring to meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the

-Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were allied with them, made

-peace after the Commissioners had assented to the terms laid down by

-Red Cloud in 1867. They had convinced themselves that the occupation of

-the Powder River Valley was both illegal and unjust, and accordingly

-the garrisons had been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger of

-Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic pusillanimity," wrote

-one of the pioneers, years later, denouncing the act, "the government

-ordered all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel." In the

-new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868, it was specifically agreed

-that the country east of the Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as

-unceded Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves to occupy

-as their permanent home the lands west of the Missouri, between the

-parallels of 43° and 46°, and east of the 104th meridian--an area

-coinciding to-day with the western end of South Dakota. Thus was begun

-the actual compression of the Sioux of the plains.

-

-The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners were the most important,

-but were not the only treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the

-relinquishment by the Indians of lands along the railroad's right

-of way. It had been found that rights of transit through the Indian

-Country, such as those secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient.

-The Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of travel, for

-peace and his own good.

-

-Most important of the other tribes shoved away from the route were the

-Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock, whose country lay across the great trail

-just west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their name to the

-territory of Utah, were to be found south of the trail, between it and

-the lower waters of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest

-in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most important being

-on the Uintah River in northeast Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute

-began to treat in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until

-1868, when the southwestern third of Colorado was set apart for them.

-Active life in Colorado territory was at the start confined to the

-mountains in the vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were pushed

-down the slopes of the range on both sides. But as the eastern Sand

-Creek reserve soon had to be abolished, so Colorado began to growl at

-the western Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages were

-given better treatment than white citizens. The Shoshoni and Bannock

-ranged from Fort Hall to the north and were visited by General Augur

-at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results of his gifts

-and diplomacy the former were pushed up to the Wind River reserve in

-Wyoming territory, while the latter were granted a home around Fort

-Hall.

-

-The friction with the Indians was heaviest near the line of the old

-Indian frontier and tended to be lighter towards the west. It was

-natural enough that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the

-tribes had been colonized and where Indian population was most dense,

-the difficulties should be greatest. Indeed the only wars which were

-sufficiently important to count as resistance to the westward movement

-were those of the plains tribes and were fought east of the continental

-divide. The mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated from the

-main movements. Yet these great plains that now had to be abandoned

-had been set aside as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of

-Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners all agreed

-that the time had come to change it.

-

-The influence of the humanitarians dominated the report of the

-Commissioners, which was signed in January, 1868. Wherever possible,

-the side of the Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was an

-"indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled in the "records of

-the Indian barbarity"; General Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the

-Cheyenne at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to the existence

-of a war: Fetterman had been killed because "the civil and military

-departments of our government cannot, or will not, understand each

-other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility, and the "revolting"

-history of the removal policy was described. It had been the result of

-this policy to promote barbarism rather than civilization. "But one

-thing then remains to be done with honor to the nation, and that is to

-select a district, or districts of country, as indicated by Congress,

-on which all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be gathered.

-For each district let a territorial government be established, with

-powers adapted to the ends designed. The governor should be a man of

-unquestioned integrity and purity of character; he should be paid

-such salary as to place him above temptation." He should be given

-adequate powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of progressive

-civilization. The belief that under American conditions the Indian

-problem was insoluble was confirmed by this report of the Peace

-Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as they were. After

-their condemnation of an existing removal policy, the only remedy which

-they could offer was another policy of concentration and removal.

-

-The Commissioners recommended that the Indians should be colonized on

-two reserves, north and south of the railway lines respectively. The

-southern reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized tribes,

-known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners thought a total of

-86,000 could be settled within a few years. A northern district might

-be located north of Nebraska, within the area which they later allotted

-to the Sioux; 54,000 could be colonized here. Individual savages might

-be allowed to own land and be incorporated among the citizens of the

-Western states, but most of the tribes ought to be settled in the two

-Indian territories, while this removal policy should be the last.

-

-Upon the vexed question of civilian or military control the

-Commissioners were divided. They believed that both War and Interior

-departments were too busy to give proper attention to the wards, and

-recommended an independent department for the Indians. In October,

-1868, they reversed this report and, under military influence,

-spoke strongly for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the

-War Department. "We have now selected and provided reservations for

-all, off the great roads," wrote General Sherman to his brother in

-September, 1868. "All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are

-hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort

-of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the

-indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so

-large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a

-single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances

-and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the

-tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near

-the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together.

-

-The way across the continent was opened by these treaties of 1867 and

-1868, and the Union Pacific hurried to take advantage of it. The other

-Pacific railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific, were so

-slow in using their charters that hope in their construction was

-nearly abandoned, but the chief enterprise neared completion before the

-inauguration of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming, rather

-than the statue of Columbus which Benton had foreseen, was perched upon

-the summit of the Rockies as its monument.

-

-Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping pace with western

-development during the decade of the Civil War. The United States

-itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and

-allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a

-thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and

-army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general

-public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the

-Mississippi," lamented the _Nation_ in 1868, but "there is no book

-of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a

-mass of very desultory information. Few men have more than the most

-unconnected and unmethodical knowledge of the vast expanse of territory

-which lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth must have

-ceased to be in the West; probably, as we write, Denver has become an

-Eastern city, and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the

-marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life.... A man talks to us

-of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and while he is talking,

-the Territory of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor his

-auditors have before heard."

-

-[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1863

-

-The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the

-Southwest. In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming

-followed in 1868.]

-

-In that division of the plains which was sketched out in the fifties,

-the great amorphous eastern territories of Kansas and Nebraska met on

-the summit of the Rockies the great western territories of Washington,

-Utah, and New Mexico. The gold booms had broken up all of these.

-Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found their

-excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada entered the Union, with

-Nebraska following in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first

-parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide. To the north, in the

-region of the great river valleys,--Green, Big Horn, Powder, Platte,

-and Sweetwater,--the precious metals were not found in quantities which

-justified exploitation earlier than 1867. But in that year moderate

-discoveries on the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal camps of

-the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a scheme for a new territory.

-

-The Sweetwater mines, without causing any great excitement, brought a

-few hundred men to the vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was

-established, a county was organized, a newspaper was brought into life

-at Fort Bridger. If the railway had not appeared at the same time, the

-foundation for a territory would probably have been too slight. But the

-Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg early in 1867, extended its

-terminus to a new town, Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in

-the spring of 1868.

-

-Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the Union Pacific advanced

-to its site. It had a better prospect of life than had most of the

-mushroom cities that accompanied the westward course of the railroad,

-because it was the natural junction point for Denver trade. Colorado

-had been much disappointed at its own failure to induce the Union

-Pacific managers to put Denver City on the main line of the road, and

-felt injured when compelled to do its business through Cheyenne. But

-just because of this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a

-rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an orderly or reputable

-population that it had during the first months of its existence, but,

-to its good fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off the

-worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868. Cheyenne was left with

-an overlarge town site, but with some real excuse for existence. Most

-of the terminal towns vanished completely when the railroad moved on.

-

-A new territory for the country north of Colorado had been talked about

-as early as 1861. Since the creation of Montana territory in 1864, this

-area had been attached, obviously only temporarily, to Dakota. Now,

-with the mining and railway influences at work, the population made

-appeal to the Dakota legislature and to Congress for independence.

-"Without opposition or prolonged discussion," as Bancroft puts it, the

-new territory was created by Congress in July, 1868. It was called

-Wyoming, just escaping the names of Lincoln and Cheyenne, and received

-as bounds the parallels of 41° and 45°, and the meridians of 27° and

-34°, west of Washington.

-

-For several years after the Sioux treaties of 1868 and the erection of

-Wyoming territory, the Indians of the northern plains kept the peace.

-The routes of travel had been opened, the white claim to the Powder

-River Valley had been surrendered, and a great northern reserve had

-been created in the Black Hills country of southern Dakota. All these,

-by lessening contact, removed the danger of Indian friction. But

-the southern tribes were still uneasy,--treacherous or ill-treated,

-according as the sources vary,--and one more war was needed before they

-could be compelled to settle down.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVIII

-

-BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID

-

-

-Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations determined the

-condition of the frontier, none admitted that it desired to provoke

-Indian wars. The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish to

-be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian agents lost their authority

-and many of their perquisites during war time. The army and the

-frontiersmen denied that they were belligerent. "I assert," wrote

-Custer, "and all candid persons familiar with the subject will sustain

-the assertion, that of all classes of our population the army and

-the people living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of an

-Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices to avoid

-its horrors." To fix the responsibility for the wars which repeatedly

-occurred, despite the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls

-for the examination of individual episodes in large number. It is

-easier to acquit the first two classes than the last two. There are

-enough instances in which the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep

-the peace to establish the belief that a policy combining benevolence,

-equity, and relentless firmness in punishing wrong-doers, white or red,

-could have maintained friendly relations with ease. The Indian agents

-were hampered most by their inability to enforce the laws intrusted

-to them for execution, and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying

-agreements and of Congress in voting supplies. The frontiersmen, with

-their isolated homesteads lying open to surprise and destruction,

-would seem to be sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly

-they thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted Indian

-title, while their personal relations with the red men were commonly

-marked by fear and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and better

-administration than the Indian Bureau, overdid its work, being unable

-to think of the Indians as anything but public enemies and treating

-them with an arbitrary curtness that would have been dangerous even

-among intelligent whites. The history of the southwest Indians, after

-the Sand Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially

-ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances which led to their

-destruction.

-

-After the battle at Sand Creek, the southwest tribes agreed to a

-series of treaties in 1865 by which new reserves were promised them

-on the borderland of Kansas and Indian Territory. These treaties were

-so amended by the Senate that for a time the tribes had no admitted

-homes or rights save the guaranteed hunting privileges on the plains

-south of the Platte. They seem generally to have been peaceful during

-1866, in spite of the rather shabby treatment which the neglect

-of Congress procured for them. In 1867 uneasiness became apparent.

-Agent E. W. Wynkoop, of Sand Creek fame, was now in charge of the

-Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache tribes in the vicinity of Fort Larned,

-on the Santa Fé trail in Kansas. In 1866 they had "complained of the

-government not having fulfilled its promises to them, and of numerous

-impositions practised upon them by the whites." Some of their younger

-braves had gone on the war-path. But Wynkoop claimed to have quieted

-them, and by March, 1867, thought that they were "well satisfied and

-quiet, and anxious to retain the peaceful relations now existing."

-

-The military authorities at Fort Dodge, farther up the Arkansas and

-near the old Santa Fé crossing, were less certain than Wynkoop that

-the Indians meant well. Little Raven, of the Arapaho, and Satanta,

-"principal chief" of the Kiowa, were reported as sending in insulting

-messages to the troops, ordering them to cut no more wood, to leave

-the country, to keep wagons off the Santa Fé trail. Occasional thefts

-of stock and forays were reported along the trail. Custer thought that

-there was "positive evidence from the agents themselves" that the

-Indians were guilty, the trouble only being that Wynkoop charged the

-guilt on the Kiowa and Comanche, while J. H. Leavenworth, agent for

-these tribes, asserted their innocence and accused the wards of Wynkoop.

-

-The Department of the Missouri, in which these tribes resided, was

-under the command of Major-general Winfield Scott Hancock in the spring

-of 1867. With a desire to promote the tranquillity of his command,

-Hancock prepared for an expedition on the plains as early as the roads

-would permit. He wrote of this intention to both of the agents, asking

-them to accompany him, "to show that the officers of the government are

-acting in harmony." His object was not necessarily war, but to impress

-upon the Indians his ability "to chastise any tribes who may molest

-people who are travelling across the plains." In each of the letters he

-listed the complaints against the respective tribes--failure to deliver

-murderers, outrages on the Smoky Hill route in 1866, alliances with

-the Sioux, hostile incursions into Texas, and the specially barbarous

-Box murder. In this last affair one James Box had been murdered by the

-Kiowas, and his wife and five daughters carried off. The youngest of

-these, a baby, died in a few days, the mother stated, and they "took

-her from me and threw her into a ravine." Ultimately the mother and

-three of the children were ransomed from the Kiowas after Mrs. Box and

-her eldest daughter, Margaret, had been passed around from chief to

-chief for more than two months. Custer wrote up this outrage with much

-exaggeration, but the facts were bad enough.

-

-With both agents present, Hancock advanced to Fort Larned. "It is

-uncertain whether war will be the result of the expedition or not,"

-he declared in general orders of March 26, 1867, thus admitting that

-a state of war did not at that time exist. "It will depend upon the

-temper and behavior of the Indians with whom we may come in contact. We

-go prepared for war and will make it if a proper occasion presents."

-The tribes which he proposed to visit were roaming indiscriminately

-over the country traversed by the Santa Fé trail, in accordance with

-the treaties of 1865, which permitted them, until they should be

-settled upon their reserves, to hunt at will over the plains south

-of the Platte, subject only to the restriction that they must not

-camp within ten miles of the main roads and trails. It was Hancock's

-intention to enforce this last provision, and more, to insist "upon

-their keeping off the main lines of travel, where their presence is

-calculated to bring about collisions with the whites."

-

-The first conference with the Indians was held at Fort Larned, where

-the "principal chiefs of the Dog Soldiers of the Cheyennes" had been

-assembled by Agent Wynkoop. Leavenworth thought that the chiefs here

-had been very friendly, but Wynkoop criticised the council as being

-held after sunset, which was contrary to Indian custom and calculated

-"to make them feel suspicious." At this council General Hancock

-reprimanded the chiefs and told them that he would visit their village,

-occupied by themselves and an almost equal number of Sioux; which

-village, said Wynkoop, "was 35 miles from any travelled road." "Why

-don't he confine the troops to the great line of travel?" demanded

-Leavenworth, whose wards had the same privilege of hunting south of the

-Arkansas that those of Wynkoop had between the Arkansas and the Platte.

-So long as they camped ten miles from the roads, this was their right.

-

-Contrary to Wynkoop's urgings, Hancock led his command from Fort

-Larned on April 13, 1867, moving for the main Arapaho, Cheyenne, and

-Sioux village on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles west of the post. With

-cavalry, infantry, artillery, and a pontoon train, it was hard for him

-to assume any other appearance than that of war. Even the General's

-particular assurance, as Custer puts it, "that he was not there to

-make war, but to promote peace," failed to convince the chiefs who had

-attended the night council. It was not a pleasant march. The snow was

-nearly a foot deep, fodder was scarce, and the Indian disposition was

-uncertain. Only a few had come in to the Fort Larned conference, and

-none appeared at camp after the first day's march. After this refusal

-to meet him, Hancock marched on to the village, in front of which he

-found some three hundred Indians drawn up in battle array. Fighting

-seemed imminent, but at last Roman Nose, Bull Bear, and other chiefs

-met Hancock between the lines and agreed upon an evening conference. It

-developed that the men alone were left at the Indian camp. Women and

-children, with all the movables they could handle, had fled out upon

-the snowy plains at the approach of the troops. Fear of another Sand

-Creek had caused it, said Wynkoop. But Hancock chose to regard this

-as evidence of a treacherous disposition, demanded that the fugitives

-return at once, and insisted upon encamping near the village against

-the protest of the chiefs. Instead of bringing back their people, the

-men themselves abandoned the village that evening, while Hancock,

-learning of the flight, surrounded and took possession of it. The next

-morning, April 15, Custer was sent with cavalry in pursuit of the

-flying bands. Depredations occurring to the north of Pawnee Fork within

-a day or two, Hancock burned the village in retaliation and proceeded

-to Fort Dodge. Wynkoop insisted that the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been

-entirely innocent and that these injuries had been committed by the

-Sioux. "I have no doubt," he wrote, "but that they think that war has

-been forced upon them."

-

-When Hancock started upon the plains, there was no war, but there was

-no doubt about its existence as the spring advanced. When the Peace

-Commissioners of this year came with their protestations of benevolence

-for the Great Father, it was small wonder that the Cheyenne and Arapaho

-had to be coaxed into the camp on the Medicine Lodge Creek. And when

-the treaties there made failed of prompt execution by the United

-States, the war naturally dragged on in a desultory way during 1868 and

-1869.

-

-In the spring of 1868 General Sheridan, who had succeeded Hancock in

-command of the Department of the Missouri, visited the posts at Fort

-Larned and Fort Dodge. Here on Pawnee and Walnut creeks most of the

-southwest Indians were congregated. Wynkoop, in February and April,

-reported them as happy and quiet. They were destitute, to be sure, and

-complained that the Commissioners at Medicine Lodge had promised them

-arms and ammunition which had not been delivered. Indeed, the treaty

-framed there had not yet been ratified. But he believed it possible to

-keep them contented and wean them from their old habits. To Sheridan

-the situation seemed less happy. He declined to hold a council with

-the complaining chiefs on the ground that the whole matter was yet in

-the hands of the Peace Commission, but he saw that the young men were

-chafing and turbulent and that frontier hostilities would accompany the

-summer buffalo hunt.

-

-There is little doubt of the destitution which prevailed among the

-plains tribes at this time. The rapid diminution of game was everywhere

-observable. The annuities at best afforded only partial relief, while

-Congress was irregular in providing funds. Three times during the

-spring the Commissioner prodded the Secretary of the Interior, who in

-turn prodded Congress, with the result that instead of the $1,000,000

-asked for $500,000 were, in July, 1868, granted to be spent not by the

-Indian Office, but by the War Department. Three weeks later General

-Sherman created an organization for distributing this charity, placing

-the district south of Kansas in command of General Hazen. Meanwhile,

-the time for making the spring issues of annuity goods had come. It

-was ordered in June that no arms or ammunition should be given to the

-Cheyenne and Arapaho because of their recent bad conduct; but in July

-the Commissioner, influenced by the great dissatisfaction on the part

-of the tribes, and fearing "that these Indians, by reason of such

-non-delivery of arms, ammunition, and goods, will commence hostilities

-against the whites in their vicinity, modified the order and

-telegraphed Agent Wynkoop that he might use his own discretion in the

-matter: "If you are satisfied that the issue of the arms and ammunition

-is necessary to preserve the peace, and that no evil will result from

-their delivery, let the Indians have them." A few days previously on

-July 20, Wynkoop had issued the ordinary supplies to his Arapaho and

-Apache, his Cheyenne refusing to take anything until they could have

-the guns as well. "They felt much disappointed, but gave no evidence of

-being angry ... and would wait with patience for the Great Father to

-take pity upon them." The permission from the Commissioner was welcomed

-by the agent, and approved by Thomas Murphy, his superintendent. Murphy

-had been ordered to Fort Larned to reënforce Wynkoop's judgment. He

-held a council on August 1 with Little Raven and the Arapaho and

-Apache, and issued them their arms. "Raven and the other chiefs then

-promised that these arms should never be used against the whites, and

-Agent Wynkoop then delivered to the Arapahoes 160 pistols, 80 Lancaster

-rifles, 12 kegs of powder, 1-1/2 keg of lead, and 15,000 caps; and to

-the Apaches he gave 40 pistols, 20 Lancaster rifles, 3 kegs of powder,

-1/2 keg of lead, and 5000 caps." The Cheyenne came in a few days later

-for their share, which Wynkoop handed over on the 9th. "They were

-delighted at receiving the goods," he reported, "particularly the

-arms and ammunition, and never before have I known them to be better

-satisfied and express themselves as being so well contented." The

-fact that within three days murders were committed by the Cheyenne on

-the Solomon and Saline forks throws doubt upon the sincerity of their

-protestations.

-

-The war party which commenced the active hostilities of 1868 at a time

-so well calculated to throw discredit upon the wisdom of the Indian

-Office, had left the Cheyenne village early in August, "smarting

-under their _supposed_ wrongs," as Wynkoop puts it. They were mostly

-Cheyenne, with a small number of Arapaho and a few visiting Sioux,

-about 200 in all. Little Raven's son and a brother of White Antelope,

-who died at Sand Creek, were with them; Black Kettle is said to have

-been their leader. On August 7 some of them spent the evening at Fort

-Hays, where they held a powwow at the post. "Black Kettle loves his

-white soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he meets them

-and shakes their hands in friendship," is the way the post-trader,

-Hill P. Wilson, reported his speech. "The white soldiers ought to be

-glad all the time, because their ponies are so big and so strong,

-and because they have so many guns and so much to eat.... All other

-Indians may take the war trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep

-friendship with his white brothers." Three nights later they began to

-kill on Saline River, and on the 11th they crossed to the Solomon. Some

-fifteen settlers were killed, and five women were carried off. Here

-this particular raid stopped, for the news had got abroad, and the

-frontier was instantly in arms. Various isolated forays occurred, so

-that Sheridan was sure he had a general war upon his hands. He believed

-nearly all the young men of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche

-to be in the war parties, the old women, men, and children remaining

-around the posts and professing solicitous friendship. There were 6000

-potential warriors in all, and that he might better devote himself to

-suppressing them, Sheridan followed the Kansas Pacific to its terminus

-at Fort Hays and there established his headquarters in the field.

-

-The war of 1868 ranged over the whole frontier south of the Platte

-trail. It influenced the Peace Commission, at its final meeting in

-October, 1868, to repudiate many of the pacific theories of January

-and recommend that the Indians be handed over to the War Department.

-Sheridan, who had led the Commission to this conclusion, was in the

-field directing the movement. His policy embraced a concentration of

-the peaceful bands south of the Arkansas, and a relentless war against

-the rest. It is fairly clear that the war need not have come, had it

-not been for the cross-purposes ever apparent between the Indian Office

-and the War Department, and even within the War Department itself.

-

-At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared for war. He had, at the start, about

-2600 men, nearly equally divided among cavalry and infantry. Believing

-his force too small to cover the whole plains between Fort Hays and

-Denver, he called for reënforcements, receiving a part of the Fifth

-Cavalry and a regiment of Kansas volunteers. With enthusiasm this last

-addition was raised among the frontiersmen, where Indian fighting was

-popular; the governor of the state resigned his office to become its

-colonel. September and October were occupied in getting the troops

-together, keeping the trails open for traffic, and establishing, about

-a hundred miles south of Fort Dodge, a rendezvous which was known

-as Camp Supply. It was the intention to protect the frontier during

-the autumn, and to follow up the Indian villages after winter had

-fallen, catching the tribes when they would be concentrated and at a

-disadvantage.

-

-On October 15, 1868, Sherman, just from the Chicago meeting of the

-Peace Commissioners and angry because he had there been told that the

-army wanted war, gave Sheridan a free hand for the winter campaign. "As

-to 'extermination,' it is for the Indians themselves to determine. We

-don't want to exterminate or even to fight them.... The present war ...

-was begun and carried on by the Indians in spite of our entreaties and

-in spite of our warnings, and the only question to us is, whether we

-shall allow the progress of our western settlements to be checked, and

-leave the Indians free to pursue their bloody career, or accept their

-war and fight them.... We ... accept the war ... and hereby resolve to

-make its end final.... I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain

-our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow

-no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their

-hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these

-Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not

-again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind

-of pretext that they may choose to allege."

-

-The plan of campaign provided that the main column, Custer in immediate

-command, should march from Fort Hays directly against the Indians, by

-way of Camp Supply; two smaller columns were to supplement this, one

-marching in on Indian Territory from New Mexico, and the other from

-Fort Lyon on the old Sand Creek reserve. Detachments of the chief

-column began to move in the middle of November, Custer reaching the

-depot at Camp Supply ahead of the rest, while the Kansas volunteers

-lost themselves in heavy snow-storms. On November 23 Custer was ordered

-out of Camp Supply, on the north fork of the Canadian, to follow a

-fresh trail which led southwest towards the Washita River, near the

-eastern line of Texas. He pushed on as rapidly as twelve inches of snow

-would allow, discovering in the early morning of November 27 a large

-camp in the valley of the Washita.

-

-It was Black Kettle's camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho that they had found

-in a strip of heavy timber along the river. After reconnoitring Custer

-divided his force into four columns for simultaneous attacks upon the

-sleeping village. At daybreak "my men charged the village and reached

-the lodges before the Indians were aware of our presence. The moment

-the charge was ordered the band struck up 'Garry Owen,' and with cheers

-that strongly reminded me of scenes during the war, every trooper,

-led by his officer, rushed towards the village." For several hours a

-promiscuous fight raged up and down the ravine, with Indians everywhere

-taking to cover, only to be prodded out again. Fifty-one lodges in

-all fell into Custer's hands; 103 dead Indians, including Black

-Kettle himself, were found later. "We captured in good condition 875

-horses, ponies, and mules; 241 saddles, some of very fine and costly

-workmanship; 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins for lodges, 160

-untanned robes, 210 axes, 140 hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535

-pounds of powder, 1050 pounds of lead, 4000 arrows and arrowheads, 75

-spears, 90 bullet moulds, 35 bows and quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds

-of bullets, 775 lariats, 940 buckskin saddle-bags, 470 blankets, 93

-coats, 700 pounds of tobacco."

-

-As the day advanced, Custer's triumph seemed likely to turn into

-defeat. The Cheyenne village proved to be only the last of a long

-string of villages that extended down the Washita for fifteen miles

-or more, and whose braves rode up by hundreds to see the fight. A

-general engagement was avoided, however, and with better luck and more

-discretion than he was one day to have, Custer marched back to Camp

-Supply on December 3, his band playing gayly the tune of battle, "Garry

-Owen." The commander in his triumphal procession was followed by his

-scouts and trailers, and the captives of his prowess--a long train of

-Indian widows and orphans.

-

-The decisive blow which broke the power of the southwest tribes had

-been struck, and Black Kettle had carried on his last raid,--if indeed

-he had carried on this one at all--but as the reports came in it became

-evident that the merits of the triumph were in doubt. The Eastern

-humanitarians were shocked at the cold-blooded attack upon a camp of

-sleeping men, women, and children, forgetting that if Indians were to

-be fought this was the most successful way to do it, and was no shock

-to the Indians' own ideals of warfare and attack. The deeper question

-was whether this camp was actually hostile, whether the tribes had not

-abandoned the war-path in good faith, whether it was fair to crush a

-tribe that with apparent earnestness begged peace because it could not

-control the excesses of some of its own braves. It became certain, at

-least, that the War Department itself had fallen victim to that vice

-with which it had so often reproached the Indian Office--failure to

-produce a harmony of action among several branches of the service.

-

-The Indian Office had no responsibility for the battle of the Washita.

-It had indeed issued arms to the Cheyenne in August, but only with

-the approval of the military officer commanding Forts Larned and

-Dodge, General Alfred Sully, "an officer of long experience in Indian

-affairs." In the early summer all the tribes had been near these forts

-and along the Santa Fé trail. After Congress had voted its half million

-to feed the hungry, Sherman had ordered that the peaceful hungry among

-the southern tribes should be moved from this locality to the vicinity

-of old Fort Cobb, in the west end of Indian Territory on the Washita

-River.

-

-During September, while Sheridan was gathering his armament at Fort

-Hays, Sherman was ordering the agents to take their peaceful charges

-to Fort Cobb. With the major portion of the tribes at war it would

-be impossible for the troops to make any discrimination unless there

-should be an absolute separation between the well-disposed and the

-warlike. He proposed to allow the former a reasonable time to get to

-their new abode and then beg the President for an order "declaring all

-Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations" to be outlaws.

-He believed that by going to war these tribes had violated their

-hunting rights. Superintendent Murphy thought he saw another Sand Creek

-in these preparations. Here were the tribes ordered to Fort Cobb; their

-fall annuity goods were on the way thither for distribution; and now

-the military column was marching in the same direction.

-

-In the meantime General W. B. Hazen had arrived at Fort Cobb on

-November 7 and had immediately voiced his fear that "General Sheridan,

-acting under the impression of hostiles, may attack bands of Comanche

-and Kiowa before they reach this point." He found, however, most of

-these tribes, who had not gone to war this season, encamped within

-reach on the Canadian and Washita rivers,--5000 of the Comanche and

-1500 of the Kiowa. Within a few days Cheyenne and Arapaho began to join

-the settlements in the district, Black Kettle bringing in his band to

-the Washita, forty miles east of Antelope Hills, and coming in person

-to Fort Cobb for an interview with General Hazen on November 20.

-

-"I have always done my best," he protested, "to keep my young men

-quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have

-not been able to keep them all at home. But we all want peace." To

-which added Big Mouth, of the Arapaho: "I came to you because I wish

-to do right.... I do not want war, and my people do not, but although

-we have come back south of the Arkansas, the soldiers follow us and

-continue fighting, and we want you to send out and stop these soldiers

-from coming against us."

-

-To these, General Hazen, fearful as he was of an unjust attack,

-responded with caution. Sherman had spoken of Fort Cobb in his orders

-to Sheridan, as "aimed to hold out the olive branch with one hand

-and the sword in the other. But it is not thereby intended that any

-hostile Indians shall make use of that establishment as a refuge from

-just punishment for acts already done. Your military control over

-that reservation is as perfect as over Kansas, and if hostile Indians

-retreat within that reservation, ... they may be followed even to

-Fort Cobb, captured, and punished." It is difficult to see what could

-constitute the fact of peaceful intent if coming in to Fort Cobb did

-not. But Hazen gave to Black Kettle cold comfort: "I am sent here as

-a peace chief; all here is to be peace; but north of the Arkansas is

-General Sheridan, the great war chief, and I do not control him; and he

-has all the soldiers who are fighting the Arapahoes and Cheyennes....

-If the soldiers come to fight, you must remember they are not from me,

-but from that great war chief, and with him you must make peace....

-I cannot stop the war.... You must not come in again unless I send

-for you, and you must keep well out beyond the friendly Kiowas and

-Comanches." So he sent the suitors away and wrote, on November 22,

-to Sherman for more specific instructions covering these cases. He

-believed that Black Kettle and Big Mouth were themselves sincere, but

-doubted their control over their bands. These were the bands which

-Custer destroyed before the week was out, and it is probable that

-during the fight they were reënforced by braves from the friendly

-lodges of Satanta's Kiowa and Little Raven's Arapaho.

-

-Whatever might have been a wise policy in treating semi-hostile Indian

-tribes, this one was certainly unsatisfactory. It is doubtful whether

-the war was ever so great as Sherman imagined it. The injured tribes

-were unquestionably drawn to Fort Cobb by a desire for safety; the army

-was in the position of seeming to use the olive branch to assemble

-the Indians in order that the sword might the better disperse them.

-There is reasonable doubt whether Black Kettle had anything to do with

-the forays. Murphy believed in him and cited many evidences of his

-friendly disposition, while Wynkoop asserted positively that he had

-been encamped on Pawnee Fork all through the time when he was alleged

-to have been committing depredations on the Saline. The army alone had

-been no more successful in producing obvious justice than the army and

-Indian Office together had been. Yet whatever the merits of the case,

-the power of the Cheyenne and their neighbors was permanently gone.

-

-During the winter of 1868-1869 Sheridan's army remained in the

-vicinity of Fort Cobb, gathering the remnants of the shattered tribes

-in upon their reservation. The Kiowa and Comanche were placed at last

-on the lands awarded them at the Medicine Lodge treaties, while the

-Arapaho and Cheyenne once more had their abiding-place changed in

-August, 1869, and were settled down along the upper waters of the

-Washita, around the valley of their late defeat.

-

-The long controversy between the War and Interior departments over the

-management of the tribes entered upon a new stage with the inauguration

-of Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his administration

-was a bill erecting a board of civilian Indian commissioners to advise

-the Indian Department and promote the civilization of the tribes. A

-generous grant of two millions accompanied the act. More care was used

-in the appointment of agents than had hitherto been taken, and the

-immediate results seemed good when the Commissioner wrote his annual

-report in December, 1869. But the worst of the troubles with the

-Indians of the plains was over, so that without special effort peace

-could now have been the result.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIX

-

-THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS

-

-

-Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last

-stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun;

-ten years before, Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic

-Whitney and the leadership of more practical men, had provided for a

-survey of railroad routes along the trails; on the eve of the struggle

-the earliest continental railway had received its charter; and the

-struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in 1867, sent out its

-Peace Commission to prepare an open way. That the tribes must yield

-was as inevitable as it was that their yielding must be ungracious and

-destructive to them. Too weak to compel their enemy to respect their

-rights, and uncertain what their rights were, they were too low in

-intelligence to realize that the more they struggled, the worse would

-be their suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in which

-the iron band was put across the continent. Its completion and their

-subjection came in 1869.

-

-After years of tedious debate the earliest of the Pacific railways was

-chartered in 1862. The withdrawal of southern claims had made possible

-an agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality engendered

-by the Civil War gave to the project its final impetus. Under the

-management of the Central Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and

-two or three border railways, provision was made for a road from the

-Iowa border to California. Land grants and bond subsidies were for two

-years dangled before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt to

-entice them to construct it. Only after these were increased in 1864

-did active organization begin, while at the end of 1865 but forty miles

-of the Union Pacific had been built.

-

-Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was

-easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In

-their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania

-Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of

-these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled

-along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across

-plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains.

-Worse yet, the road could hope for little aid from the country through

-which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson, Salt Lake, and

-Denver, the last of which it missed by a hundred miles, its course lay

-through unsettled wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the

-trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected themselves across

-the continent, relying, up to the moment of joining, upon the firm

-anchorage of the termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California.

-Equally trying, though different in variety, were the difficulties

-attendant upon construction at either end.

-

-The impetus which Judah had given to the Central Pacific had started

-the western end of the system two years ahead of the eastern, but had

-not produced great results at first. It was hard work building east

-into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging, tunnelling,

-filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade down and the curvature out.

-Twenty miles a year only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865,

-thirty in 1866, and forty-six in 1867--one hundred and thirty-six

-miles during the first five years of work. Nature had done her best

-to impede the progress of the road by thrusting mountains and valleys

-across its route. But she had covered the mountains with timber and

-filled them with stone, so that materials of construction were easily

-accessible along all of the costliest part of the line. Bridges and

-trestles could be built anywhere with local material. The labor problem

-vexed the Central Pacific managers at the start. It was a scanty

-and inefficient supply of workmen that existed in California when

-construction began. Like all new countries, California possessed more

-work than workmen. Economic independence was to be had almost for the

-asking. Free land and fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work

-for hire. The slight results of the first five years were due as much

-to lack of labor as to refractory roadway or political opposition. But

-by 1865 the employment of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported

-by the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker, who was the

-most active constructor, brought a new rapidity into construction. "I

-used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull," Crocker

-dictated to Bancroft's stenographer, "stopping along wherever there

-was anything amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not

-up to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles began. California

-could manufacture no iron. Rolling stock and rails had to be imported

-from Europe or the East, and came to San Francisco after the costly sea

-voyage, _via_ Panama or the Horn. But the men directing the Central

-Pacific--Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and the rest--rose to the

-difficulties, and once they had passed the mountains, fairly romped

-across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.

-

-The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the

-California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached

-Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union

-Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri

-River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across

-Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the

-Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri

-steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway

-connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less

-great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union

-Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail,

-flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could

-do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could

-deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and

-trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood

-lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood

-as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had

-to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern

-terminus.

-

-The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with

-the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no

-trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union

-Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were

-most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees

-contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently

-discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief

-engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their

-arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and

-fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves.

-The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief

-constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced

-officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five

-years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket

-in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had

-passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians

-had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its

-crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal,"

-with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I

-called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every

-man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was

-a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the

-command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had

-seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."

-

-By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much to accelerate the

-construction of the road. Heretofore the junction point had been in the

-Nevada Desert, a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line.

-It was now provided that each road might build until it met the other.

-Since the mountain section, with the highest accompanying subsidies,

-was at hand, each of the companies was spurred on by its desire to get

-as much land and as many bonds as possible. The race which began in the

-autumn of 1866 ended only with the completion of the track in 1869. A

-mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start; seven or eight a

-day were laid before the end.

-

-The English traveller, Bell, who published his _New Tracks in North

-America_ in 1869, found somewhere an enthusiastic quotation admirably

-descriptive of the process. "Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a

-science," it read, "and we pundits of the Far East stood upon that

-embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed

-westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives with mingled

-feelings of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came.

-A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its

-load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the

-rest of the gang taking hold by twos until it is clear of the car. They

-come forward at a run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in

-its place, right side up, with care, while the same process goes on at

-the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each

-gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say, but

-the fellows on the U. P. are tremendously in earnest. The moment the

-car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next

-loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a sight

-to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full

-gallop at the end of 60 or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu,

-who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers,

-spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand

-Anvil Chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.

-It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes

-to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San

-Francisco. That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one million

-times are those sledges to be swung--twenty-one million times are they

-to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of

-modern America is complete!"

-

-Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built

-the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the

-Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and

-Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon

-which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental

-railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to

-carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as

-their general offices.

-

-An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and

-seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards,

-furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city.

-"The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform,

-called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of

-the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that

-was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its

-tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the

-head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving

-across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had

-rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight

-train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its

-vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at

-Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring.

-Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of

-the railroad.

-

-In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of

-the _Springfield Republican_, appropriately designated the terminal

-town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from

-Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very

-midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the

-town stood dusty white--"a new arrival with black clothes looked like

-nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel."

-A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within

-two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with

-ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice

-ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the

-road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet

-constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning

-of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the

-similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.

-

-The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John

-H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five

-dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling

-and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution

-was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness,

-called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by

-forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and

-gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry

-alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in

-full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in

-what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people,

-and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would

-appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they

-must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its

-highest seats and most diabolical service."

-

-Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads,

-were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction

-gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation

-for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling

-in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly

-shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the

-great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on,

-the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the

-street lines and débris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle

-thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied

-about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of

-their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied

-together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their

-relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they

-quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the

-future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to

-get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some

-consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point

-to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other

-one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.

-

-The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough.

-At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years

-before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track,

-to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty

-laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while

-in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868,

-the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to

-its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide,

-making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776

-miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the

-continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a

-half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been

-systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great.

-

-Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the

-building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was

-scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had

-written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the

-men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press

-their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention

-no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name

-your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's

-first administration the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal proved that men,

-high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose

-success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of

-indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of

-their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more

-prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national

-conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever

-disregarded in the past.

-

-The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been

-variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open

-to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it

-might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two

-rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake,

-where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel

-for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree

-upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to

-bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest

-of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was

-celebrated in due form.

-

-Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the

-Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of

-a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May,

-1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction

-of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short

-notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the

-Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come

-to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last

-Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General

-Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how

-at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie

-of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few

-beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic

-taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the

-United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the

-leading paragraph of the _Nation_ of the Thursday after. "So far as

-we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the

-speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down

-under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them

-to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to

-get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man

-says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with

-questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will

-say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being

-offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with

-a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying.

-The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was

-celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country.

-Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting,

-fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity;

-Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled

-Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of

-a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the

-Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between

-the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the

-perpetuity of the Union as it is."

-

-No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater

-significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this

-act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question

-that all were framing:--

-

-      "What was it the Engines said,

-      Pilots touching, head to head

-      Facing on the single track,

-      Half a world behind each back?"

-

-But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine

-retorted to the eastern:--

-

-      "'You brag of the East! _You_ do?

-      Why, _I_ bring the East to _you_!

-      All the Orient, all Cathay,

-      Find through me the shortest way;

-      And the sun you follow here

-      Rises in my hemisphere.

-      Really,--if one must be rude,--

-      Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"

-

-The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the

-men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying

-beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more

-important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the

-road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific

-Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert

-and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised

-a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the

-railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading

-upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the

-Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national

-assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as

-other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap

-between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XX

-

-THE NEW INDIAN POLICY

-

-

-Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868,

-and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the

-plains had been cleanly split into two main groups which had their

-centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest Dakota and the old Indian

-Territory. The advance of a new wave of population had followed along

-the road thus opened, pushing settlements into central Nebraska and

-Kansas. Through the latter state the Union Pacific, Eastern Division,

-better known as the Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver,

-where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this advance of civilized

-life upon the plains it became clear that the old Indian policy

-was gone for good, and that the idea of a permanent country, where

-the tribes, free from white contact, could continue their nomadic

-existence, had broken down. The old Indian policy had been based upon

-the permanence of this condition, but with the white advance troops

-for police had been added, while the loud bickerings between the

-military authorities, thus superimposed, and the Indian Office, which

-regarded itself as the rightful custodian of the problem, proved

-to be the overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first annual

-message in 1869: "No matter what ought to be the relations between

-such [civilized] settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do

-not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end.

-A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible

-for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all

-Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life

-and the rights of others, dangerous to society. I see no substitute for

-such a system, except in placing all the Indians on large reservations,

-as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection

-there."

-

-The vexed question of civilian or military control had reached the

-bitterest stage of its discussion when Grant became President. For five

-years there had been general wars in which both departments seemed

-to be badly involved and for which responsibility was hard to place.

-There were many things to be said in favor of either method of control.

-Beginning with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in

-1832, the office had been run by the War Department for seventeen

-years. In this period the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been

-carried out; the frontier had been established in an unbroken line of

-reserves from Texas to Green Bay; and the migration across the plains

-had begun. But with the creation of the Interior Department in 1849

-the Indian Bureau had been transferred to civilian hands. As yet the

-Indian war was so exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments in

-favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly too, though the

-results make this conviction hard to hold, to treat the Indian well,

-to keep the peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they would

-permit it. However the government failed in practice and in controlling

-the men of the frontier, there is no doubt about the sincerity of its

-general intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California, no mines

-and no railways, and no mixture of slavery and politics, the hope might

-not have failed of realization. Even as it was, the civilian bureau

-had little trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years after

-its organization. In general the military power was called upon when

-disorder passed beyond the control of the agent; short of that time the

-agent remained in authority.

-

-As a means of introducing civilization among the tribes the agents

-were more effective than army officers could be. They were, indeed,

-underpaid, appointed for political reasons, and often too weak to

-resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty; but they were

-civilians. Their ideals were those of industry and peace. Their terms

-of service were often too short for them to learn the business, but

-they were not subject to the rapid shifting and transfer which made up

-a large part of army life. Army officers were better picked and trained

-than the agents, but their ambitions were military, and they were

-frequently unable to understand why breaches of formal discipline were

-not always matters of importance.

-

-The strong arguments in favor of military control were founded largely

-on the permanency of tenure in the army. Political appointments were

-fewer, the average of personal character and devotion was higher. Army

-administration had fewer scandals than had that of the Indian Bureau.

-The partisan on either side in the sixties was prone to believe that

-his favorite branch of the service was honest and wise, while the

-other was inefficient, foolish, and corrupt. He failed to see that

-in the earliest phase of the policy, when there was no friction, and

-consequently little fighting, the problem was essentially civilian;

-that in the next period, when constant friction was provoking wars,

-it had become military; and that finally, when emigration and

-transportation had changed friction into overwhelming pressure, the

-wars would again cease. A large share of the disputes were due to

-the misunderstandings as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes

-should be under the bureau or the army. On the whole, even when the

-tribes were hostile, army control tended to increase the cost of

-management and the chance of injustice. There never was a time when

-a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals of police rather than

-those of soldiers, could not have done better than the army did. But

-the student, attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve it

-fully and justly as were its immediate custodians. He can at most steer

-in between the badly biassed "Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson,

-and the outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier, that the

-Indian must go.

-

-The demand of the army for the control of the Indians was never

-gratified. Around 1870 its friends were insistent that since the army

-had to bear the knocks of the Indian policy,--knocks, they claimed,

-generally due to mistakes of the bureau,--it ought to have the whole

-responsibility and the whole credit. The inertia which attaches to

-federal reforms held this one back, while the Indian problem itself

-changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary. Once the great

-wars of the sixties were done the tribes subsided into general peace.

-Their vigorous resistance was confined to the years when the last great

-wave of the white advance was surging over them. Then, confined to

-their reservations, they resumed the march to civilization.

-

-From the commencement of his term, Grant was willing to aid in at once

-reducing the abuses of the Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy

-on the plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done good work, which

-would have been more effective had coöperation between the army and the

-bureau been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted two millions

-to be used in maintaining peace on the plains, "among and with the

-several tribes ... to promote civilization among said Indians, bring

-them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve their necessities,

-and encourage their efforts at self-support." The President was

-authorized at the same time to erect a board of not more than ten men,

-"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy," who should, with the

-Secretary of the Interior, and without salary, exercise joint control

-over the expenditures of this or any money voted for the use of the

-Indian Department.

-

-The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed to give greater wisdom

-to the administration of the Indian policy and to minimize peculation

-in the bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of the peace

-party over the army. "The gentlemen who wrote the reports of the

-Commissioners revelled in riotous imaginations and discarded facts,"

-sneered a friend of military control; but there was, more or less, a

-distinct improvement in the management of the reservation tribes after

-1869; although, as the exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption

-was by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners and Grant

-sought to elevate the tone of agency control was through the religious,

-charitable, and missionary societies. These organizations, many of

-which had long maintained missionary schools among the more civilized

-tribes, were invited to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians

-for appointment by the bureau. On the whole these appointments were

-an improvement over the men whom political influence had heretofore

-brought to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner and the board

-were again complaining of the character of the agents; but there was an

-increasing standard of criticism.

-

-In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869,

-and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In

-1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to

-civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable

-spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and

-Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of

-Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without

-occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers

-whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872,

-"the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity

-has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly

-improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their

-own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over

-them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult

-Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its _38th Annual

-Report_, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last

-thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their

-education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their

-admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes,

-upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may

-justly be proud."

-

-The board of Indian Commissioners believed that most of the obvious

-improvement in the Indian condition was due to the substitution of

-a peace policy for a policy of something else. It made a mistake in

-assuming that there had ever been a policy of war. So far as the United

-States government had been concerned the aim had always been peace

-and humanity, and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the

-Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy been administered.

-Even then it was distinctly temporary. The events of the sixties

-had involved such continuous friction and necessitated such severe

-repression that contemporaries might be pardoned for thinking that war

-was the policy rather than the cure. But the resistance of the tribes

-would generally have ceased by 1870, even without the new peace policy.

-Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for

-resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The

-Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific,

-and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads

-like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande,

-the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and the Missouri, Kansas, and

-Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet

-the board was right in that its influence in bringing closer harmony

-between public opinion and the Indian Bureau, and in improving the

-tone of the bureau, had made the transformation of the savage into the

-citizen farmer more rapid.

-

-Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian Commissioners

-Congress took another long step towards a better condition by

-ordering that no more treaties with the Indian tribes should be made

-by President and Senate. For more than two years before 1871 no

-treaty had been made and ratified, and now the policy was definitely

-changed. For ninety years the Indians had been treated as independent

-nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had been concluded with

-various tribes, the United States only once repudiating any of them.

-In 1863, after the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the

-tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had not applied

-to Indian relations the rule of international law that war terminates

-all existing treaties. The relation implied by the treaty had been

-anomalous. The tribes were at once independent and dependent. No

-foreign nation could treat with them; hence they were not free. No

-state could treat with them, and the Indian could not sue in United

-States courts; hence they were not Americans. The Supreme Court in the

-Cherokee cases had tried to define their unique status, but without

-great success. It was unfortunate for the Indians that the United

-States took their tribal existence seriously. The agreements had always

-a greater sanctity in appearance than in fact. Indians honestly unable

-to comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and often denying that they

-were in any wise bound by it, were held to fulfilment by the power

-of the United States. The United States often believed that treaty

-violation represented deliberate hostility of the tribes, when it

-signified only the unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to

-follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce treaties thus

-violated led constantly to wars whose justification the Indian could

-not see.

-

-The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making of any Indian treaty in

-the future. Hereafter when agreements became necessary, they were to be

-made, much as they had been in the past, but Congress was the ratifying

-power and not the Senate. The fiction of an independence which had held

-the Indians to a standard which they could not understand was here

-abandoned; and quite as much to the point, perhaps, the predominance of

-the Senate in Indian affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a

-whole. In no other branch of internal administration would the Senate

-have been permitted to make binding agreements, but here the fiction

-had given it a dominance ever since the organization of the government.

-

-In the thirty-five years following the abandonment of the Indian

-treaties the problems of management changed with the ascending

-civilization of the national wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian

-Commissioner in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day of deliverance

-from the fear of Indian hostilities," while his successors in office

-saw his prophecy fulfilled. Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary

-of the Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement of

-management and the drafting of a positive policy. His application

-of the merit system to Indian appointments, which was a startling

-innovation in national politics, worked a great change after the petty

-thievery which had flourished in the presidency of General Grant.

-Grant had indeed desired to do well, and conditions had appreciably

-bettered, yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians to

-continue their peculations in instances which ranged from humble agents

-up to the Cabinet itself. Schurz not only corrected much of this,

-but the first report of his Commissioner, E. A. Hayt, outlined the

-preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides the continuance

-of concentration and education there were four policies which stood

-out in this report--economy in the administration of rations, that

-the Indians might not be pauperized; a special code of law for the

-Indian reserves; a well-organized Indian police to enforce the laws;

-and a division of reserve lands into farms which should be assigned to

-individual Indians in severalty. The administration of Secretary Schurz

-gave substance to all these policies.

-

-The progress of Indian education and civilization began to be a

-real thing during Hayes's presidency. Most of the wars were over,

-permanency in residence could be relied on to a considerable degree,

-the Indians could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In

-1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department, the Indian

-Office reported an Indian population of 256,127 for the United

-States, excluding Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing

-citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read. Among them had been

-erected both boarding and day schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the

-latter. "Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement,

-showing an increased and more regular attendance of pupils and a

-growing interest in education on the part of parents." Interest in

-the problem of Indian education had been aroused in the East as well

-as among the tribes during the preceding year or two, because of the

-experiment with which the name of R. H. Pratt was closely connected.

-The non-resident boarding school, where the children could be taken

-away from the tribe and educated among whites, had become a factor in

-Carlisle, Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt had opened the

-first of these with 147 students in November, 1879. His design had been

-to give to the boys and girls the rudiments of education and training

-in farming and mechanic arts. His experience had already, in 1880,

-shown this to be entirely practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled

-as soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals, marched to the

-music of their own band. Both sexes had exhibited at the Cumberland

-County Agricultural Fair, where prizes were awarded to many of them for

-quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness, tinware, and penmanship.

-Many of the students had increased their knowledge of white customs by

-going out in the summers to work in the fields or kitchens of farmers

-in the East. Here, too, they had shown the capacity for education and

-development which their bitterest frontier enemies had denied. In 1906

-there were twenty-five of these schools with more than 9000 students in

-attendance.

-

-It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away

-from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another

-to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The

-ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive

-to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or

-Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade,

-and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for

-rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but

-the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana Crows, for

-instance, were, in 1904, encouraged into agricultural rivalry by a

-county fair. Their congenital love for gambling was converted into

-competition over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906 they had not been

-drawing rations for nearly two years. While their settling down was

-but a single incident in tribal education and not a general reform,

-it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian conditions since

-the warlike sixties. The brilliant green placard which announced their

-county fair for 1906 bears witness to this:--

-

-                          "CROWS, WAKE UP!

-

-          "Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.

-                    "Begin Planting for it Now.

-                       "Plant a Good Garden.

-                      "Put in Wheat and Oats.

-  Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to

-                             the Fair.

-   Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best

-                             Exhibits.

-    "Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.

-

-  "_Committee._"

-

-A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence

-for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their

-relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership

-of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no

-attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them,

-while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of

-this on their own account. Individual attempts at progress were often

-checked by the fact that crime went unpunished in the Indian Country.

-An Indian police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in 1880,

-but the law respecting trespassers on Indian lands was inadequate, and

-Congress was slow in providing codes and courts for the reservations.

-The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts on his own

-authority in 1883; Congress extended certain laws over the tribes in

-1885; and a little later provided salaries for the officials of the

-agency courts.

-

-An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in severalty by

-Indians marked a great step towards solidifying Indian civilization.

-There had been no greater obstacle to this civilization than communal

-ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of hunting, with

-agriculture as an incidental and rather degrading feature. Few of

-the tribes had any recognition of individual ownership. The educated

-Indian and the savage alike were forced into economic stagnation by the

-system. Education could accomplish little in face of it. The changes of

-the seventies brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated

-requests that Congress begin the breaking down of the tribal system

-through the substitution of Indian ownership.

-

-In isolated cases and by special treaty provisions a few of the Indians

-had been permitted to acquire lands and be blended in the body of

-American citizens. But no general statute existed until the passage

-of the Dawes bill in February, 1887. In this year the Commissioner

-estimated that there were 243,299 Indians in the United States,

-occupying a total of 213,117 square miles of land, nearly a section

-apiece. By the Dawes bill the President was given authority to divide

-the reserves among the Indians located on them, distributing the

-lands on the basis of a quarter section or 160 acres to each head

-of a family, an eighth section to single adults and orphans, and a

-sixteenth to each dependent child. It was provided also that when the

-allotments had been made, tribal ownership should cease, and the title

-to each farm should rest in the individual Indian or his heirs. But to

-forestall the improvident sale of this land the owner was to be denied

-the power to mortgage or dispose of it for at least twenty-five years.

-The United States was to hold it in trust for him for this time.

-

-Besides allowing the Indian to own his farm and thus take his

-step toward economic independence, the Dawes bill admitted him to

-citizenship. Once the lands had been allotted, the owners came within

-the full jurisdiction of the states or territories where they lived,

-and became amenable to and protected by the law as citizens of the

-United States.

-

-The policy which had been recommended since the time of Schurz became

-the accepted policy of the United States in 1887. "I fail to comprehend

-the full import of the allotment act if it was not the purpose of the

-Congress which passed it and the Executive whose signature made it

-a law ultimately to dissolve all tribal relations and to place each

-adult Indian on the broad platform of American citizenship," wrote

-the Commissioner in 1887. For the next twenty years the reports of

-the office were filled with details of subdivision of reserves and

-the adjustment of the legal problems arising from the process. And in

-the twenty-first year the old Indian Country ceased to exist as such,

-coming into the Union as the state of Oklahoma.

-

-The progress of allotment under the Dawes bill steadily broke down the

-reserves of the so-called Indian Territory. Except the five civilized

-tribes, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, the

-inhabitants who had been colonized there since the Civil War wanted to

-take advantage of the act. The civilized tribes preferred a different

-and more independent system for themselves, and retained their tribal

-identity until 1906. In the transition it was found that granting

-citizenship to the Indian in a way increased his danger by opening him

-to the attack of the liquor dealer and depriving him of some of the

-special protection of the Indian Office. To meet this danger, as the

-period of tribal extinction drew near, the Burke act of 1906 modified

-and continued the provisions of the Dawes bill. The new statute

-postponed citizenship until the expiration of the twenty-five-year

-period of trust, while giving complete jurisdiction over the allottee

-to the United States in the interim. In special cases the Secretary of

-the Interior was allowed to release from the period of guardianship

-and trusteeship individual Indians who were competent to manage their

-own affairs, but for the generality the period of twenty-five years

-was considered "not too long a time for most Indians to serve their

-apprenticeship in civic responsibilities."

-

-Already the opening up to legal white settlement had begun. In the

-Dawes bill it was provided that after the lands had been allotted in

-severalty the undivided surplus might be bought by the United States

-and turned into the public domain for entry and settlement. Following

-this, large areas were purchased in 1888 and 1889, to be settled in

-1890. The territory of Oklahoma, created in this year in the western

-end of Indian Territory, and "No Man's Land," north of Texas, marked

-the political beginning of the end of Indian Territory. It took nearly

-twenty years to complete it, through delays in the process of allotment

-and sale; but in these two decades the work was done thoroughly, the

-five civilized tribes divided their own lands and abandoned tribal

-government, and in November, 1908, the state of Oklahoma was admitted

-by President Roosevelt.

-

-The Indian relations, which were most belligerent in the sixties, had

-changed completely in the ensuing forty years. In part the change was

-due to a greater and more definite desire at Washington for peace, but

-chiefly it was environmental, due to the progress of settlement and

-transportation which overwhelmed the tribes, destroying their capacity

-to resist and embedding them firmly in the white population. Oklahoma

-marked the total abandonment of Monroe's policy of an Indian Country.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXI

-

-THE LAST STAND OF CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL

-

-

-The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians ceased with the

-termination of the Indian wars of the sixties. Here the resistance had

-most closely resembled a general war with the tribes in close alliance

-against the invader. With this obstacle overcome, the work left to

-be done in the conquest of the continent fell into two main classes:

-terminating Indian resistance by the suppression of sporadic outbreaks

-in remote byways and letting in the population. The new course of the

-Indian problem after 1869 led it speedily away from the part it had

-played in frontier advance until it became merely one of many social or

-race problems in the United States. It lost its special place as the

-great illustration of the difficulties of frontier life. But although

-the new course tended toward chronic peace, there were frequent

-relapses, here and there, which produced a series of Indian flurries

-after 1869. Never again do these episodes resemble, however remotely, a

-general Indian war.

-

-Human nature did not change with the adoption of the so-called peace

-policy. The government had constantly to be on guard against the

-dishonest agent, while improved facilities in communication increased

-the squatters' ability to intrude upon valuable lands. The Sioux treaty

-of 1868, whereby the United States abandoned the Powder River route and

-erected the great reserve in Dakota, west of the Missouri River, was

-scarcely dry before rumors of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills

-turned the eyes of prospectors thither.

-

-Early in 1870 citizens of Cheyenne and the territory of Wyoming

-organized a mining and prospecting company that professed an intention

-to explore the Big Horn country in northern Wyoming, but was believed

-by the Sioux to contemplate a visit to the Black Hills within their

-reserve. The local Sioux agent remonstrated against this, and General

-C. C. Augur was sent to Cheyenne to confer with the leaders of the

-expedition. He found Wyoming in a state of irritation against the

-Sioux treaty, which left the Indians in control of their Powder River

-country--the best third of the territory. He sympathized with the

-frontiersmen, but finally was forced by orders from Washington to

-prevent the expedition from starting into the field. Four years later

-this deferred reconnoissance took place as an official expedition under

-General Custer, with "great excitement among the whole Sioux." The

-approach from the northeast of the Northern Pacific, which had reached

-a landing at Bismarck on the Missouri before the panic of 1873, still

-further increased the apprehension of the tribes that they were to be

-dispossessed. The Indian Commissioner, in the end of 1874, believed

-that no harm would come of the expedition since no great gold finds

-had been made, but the Montana historian was nearer the truth when

-he wrote: "The whole Sioux nation was successfully defied." It was a

-clear violation of the tribal right, and necessarily emboldened the

-frontiersmen to prospect on their own account.

-

-[Illustration: POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN

-

-From a photograph made by Mr. W. R. Bowlin, of Chicago, and reproduced

-by his permission]

-

-Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give countenance to the

-disgruntled warrior bands that resented the treaties already made, came

-the mismanagement of the Red Cloud agency. Professor O. C. Marsh, of

-Yale College, was stopped by Red Cloud, while on a geological visit to

-the Black Hills, in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the

-Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington samples of decayed

-flour and inferior rations which the Indian agent was issuing to the

-Oglala Sioux. With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded

-to study the new problem thus brought to his notice, and accumulated

-a mass of evidence which seemed to him to prove the existence of big

-plots to defraud the government, and mismanagement extending even to

-the Secretary of the Interior. He published his charges in pamphlet

-form, and wrote letters of protest to the President, in which he

-maintained that the Indian officials were trying harder to suppress

-his evidence than to correct the grievances of the Sioux. He managed

-to stir up so much interest in the East that the Board of Indian

-Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate the affairs

-of the Red Cloud agency. The report of the committee in October, 1875,

-whitewashed many of the individuals attacked by Professor Marsh, and

-exonerated others of guilt at the expense of their intelligence,

-but revealed abuses in the Indian Office which might fully justify

-uneasiness among the Sioux.

-

-To these tribes, already discontented because of their compression

-and sullen because of mismanagement, the entry of miners into the

-Black Hills country was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners

-were there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating disturbances

-and exaggerating in the Indian mind the value of the reserve, so that

-an attempt by the Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn

-came to nothing. The natural tendency of these forces was to drive the

-younger braves off the reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty

-bands that roamed at will and were scornful of those that lived in

-peace. Most important of the leaders of these bands was Sitting Bull.

-

-In December the Indian Commissioner, despite the Sioux privilege to

-pursue the chase, ordered all the Sioux to return to their reserves

-before February 1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile. As

-yet the mutterings had not broken out in war, and the evidence does not

-show that conflict was inevitable. The tribes could not have got back

-on time had they wanted to; but their failure to return led the Indian

-Office to turn the Sioux over to the War Department. The army began by

-destroying a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested not

-by an enemy of the army, but by General H. H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who

-himself had fought the Sioux with marked success in 1862.

-

-With war now actually begun, three columns were sent into the field to

-arrest and restrain the hostile Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook,

-Gibbon, and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic of fighters.

-He was already well known for his Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier

-book. Sherman had described him in 1867 as "young, _very_ brave, even

-to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer," and as "ready and

-willing now to fight the Indians." La Barge, who had carried some

-of Custer's regiment on his steamer _De Smet_, in 1873, saw him as

-"an officer ... clad in buckskin trousers from the seams of which a

-large fringe was fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large

-gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited animal." His showy

-vanity and his admitted courage had already got him into more than one

-difficulty; now on June 25, 1876, his whole column of five companies,

-excepting only his battle horse, Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was

-destroyed in a battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had lived,

-he might perhaps have been cleared of the charge of disobedience, as

-Fetterman might ten years before, but, as it turned out, there were

-many to lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended before 1876

-was over, though Sitting Bull with a small band escaped to Canada,

-where he worried the Dominion Government for several years. "I know of

-no instance in history," wrote Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, "where a

-great nation has so shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux

-were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the disappointed tribes

-settled down to another decade of quiescence.

-

-In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull a hero in the

-Centennial year was transferred to Chief Joseph, leader of the

-non-treaty Nez Percés, in the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been

-a friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since the expedition

-of Lewis and Clark. Living in the valleys of the Snake and its

-tributaries, it could easily have hindered the course of travel along

-the Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was always good.

-In 1855 it had begun to treat with the United States and had ceded

-considerable territory at the conference held by Governor Stevens with

-Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.

-

-The exigencies of the Civil War, failure of Congress to fulfil treaty

-stipulations, and the discovery of gold along the Snake served to

-change the character of the Nez Percés. Lawyer's annuity of five

-hundred dollars, as Principal Chief, was at best not royal, and when

-its vouchers had to be cashed in greenbacks at from forty-five to

-fifty cents on the dollar, he complained of hardship. It was difficult

-to persuade the savage that a depreciated greenback was as good as

-money. Congress was slow with the annuities promised in 1855. In 1861,

-only one Indian in six could have a blanket, while the 4393 yards of

-calico issued allowed under two yards to each Indian. The Commissioner

-commented mildly upon this, to the effect that "Giving a blanket to one

-Indian works no satisfaction to the other five, who receive none." The

-gold boom, with the resulting rise of Lewiston, in the heart of the

-reserve, brought in so many lawless miners that the treaty of 1855 was

-soon out of date.

-

-In 1863 a new treaty was held with Chief Lawyer and fifty other

-headmen, by which certain valleys were surrendered and the bounds of

-the Lapwai reserve agreed upon. Most of the Nez Percés accepted this,

-but Chief Joseph refused to sign and gathered about him a band of

-unreconciled, non-treaty braves who continued to hunt at will over the

-Wallowa Valley, which Lawyer and his followers had professed to cede.

-It was an interesting legal point as to the right of a non-treaty chief

-to claim to own lands ceded by the rest of his tribe. But Joseph,

-though discontented, was not dangerous, and there was little friction

-until settlers began to penetrate into his hunting-grounds. In 1873,

-President Grant created a Wallowa reserve for Joseph's Nez Percés,

-since they claimed this chiefly as their home. But when they showed no

-disposition to confine themselves to its limits, he revoked the order

-in 1875. The next year a commission, headed by the Secretary of the

-Interior, Zachary Chandler, was sent to persuade Joseph to settle down,

-but returned without success. Joseph stood upon his right to continue

-to occupy at pleasure the lands which had always belonged to the Nez

-Percés, and which he and his followers had never ceded. The commission

-recommended the segregation of the medicine-men and dreamers,

-especially Smohalla, who seemed to provide the inspiration for Joseph,

-and the military occupation of the Wallowa Valley in anticipation of an

-outbreak by the tribe against the incoming white settlers. These things

-were done in part, but in the spring of 1877, "it becoming evident to

-Agent Monteith that all negotiations for the peaceful removal of Joseph

-and his band, with other non-treaty Nez Percé Indians, to the Lapwai

-Indian reservation in Idaho must fail of a satisfactory adjustment,"

-the Indian Office gave it up, and turned the affair over to General O.

-O. Howard and the War Department.

-

-The conferences held by Howard with the leaders, in May, made it clear

-to them that their alternatives were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight.

-At first Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass and White

-Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater to which the tribe agreed to

-remove at once; but just before the day fixed for the removal, the

-murder of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge directed

-against the whites and the massacre of several. War immediately

-followed, for the next two months covering the borderland of Idaho

-and Montana with confusion. A whole volume by General Howard has been

-devoted to its details. Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the

-_North American Review_ in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically in

-his _Massacres of the Mountains_, and the Montana Historical Society

-has published many articles concerning it. Considerably less is known

-of the more important wars which preceded it than of this struggle of

-the Nez Percés. In August the fighting turned to flight, Chief Joseph

-abandoning the Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone

-Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased him 1321 miles, across the

-Yellowstone Park toward the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve.

-Along the swift flight there were running battles from time to time,

-while the fugitives replenished their stores and stock from the country

-through which they passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front

-Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them off. Miles caught

-their trail in the end of September after they had crossed the Missouri

-River and had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting Bull had

-found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised the Nez Percé camp on Snake

-Creek, capturing six hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's

-band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later the stubborn chief

-surrendered to Colonel Miles.

-

-"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner Hayt asked at the end of

-1877. For once an Indian band had conducted a war on white principles,

-obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation and torture.

-Joseph had by his sheer military skill won the admiration and respect

-of his military opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated the

-war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho. To exile they were sent,

-and Joseph's uprising ended as all such resistances must. The forcible

-invasion of the territory by the whites was maintained; the tribe was

-sent in punishment to malarial lands in Indian Territory, where they

-rapidly dwindled in number. There has been no adequate defence of the

-policy of the United States from first to last.

-

-The Modoc of northern California, and the Apache of Arizona and New

-Mexico fought against the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez

-Percés. The former broke out in resistance in the winter of 1872-1873,

-after they had long been proscribed by California opinion. In March of

-1873 they made their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General E.

-R. S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent to confer with them.

-In the war which resulted the Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced

-Charley, were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava beds of the

-Modoc country until regular soldiers finally corralled them all. Jack

-was hanged for murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley lived to

-settle down and reform with a portion of the tribe in Indian Territory.

-

-The Apache had always been a thorn in the flesh of the trifling

-population of Arizona and New Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and

-Indian Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard decade with

-Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had quieted down during the seventies

-and advanced towards economic independence. But the Apache were long

-in learning the virtues of non-resistance. Bell had found in Arizona

-a young girl whose adventures as a fifteen-year-old child served to

-explain the attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by Indians

-who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped her naked, knocked her

-senseless with a tomahawk, pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg

-with one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon her. The

-child had come to, and without food, clothes, or water, had found her

-way home over thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily

-inspired the white population with fear and hatred, while the continued

-residence of the sufferers in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the

-persistence of the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes in

-the end. Tucson had retaliated against such excesses of the red men

-by equal excesses of the whites. Without any immediate provocation,

-fourscore Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated under military

-supervision at Camp Grant, were massacred in cold blood.

-

-General George Crook alone was able to bring order into the Arizona

-frontier. From 1871 to 1875 he was there in command,--"the beau-ideal

-Indian fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged in constant

-campaigns against the "incorrigibly hostile," but before 1873 was over

-he had most of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police

-supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a brass identification

-check, so that it might be easier for his police to watch them. The

-tribes were passed back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook

-was transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately the Indian

-Commissioner commenced to concentrate the scattered tribes, but was

-hindered by hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as bitter as

-their hatred for the whites. First Victorio, and then Geronimo was the

-centre of the resistance to the concentration which placed hereditary

-enemies side by side. They protested against the sites assigned them,

-and successfully defied the Commissioner to carry out his orders. Crook

-was brought back to the department in 1882, and after another long war

-gradually established peace.

-

-Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876, returned to Dakota in the

-early eighties in time to witness the rapid settlement of the northern

-plains and the growth of the territories towards statehood. After his

-revolt the Black Hills had been taken away from the tribe, as had

-been the vague hunting rights over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood

-advanced in the later eighties, and as population piled up around the

-edges of the reserve, the time was ripe for the medicine-men to preach

-the coming of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his personal

-following. Bad crops which in these years produced populism in Kansas

-and Nebraska, had even greater menace for the half-civilized Indians.

-Agents and army officers became aware of the undercurrent of danger

-some months before trouble broke out.

-

-The state of South Dakota was admitted in November, 1889. Just a year

-later the Bureau turned the Sioux country over to the army, and General

-Nelson A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in the vicinity

-of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies. The arrest of Sitting Bull,

-who claimed miraculous powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts"

-were supposed to give invulnerability to his followers, was attempted

-in December. The troops sent out were resisted, however, and in the

-męlée the prophet was killed. The war which followed was much noticed,

-but of little consequence. General Miles had plenty of troops and

-Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph stations conveyed news easily and safely.

-But when orders were issued two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull

-to disarm the camp at Wounded Knee, the savages resisted. The troops

-within reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their rapid-fire guns,

-regardless of age or sex, with such effect that more than two hundred

-Indian bodies, mostly women and children, were found dead upon the

-field.

-

-With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among the Indians,

-important enough to be called resistance, came to an end. There had

-been many other isolated cases of outbreak since the adoption of the

-peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and individual murders

-long after 1890. But there were, and could be, no more Indian wars.

-Many of the tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while lands

-in severalty had changed the point of view of many tribesmen. The

-relative strength of the two races was overwhelmingly in favor of the

-whites.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXII

-

-LETTING IN THE POPULATION[3]

-

-    [3] This chapter follows, in part, F. L. Paxson, "The Pacific

-        Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in

-        America," in Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol.

-        I, pp. 105-118.

-

-      "Veil them, cover them, wall them round--

-        Blossom, and creeper, and weed--

-      Let us forget the sight and the sound,

-        The smell and the touch of the breed!"

-

-

-Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle," upon the Indian village.

-The forces of nature were turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled

-at the growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and the wild

-pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the thatched huts dissolved in

-the torrents, and "by the end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle

-in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months

-before." The white man worked the opposite of this on what remained of

-the American desert in the last fifteen years of the history of the old

-frontier. In a decade and a half a greater change came over it than the

-previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890, it is fair to say that

-the frontier was no more.

-

-The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary line separating the

-farm lands and the unused West, had become nearly a circle before

-the compromise of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks

-it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the last generation.

-The flanks had widened out in the thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri,

-and Iowa had received their population. In the next ten years Texas

-and the Pacific settlements had carried the line further west until

-the circular shape of the frontier was clearly apparent by the middle

-of the century. And thus it stood, with changes only in detail, for a

-generation more. In whatever sense the word "frontier" is used, the

-fact is the same. If it be taken as the dividing line, as the area

-enclosed, or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the frontier

-of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier of 1850.

-

-The pressure on the frontier line had increased steadily during these

-thirty years. Population moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War.

-The agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in size and

-wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that became clearer as more

-citizens settled along it. East and south, it was close to the rainfall

-line which divides easy farming country from the semi-arid plains;

-west, it was a mountain range. In either case the country enclosed was

-too refractory to yield to the piecemeal process which had conquered

-the wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to expansion

-and hindrance to communication became of increasing consequence as

-population grew.

-

-Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural frontier was pressing

-against it. By 1860 the railway frontier had reached it. The former

-could not cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture

-offered by the lands beyond; the latter was restrained by the

-prohibitive cost of building railways through an entirely unsettled

-district. Private initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the

-continent; the one remaining task called for direct national aid.

-

-The influences operating upon this frontier of the Far West, though

-not making it less of a barrier, made it better known than any of the

-earlier frontiers. In the first place, the trails crossed it, with the

-result that its geography became well known throughout the country.

-No other frontier had been the site of a thoroughfare for many years

-before its actual settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the

-later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge of the West, and

-scattered groups of inhabitants here and there, without populating it

-in any sense. Finally the Indian friction produced the series of Indian

-wars which again called the wild West to the centre of the stage for

-many years.

-

-All of these forces served to advertise the existence of this frontier

-and its barrier character. They had coöperated to enlarge the railway

-movement, as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union Pacific

-was authorized to meet the new demand; and while the Union Pacific

-was under construction, other roads to meet the same demands were

-chartered and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled the

-final barrier.

-

-Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation of the

-entire frontier between 1862 and 1871. The charter acts of the Northern

-Pacific, the Atlantic and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern

-Pacific at once opened the way for some five new continental lines and

-closed the period of direct federal aid to railway construction. The

-Northern Pacific received its charter on the same day that the Union

-Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864. It was authorized to

-join the waters of Lake Superior and Puget Sound, and was to receive a

-land grant of twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in the

-territories through which it should run. In the summer of 1866 a third

-continental route was provided for in the South along the line of the

-thirty-fifth parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific, was to

-build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico,

-to the Pacific, and to connect, near the eastern line of California,

-with the Southern Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised

-twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the territories.

-The Texas Pacific was chartered March 3, 1871, as the last of the land

-grant railways. It received the usual grant, which was applicable only

-west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana and El Paso, it

-could receive no federal aid since in Texas there were no public lands.

-Its charter called for construction to San Diego, but the Southern

-Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico, headed it off at El

-Paso, and it got no farther.

-

-To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways, Congress

-added others in the form of local or state grants in the same years,

-so that by 1871 all that the companies could ask for the future was

-lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the first time the

-federal government had taken an active initiative in providing for

-the destruction of a frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no

-longer with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence of a

-realization of the approaching frontier change.

-

-The new Pacific railways began to build just as the Union Pacific was

-completed and opened to traffic. In the cases of all, the development

-was slow, since the investing public had little confidence in the

-existence of a business large enough to maintain four systems,

-or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert. The first period of

-construction of all these roads terminated in 1873, when panic brought

-transportation projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of

-five years.

-

-Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done much to establish public

-credit during the war and had created a market of small buyers

-for investment securities on the strength of United States bonds,

-popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869 and 1870. Within two years he

-is said to have raised thirty millions for the construction of the

-road, making its building a financial possibility. And although he

-may have distorted the isotherm several degrees in order to picture

-his farm lands as semi-tropical in their luxuriance, as General

-Hazen charged, he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul her

-opportunity, and had run the main line of track through Fargo, on the

-Red, to Bismarck, on the Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty

-miles from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought expansion

-to an end.

-

-For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern Pacific was of

-fundamental importance. The railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota,

-Dakota, and much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential grain

-fields of the Red River region were virgin forest, and on the main

-line of the new road, for two thousand miles, hardly a trace of

-settled habitation existed. The panic of 1873 caught the Union

-Pacific at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable

-track extending in advance of the railroad frontier. The Atlantic

-and Pacific and Texas Pacific were less seriously overbuilt, but not

-less effectively checked. The former, starting from Springfield,

-had constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita, in Indian

-Territory, where it arrived in the fall of 1871. It had meanwhile

-acquired some of the old Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track

-into St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita remained its

-terminus for several years, and when it emerged from the receiver's

-hands, it bore the new name of St. Louis and San Francisco.

-

-The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of local lines which

-expected, through federal incorporation, to reach the dignity of a

-continental railroad. It began its construction towards El Paso from

-Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state line, and reached

-the vicinity of Dallas and Fort Worth before the panic. It planned to

-get into St. Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern, and

-into New Orleans over the New Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas,

-Arkansas, and Missouri became through these lines a centre of railway

-development, while in the near-by grazing country the meat-packing

-industries shortly found their sources of supply.

-

-The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated in 1873 could

-scarcely have been deferred for many years. The waste of the Civil War

-period, and the enthusiasm for economic development which followed it,

-invited the retribution that usually follows continued and widespread

-inflation. Already the completion of a national railway system was

-foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had been for railways at

-any cost, but the Granger activities following the panic gave warning

-of an approaching period when this should be changed into a demand for

-regulation of railroads. But as yet the frontier remained substantially

-intact, and until its railway system should be completed the Granger

-demand could not be translated into an effective movement for federal

-control. It was not until 1879 that the United States recovered from

-the depression following the crisis. In that year resumption marked the

-readjustment of national currency, reconstruction was over, and the

-railways entered upon the last five years of the culminating period in

-the history of the frontier. When the five years were over, five new

-continental routes were available for transportation.

-

-The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress across Texas when

-checked by the panic in the vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived,

-it pushed its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by a land

-grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never built. Corporations of

-California, Arizona, and New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern

-Pacific, constructed the line across the Colorado River and along the

-Gila, through lands acquired by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains

-were running over its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to

-New Orleans by the following October. In the course of this Southern

-Pacific construction, connection had been made with the Atchison,

-Topeka, and Santa Fé at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but

-through lack of harmony between the roads their junction was of little

-consequence.

-

-[Illustration: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884

-

-This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads

-in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads which existed

-everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower

-Missouri valleys.]

-

-The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an additional line through

-southern Texas in the beginning of 1883. Around the Galveston,

-Harrisburg, and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other lines

-and begun double construction from San Antonio west, and from El Paso,

-or more accurately Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra

-Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new line and the Texas

-and Pacific used the same track. In later years the line through San

-Antonio and Houston became the main line of the Southern Pacific.

-

-A third connection of the Southern Pacific across Texas was operated

-before the end of 1883 over its Mojave extension in California and the

-Atlantic and Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic

-and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership, and come out

-as St. Louis and San Francisco. But its land grant had remained unused,

-while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé had reached Albuquerque and

-had exhausted its own land grant, received through the state of Kansas

-and ceasing at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter had

-passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch along the old Santa Fé trail

-to Santa Fé and Albuquerque. Here it came to an agreement with the

-St. Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were to build

-jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise, from Albuquerque

-into California. They built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not

-relishing a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege

-to meet the new road on the eastern boundary of California. Hence its

-Mojave branch was waiting at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific

-arrived there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the completion of

-bridges over the Colorado and Rio Grande this third eastern connection

-of the Southern Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were running

-through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.

-

-The names of Billings and Villard are most closely connected with the

-renascence of the Northern Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at

-the Missouri River, although it had built a few miles in Washington

-territory, around its new terminal city of Tacoma. The illumination of

-crisis times had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay

-Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in his palmy days. The

-existence of various land grant railways in Washington and Oregon made

-the revival difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer

-competition by both water and rail along the Columbia River, below

-Walla Walla. Under the presidency of Frederick Billings construction

-revived about 1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri,

-and from Wallula, at the junction of the Columbia and Snake. From

-these points lines were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri

-divisions towards the continental divide. Below Wallula, the Columbia

-Valley traffic was shared by agreement with the Oregon Railway and

-Navigation Company, which, under the presidency of Henry Villard, owned

-the steamship and railway lines of Oregon. As the time for opening the

-through lines approached, the question of Columbia River competition

-increased in serious aspect. Villard solved the problem through the

-agency of his famous blind pool, which still stands remarkable in

-railway finance. With the proceeds of the pool he organized the Oregon

-and Transcontinental as a holding company, and purchased a controlling

-interest in the rival roads. With harmony of plan thus insured, he

-assumed the presidency of the Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to

-complete and celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His

-celebration was elaborate, yet the _Nation_ remarked that the "mere

-achievement of laying a continuous rail across the continent has long

-since been taken out of the realm of marvels, and the country can

-never feel again the thrill which the joining of the Central and Union

-Pacific lines gave it."

-

-The land grant railways completed these four eastern connections across

-the frontier in the period of culmination. Private capital added a

-fifth in the new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled by the

-Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the Denver and Rio Grande. The

-Burlington, built along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had

-competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of that point since

-June, 1882. West of Denver the narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio

-Grande had been advancing since 1870.

-

-General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia capitalists had,

-in 1870, secured a Colorado charter for their Denver and Rio Grande.

-Started in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at Colorado Springs

-that autumn, and had continued south in later years. Like other roads

-it had progressed slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had been met at

-Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé. From Pueblo it contested

-successfully with this rival for the grand cańon of the Arkansas,

-and built up that valley through the Gunnison country and across the

-old Ute reserve, to Grand Junction. From the Utah line it had been

-continued to Ogden by an allied corporation. A through service to

-Ogden, inaugurated in the summer of 1883, brought competition to the

-Union Pacific throughout its whole extent.

-

-The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had

-threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different

-lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to

-cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer

-could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach

-of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in

-its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and

-through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and

-political unit. "As the railroads overtook the successive lines of

-isolated frontier posts, and settlements spread out over country no

-longer requiring military protection," wrote General P. H. Sheridan in

-1882, "the army vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into

-remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its pioneer work.

-In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and

-cabins of the frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful

-houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who

-knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The

-civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly

-approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening

-strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old

-Mexico, yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines will

-entirely disappear and the mingling settlements absorb the remnants

-of the once powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly

-attempted to forbid the destined progress of the age." The deluge of

-population realized by Sheridan, and let in by the railways, had, by

-1890, blotted the uninhabited frontier off the map. Local spots yet

-remained unpeopled, but the census of 1890 revealed no clear division

-between the unsettled West and the rest of the United States.

-

-New states in plains and mountains marked the abolition of the last

-frontier as they had the earlier. In less than ten years the gap

-between Minnesota and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and South

-Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington. In 1890, for the

-first time, a solid band of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific.

-Farther south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new pressure. The

-Dawes bill released a fertile acreage to be distributed to the land

-hungry who had banked up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and

-Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890, while in eighteen

-more years, swallowing up the whole Indian Country, it had taken its

-place as a member of the Union. Between the northern tier of states

-and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and

-Colorado, the last creating eleven new counties in its eastern third

-in 1889, had seen their population densify under the stimulus of easy

-transportation. Much of the settlement had been premature, inviting

-failure, as populism later showed, but it left no area in the United

-States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large enough to be regarded as a

-national frontier. The last frontier, the same that Long had described

-as the American Desert in 1820, had been won.

-

-

-

-

-NOTE ON THE SOURCES

-

-

-The fundamental ideas upon which all recent careful work in western

-history has been based were first stated by Frederick J. Turner, in

-his paper on _The Significance of the Frontier in American History_,

-in the _Annual Report of the Am. Hist. Assn._, 1893. No comprehensive

-history of the trans-Mississippi West has yet appeared; Randall

-Parrish, _The Great Plains_ (2d ed., Chicago, 1907), is at best only a

-brief and superficial sketch; the histories of the several far western

-states by Hubert Howe Bancroft remain the most useful collection of

-secondary materials upon the subject. R. G. Thwaites, _Rocky Mountain

-Exploration_ (N.Y., 1904); O. P. Austin, _Steps in the Expansion of

-our Territory_ (N.Y., 1903); H. Gannett, _Boundaries of the United

-States and of the Several States and Territories_ (_Bulletin of the

-U.S. Geological Survey_, No. 226, 1904); and _Organic Acts for the

-Territories of the United States with Notes thereon_ (56th Cong., 1st

-sess., Sen. Doc. 148), are also of use.

-

-The local history of the West must yet be collected from many varieties

-of sources. The state historical societies have been active for many

-years, their more important collections comprising: _Publications of

-the Arkansas Hist. Assn._, _Annals of Iowa_, _Iowa Hist. Record_, _Iowa

-Journal of Hist. and Politics_, _Collections of the Minnesota Hist.

-Soc._, _Trans. of the Kansas State Hist. Soc._, _Trans. and Rep. of

-the Nebraska Hist. Soc._, _Proceedings of the Missouri Hist. Soc._,

-_Contrib. to the Hist. Soc. of Montana_, _Quart. of the Oregon Hist.

-Soc._, _Quart. of the Texas State Hist. Assn._, _Collections of the

-Wisconsin State Hist. Soc._ The scattered but valuable fragments to be

-found in these files are to be supplemented by the narratives contained

-in the histories of the single states or sections, the more important

-of these being: T. H. Hittell, _California_; F. Hall, _Colorado_; J.

-C. Smiley, _Denver_ (an unusually accurate and full piece of local

-history); W. Upham, _Minnesota in Three Centuries_; G. P. Garrison,

-_Texas_; E. H. Meany, _Washington_; J. Schafer, _Hist. of the Pacific

-Northwest_; R. G. Thwaites, _Wisconsin_, and the _Works_ of H. H.

-Bancroft.

-

-The comprehensive collection of geographic data for the West is

-the _Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad from the

-Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean_, made by the War Department and

-published by Congress in twelve huge volumes, 1855-. The most important

-official predecessors of this survey left the following reports: E.

-James, _Account of an Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains,

-performed in the Years 1819, 1820, ... under the Command of Maj. S.

-H. Long_ (Phila., 1823); J. C. Frémont, _Report of the Exploring

-Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and

-North California in the Years 1843-'44_ (28th Cong., 2d sess., Sen.

-Doc. 174); W. H. Emory, _Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Ft.

-Leavenworth ... to San Diego ..._ (30th Cong., 1st sess., Ex. Doc.

-41); H. Stansbury, _Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great

-Salt Lake of Utah ..._ (32d Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Ex. Doc. 3). From

-the great number of personal narratives of western trips, those of

-James O. Pattie, John B. Wyeth, John K. Townsend, and Joel Palmer may

-be selected as typical and useful. All of these, as well as the James

-narrative of the Long expedition, are reprinted in the monumental R.

-G. Thwaites, _Early Western Travels_, which does not, however, give

-any aid for the period after 1850. Later travels of importance are J.

-I. Thornton, _Oregon and California in 1848 ..._ (N.Y., 1849); Horace

-Greeley, _An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the

-Summer of 1859_ (N.Y., 1860); R. F. Burton, _The City of the Saints,

-and across the Rocky Mountains to California_ (N.Y., 1862); R. B.

-Marcy, _The Prairie Traveller, a Handbook for Overland Expeditions_

-(edited by R. F. Burton, London, 1863); F. C. Young, _Across the

-Plains in '65_ (Denver, 1905); Samuel Bowles, _Across the Continent_

-(Springfield, 1861); Samuel Bowles, _Our New West, Records of Travels

-between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean_ (Hartford, 1869);

-W. A. Bell, _New Tracks in North America_ (2d ed., London, 1870); J.

-H. Beadle, _The Undeveloped West, or Five Years in the Territories_

-(Phila., 1873).

-

-The classic account of traffic on the plains is Josiah Gregg, _Commerce

-of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé Trader_ (many editions,

-and reprinted in Thwaites); H. M. Chittenden, _History of Steamboat

-Navigation on the Missouri River_ (N.Y., 1903), and _The American Fur

-Trade of the Far West_ (N.Y., 1902), are the best modern accounts. A

-brilliant sketch is C. F. Lummis, _Pioneer Transportation in America,

-Its Curiosities and Romance_ (_McClure's Magazine_, 1905). Other works

-of use are Henry Inman, _The Old Santa Fé Trail_ (N.Y., 1898); Henry

-Inman and William F. Cody, _The Great Salt Lake Trail_ (N.Y., 1898);

-F. A. Root and W. E. Connelley, _The Overland Stage to California_

-(Topeka, 1901); F. G. Young, _The Oregon Trail_, in _Oregon Hist. Soc.

-Quarterly_, Vol. I; F. Parkman, _The Oregon Trail_.

-

-Railway transportation in the Far West yet awaits its historian.

-Some useful antiquarian data are to be found in C. F. Carter, _When

-Railroads were New_ (N.Y., 1909), and there are a few histories

-of single roads, the most valuable being J. P. Davis, _The Union

-Pacific Railway_ (Chicago, 1894), and E. V. Smalley, _History

-of the Northern Pacific Railroad_ (N.Y., 1883). L. H. Haney, _A

-Congressional History of Railways in the United States to 1850_; J.

-B. Sanborn, _Congressional Grants of Lands in Aid of Railways_, and

-B. H. Meyer, _The Northern Securities Case_, all in the _Bulletins_

-of the University of Wisconsin, contain much information and useful

-bibliographies. The local historical societies have published many

-brief articles on single lines. There is a bibliography of the

-continental railways in F. L. Paxson, _The Pacific Railroads and the

-Disappearance of the Frontier in America_, in _Ann. Rep. of the Am.

-Hist. Assn._, 1907. Their social and political aspects may be traced in

-J. B. Crawford, _The Crédit Mobilier of America_ (Boston, 1880) and E.

-W. Martin, _History of the Granger Movement_ (1874). The sources, which

-are as yet uncollected, are largely in the government documents and the

-files of the economic and railroad periodicals.

-

-For half a century, during which the Indian problem reached and

-passed its most difficult places, the United States was negligent

-in publishing compilations of Indian laws and treaties. In 1837 the

-Commissioner of Indian Affairs published in Washington, _Treaties

-between the United States of America and the Several Indian Tribes,

-from 1778 to 1837: with a copious Table of Contents_. After this date,

-documents and correspondence were to be found only in the intricate

-sessional papers and the _Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian

-Affairs_, which accompanied the reports of the Secretary of War,

-1832-1849, and those of the Secretary of the Interior after 1849. In

-1902 Congress published C. J. Kappler, _Indian Affairs, Laws, and

-Treaties_ (57th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc. 452). Few historians have

-made serious use of these compilations or reports. Two other government

-documents of great value in the history of Indian negotiations are,

-Thomas Donaldson, _The Public Domain_ (47th Cong., 2d sess., H. Misc.

-Doc. 45, Pt. 4), and C. C. Royce, _Indian Land Cessions in the United

-States_ (with many charts, in 18th _Ann. Rep. of the Bureau of Am.

-Ethnology_, Pt. 2, 1896-1897). Most special works on the Indians

-are partisan, spectacular, or ill informed; occasionally they have

-all these qualities. A few of the most accessible are: A. H. Abel,

-_History of the Events resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the

-Mississippi_ (in _Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn._, 1906, an elaborate

-and scholarly work); J. P. Dunn, _Massacres of the Mountains, a

-History of the Indian Wars of the Far West_ (N.Y., 1886; a relatively

-critical work, with some bibliography); R. I. Dodge, _Our Wild Indians

-..._ (Hartford, 1883); G. E. Edwards, _The Red Man and the White Man

-in North America from its Discovery to the Present Time_ (Boston,

-1882; a series of Lowell Institute lectures, by no means so valuable

-as the pretentious title would indicate); I. V. D. Heard, _History

-of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863_ (N.Y., 1863; a

-contemporary and useful narrative); O. O. Howard, _Nez Perce Joseph,

-an Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his Confederates, his Enemies,

-his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and Capture_ (Boston, 1881; this

-is General Howard's personal vindication); Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson,

-_A Century of Dishonor, a Sketch of the United States Government's

-Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes_ (N.Y., 1881; highly colored

-and partisan); G. W. Manypenny, _Our Indian Wards_ (Cincinnati, 1880;

-by a former Indian Commissioner); L. E. Textor, _Official Relations

-between the United States and the Sioux Indians_ (Palo Alto, 1896; one

-of the few scholarly and dispassionate works on the Indians); F. A.

-Walker, _The Indian Question_ (Boston, 1874; three essays by a former

-Indian Commissioner); C. T. Brady, _Indian Fights and Fighters_ and

-_Northwestern Fights and Fighters_ (N.Y., 1907; two volumes in his

-series of _American Fights and Fighters_, prepared for consumers of

-popular sensational literature, but containing much valuable detail,

-and some critical judgments).

-

-Nearly every incident in the history of Indian relations has been made

-the subject of investigations by the War and Interior departments. The

-resulting collections of papers are to be found in the congressional

-documents, through the indexes. They are too numerous to be listed

-here. The searcher should look for reports from the Secretary of

-War, the Secretary of the Interior, or the Postmaster-general, for

-court-martial proceedings, and for reports of special committees of

-Congress. Dunn gives some classified lists in his _Massacres of the

-Mountains_.

-

-There is a rapidly increasing mass of individual biography and

-reminiscence for the West during this period. Some works of this class

-which have been found useful here are: W. M. Meigs, _Thomas Hart

-Benton_ (Phila., 1904); C. W. Upham, _Life, Explorations, and Public

-Services of John Charles Frémont_ (40th thousand, Boston, 1856); S.

-B. Harding, _Life of George B. Smith, Founder of Sedalia, Missouri_

-(Sedalia, 1907); P. H. Burnett, _Recollections and Opinions of an Old

-Pioneer_ (N.Y., 1880; by one who had followed the Oregon trail and

-had later become governor of California); A. Johnson, _S. A. Douglas_

-(N.Y., 1908; one of the most significant biographies of recent years);

-H. Stevens, _Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens_ (Boston, 1900); R. S.

-Thorndike, _The Sherman Letters_ (N.Y., 1894; full of references

-to frontier conditions in the sixties); P. H. Sheridan, _Personal

-Memoirs_ (London, 1888; with a good map of the Indian war of 1867-1868,

-which the later edition has dropped); E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke,

-Financier of the Civil War_ (Phila., 1907; with details of Northern

-Pacific railway finance); H. Villard, _Memoirs_ (Boston, 1904; the life

-of an active railway financier); Alexander Majors, _Seventy Years on

-the Frontier_ (N.Y., 1893; the reminiscences of one who had belonged

-to the great firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell); G. R. Brown,

-_Reminiscences of William M. Stewart of Nevada_ (1908).

-

-Miscellaneous works indicating various types of materials which

-have been drawn upon are: O. J. Hollister, _The Mines of Colorado_

-(Springfield, 1867; a miners' handbook); S. Mowry, _Arizona and Sonora_

-(3d ed., 1864; written in the spirit of a mining prospectus); T. B.

-H. Stenhouse, _The Rocky Mountain Saints_ (London, 1874; a credible

-account from a Mormon missionary who had recanted without bitterness);

-W. A. Linn, _The Story of the Mormons_ (N.Y., 1902; the only critical

-history of the Mormons, but having a strong Gentile bias); T. J.

-Dimsdale, _The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky

-Mountains_ (2d ed., Virginia City, 1882; a good description of the

-social order of the mining camp).

-

-

-

-

-INDEX

-

-

-  Acton, Minnesota, Sioux massacre at, 235.

-

-  Alder Gulch mines, Idaho, 168.

-

-  Anthony, Major Scott J., 259.

-

-  Apache Indians, 247, 267, 268, 292, 312;

-    treaty of 1853 with, 124;

-    troubles with, in Arizona, 162-163;

-    last struggles of, against whites, 368-369.

-

-  Arapaho Indians, 247, 248, 252, 256 ff., 263, 267, 292;

-    Medicine Lodge treaty with, 292-293;

-    issue of arms to, 312-313;

-    join in war of 1868, 313-318;

-    Custer's defeat of, 317-318.

-

-  Arapahoe, county of, 141.

-

-  Arickara Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Arizona, beginnings of, 158 ff.;

-    erection of territory of, 162.

-

-  Arkansas, boundaries of, 28-29;

-    admission as a state, 40.

-

-  Army, question of control of Indian affairs by, 324-344.

-

-  Assiniboin Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Atchison, Senator, 129.

-

-  Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway, 347, 384.

-

-  Atlantic and Pacific Railway, 375, 376, 377;

-    becomes the St. Louis and San Francisco, 378.

-

-  Augur, General C. C., 292, 295, 359.

-

-  Auraria settlement, Colorado, 142.

-

-

-  Bannack City, mining centre, 168.

-

-  Bannock Indians, 295.

-

-  Beadle, John H., on western railways and their builders, 332-333, 335.

-

-  Bear Flag Republic, the, 105.

-

-  Becknell, William, 56.

-

-  Beckwith, Lieut. E. G., Pacific railway survey by, 203-206.

-

-  Bell, English traveller, on railway building in the West, 329-331.

-

-  Benton, Thomas Hart, 58;

-    interest of, in railways, 193-194.

-

-  Bent's Fort, 65, 66.

-

-  Billings, Frederick, 382.

-

-  Blackfoot Indians, 264.

-

-  Black Hawk, Colorado, village of, 145.

-

-  Black Hawk, Indian chief, 17.

-

-  Black Hawk War, 21, 25-26, 37.

-

-  Black Hills, discovery of gold in, 359;

-    troubles with Indians resulting from discovery, 361 ff.

-

-  Black Kettle, Indian chief, 255-261;

-    leads war party in 1868, 313;

-    death of, 317.

-

-  Blind pool, Villard's, 383.

-

-  Boisé mines, 165.

-

-  Boulder, Colorado, 145.

-

-  Bowles, Samuel, on railway terminal towns, 332, 333.

-

-  Box family outrage, 307.

-

-  Bridge across the Mississippi, the first, 210.

-

-  Bridger, "Jim," 274.

-

-  Brown, John, murder of Kansans by, 134.

-

-  Brulé Sioux Indians, 264, 266.

-

-  Bull Bear, Indian chief, 309.

-

-  Bureau of Indian Affairs, 31, 123, 341 ff.

-

-  Burlington, capital of Iowa territory, 45;

-    description of, in 1840, 47-48.

-

-  Burnett, governor of California, 117.

-

-  Bushwhacking in Kansas during Civil War, 231.

-

-  Butterfield, John, mail and express route of, 177 ff.

-

-  Byers, Denver editor, 144;

-    quoted, 149, 150.

-

-

-  Caddo Indians, 28.

-

-  California, early American designs on, 104-105;

-    becomes American possession, 105;

-    discovery of gold in, and results, 108-113;

-    population in 1850, 117;

-    local railways constructed in, 219;

-    Central Pacific Railway in, 220, 222.

-

-  Camels, experiment with, in Texas, 176.

-

-  Camp Grant massacre, 162.

-

-  Canals, land grants in aid of, 215, 217.

-

-  Canby, E. R. S., 228, 233;

-    murder of, 367.

-

-  Carleton, Colonel J. H., 160, 233.

-

-  Carlyle, George H., 250-251.

-

-  Carrington, Colonel Henry B., 274-275.

-

-  Carson, Kit, 285.

-

-  Carson City, 157-158.

-

-  Carson County, 157.

-

-  Cass, Lewis, 21, 23.

-

-  Census of Indians, in 1880, 351.

-

-  Central City, Colorado, 145.

-

-  Central Overland, California, and Pike's Peak Express, 186.

-

-  Central Pacific of California Railway, 220, 222;

-    description of construction of, 325-335.

-

-  Cherokee Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Cherokee Neutral Strip, 29.

-

-  Cheyenne, founding of, 301;

-    consequence of, as a railway junction, 334.

-

-  Cheyenne Indians, massacre of, at Sand Creek, 260-261;

-    assigned lands in Indian Territory, 263;

-    Medicine Lodge treaty with, 292-293;

-    issue of arms to, 312-313;

-    begin war against whites in 1868, 313;

-    Custer's defeat of, 317-318.

-

-  Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway, 383.

-

-  Chickasaw Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Chief Joseph, leader of Nez Percé Indians, 363-365;

-    military skill shown by, in retreat of Nez Percés, 366-367.

-

-  Chief Lawyer, 363-364.

-

-  Chinese labor for railway building, 326-327.

-

-  Chippewa Indians, 26-27.

-

-  Chittenden, Hiram Martin, 70-71, 93.

-

-  Chivington, J. M., 229-230, 257;

-    massacre of Indians at Sand Creek by, 260-261.

-

-  Civil War, the West during the, 225 ff.

-

-  Claims associations, 47.

-

-  Clark, Governor, 20, 21, 25.

-

-  Clemens, S. L., quoted, 186-187.

-

-  Cody, William F., 184.

-

-  Colley, Major, Indian agent, 255, 258, 262.

-

-  Colorado, first settlements in, 142-145;

-    movement for separate government for, 146 ff.;

-    Senate bill for erection of territory of, 151, 154;

-    boundaries of, 154;

-    admission of, and first governor, 154-155;

-    during the Civil War, 228-230.

-

-  Colorado-Idaho plan, 151.

-

-  Comanche Indians, 28, 124, 252, 253, 263, 267, 268, 292.

-

-  Comstock lode, the, 157.

-

-  Conestoga wagons, 41, 64.

-

-  Connor, General Patrick E., 274.

-

-  Cooke, Jay, railway promotion and later failure of, 376-377.

-

-  Cooper, Colonel, 57.

-

-  Council Bluffs, importance of, as a railway terminus, 334.

-

-  Council Grove, rendezvous of Santa Fé traders, 59, 63-64.

-

-  _Crédit Mobilier_, the, 335.

-

-  Creek Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Crocker, Charles, 220;

-    activity of, as a railway builder, 327.

-

-  Crook, General George, 368-369.

-

-  Crow Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Culbertson, Alexander, 200.

-

-  Cumberland Road, 41, 215, 325.

-

-  Custer, General, 304, 306, 307 ff., 310, 316, 359;

-    commands in attack on Cheyenne, 316-318;

-    romantic character of, and death in Sioux war, 362.

-

-

-  Dakota, erection and growth of territory of, 166-167;

-    Idaho created from a part of, 167.

-

-  Dawes bill of 1887, for division of lands among Indians, 354-355;

-    effect of, on Indian reserves, 356.

-

-  Delaware Indians, settlement of, in the West, 24, 127.

-

-  Demoine County created, 42.

-

-  Denver, settlement of, 142;

-    early caucuses and conventions at, 147-149.

-

-  Denver and Rio Grande Railway, 383-384.

-

-  Desert, tradition of a great American, 11-13;

-    disappearance of tradition, 119;

-    Kansas formed out of a portion of, 137;

-    final conquest by railways of region known as, 384-386.

-

-  Digger Indians, 203-204.

-

-  Dillon, President, 336.

-

-  Dodge, Henry, 35-36, 37-38, 44, 328-329.

-

-  Dole, W. P., Indian Commissioner, 239.

-

-  Donnelly, Ignatius, 237.

-

-  Douglas, Stephen A., 128, 213-214.

-

-  Downing, Major Jacob, 252, 260.

-

-  Dubuque, lead mines at, 34;

-    as a mining camp, 42.

-

-  Dubuque County created, 42.

-

-

-  Education of Indians, 351-352.

-

-  Emigrant Aid Society, 130.

-

-  Emory, Lieut.-Col., survey by, 208.

-

-  Erie Canal, 10, 21, 24, 38, 325.

-

-  Evans, Governor, war against Indians conducted by, 253 ff.;

-    quoted, 269.

-

-  Ewbank Station massacre, 250.

-

-

-  Fairs, agricultural, for Indians, 352-353.

-

-  Falls line, 5.

-

-  Far West, Mormon headquarters at, 90.

-

-  Fetterman, Captain W. J., 274, 277-278, 279;

-    slaughter of, by Indians, 280-281.

-

-  Fiske, Captain James L., 188.

-

-  Fitzpatrick, Indian agent, 122-124.

-

-  Fort Armstrong, purchase at, of Indian lands, 26.

-

-  Fort Benton, 163, 164.

-

-  Fort Bridger, 301.

-

-  Fort C. F. Smith, 275-277.

-

-  Fort Hall, 74.

-

-  Fort Kearney, 78.

-

-  Fort Laramie, 78, 121;

-    treaties with Indians signed at, in 1851, 123-124;

-    conference of Peace Commission with Indians held at (1867), 291.

-

-  Fort Larned, conference with Indians at, 308.

-

-  Fort Leavenworth, 24, 59.

-

-  Fort Philip Kearney, Indian fight at (1866), 274-275;

-    extermination of Fetterman's party at, 280-282.

-

-  Fort Pierre, 267.

-

-  Fort Ridgely, Sioux attack on, 235-236.

-

-  Fort Snelling, 33-34, 48.

-

-  Fort Sully conference, 271-272, 273.

-

-  Fort Whipple, 162.

-

-  Fort Winnebago, 35.

-

-  Fort Wise, treaty with Indians signed at, 249.

-

-  Forty-niners, 109-118.

-

-  Fox Indians, 21, 25, 26, 127.

-

-  Flandrau, Judge Charles E., 236-237.

-

-  Franklin, town of, 63.

-

-  Freighting on the plains, 174 ff.

-

-  Frémont, John C., 58;

-    explorations of, beyond the Rockies, 73-75, 195;

-    senator from California, 117.

-

-  Fur traders, pioneer western, 70-71.

-

-

-  Galbraith, Thomas J., Indian agent, 238.

-

-  Geary, John W., 135.

-

-  Georgetown, Colorado, 145.

-

-  Geronimo, Indian chief, 369.

-

-  Gilpin, William, first governor of Colorado Territory, 155;

-    quoted, 225;

-    responsibility assumed by, during the Civil War, 228-229.

-

-  Gold, discovery of, in California, 108-113;

-    in Pike's Peak region, 141-142;

-    in the Black Hills, 359-361.

-

-  Grattan, Lieutenant, 265.

-

-  Great American desert. _See_ Desert.

-

-  Great Salt Lake. _See_ Salt Lake.

-

-  Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company, 176.

-

-  Greeley, Horace, western adventures of, 145, 179, 182.

-

-  Gregg, Josiah, 61-62.

-

-  Grosventre Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Guerrilla conflicts during the Civil War, 230-233.

-

-  Gunnison, Captain J. W., 204-205.

-

-

-  Hancock, General W. S., 306-311.

-

-  Hand-cart incident in Mormon emigration, 100-101.

-

-  Harney, General, 266.

-

-  Harte, Bret, verses by, 338.

-

-  Hayt, E. A., Indian Commissioner, 350.

-

-  Hazen, General W. B., 320-321.

-

-  Helena, growth of city of, 169.

-

-  Highland settlement, Colorado, 142.

-

-  Holladay, Ben, 186-190, 284;

-    losses from Indians by, 250.

-

-  Hopkins, Mark, 220.

-

-  Howard, General O. O., 365-366.

-

-  Hungate family, murder of, by Indians, 253.

-

-  Hunkpapa Indians, 264.

-

-  Hunter, General, in charge of Department of Kansas during Civil War,

-      230-231.

-

-  Huntington, Collis P., 220.

-

-

-  Idaho, proposed name for Colorado, 151, 154;

-    establishment of territory of, 166-167.

-

-  Idaho Springs, settlement of, 145.

-

-  Illinois, opening of, to whites, 21.

-

-  Illinois Central Railroad, 210, 216-218.

-

-  Independence, town of, 63;

-    outfitting post of traders, 71;

-    Mormons at, 89-90.

-

-  Indian agents, position of, in regard to Indian affairs, 304-305;

-    question regarding, as opposed to military control of Indians,

-        342-343.

-

-  Indian Bureau, creation of, 31;

-    transference from War Department to the Interior, 123;

-    history of the, 341 ff.

-

-  Indian Commissioners, Board of, created in 1869, 345.

-

-  Indian Intercourse Act, 31.

-

-  Indian Territory, position of Indians in, during the Civil War,

-        240-241;

-    breaking up of, following allotment of lands to individual Indians,

-        357.

-

-  Indians, numbers of, in United States, 14;

-    governmental policy regarding, 16 ff.;

-    Monroe's policy of removal of, to western lands, 18-19;

-    treaties of 1825 with, 19-20;

-    allotment of territory among, on western frontier, 20-30;

-    troubles with, resulting from Oregon, California, and Mormon

-        emigrations, 119-123;

-    fresh treaties with at Upper Platte agency in 1851, 123-124;

-    further cession of lands in Indian Country by, in 1854, 127;

-    treatment of, by Arizona settlers, 162-163;

-    danger to overland mail and express business from, 187-188, 250;

-    Digger Indians, 203-204;

-    the Sioux war in Minnesota, 234 ff.;

-    effect of the Civil War on, 240-242;

-    causes of restlessness of, during Civil War, 234 ff.;

-    antagonism of, aroused by advance westward of whites, 244-252;

-    conditions leading to Sioux war, 264 ff.;

-    war with plains Sioux (1866), 273-283;

-    the discussion as to proper treatment of, 284-288;

-    appointment of Peace Commissioner of 1867 to end Cheyenne and Sioux

-        troubles, 289-290;

-    Medicine Lodge treaties concluded with, 292-293;

-    report and recommendations of Peace Commission, 296-298;

-    interval of peace with, 302-303;

-    continued troubles with, and causes, 304 ff.;

-    war begun by Arapahoes and Cheyenne in 1868, 313;

-    war of 1868, 313-318;

-    President Grant appoints board of civilian Indian commissioners,

-        323, 341 ff.;

-    railway builders' troubles with, 328-329;

-    question of civilian or military control of, 342-344;

-    Board of Commissioners, appointed for (1869), 345;

-    Congress decides to make no more treaties with, 348;

-    mistaken policy of treaties, 348-349;

-    census of, in 1880, 351;

-    agricultural fairs for, 352-353;

-    individual ownership of land by, 354-357;

-    effect of allotment of lands among, on Indian reserves, 356-357;

-    end of Monroe's policy, 357;

-    last struggles of the Sioux, Nez Percés, and Apaches, 361-371.

-

-  Inkpaduta's massacre, 51.

-

-  Inman, Colonel Henry, quoted, 285.

-

-  Iowa, Indian lands out of which formed, 26;

-    territory of, organized, 45.

-

-  Iowa Indians, 127.

-

-

-  Jackson, Helen Hunt, work by, 344.

-

-  Jefferson, early name of state of Colorado, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155.

-

-  Johnston, Albert Sidney, commands army against Mormons, 102;

-    escapes to the South, on opening of the Civil War, 226-227.

-

-  Jones and Russell, firm of, 181.

-

-  Judah, Theodore D., 219, 220, 326.

-

-  Julesburg, station on overland mail route, 182, 331.

-

-

-  Kanesville, Iowa, founding of, 95.

-

-  Kansa Indians, 19, 20, 24.

-

-  Kansas, reasons for settlement of, 124-125;

-    creation of territory of, 129;

-    the slavery struggle in, 129-131;

-    squatters on Indian lands in, 131-132;

-    further contests between abolition and pro-slave parties, 132-136;

-    admission to the union in 1861, 136;

-    boundaries of, 138;

-    during the Civil War, 230-233.

-

-  Kansas-Nebraska bill, 128-129.

-

-  Kansas Pacific Railway, 340.

-

-  Kaskaskia Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Kaw Indians. _See_ Kansa Indians.

-

-  Kearny, Stephen W., 65-66, 78.

-

-  Kendall, Superintendent of Indian department, quoted, 165.

-

-  Keokuk, Indian chief, 25.

-

-  Kickapoo Indians, 24, 127.

-

-  Kiowa Indians, 252, 253, 263, 267, 268, 292, 306.

-

-  Kirtland, Ohio, temporary headquarters of Mormons, 88.

-

-  Labor question in railway construction, 326-327.

-

-  Lake-to-Gulf railway scheme, 217.

-

-  Land, allotment of, to Indians as individuals, 354-357.

-

-  Land grants in aid of railways, 215-218, 222, 325, 329, 336, 375.

-

-  Land titles, pioneers' difficulties over, 46-47.

-

-  Larimer, William, 147, 152.

-

-  Last Chance Gulch, Idaho, mining district, 169.

-

-  Lawrence, Amos A., 130.

-

-  Lawrence, Kansas, settlement of, 130-131;

-    visit of Missouri mob to, 134;

-    Quantrill's raid on, 232.

-

-  Lead mines about Dubuque, 34-35.

-

-  Leavenworth, J. H., Indian agent, 306, 308-309.

-

-  Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company, 181.

-

-  Leavenworth constitution, 135-136.

-

-  Lecompton constitution, 135-136.

-

-  Lewiston, Washington, founding of, 164.

-

-  Linn, Senator, 72-73.

-

-  Liquor question in Oregon, 81-82.

-

-  Little Big Horn, battle of the, 362.

-

-  Little Blue Water, defeat of Brulé Sioux at, 266.

-

-  Little Crow, Sioux chief, 235-239.

-

-  Little Raven, Indian chief, 306.

-

-  Long, Major Stephen H., 11.

-

-

-  McClellan, George B., survey for Pacific railway by, 199.

-

-  Madison, Wisconsin, development of, 44, 45.

-

-  Mails, carriage of, to frontier points, 174 ff.

-

-  Manypenny, George W., 126, 266.

-

-  Marsh, O. C., bad treatment of Indians revealed by, 360-361.

-

-  Marshall, James W., 108-109.

-

-  Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, 130.

-

-  Medicine Lodge Creek, conference with Indians at, 292-293.

-

-  Menominee Indians, 27.

-

-  Methodist missionaries to western Indians, 72.

-

-  Mexican War, Army of the West in the, 65-66.

-

-  Miami Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Michigan, territory and state of, 39-40.

-

-  Miles, General Nelson A., as an Indian fighter, 366, 370.

-

-  Milwaukee, founding of, 44.

-

-  Mines, trails leading to, 169-170.

-

-  Miniconjou Indians, 265.

-

-  Mining, lead, 34-35, 42;

-    gold, 108-113, 141-142, 156-157, 359-361;

-    silver, 157 ff.

-

-  Mining camps, description of, 170-173.

-

-  Minnesota, organization of, as a territory, 48-49;

-    Sioux war in, in 1862, 234 ff.

-

-  Missionaries, pioneer, 72;

-    civilization and education of Indians by, 345-346.

-

-  Missoula County, Washington Territory, 168.

-

-  Missouri Indians, 127.

-

-  Modoc Indians, last war of the, 367.

-

-  Modoc Jack, 367.

-

-  Mojave branch of Southern Pacific Railway, 381-382.

-

-  Monroe's policy toward Indians, 18-19;

-    end of, 357.

-

-  Montana, creation of territory of, 169.

-

-  Montana settlement, Colorado, 142.

-

-  Monteith, Indian Agent, 365.

-

-  Mormons, the, 86 ff., 102.

-

-  Mowry, Sylvester, 159, 161.

-

-  Mullan Road, the, 167, 170.

-

-  Murphy, Thomas, Indian superintendent, 312.

-

-

-  Nauvoo, Mormon settlement of, 91-94.

-

-  Navaho Indians, 243, 368.

-

-  Nebraska, movement for a territory of, 125;

-    creation of territory of, 129;

-    boundaries of, 138.

-

-  Neutral Line, the, 21.

-

-  Nevada, beginnings of, 156-158;

-    territory of, organized, 158.

-

-  New Mexico, the early trade to, 53-69;

-    boundaries of, in 1854, 139;

-    during the Civil War, 229-230.

-

-  New Ulm, Minnesota, fight with Sioux Indians at, 236-237.

-

-  Nez Percé Indians, 164, 363-365;

-    precipitation of war with, in 1877, 365-366;

-    defeat and disposal of tribe, 366-367.

-

-  Niles, Hezekiah, 60, 79.

-

-  Noland, Fent, 42-43.

-

-  No Man's Land, 357.

-

-  Northern Pacific Railway, 375, 376, 377, 382-383.

-

-

-  Oglala Sioux, 281, 291, 360.

-

-  Oklahoma, 357, 386.

-

-  Omaha, cause of growth of, 334.

-

-  Omaha Indians, 25.

-

-  Oregon, fur traders and early pioneers, in, 70-72;

-    emigration to, in 1844-1847, 75-76;

-    provisional government organized by settlers in, 79-80;

-    region included under name, 83-84;

-    territory of, organized (1848), 85;

-    population in 1850, 117;

-    boundaries of, in 1854, 139;

-    territory of Washington cut from, 163;

-    railway lines in, 382-383.

-

-  Oregon trail, 70-85;

-    course of the, 78-79;

-    the Mormons on the, 86 ff.

-

-  Osage Indians, 19, 20.

-

-  Oto Indians, 127.

-

-  Ottawa Indians, 27.

-

-  Overland mail, the, 174 ff.

-

-  Owyhee mining district, 165.

-

-

-  Paiute Indians, murder of Captain Gunnison by, 205.

-

-  Palmer, General William J., 383.

-

-  Panic, of 1837, 43-44;

-    of 1857, 51-52;

-    of 1873, 377-379.

-

-  Parke, Lieut. J. G., survey for Pacific railway by, 207-208.

-

-  Peace Commission of 1867, to conclude Cheyenne and Sioux wars,

-      289-290;

-    Medicine Lodge treaties concluded by, 292-293;

-    report of, quoted, 296-298.

-

-  Pennsylvania Portage Railway, 325.

-

-  Peoria Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Piankashaw Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Pike, Zebulon M., 19, 34, 55.

-

-  Pike's Peak, discovery of gold about, 141-142;

-    the rush to, 142-145;

-    reaction from boom, 145-146;

-    origin of Colorado Territory in the Pike's Peak boom, 146-155.

-

-  "Pike's Peak Guide," the, 144.

-

-  Plum Creek massacre, 250.

-

-  Pony express, 158, 182-185.

-

-  Pope, Captain John, survey by, 207.

-

-  Popular sovereignty, doctrine of, 128.

-

-  Poston, Charles D., 159.

-

-  Potawatomi Indians, 26-27.

-

-  Powder River expedition, 273-274.

-

-  Powder River war with Indians, 276-283.

-

-  Powell, Major James, 283.

-

-  Prairie du Chien, treaty made with Indians at, 20-21;

-    second treaty of (1830), 25.

-

-  Prairie schooners, 64.

-

-  Pratt, R. H., education of Indians attempted by, 351.

-

-  Price's Missouri expedition, 233.

-

-

-  Quantrill's raid into Kansas, 231-232.

-

-  Quapaw Indians, 29.

-

-

-  Railways, early craze for building, 40;

-    advance of, in the fifties, 51;

-    first thoughts about a Pacific road, 192 ff.;

-    surveys for Pacific, 192 ff., 197-203;

-    bearing of slavery question on transcontinental, 211-214;

-    Senator Douglas's bill, 213-214;

-    land grants in aid of, 215-218, 222, 325, 329, 336, 375;

-    Indian hostilities caused by advance of the, 283;

-    description of construction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific

-        roads, 325-335;

-    scandals connected with building of roads, 335;

-    description of formal junction of Central Pacific and Union

-        Pacific, 336-337;

-    effect of roads in bringing peace upon the plains, 347;

-    charter acts of the Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas

-        Pacific, and Southern Pacific, 375;

-    slow development of the later Pacific roads, 376;

-    the five new continental routes and their connections, 379-382;

-    Northern Pacific, 382-383;

-    Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, 383;

-    Denver and Rio Grande, 383-384;

-    disappearance of frontier through extension of lines of, and

-        conquest of Great American Desert, 384-386.

-

-  Ration system, pauperization of Indians by, 352.

-

-  Real estate speculation along western railways, 333-334.

-

-  Red Cloud, Indian chief, 274, 281, 283, 291-292, 294, 360.

-

-  Reeder, Andrew H., governor of Kansas Territory, 131-133.

-

-  _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_, 286-287.

-

-  Rhodes, James Ford, cited, 128.

-

-  Riggs, Rev. S. R., 239.

-

-  Riley, Major, 59-60.

-

-  Rio Grande, struggle for the, in Civil War, 228-230.

-

-  Robinson, Dr. Charles, 130;

-    elected governor of Kansas, 133.

-

-  _Rocky Mountain News_, the, 144, 150.

-

-  Roman Nose, Indian chief, 309.

-

-  Ross, John, Cherokee chief, 241.

-

-  Russell, William H., 181, 182, 185.

-

-  Russell, Majors, and Waddell, firm of, 181.

-

-

-  St. Charles settlement, Colorado, 142;

-    merged into Denver, 146.

-

-  St. Paul, Sioux Indian reserve at, 19;

-    early fort near site of, 33-34;

-    first settlement at, 49.

-

-  Saline River raid by Indians, 313, 314.

-

-  Salt Lake, Frémont's visit to, 74;

-    settlement of Mormons at, 96;

-    population of, in 1850, 117-118.

-

-  Sand Creek, massacre of Cheyenne Indians at, 260-261.

-

-  Sans Arcs Indians, 264.

-

-  Santa Fé, trade with, 53-69.

-

-  Santa Fé trail, Indians along the, 20;

-    beginnings of the (1822), 56-58;

-    course of the, 64-65.

-

-  Satanta, Kiowa Indian chief, 306.

-

-  Sauk Indians, 21, 25, 26, 127.

-

-  Saxton, Lieutenant, 199, 201.

-

-  Scandals, railway-building, 335.

-

-  Scar-faced Charley, Modoc Indian leader, 367.

-

-  Schofield, General John M., 232.

-

-  Schools for Indians, 351-352.

-

-  Schurz, Carl, policy of, toward Indians, 350.

-

-  Seminole Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Seneca Indians, 29.

-

-  Shannon, Wilson, governor of Kansas, 133, 134.

-

-  Shawnee Indians, 23-24, 127.

-

-  Sheridan, General, in command against Indians, 310-323;

-    quoted, 384-385.

-

-  Sherman, John, quoted on Indian matters, 285, 289.

-

-  Sherman, W. T., quoted, 143-144, 298;

-    instructions issued to Sheridan by, in Indian war of 1868, 316.

-

-  Shoshoni Indians, 123-124, 295.

-

-  Sibley, General H. H., 228, 237-238, 362.

-

-  Silver mining, 157 ff.

-

-  Sioux Indians, treaty of 1825 affecting the, 21;

-    location of, in 1837, 27;

-    surrender of lands in Minnesota by, 49;

-    treaties of 1851 with, 123-124;

-    war with, in Minnesota, in 1862, 234 ff.;

-    trial and punishment of, for Minnesota outrages, 239-240;

-    bands composing the plains Sioux, 264-265;

-    war with the plains Sioux in 1866, 264-283;

-    lands assigned to, by Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, 294;

-    sources of irritation between white settlers and, in 1870, 359;

-    disturbance of, by discovery of gold in the Black Hills, 359, 361;

-    war with, in 1876, 362-363;

-    crushing of, by United States forces, 363.

-

-  Sitting Bull, 361;

-    career of, as leader of insurgent Sioux, 362-363;

-    settles in Canada, 363;

-    returns to United States, 369;

-    death of, 370.

-

-  Slade, Jack, 182.

-

-  Slavery question, in territories, 128 ff.;

-    bearing of, on transcontinental railway question, 211-214.

-

-  Slough, Colonel John P., 229-230.

-

-  Smith, Joseph, 87, 90-93.

-

-  Smohalla, medicine-man, 365.

-

-  Sod breaking, Iowa, 46.

-

-  Solomon River raid, 313, 314.

-

-  Southern Pacific Railway, 375-376, 379, 381.

-

-  South Pass, the gateway to Oregon, 70.

-

-  Southport, founding of, 44.

-

-  Spirit Lake massacre, 51.

-

-  Stanford, Leland, 220, 336.

-

-  Stansbury, Lieutenant, survey by, 112, 113, 203;

-    quoted, 114-115.

-

-  Steamboats as factors in emigration, 40-41, 49.

-

-  Steele, Robert W., governor of Jefferson Territory (Colorado), 150,

-      152, 153, 155.

-

-  Stevens, Isaac I., 197-203.

-

-  Stuart, Granville and James, 168.

-

-  Subsidies to railways, 222, 325, 329, 375.

-    _See_ Land grants.

-

-  Sully, General Alfred, 268, 319.

-

-  Surveys for Pacific railway, 192 ff.

-

-  Sutter, John A., 104, 107-109.

-

-  Sweetwater mines, 301.

-

-

-  Telegraph system, inauguration of transcontinental, 185;

-    freedom of, from Indian interference, 283.

-

-  Ten Eyck, Captain, 280.

-

-  Texas, railway building in, 375-376, 377 ff.

-

-  Texas Pacific Railway, 375-376, 378, 379.

-

-  Thayer, Eli, 129-130.

-

-  Tippecanoe, battle of, 17.

-

-  Topeka constitution, 133.

-

-  Traders, wrongs done to Indians by, 234-235.

-

-  Treaties with Indians, 19-20, 123-124, 292-293;

-    fallacy of, 348-349.

-    _See_ Indians.

-

-  Tucson, 159, 160.

-

-

-  Union Pacific Railway, the, 211 ff.;

-    reason for name, 221;

-    incorporation of company, 221;

-    route of, 221-222;

-    land grants in aid of, 222 (_see_ Land grants);

-    financing of project, 222-223;

-    progress in construction of, 298-299, 301;

-    description of construction of, 325-335.

-

-  Utah, territory of, organized, 101-102;

-    boundaries of, 139;

-    partition of Nevada from, 157 ff.;

-    derivation of name from Ute Indians, 295.

-

-

-  Victorio, Indian chief, 369.

-

-  Vigilance committees in mining camps, 172.

-

-  Villard, Henry, 145, 182, 186, 382-383.

-

-  Vinita, terminus of Atlantic and Pacific road, 377.

-

-  Virginia City, 158, 168-169.

-

-

-  Wagons, Conestoga, 41, 64;

-    overland mail coaches, 178-179;

-    numbers employed in overland freight business, 190.

-

-  Wakarusa War, 133-134.

-

-  Walker, General Francis A., 285, 349.

-

-  Walker, Robert J., 135.

-

-  Washington, creation of territory of, 163;

-    mining in, 164-166;

-    a part of Idaho formed from, 166-167.

-

-  Washita, battle of the, 317-318.

-

-  Wayne, Anthony, 8, 17.

-

-  Wea Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Wells, Fargo, and Company, 186, 190.

-

-  Whipple, Lieut. A. W., survey for Pacific railway by, 206-207.

-

-  White, Dr. Elijah, 75-76.

-

-  White Antelope, Indian chief, 256, 260, 313.

-

-  Whitman, Marcus, 72, 77, 80-81.

-

-  Whitney, Asa, 193, 212.

-

-  Willamette provisional government, 79-80.

-

-  Williams, Beverly D., 149.

-

-  Williamson, Lieut. R. S., survey by, 208.

-

-  Wilson, Hill P., Indian trader, 314.

-

-  Winnebago Indians, 26.

-

-  Wisconsin, opening of, to whites, 21;

-    territory of, organized, 44.

-

-  Wounded Knee, Indian fight at, 370.

-

-  Wyeth, Nathaniel J., 72.

-

-  Wynkoop, E. W., 255-259, 306, 310, 312-313.

-

-  Wyoming, territory of, 299, 302.

-

-

-  Yankton Sioux, the, 25, 166, 264.

-

-  Yerba Buena, village of, later San Francisco, 105.

-

-  Young, Brigham, 93-94, 96, 97 ff., 206;

-    made governor of Utah Territory, 101-102.

-

-

-

-

-      *      *      *      *      *      *

-

-

-

-

-Transcribers' note:

-

-Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a

-predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were

-not changed.

-

-Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unpaired

-quotation marks were retained. For example, the paragraph beginning

-on page 311 with "There is little doubt" and ending on page 313 with

-"sincerity of their protestations" contains an unpaired quotation

-mark.

-

-Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

-

-Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

-

-Text uses both "reconnaissance" and "reconnoissance"; both retained.

-

-Text mostly uses "Santa Fé", so three occurrences of "Sante Fé" have

-been changed.

-

-

-

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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45699 ***
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 45699-h.htm or 45699-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45699/45699-h/45699-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45699/45699-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      https://archive.org/details/fronlastamerican00paxsrich
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
+
+Stories from American History
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+  NEW YORK ¡ BOSTON ¡ CHICAGO
+  ATLANTA ¡ SAN FRANCISCO
+
+  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
+  LONDON ¡ BOMBAY ¡ CALCUTTA
+  MELBOURNE
+
+  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+  TORONTO
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
+
+by
+
+FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON
+
+Junior Professor of American History in the University of Michigan
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+The Macmillan Company
+1910
+
+All rights reserved
+
+Copyright, 1910,
+By the Macmillan Company.
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.
+
+Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+I have told here the story of the last frontier within the United
+States, trying at once to preserve the picturesque atmosphere which
+has given to the "Far West" a definite and well-understood meaning,
+and to indicate those forces which have shaped the history of the
+country beyond the Mississippi. In doing it I have had to rely largely
+upon my own investigations among sources little used and relatively
+inaccessible. The exact citations of authority, with which I might have
+crowded my pages, would have been out of place in a book not primarily
+intended for the use of scholars. But I hope, before many years, to
+exploit in a larger and more elaborate form the mass of detailed
+information upon which this sketch is based.
+
+My greatest debts are to the owners of the originals from which the
+illustrations for this book have been made; to Claude H. Van Tyne, who
+has repeatedly aided me with his friendly criticism; and to my wife,
+whose careful readings have saved me from many blunders in my text.
+
+              FREDERIC L. PAXSON.
+
+ANN ARBOR, August 7, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER I
+                                                              PAGE
+  THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT                                          1
+
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  THE INDIAN FRONTIER                                           14
+
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST                                    33
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL                                            53
+
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  THE OREGON TRAIL                                              70
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS                                     86
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS                              104
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+  KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER                               119
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+  "PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST!"                                       138
+
+
+  CHAPTER X
+
+  FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA                                      156
+
+
+  CHAPTER XI
+
+  THE OVERLAND MAIL                                            174
+
+
+  CHAPTER XII
+
+  THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER                                      192
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIII
+
+  THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD                                   211
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIV
+
+  THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR                                  225
+
+
+  CHAPTER XV
+
+  THE CHEYENNE WAR                                             243
+
+
+  CHAPTER XVI
+
+  THE SIOUX WAR                                                264
+
+
+  CHAPTER XVII
+
+  THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY                        284
+
+
+  CHAPTER XVIII
+
+  BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID                                     304
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIX
+
+  THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS                                    324
+
+
+  CHAPTER XX
+
+  THE NEW INDIAN POLICY                                        340
+
+
+  CHAPTER XXI
+
+  THE LAST STAND: CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL                358
+
+
+  CHAPTER XXII
+
+  LETTING IN THE POPULATION                                    372
+
+
+  CHAPTER XXIII
+
+  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                                         387
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER                              _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                              PAGE
+  MAP: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841      22
+
+  CHIEF KEOKUK                                        _facing_  30
+
+  IOWA SOD PLOW. (From a Cut belonging to the Historical
+  Department of Iowa.)                                          46
+
+  MAP: OVERLAND TRAILS                                          57
+
+  FORT LARAMIE, 1842                                  _facing_  78
+
+  MAP: THE WEST IN 1849                                        120
+
+  MAP: THE WEST IN 1854                                        140
+
+  "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"                          _facing_  144
+
+  THE MINING CAMP                                        "     158
+
+  FORT SNELLING                                          "     204
+
+  RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH                          "     274
+
+  MAP: THE WEST IN 1863                                        300
+
+  POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN            _facing_  360
+
+  MAP: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884                             380
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
+
+
+The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which
+the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which
+courage and foresight have gradually transformed from desert waste to
+virile commonwealth. It is the story of one long struggle, fought over
+different lands and by different generations, yet ever repeating the
+conditions and episodes of the last period in the next. The winning of
+the first frontier established in America its first white settlements.
+Later struggles added the frontiers of the Alleghanies and the Ohio,
+of the Mississippi and the Missouri. The winning of the last frontier
+completed the conquest of the continent.
+
+The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West.
+For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas
+of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to
+migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness
+stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.
+Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails
+and clearing in the valleys. The advance line of the farmsteads was
+never far behind it. And out of this shifting frontier between man and
+nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American
+governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved
+them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has
+always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled
+the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic
+development and social organization, have in most instances originated
+near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier
+interest.
+
+The controlling influence of the frontier in shaping American problems
+has been possible because of the construction of civilized governments
+in a new area, unhampered by institutions of the past or conservative
+prejudices of the present. Each commonwealth has built from the
+foundation. An institution, to exist, has had to justify itself again
+and again. No force of tradition has kept the outlawed fact alive. The
+settled lands behind have in each generation been forced to remodel
+their older selves upon the newer growths beyond.
+
+Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the
+frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with
+the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have
+counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive
+courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings
+or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a
+picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements,
+but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad
+man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both
+have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and
+initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted
+an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their
+strength in numbers.
+
+The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor
+in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the
+earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century,
+when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous
+in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose
+characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New
+England were not too early for its shaping.
+
+The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier,
+separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness
+in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the
+successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations
+and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended.
+The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at
+once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and
+translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments
+of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious
+and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a
+melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a
+generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made
+a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which
+by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the
+middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking
+distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always,
+determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line
+of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating
+link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along
+its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The
+extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the
+contour of the seaboard along which it lay.
+
+Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic
+rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems
+in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the
+neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the
+settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on
+the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the
+various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river
+mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into
+the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.
+
+For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are
+navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge
+upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the
+foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a
+line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once
+the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second
+frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was
+reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.
+
+Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began.
+English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in
+growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the
+needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English
+in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of
+Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly
+to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the
+similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier.
+Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached,
+the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism
+plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.
+
+The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an
+end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing,
+up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they
+approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind,
+the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the
+combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley
+routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run
+parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge
+among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every
+reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the
+pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and
+meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause
+against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where
+the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the
+Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have
+common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in
+which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with
+talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was
+already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union
+than had been known before.
+
+The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700.
+By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing
+down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping
+backward to north and south. The French war of 1756-1763 saw the
+apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the
+Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and
+Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river
+valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and
+population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both
+sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested
+the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian
+strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was
+the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by
+all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the
+three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.
+
+The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started
+down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed
+by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the
+boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed
+it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi
+itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The
+new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations
+which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties
+felt the frontier pressure from the start.
+
+Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states
+appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its
+advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony
+Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge
+to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio
+entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet
+the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to
+till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern
+communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation;
+but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines
+were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or
+interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes,
+through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as
+state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war
+with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.
+
+The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad
+investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military
+reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was
+signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern
+population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt
+too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result
+of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was
+the western accompaniment.
+
+The westward movement has been continuous in America since the
+beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have
+never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession
+of pioneers has marched up the slopes of the Appalachians, across
+the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the
+Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream
+has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed
+the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever
+before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years
+following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in
+the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.
+
+Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement
+down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its
+junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with
+states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north
+and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more
+apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended
+the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including
+New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north.
+The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as
+yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than
+to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the
+convenience of the natural route.
+
+For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit
+of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio
+facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred
+and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to
+afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the
+Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and
+it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend
+an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas
+all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The
+emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed
+by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission
+of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend
+of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease.
+Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was
+simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out
+to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge
+began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of
+population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up.
+The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the
+northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and
+Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the
+apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in
+1821.
+
+There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri
+than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers
+were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major
+of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a
+tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty,
+steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew
+longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.
+
+Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from
+the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American
+desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their
+maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara
+or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded
+upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the slopes approach
+the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who
+traversed the country in 1819-1820. Long reported that it could never
+support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of
+the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc."
+A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber,
+the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point
+the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are
+annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no
+farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many
+years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from
+Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy
+desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the
+states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the
+western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had
+reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.
+
+By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward
+march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the
+Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn.
+Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached
+nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the
+nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert
+and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which
+had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War,
+even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier
+scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of
+life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired
+an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its
+doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,
+threatened to become a constant quantity.
+
+From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for
+the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard
+continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are
+filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains
+in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear
+the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian
+tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility
+of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once.
+A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of
+the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the
+continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and
+intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the
+control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out
+the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian
+policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period,
+the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating
+the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is
+larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such,
+before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American
+history has been closed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE INDIAN FRONTIER
+
+
+A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly
+relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the
+continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its
+advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands,
+concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating
+their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed
+had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly
+enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements
+and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every
+twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never
+more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it
+until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt
+that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual
+members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable
+as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the
+part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and
+contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the
+danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not
+responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries,
+real or imaginary,--and too often they were real,--made him the most
+dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier.
+The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and
+endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached
+a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but
+never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had
+been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.
+
+The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have
+ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful
+of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade
+among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land,
+possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase,
+could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a
+higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against
+the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against
+self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian
+must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with
+progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever
+have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for
+him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss
+of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that
+invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national
+honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed
+maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older
+ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all
+these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government
+has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to
+administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade,
+punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct
+not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.
+
+The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its
+responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In
+theory the disposition of the government was generally benevolent, but
+the scheme was badly conceived, while human frailty among officers of
+the law and citizens as well rendered execution short of such ideal as
+there was.
+
+For thirty years the government under the Constitution had no Indian
+policy. In these years it acquired the habit of dealing with the tribes
+as independent--"domestic dependent nations," Justice Marshall later
+called them--by means of formal treaties. Europe thought of chiefs as
+kings and tribes as nations. The practice of making treaties was based
+on this delusion. After a century of practice it was finally learned
+that nomadic savages have no idea of sovereign government or legal
+obligation, and that the assumption of the existence of such knowledge
+can lead only to misconception and disappointment.
+
+As the frontier moved down the Ohio, individual wars were fought and
+individual treaties were made as occasion offered. At times the tribes
+yielded readily to white occupation; occasionally they struggled
+bitterly to save their lands; but the result was always the same. The
+right bank of the river, long known as the Indian Shore, was contested
+in a series of wars lasting nearly until 1800, and became available for
+white colonization only after John Jay had, through his treaty of 1794,
+removed the British encouragement to the Indians, and General Wayne had
+administered to them a decisive defeat. Isolated attacks were frequent,
+but Tecumseh's war of 1811 was the next serious conflict, while, after
+General Harrison brought this war to an end at Tippecanoe, there was
+comparative peace along the northwest frontier until the time of Black
+Hawk and his uprising of 1832.
+
+The left bank of the river was opened with less formal resistance,
+admitting Kentucky and Tennessee before the Indian Shore was a safe
+habitation for whites. South of Tennessee lay the great southern
+confederacies, somewhat out of the line of early western progress, and
+hence not plunged into struggles until the War of 1812 was over. But
+as Wayne and Harrison had opened the Northwest, so Jackson cleared
+the way for white advance into Alabama and Mississippi. By 1821 new
+states touched the Mississippi River along its whole course between New
+Orleans and the lead mines of upper Illinois.
+
+In the advance of the frontier to the bend of the Missouri some of the
+tribes were pushed back, while others were passed and swallowed up by
+the invading population. Experience showed that the two races could
+not well live in adjacent lands. The conditions which made for Indian
+welfare could not be kept up in the neighborhood of white settlements,
+for the more lawless of the whites were ever ready, through illicit
+trade, deceit, and worse, to provoke the most dangerous excesses of
+the savage. The Indian was demoralized, the white became steadily more
+intolerant.
+
+Although the ingenious Jefferson had anticipated him in the idea,
+the first positive policy which looked toward giving to the Indian
+a permanent home and the sort of guardianship which he needed until
+he could become reconciled to civilized life was the suggestion of
+President Monroe. At the end of his presidency, Georgia was angrily
+demanding the removal of the Cherokee from her limits, and was ready to
+violate law and the Constitution in her desire to accomplish her end.
+Monroe was prepared to meet the demand. He submitted to Congress, on
+January 27, 1825, a report from Calhoun, then Secretary of War, upon
+the numbers of the tribes, the area of their lands, and the area of
+available destinations for them. He recommended that as rapidly as
+agreements could be made with them they be removed to country lying
+westward and northwestward,--to the further limits of the Louisiana
+Purchase, which lay beyond the line of the western frontier.
+
+Already, when this message was sent to Congress, individual steps
+had been taken in the direction which it pointed out. A few tribes
+had agreed to cross the Mississippi, and had been allotted lands in
+Missouri and Arkansas. But Missouri, just admitted, and Arkansas, now
+opening up, were no more hospitable to Indian wards than Georgia and
+Ohio had been. The Indian frontier must be at some point still farther
+west, towards the vast plains overrun by the Osage[1] and Kansa tribes,
+the Pawnee and the Sioux. There had been few dealings with the Indians
+beyond the Mississippi before Monroe advanced his policy. Lieutenant
+Pike had visited the head of the Mississippi in 1805 and had treated
+with the Sioux for a reserve at St. Paul. Subsequent agreements farther
+south brought the Osage tribes within the treaty arrangements. The year
+1825 saw the notable treaties which prepared the way for peace among
+the western tribes, and the reception by these tribes of the eastern
+nations.
+
+    [1] My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed
+        upon by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American
+        Ethnology, and printed in C. J. Kappler, Indian Affairs,
+        Laws and Treaties, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452,
+        Serial 4253, p. 1021.
+
+Five weeks after the special message Congress authorized a negotiation
+with the Kansa and Osage nations. These tribes roamed over a vast
+country extending from the Platte River to the Red, and west as far as
+the lower slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Their limits had never been
+definitely stated, although the Osage had already surrendered claim to
+lands fronting on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Missouri
+and the Arkansas. Not only was it now desirable to limit them more
+closely in order to make room for Indian immigrants, but these tribes
+had already begun to worry traders going overland to the Southwest. As
+soon as the frontier reached the bend of the Missouri, the profits of
+the Santa FĂŠ trade had begun to tempt caravans up the Arkansas valley
+and across the plains. To preserve peace along the Santa FĂŠ 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 FĂŠ, and gave the United States title to ample lands west of the
+frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.
+
+The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien the first step
+towards peace and condensation along the northern frontier. The Erie
+Canal, not yet opened, had not begun to drain the population of the
+East into the Northwest, and Indians were in peaceful possession of
+the lake shores nearly to Fort Wayne. West of Lake Michigan were
+constant tribal wars. The Potawatomi, Menominee, and Chippewa, first,
+then Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes, and finally the various bands of
+Sioux around the Mississippi and upper Missouri, enjoyed still their
+traditional hostility and the chase. Governor Clark again, and Lewis
+Cass, met the tribes at the old trading post on the Mississippi to
+persuade them to bury the tomahawk among themselves. The treaty, signed
+August 19, 1825, defined the boundaries of the different nations by
+lines of which the most important was between the Sioux and Sauk and
+Foxes, which was later to be known as the Neutral Line, across northern
+Iowa. The basis of this treaty of Prairie du Chien was temporary at
+best. Before it was much more than ratified the white influx began,
+Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake Michigan blossomed out into Chicago,
+and squatters penetrating to Rock Island in the Mississippi had
+provoked the war of 1832, in which Black Hawk made the last stand of
+the Indians in the old Northwest. In the thirties the policy of removal
+completed the opening of Illinois and Wisconsin to the whites.
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841
+
+Showing the solid line of reservation lands extending from the Red
+River to Green Bay, and the agricultural frontier of more than six
+inhabitants per square mile.]
+
+The policy of removal and colonization urged by Monroe and Calhoun was
+supported by Congress and succeeding Presidents, and carried out during
+the next fifteen years. It required two transactions, the acquisition
+by the United States of western titles, and the persuasion of eastern
+tribes to accept the new lands thus available. It was based upon an
+assumption that the frontier had reached its final resting place.
+Beyond Missouri, which had been admitted in 1821, lay a narrow strip of
+good lands, merging soon into the American desert. Few sane Americans
+thought of converting this land into states as had been the process
+farther east. At the bend of the Missouri the frontier had arrived;
+there it was to stay, and along the lines of its receding flanks the
+Indians could be settled with pledges of permanent security and growth.
+Here they could never again impede the western movement in its creation
+of new communities and states. Here it would be possible, in the words
+of Lewis Cass, to "leave their fate to the common God of the white man
+and the Indian."
+
+The five years following the treaty of Prairie du Chien were filled
+with active negotiation and migration in the lands beyond the Missouri.
+First came the Shawnee to what was promised as a final residence.
+From Pennsylvania, into Ohio, and on into Missouri, this tribe had
+already been pushed by the advancing frontier. Now its ever shrinking
+lands were cut down to a strip with a twenty-five-mile frontage on the
+Missouri line and an extension west for one hundred and twenty-five
+miles along the south bank of the Kansas River and the south line of
+the Kaw reserve. Its old neighbors, the Delawares, became its new
+neighbors in 1829, accepting the north bank of the Kansas, with a
+Missouri River frontage as far north as the new Fort Leavenworth, and a
+ten-mile outlet to the buffalo country, along the northern line of the
+Kaw reserve. Later the Kickapoo and other minor tribes were colonized
+yet farther to the north. The chase was still to be the chief reliance
+of the Indian population. Unlimited supplies of game along the plains
+were to supply his larder, with only occasional aid from presents of
+other food supplies. In the long run agriculture was to be encouraged.
+Farmers and blacksmiths and teachers were to be provided in various
+ways, but until the longed-for civilization should arrive, the red man
+must hunt to live. The new Indian frontier was thus started by the
+colonization of the Shawnee and Delawares just beyond the bend of the
+Missouri on the old possessions of the Kaw.
+
+The northern flank of the Indian frontier, as it came to be
+established, ran along the line of the frontier of white settlements,
+from the bend of the Missouri, northeasterly towards the upper lakes.
+Before the final line of the reservations could be determined the
+Erie Canal had begun to shape the Northwest. Its stream of population
+was filling the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and
+working up into Michigan and Wisconsin. Black Hawk's War marked the
+last struggle for the fertile plains of upper Illinois, and made
+possible an Indian line which should leave most of Wisconsin and part
+of Iowa open to the whites.
+
+Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie
+du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same
+place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reĂŤnforced the
+guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the
+Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto
+and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the
+Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became
+a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the
+Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had
+threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the
+frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along
+the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond
+the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had
+clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might
+have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois,
+and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the
+pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike
+promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought
+over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the
+frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger
+threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from
+eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a
+campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a
+new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their
+resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the
+Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to
+the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west
+bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and
+Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this
+time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the
+Neutral Strip.
+
+The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work
+of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the
+line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west
+line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black
+Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter
+acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the
+Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established
+a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others
+forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more
+correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the
+tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these
+three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago
+to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to
+cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and
+east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors
+to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River,
+gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live
+on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of
+the Wisconsin River.
+
+The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies,
+they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the
+old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made
+further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion
+of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future
+eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the
+Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St.
+Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country.
+With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had
+been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white
+occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to
+Green Bay.
+
+While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established
+beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was
+extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the
+Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine
+River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of
+the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians
+roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo,
+in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into
+Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the
+country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way
+for the colonizing policy.
+
+The southern part of the Indian Country was early set aside as the new
+home of the eastern confederacies lying near the Gulf of Mexico. The
+Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had in the twenties
+begun to feel the pressure of the southern states. Jackson's campaigns
+had weakened them even before the cession of Florida to the United
+States removed their place of refuge. Georgia was demanding their
+removal when Monroe announced his policy.
+
+A new home for the Choctaw was provided in the extreme Southwest in
+1830. Ten years before, this nation had been given a home in Arkansas
+territory, but now, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, it received a new eastern
+limit in a line drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas due south to the
+Red River. Arkansas had originally reached from the Mississippi to the
+hundredth meridian, but it was, after this Choctaw cession, cut down
+to the new Choctaw line, which remains its boundary to-day. From Fort
+Smith the new boundary was run northerly to the southwest corner of
+Missouri.
+
+The Creeks and Cherokee promised in 1833 to go into the Indian Country,
+west of Arkansas and north of the Choctaw. The Creeks became the
+neighbors of the Choctaw, separated from them by the Canadian River,
+while the Cherokee adjoined the Creeks on the north and east. With
+small exceptions the whole of the present state of Oklahoma was thus
+assigned to these three nations. The migrations from their old homes
+came deliberately in the thirties and forties. The Chickasaw in 1837
+purchased from the Choctaw the right to occupy the western end of their
+strip between the Red and Canadian. The Seminole had acquired similar
+rights among the Creeks, but were so reluctant to keep the pledge to
+emigrate that their removal taxed the ability of the United States army
+for several years.
+
+Between the southern portion of the Indian Country and the Missouri
+bend minor tribes were colonized in profusion. The Quapaw and United
+Seneca and Shawnee nations were put into the triangle between the
+Neosho and Missouri. The Cherokee received an extra grant in the
+"Cherokee Neutral Strip," between the Osage line of 1825 and the
+Missouri line. Next to the north was made a reserve for the New York
+Indians, which they refused to occupy. The new Miami home came next,
+along the Missouri line; while north of this were little reserves for
+individual bands of Ottawa and Chippewa, for the Piankashaw and Wea,
+the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the last of which adjoined the Shawnee line
+of 1825 upon the south.
+
+The Indian frontier, determined upon in 1825, had by 1840 been carried
+into fact, and existed unbroken from the Red River and Texas to the
+Lakes. The exodus from the old homes to the new had in many instances
+been nearly completed. The tribes were more easily persuaded to promise
+than to act, and the wrench was often hard enough to produce sullenness
+or even war when the moment of departure arrived. A few isolated bands
+had not even agreed to go. But the figures of the migrations, published
+from year to year during the thirties, show that all of the more
+important nations east of the new frontier had ceded their lands, and
+that by 1840 the migration was substantially over.
+
+[Illustration: CHIEF KEOKUK
+
+From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C. F.
+Davis. Reproduced by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.]
+
+President Monroe had urged as an essential part of the removal policy
+that when the Indians had been transferred and colonized they should be
+carefully educated into civilization, and guarded from contamination by
+the whites. Congress, in various laws, tried to do these things. The
+policy of removal, which had been only administrative at the start,
+was confirmed by law in 1830. A formal Bureau of Indian Affairs was
+created in 1832, under the supervision of a commissioner. In 1834 was
+passed the Indian Intercourse Act, which remained the fundamental law
+for half a century.
+
+The various treaties of migration had contained the pledge that never
+again should the Indians be removed without their consent, that
+whites should be excluded from the Indian Country, and that their
+lands should never be included within the limits of any organized
+territory or state. To these guarantees the Intercourse Act attempted
+to give force. The Indian Country was divided into superintendencies,
+agencies, and sub-agencies, into which white entry, without license,
+was prohibited by law. As the tribes were colonized, agents and schools
+and blacksmiths were furnished to them in what was a real attempt to
+fulfil the terms of the pledge. The tribes had gone beyond the limits
+of probable extension of the United States, and there they were to
+settle down and stay. By 1835 it was possible for President Jackson to
+announce to Congress that the plan approached its consummation: "All
+preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians" had failed;
+but now "no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the
+United States to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the
+scattered remnants of this race which are left within our borders....
+The pledge of the United States," he continued, "has been given by
+Congress that the country destined for the residence of this people
+shall be forever 'secured and guaranteed to them.' ... No political
+communities can be formed in that extensive region.... A barrier has
+thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of
+our citizens." And now, he concluded, "they ought to be left to the
+progress of events."
+
+The policy of the United States towards the wards was generally
+benevolent. Here, it was sincere, whether wise or not. As it turned
+out, however, the new Indian frontier had to contend with movements
+of population, resistless and unforeseen. No Joshua, no Canute, could
+hold it back. The result was inevitable. The Indian, wrote one of the
+frontiersmen in a later day, speaking in the language of the West, "is
+a savage, noxious animal, and his actions are those of a ferocious
+beast of prey, unsoftened by any touch of pity or mercy. For them he
+is to be blamed exactly as the wolf or tiger is blamed." But by 1840
+an Indian frontier had been erected, coterminous with the agricultural
+frontier, and beyond what was believed to be the limit of expansion.
+The American desert and the Indian frontier, beyond the bend of the
+Missouri, were forever to be the western boundary of the United States.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST
+
+
+In the end of the thirties the "right wing" of the frontier, as a
+colonel of dragoons described it, extended northeasterly from the bend
+of the Missouri to Green Bay. It was an irregular line beyond which
+lay the Indian tribes, and behind which was a population constantly
+becoming more restless and aggressive. That it should have been a
+permanent boundary is not conceivable; yet Congress professed to regard
+it as such, and had in 1836 ordered the survey and construction of
+a military road from the mouth of the St. Peter's to the Red River.
+The maintenance of the southern half of the frontier was perhaps
+practicable, since the tradition of the American desert was long to
+block migration beyond the limits of Missouri and Arkansas, but north
+and east of Fort Leavenworth were lands too alluring to be safe in the
+control of the new Indian Bureau. And already before the thirties were
+over the upper Mississippi country had become a factor in the westward
+movement.
+
+A few years after the English war the United States had erected a
+fort at the junction of the St. Peter's and the Mississippi, near the
+present city of St. Paul. In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike had treated
+with the Sioux tribes at this point, and by 1824 the new post had
+received the name Fort Snelling, which it was to retain until after the
+admission of Minnesota as a state. Pike and his followers had worked
+their way up the Mississippi from St. Louis or Prairie du Chien in
+skiffs or keelboats, and had found little of consequence in the way of
+white occupation save a few fur-trading posts and the lead mines of
+Du Buque. Until after the English war, indeed, and the admission of
+Illinois, there had been little interest in the country up the river;
+but during the early twenties the lead deposits around Du Buque's
+old claim became the centre of a business that soon made new treaty
+negotiations with the northern Indians necessary.
+
+On both sides of the Mississippi, between the mouths of the Wisconsin
+and the Rock, lie the extensive lead fields which attracted Du Buque
+in the days of the Spanish rule, and which now in the twenties induced
+an American immigration. The ease with which these diggings could
+be worked and the demand of a growing frontier population for lead,
+brought miners into the borderland of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa
+long before either of the last states had acquired name or boundary
+or the Indian possessors of the soil had been satisfied and removed.
+The nations of Winnebago, Sauk and Foxes, and Potawatomi were most
+interested in this new white invasion, while all were reluctant to
+yield the lands to the incoming pioneers. The Sauk and Foxes had given
+up their claim to nearly all the lead country in 1804; the Potawatomi
+ceded portions of it in 1829; and the Winnebago in the same year made
+agreements covering the mines within the present state of Wisconsin.
+
+Gradually in the later twenties the pioneer miners came in, one
+by one. From St. Louis they came up the great river, or from Lake
+Michigan they crossed the old portage of the Fox and Wisconsin. The
+southern reĂŤnforcements looked much to Fort Armstrong on Rock Island
+for protection. The northern, after they had left Fort Howard at Green
+Bay, were out of touch until they arrived near the old trading post at
+Prairie du Chien. War with the Winnebago in 1827 was followed in 1828
+by the erection of another United States fort,--at the portage, and
+known as Fort Winnebago. Thus the United States built forts to defend a
+colonization which it prohibited by law and treaty.
+
+The individual pioneers differed much in their morals and their
+cultural antecedents, but were uniform in their determination to enjoy
+the profits for which they had risked the dangers of the wilderness.
+Notable among them, and typical of their highest virtues, was Henry
+Dodge, later governor of Wisconsin, and representative and senator for
+his state in Congress, but now merely one of the first in the frontier
+movement. It is related of him that in 1806 he had been interested in
+the filibustering expedition of Aaron Burr, and had gone as far as
+New Madrid, to join the party, before he learned that it was called
+treason. He turned back in disgust. "On reaching St. Genevieve," his
+chronicler continues, "they found themselves indicted for treason by
+the grand jury then in session. Dodge surrendered himself, and gave
+bail for his appearance; but feeling outraged by the action of the
+grand jury he pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and whipt
+nine of the jurors; and would have whipt the rest, if they had not run
+away." With such men to deal with, it was always difficult to enforce
+unpopular laws upon the frontier. Dodge had no hesitation in settling
+upon his lead diggings in the mineral country and in defying the Indian
+agents, who did their best to persuade him to leave the forbidden
+country. On the west bank of the Mississippi federal authority was
+successful in holding off the miners, but the east bank was settled
+between Galena and Mineral Point before either the Indian title had
+been fully quieted, or the lands had been surveyed and opened to
+purchase by the United States.
+
+The Indian war of 1827, the erection of Fort Winnebago in 1828, the
+cession of their mineral lands by the Winnebago Indians in 1829, are
+the events most important in the development of the first settlements
+in the new Northwest. In 1829 and 1830 pioneers came up the Mississippi
+to the diggings in increasing numbers, while farmers began to cast
+covetous eyes upon the prairies lying between Lake Michigan and the
+Mississippi. These were the lands which the Sauk and Fox tribes had
+surrendered in 1804, but over which they still retained rights of
+occupation and the chase until Congress should sell them. The entry of
+every American farmer was a violation of good faith and law, and so
+the Indians regarded it. Their largest city and the graves of their
+ancestors were in the peninsula between the Rock and the Mississippi,
+and as the invaders seized the lands, their resentment passed beyond
+control. The Black Hawk War was the forlorn attempt to save the lands.
+When it ended in crushing defeat, the United States exercised its
+rights of conquest to compel a revision of the treaty limits.
+
+The great treaties of 1832 and 1833 not only removed all Indian
+obstruction from Illinois, but prepared the way for further settlement
+in both Wisconsin and Iowa. The Winnebago agreed to migrate to the
+Neutral Strip in Iowa, the Potawatomi accepted a reserve near the
+Missouri River, while the Black Hawk purchase from the offending Sauk
+and Foxes opened a strip some forty miles wide along the west bank of
+the Mississippi. These Indian movements were a part of the general
+concentrating policy made in the belief that a permanent Indian
+frontier could be established. After the Black Hawk War came the
+creation of the Indian Bureau, the ordering of the great western road,
+and the erection of a frontier police. Henry Dodge was one of the few
+individuals to emerge from the war with real glory. His reward came
+when Congress formed a regiment of dragoons for frontier police, and
+made him its colonel. In his regiment he operated up and down the long
+frontier for three years, making expeditions beyond the line to hold
+Pawnee conferences and meetings with the tribes of the great plains,
+and resigning his command only in time to be the first governor of the
+new territory of Wisconsin, in 1836. He knew how little dependence
+could be placed on the permanency of the right wing of the frontier.
+"Nor let gentlemen forget," he reminded his colleagues in Congress a
+few years later, "that we are to have continually the same course of
+settlements going on upon our border. They are perpetually advancing
+westward. They will reach, they will cross, the Rocky Mountains, and
+never stop till they have reached the shores of the Pacific. Distance
+is nothing to our people.... [They will] turn the whole region into the
+happy dwellings of a free and enlightened people."
+
+The Black Hawk War and its resulting treaties at once quieted the
+Indian title and gave ample advertisement to the new Northwest. As yet
+there had been no large migration to the West beyond Lake Michigan.
+The pioneers who had provoked the war had been few in number and far
+from their base upon the frontier. Mere access to the country had been
+difficult until after the opening of the Erie Canal, and even then
+steamships did not run regularly on Lake Michigan until after 1832.
+But notoriety now tempted an increasing wave of settlers. Congress woke
+up to the need of some territorial adjustment for the new country.
+
+Ever since Illinois had been admitted in 1818, Michigan had been the
+one remaining territory of the old Northwest, including the whole area
+north of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and extending from Lake Huron
+to the Mississippi River. Her huge size was admittedly temporary, but
+as no large centre of population existed outside of Detroit, it was
+convenient to simplify the federal jurisdiction in this fashion. The
+lead mines on the Mississippi produced a secondary centre of population
+in the late twenties and pointed to an early division of Michigan. But
+before this could be accomplished the Black Hawk purchase had carried
+the Mississippi centre of population to the right bank of the river.
+The American possessions on this bank, west of the river, had been cast
+adrift without political organization on the admission of Missouri in
+1821. Now the appearance of a vigorous population in an unorganized
+region compelled Congress to take some action, and thus, for temporary
+purposes, Michigan was enlarged in 1834. Her new boundary extended
+west to the Missouri River, between the state of Missouri and Canada.
+The new Northwest, which may be held to include Iowa, Wisconsin, and
+Minnesota, started its political history as a remote settlement in a
+vast territory of Michigan, with its seat of government at Detroit.
+Before it was cut off as the territory of Wisconsin in 1836 much had
+been done in the way of populating it.
+
+The boom of the thirties brought Arkansas and Michigan into the Union
+as states, and started the growth of the new Northwest. The industrial
+activity of the period was based on speculation in public lands and
+routes of transportation. America was transportation mad. New railways
+were building in the East and being projected West. Canals were
+turning the western portage paths into water highways. The speculative
+excitement touched the field of religion as well as economics,
+producing new sects by the dozen, and bringing schisms into the old.
+And population moving already in its inherent restlessness was made
+more active in migration by the hard times of the East in 1833 and 1834.
+
+The immigrants brought to the Black Hawk purchase and its vicinity,
+in the boom of the thirties, came chiefly by the river route. The
+lake route was just beginning to be used; not until the Civil War did
+the traffic of the upper Mississippi naturally and generally seek its
+outlet by Lake Michigan. The Mississippi now carried more than its
+share of the home seekers.
+
+Steamboats had been plying on western waters in increasing numbers
+since 1811. By 1823, one had gone as far north on the Mississippi as
+Fort Snelling, while by 1832 the Missouri had been ascended to Fort
+Union. In the thirties an extensive packet service gathered its
+passengers and freight at Pittsburg and other points on the Ohio,
+carrying them by a devious voyage of 1400 miles to Keokuk, near the
+southeast corner of the new Black Hawk lands. Wagons and cattle,
+children and furniture, crowded the decks of the boats. The aristocrats
+of emigration rode in the cabins provided for them, but the great
+majority of home seekers lived on deck and braved the elements upon the
+voyage. Explosions, groundings, and collisions enlivened the reckless
+river traffic. But in 1836 Governor Dodge found more than 22,000
+inhabitants in his new territory of Wisconsin, most of whom had reached
+the promised land by way of the river.
+
+For those whom the long river journey did not please, or who lived
+inland in Ohio or Indiana, the national road was a help. In 1825 the
+continuation of the Cumberland Road through Ohio had been begun. By
+1836 enough of it was done to direct the overland course of migration
+through Indianapolis towards central Illinois. The Conestoga wagon,
+which had already done its share in crossing the Alleghanies, now
+carried a second generation to the Mississippi. At Dubuque and Buffalo
+and Burlington ferries were established before 1836 to take the
+immigrants across the Mississippi into the new West.
+
+By the terms of its treaty, the Black Hawk purchase was to be vacated
+by the Indians in the summer of 1833. Before that year closed, its
+settlement had begun, despite the fact that the government surveys had
+not yet been made. Here, as elsewhere, the frontier farmer paid little
+regard to the legal basis of his life. He settled upon unoccupied lands
+as he needed them, trusting to the public opinion of the future to
+secure his title.
+
+The legislature of Michigan watched the migration of 1833 and 1834, and
+in the latter year created the two counties of Dubuque and Demoine,
+beyond the Mississippi, embracing these settlements. At the old claim
+a town of miners appeared by magic, able shortly to boast "that the
+first white man hung in Iowa in a Christian-like manner was Patrick
+O'Conner, at Dubuque, in June, 1834." Dubuque was a mining camp,
+differing from the other villages in possessing a larger proportion
+of the lawless element. Generally, however, this Iowa frontier was
+peaceful in comparison with other frontiers. Life and property were
+safe, and except for its dealings with the Indians and the United
+States government, in which frontiers have rarely recognized a law,
+the community was law-abiding. It stands in some contrast with another
+frontier building at the same time up the valley of the Arkansas. "Fent
+Noland of Batesville," wrote a contemporary of one of the heroes of
+this frontier, "is in every way one of the most remarkable men of the
+West; for such is the versatility of his genius that he seems equally
+adapted to every species of effort, intellectual or physical. With
+a like unerring aim he shoots a bullet or a _bon mot_; and wields
+the pen or the Bowie knife with the same thought, swift rapidity
+of motion, and energetic fury of manner. Sunday he will write an
+eloquent dissertation on religion; Monday he rawhides a rogue; Tuesday
+he composes a sonnet, set in silver stars and breathing the perfume
+of roses to some fair maid's eyebrows; Wednesday he fights a duel;
+Thursday he does up brown the personal character of Senators Sevier
+and Ashley; Friday he goes to the ball dressed in the most finical
+superfluity of fashion and shines the soul of wit and the sun of merry
+badinage among all the gay gentlemen; and to close the triumphs of the
+week, on Saturday night he is off thirty miles to a country dance in
+the Ozark Mountains, where they trip it on the light fantastic toe in
+the famous jig of the double-shuffle around a roaring log heap fire in
+the woods all night long, while between the dances Fent Noland sings
+some beautiful wild song, as 'Lucy Neal' or 'Juliana Johnson.' Thus
+Fent is a myriad-minded Proteus of contradictory characters, many-hued
+as the chameleon fed on the dews and suckled at the breast of the
+rainbow." Much of this luxuriant imagery was lacking farther north.
+
+The first phase of this development of the new Northwest was ended
+in 1837, when the general panic brought confusion to speculation
+throughout the United States. For four years the sanguine hopes of the
+frontier had led to large purchases of public lands, to banking schemes
+of wildest extravagance, and to railroad promotion without reason or
+demand. The specie circular of 1836 so deranged the currency of the
+whole United States that the effort to distribute the surplus in 1837
+was fatal to the speculative boom. The new communities suffered for
+their hopeful attempts. When the panic broke, the line of agricultural
+settlement had been pushed considerably beyond the northern and western
+limits of Illinois. The new line ran near to the Fox and Wisconsin
+portage route and the west line of the Black Hawk purchase. Milwaukee
+and Southport had been founded on the lake shore, hopeful of a great
+commerce that might rival the possessions of Chicago. Madison and its
+vicinity had been developed. The lead country in Wisconsin had grown
+in population. Across the river, Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington
+gave evidence of a growing community in the country still farther west.
+Nearly the whole area intended for white occupation by the Indian
+policy had been settled, so that any further extension must be at the
+expense of the Indians' guaranteed lands.
+
+On the eve of the panic, which depopulated many of the villages of the
+new strip, Michigan had been admitted. Her possessions west of Lake
+Michigan had been reorganized as a new territory of Wisconsin, with
+a capital temporarily at Belmont, where Henry Dodge, first governor,
+took possession in the fall of 1836. A territorial census showed that
+Wisconsin had a population of 22,214 in 1836, divided nearly equally by
+the Mississippi. Most of the population was on the banks of the great
+river, near the lead mines and the Black Hawk purchase, while only a
+fourth could be found near the new cities along the lake. The outlying
+settlements were already pressing against the Indian neighbors, so that
+the new governor soon was obliged to conduct negotiations for further
+cessions. The Chippewa, Menominee, and Sioux all came into council
+within two years, the Sioux agreeing to retire west of the Mississippi,
+while the others receded far into the north, leaving most of the
+present Wisconsin open to development. These treaties completed the
+line of the Indian frontier as it was established in the thirties.
+
+The Mississippi divided the population of Wisconsin nearly equally in
+1836, but subsequent years witnessed greater growth upon her western
+bank. Never in the westward movement had more attractive farms been
+made available than those on the right bank now reached by the river
+steamers and the ferries from northern Illinois. Two years after the
+erection of Wisconsin the western towns received their independent
+establishment, when in 1838 Iowa Territory was organized by Congress,
+including everything between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and
+north of the state of Missouri. Burlington, a village of log houses
+with perhaps five hundred inhabitants, became the seat of government
+of the new territory, while Wisconsin retired east of the river to a
+new capital at Madison. At Burlington a first legislature met in the
+autumn, to choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it could for
+a community still suffering from the results of the panic.
+
+The only Iowa lands open to lawful settlement were those of the Black
+Hawk purchase, many of which were themselves not surveyed and on the
+market. But the pioneers paid little heed to this. Leaving titles to
+the future, they cleared their farms, broke the sod, and built their
+houses.
+
+[Illustration: IOWA SOD PLOW]
+
+The heavy sod of the Iowa prairies was beyond the strength of the
+individual settler. In the years of first development the professional
+sod breaker was on hand, a most important member of his community, with
+his great plough, and large teams of from six to twelve oxen, making
+the ground ready for the first crop. In the frontier mind the land
+belonged to him who broke it, regardless of mere title. The quarrel
+between the squatter and the speculator was perennial. Congress in its
+laws sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest bidder,--a
+scheme through which the sturdy impecunious farmer saw his clearing
+in danger of being bought over his modest bid by an undeserving
+speculator. Accordingly the history of Iowa and Wisconsin is full of
+the claims associations by which the squatters endeavored to protect
+their rights and succeeded well. By voluntary association they agreed
+upon their claims and bounds. Transfers and sales were recorded on
+their books. When at last the advertised day came for the formal sale
+of the township by the federal land officer the population attended the
+auction in a body, while their chosen delegate bid off the whole area
+for them at the minimum price, and without competition. At times it
+happened that the speculator or the casual purchaser tried to bid, but
+the squatters present with their cudgels and air of anticipation were
+usually able to prevent what they believed to be unfair interference
+with their rights. The claims associations were entirely illegal; yet
+they reveal, as few American institutions do, the orderly tendencies
+of an American community even when its organization is in defiance of
+existing law.
+
+The development of the new territories of Iowa and Wisconsin in the
+decade after their erection carried both far towards statehood.
+Burlington, the earliest capital of Iowa, was in 1840 "the largest,
+wealthiest, most business-doing and most fashionable city, on or in
+the neighborhood of the Upper Mississippi.... We have three or four
+churches," said one of its papers, "a theatre, and a dancing school in
+full blast." As early as 1843 the Black Hawk purchase was overrun. The
+Sauk and Foxes had ceded provisionally all their Iowa lands and the
+Potawatomi were in danger. "Although it is but ten years to-day," said
+their agent, speaking of their Chicago treaty of 1833, "the tide of
+emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until the whites are now
+crowded closely along the southern side of these lands, and will soon
+swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the very worst traits of the
+white man's character, and destroy, by fraud and illicit intercourse,
+the remnant of a powerful people, now exposed to their influence." Iowa
+was admitted to the Union in 1846, after bickering over her northern
+boundary; Wisconsin followed in 1848; the remnant of both, now known as
+Minnesota, was erected as a territory in its own right in the next year.
+
+Fort Snelling was nearly twenty years old before it came to be more
+than a distant military outpost. Until the treaties of 1837 it was
+in the midst of the Sioux with no white neighbors save the agents of
+the fur companies, a few refugees from the Red River country, and a
+group of more or less disreputable hangers-on. An enlargement of the
+military reserve in 1837 led to the eviction by the troops of its
+near-by squatters, with the result that one of these took up his grog
+shop, left the peninsula between the Mississippi and St. Peter's, and
+erected the first permanent settlement across the former, where St.
+Paul now stands. Iowa had desired a northern boundary which should
+touch the St. Peter's River, but when she was admitted without it and
+Wisconsin followed with the St. Croix as her western limit, Minnesota
+was temporarily without a government.
+
+The Minnesota territorial act of 1849 preceded the active colonization
+of the country around St. Paul. Mendota, Fort Snelling, St. Anthony's,
+and Stillwater all came into active being, while the most enterprising
+settlers began to push up the Minnesota River, as the St. Peter's now
+came to be called. As usual the Indians were in the way. As usual the
+claims associations were resorted to. And finally, as usual the Indians
+yielded. At Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, in the autumn of 1851, the
+magnates of the young territory witnessed great treaties by which the
+Sioux, surrendering their portion of the permanent Indian frontier,
+gave up most of their vast hunting grounds to accept valley reserves
+along the Minnesota. And still more rapidly population came in after
+the cession.
+
+The new Northwest was settled after the great day of the keelboat on
+western waters. Iowa and the lead country had been reached by the
+steamboats of the Mississippi. The Milwaukee district was reached by
+the steamboats from the lakes. The upper Mississippi frontier was
+now even more thoroughly dependent on the river navigation than its
+neighbors had been, while its first period was over before any railroad
+played an immediate part in its development.
+
+The boom period between the panics of 1837 and 1857 thus added another
+concentric band along the northwest border, disregarding the Indian
+frontier and introducing a large population where the prophet of the
+early thirties had declared that civilization could never go. The
+Potawatomi of Iowa had yielded in 1846, the Sioux in 1851. The future
+of the other tribes in their so-called permanent homes was in grave
+question by the middle of the decade. The new frontier by 1857 touched
+the tip of Lake Superior, included St. Paul and the lower Minnesota
+valley, passed around Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, and reached the
+Missouri near Sioux City. In a few more years the right wing of the
+frontier would run due north from the bend of the Missouri.
+
+The hopeful life of the fifties surpassed that of the thirties in
+its speculative zeal. The home seeker had to struggle against the
+occasional Indian and the unscrupulous land agent as well as his own
+too sanguine disposition. Fictitious town sites had to be distinguished
+from the real. Fraudulent dealers more than once sold imaginary lots
+and farms from beautifully lithographed maps to eastern investors.
+Occasionally whole colonies of migrants would appear on the steamboat
+wharves bound for non-existent towns. And when the settler had escaped
+fraud, and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever or
+cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.
+
+Iowa had advanced her northwest frontier up the Des Moines River, past
+the old frontier fort, until in 1856 a couple of trading houses and a
+few families had reached the vicinity of Spirit Lake. Here, in March,
+1857, one of the settlers quarrelled with a wandering Indian over a
+dog. The Indian belonged to Inkpaduta's band of Sioux, one not included
+in the treaty of 1851. Forty-seven dead settlers slaughtered by the
+band were found a few days later by a visitor to the village. A hard
+winter campaign by regulars from Fort Ridgely resulted in the rescue
+of some of the captives, but the indignant demand of the frontier for
+retaliation was never granted.
+
+In spite of fraud and danger the population grew. For the first time
+the railroad played a material part in its advance. The great eastern
+trunk lines had crossed the Alleghanies into the Ohio valley. Chicago
+had received connection with the East in 1852. The Mississippi had been
+reached by 1854. In the spring of 1856 all Iowa celebrated the opening
+of a railway bridge at Davenport.
+
+The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own
+ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837.
+Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development
+that chartered railways and even built them between points that
+scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild
+with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money
+finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about
+to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the
+railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer,
+who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town
+lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating
+population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak
+gold.
+
+But a new Northwest had come into life in spite of the vicissitudes of
+1837 and 1857. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa had in 1860 ten times
+the population of Illinois at the opening of the Black Hawk War. More
+than a million and a half of pioneers had settled within these three
+new states, building their towns and churches and schools, pushing back
+the right flank of the Indian frontier, and reiterating their perennial
+demand that the Indian must go. This was the first departure from the
+policy laid down by Monroe and carried out by Adams and Jackson. Before
+this movement had ended, that policy had been attacked from another
+side, and was once more shown to be impracticable. The Indian had too
+little strength to compel adherence to the contract, and hence suffered
+from this encroachment by the new Northwest. His final destruction
+came from the overland traffic, which already by 1857 had destroyed
+the fiction of the American desert, and introduced into his domain
+thousands of pioneers lured by the call of the West and the lust for
+gold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL
+
+
+England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior
+provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio
+Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred miles above Vera
+Cruz. Before the English seaboard had received its earliest colonists,
+the hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters of the Rio
+Grande, where her outposts had been planted around the little adobe
+village of Santa FĂŠ. For more than two hundred years this life had gone
+on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened by contact with
+the world or admixture of foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility
+characteristic of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions and
+restrictions of the law, communication with these villages of Chihuahua
+and New Mexico had been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills
+by the pack-trains of the king.
+
+It was no stately procession that wound up into the hills yearly to
+supply the Mexican frontier. From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through
+Mexico City, and thence north along the highlands through San Luis
+Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and thence to Chihuahua, and up the
+valley of the Rio Grande to Santa FĂŠ climbed the long pack-trains and
+the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the provinces their whole supply
+from outside. The civilization of the provincial life might fairly be
+measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of this transportation
+route. Nearly two thousand miles, as the road meandered, of river,
+mountain gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the mule-drivers
+of the caravans. What their pack-animals could not carry, could not go.
+What had large bulk in proportion to its value must stay behind. The
+ancient commerce of the Orient, carried on camels across the Arabian
+desert, could afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and
+precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree, the world's
+contribution to these remote towns was confined largely to textiles,
+drugs, and trinkets of adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population
+of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for more than two
+centuries without an effort to improve upon them. Their resignation
+gives some credit to the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which
+restricted their importation to the defined route and the single port.
+It is due as much, however, to the hard geographic fact which made Vera
+Cruz and Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors, until
+in the nineteenth century another civilization came within hailing
+distance, at its frontier in the bend of the Missouri.
+
+The Spanish provincials were at once willing to endure the rigors of
+the commercial system and to smuggle when they had a chance. So long as
+it was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan than to develop
+other sources of supply the caravans flourished without competition.
+It was not until after the expulsion of Spain and the independence
+of Mexico that a rival supply became important, but there are enough
+isolated events before this time to show what had to occur just so soon
+as the United States frontier came within range.
+
+The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish captivity did
+something to reveal the existence of a possible market in Santa FĂŠ.
+He had been engaged in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana
+purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the Rio Grande while
+searching for the head waters of the Red River. Here he was arrested,
+in 1807, by Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.
+After a short detention he was escorted to the limits of the United
+States, where he was released. He carried home the news of high prices
+and profitable markets existing among the Mexicans.
+
+In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify the statements of
+Pike. Rumor had come to the States of an insurrection in upper Mexico,
+which might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the revolt had
+been suppressed before the dozen or so of reckless Americans who
+crossed the plains had arrived at their destination. The Spanish
+authorities, restored to power and renewed vigor, received them with
+open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua, some for ten years,
+while the traffic which they had hoped to inaugurate remained still in
+the future. Their release came only with the independence of Mexico,
+which quickly broke down the barrier against importation and the
+foreigner.
+
+The Santa FĂŠ trade commenced when the news of the Mexican revolution
+reached the border. Late in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell,
+chancing a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took a
+small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in what proved to be a
+profitable speculation. He returned to the States in time to lead
+out a large party in the following summer. So long as the United
+States frontier lay east of the Missouri River there could have been
+no western traffic, but now that settlement had reached the Indian
+Country, and river steamers had made easy freighting from Pittsburg
+to Franklin or Independence, Santa FĂŠ was nearer to the United States
+seaboard markets than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the American
+desert and the Indian frontier made by this earliest of the overland
+trails.
+
+[Illustration: OVERLAND TRAILS
+
+The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California
+appeared about 1845; the Santa FĂŠ trail had been used since 1821. The
+overland mail of 1858 followed the southern route.]
+
+The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the Santa FĂŠ trade, but it
+saw the first wagons taken across the plains. The freight capacity
+of the mule-train placed a narrow limit upon the profits and extent
+of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled over the rough trails was
+a matter of considerable doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper
+attempted it in this year. The experiment was so successful that within
+two years the pack-train was generally abandoned for the wagons by the
+Santa FĂŠ traders. The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton
+goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics, calicoes, domestic,
+shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom shirtings, and cotton hose," were in
+high demand. There were also "a few woollen goods, consisting of super
+blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths, and shawls, crapes, bombazettes,
+some light articles of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses."
+Backward bound their freights were lighter. Many of the wagons, indeed,
+were sold as part of the cargo. The returning merchants brought some
+beaver skins and mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and
+silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.
+
+Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings, could not escape the
+public eye. The patron of the West came early to its aid. Senator
+Thomas Hart Benton had taken his seat from the new state of Missouri
+just in time to notice and report upon the traffic. No public man was
+more confirmed in his friendship for the frontier trade than Senator
+Benton. The fur companies found him always on hand to get them favors
+or to "turn aside the whip of calamity." Because of his influence his
+son-in-law, FrĂŠmont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness. Now,
+in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement. A large policy in the
+building of public roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.
+In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided $30,000 to mark
+and build a wagon road from Missouri to the United States border on the
+Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road reported some annoyance
+from the Indians, whose hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around
+their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and Kansa treaties of 1825
+these tribes agreed to let the traders traverse the country in peace.
+
+Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the Santa FĂŠ trade.
+The long journey from the fringe of settlement to the Spanish towns
+eight hundred miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican
+soil, crossing the international boundary on the Arkansas near the
+hundredth meridian. The Indians of the route knew no national lines,
+and found a convenient refuge against pursuers from either nation in
+crossing the border. There was no military protection to the frontier
+at the American end of the trail until in 1827 the war department
+erected a new post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it Fort
+Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were stationed to guard the
+border and protect the traders. The post was due as much to the new
+Indian concentration policy as to the Santa FĂŠ trade. Its significance
+was double. Yet no one seems to have foreseen that the development of
+the trade through the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment
+of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.
+
+From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of regulars convoyed the
+caravans to the Southwest. In 1829 four companies of the sixth
+infantry, under Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan at
+the usual place of organization, Council Grove, a few days west of
+the Missouri line, and marched with it to the confines of the United
+States. Along the march there had been some worry from the Indians.
+After the caravan and escort had separated at the Arkansas the former,
+going on alone into Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard
+before it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose promptly to the
+occasion. He immediately crossed the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the
+consequences of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the
+Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican authorities furnished an
+escort of troops which marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who
+had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all summer, met them. He
+entertained the Mexican officers with drill while they responded with
+a parade, chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report declares,
+and then he brought the traders back to the States by the beginning of
+November.
+
+There was some criticism in the United States of this costly use of
+troops to protect a private trade. Hezekiah Niles, who was always
+pleading for high protection to manufactures and receiving less than
+he wanted, complained that the use of four companies during a whole
+season was extravagant protection for a trade whose annual profits
+were not over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely repeated after
+1829. Fort Leavenworth and the troops gave moral rather than direct
+support. Colonel Dodge, with his dragoons,--for infantry were soon
+seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,--made long expeditions
+and demonstrations in the thirties, reaching even to the slopes of
+the Rockies. And the Santa FĂŠ caravans continued until the forties in
+relative safety.
+
+Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an event of great
+consequence in the history of the Santa FĂŠ trail. Josiah Gregg,
+impelled by ill health to seek a change of climate, made his first trip
+to Santa FĂŠ in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg would call for no
+more comment than would any one who crossed the plains eight times in a
+single decade. But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was watching
+and thinking during his entire career, examining into the details of
+Mexican life and history and tabulating the figures of the traffic.
+When he finally retired from the plains life which he had come to love
+so well, he produced, in two small volumes, the great classic of the
+trade: "The Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa FĂŠ
+Trader." It is still possible to check up details and add small bits
+of fact to supplement the history and description of this commerce
+given by Gregg, but his book remains, and is likely to remain, the
+fullest and best source of information. Gregg had power of scientific
+observation and historical imagination, which, added to unusual
+literary ability, produced a masterpiece.
+
+The Santa FĂŠ trade, begun in 1822, continued with moderate growth until
+1843. This was its period of pioneer development. After the Mexican War
+the commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its greatest volume
+in the sixties, just before the construction of the Pacific railways.
+But in its later years it was a matter of greater routine and less
+general interest than in those years of commencement during which it
+was educating the United States to a more complete knowledge of the
+southern portion of the American desert. Gregg gives a table in which
+he shows the approximate value of the trade for its first twenty-two
+years. To-day it seems strange that so trifling a commerce should have
+been national in its character and influence. In only one year, 1843,
+does he find that the eastern value of the goods sent to Santa FĂŠ was
+above a quarter of a million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,
+but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter million mark. In
+nine years it was under $100,000. The men involved were a mere handful.
+At the start nearly every one of the seventy men in the caravan was
+himself a proprietor. The total number increased more rapidly than the
+number of independent owners. Three hundred and fifty were the most
+employed in any one year. The twenty-six wagons of 1824 became two
+hundred and thirty in 1843, but only four times in the interval were
+there so many as a hundred.
+
+Yet the Santa FĂŠ trade was national in its importance. Its romance
+contained a constant appeal to a public that was reading the Indian
+tales of James Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship
+and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country with quaint people
+and strange habitations. The American desert, not much more than a
+chartless sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must have
+confirmation of the truth that frontier causes have produced results
+far beyond their normal measure, such confirmation may be found here.
+
+The traders to Santa FĂŠ commonly travelled together in a single
+caravan for safety. In the earlier years they started overland from
+some Missouri town--Franklin most often--to a rendezvous at Council
+Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth and an increasing navigation
+of the Missouri River made possible a starting-point further west than
+Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the Missouri in 1828
+its place was taken by the new settlement of Independence, further
+up the river and only twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at
+Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties.
+For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few
+weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the
+frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and
+oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening
+drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the
+Southwest,--all these gave to Independence its name and place. From
+Independence to Council Grove, some one hundred and fifty miles, across
+the border, the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove they
+halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a general company for
+self-defence. Here in ordinary years the assembled traders elected
+a captain whose responsibility was complete, and whose authority
+was as great as he could make it by his own force. Under him were
+lieutenants, and under the command of these the whole company was
+organized in guards and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company
+was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal vigilance was the
+price of safety.
+
+The unit of the caravan was the wagon,--the same Pittsburg or Conestoga
+wagon that moved frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to
+travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve mules or oxen,
+and carried from three to five thousand pounds of cargo. Over the
+wagon were large arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn water
+and protect the contents. The careful freighter used two thicknesses
+of sheetings, while the canny one slipped in between them a pair of
+blankets, which might thus increase his comfort outward bound, and
+be in an inconspicuous place to elude the vigilance of the customs
+officials at Santa FĂŠ. Arms, mounts, and general equipment were
+innumerable in variation, but the prairie schooner, as its white canopy
+soon named it, survived through its own superiority.
+
+At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey now became one
+across a treeless prairie, with water all too rare, and habitations
+entirely lacking. The first stage of the trail crossed the country,
+nearly west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two hundred
+and seventy miles from Independence. Up the Arkansas it ran on, past
+Chouteau's Island, to Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur
+traders had established a post. Water was most scarce. Whether the
+caravan crossed the river at the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's
+Fort to follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader and on
+stock. His oxen often reached Santa FĂŠ with scarcely enough strength
+left to stand alone. But with reasonable success and skilful guidance
+the caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties and at last
+enter Santa FĂŠ, seven hundred and eighty miles away, in from six to
+seven weeks from Independence.
+
+When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri frontier was familiar
+with all of the long trail to Santa FĂŠ. Even in the East there had come
+to be some real interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert
+and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the
+war was the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth,
+with orders to march overland against Mexico and Upper California.
+
+Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command of the invading army, which
+he recruited largely from the frontier and into which he incorporated a
+battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the summer of 1846, near
+Council Bluffs, on their way to the Rocky Mountains and the country
+beyond. Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken him in
+1845 all the way to the mountains and back in the interest of policing
+the trails. By the end of June he was ready to begin the march towards
+Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was to be a common
+rendezvous. To this point the army marched in separate columns, far
+enough apart to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder
+from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was little more than a
+pleasure jaunt. The trail was well known, and Indians, never likely
+to run heedlessly into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's Fort
+the advance assumed more of a military aspect, for the enemy's country
+had been entered and resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the
+mountain passes north of Santa FĂŠ. But the resistance came to naught,
+while the army, footsore and hot, marched easily into Santa FĂŠ on
+August 18, 1846. In the palace of the governor the conquering officers
+were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the provinces would
+permit. "We were too thirsty to judge of its merits," wrote one of
+them of the native wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything
+liquid and cool was palatable." With little more than the formality of
+taking possession New Mexico thus fell into the hands of the United
+States, while the war of conquest advanced further to the West. In the
+end of September Kearny started out from Santa FĂŠ for California, where
+he arrived early in the following January.
+
+The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary of the United
+States to the Gila and the Pacific, broadening the area of the desert
+within the United States and raising new problems of long-distance
+government in connection with the populations of New Mexico and
+California. The Santa FĂŠ trail, with its continuance west of the Rio
+Grande, became the attenuated bond between the East and the West. From
+the Missouri frontier to California the way was through the desert and
+the Indian Country, with regular settlements in only one region along
+the route. The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit trade
+disappeared with the conquest, so that the traffic with the Southwest
+and California boomed during the fifties.
+
+The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions which had never been
+dreamed of before the conquest. Kearny's baggage-trains started a new
+era in plains freighting. The armies had continuously to be supplied.
+Regular communication had to be maintained for the new Southwest.
+But the freighting was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the
+Santa FĂŠ traders. It became a matter of business, running smoothly
+along familiar channels. It ceased to have to do with the extension
+of geographic knowledge and came to have significance chiefly in
+connection with the organization of overland commerce. Between the
+Mexican and Civil wars was its new period of life. Finally, in the
+seventies, it gradually receded into history as the tentacles of the
+continental railway system advanced into the desert.
+
+The Santa FĂŠ trail was the first beaten path thrust in advance of the
+western frontier. Even to-day its course may be followed by the wheel
+ruts for much of the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa
+FĂŠ. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind it at the start,
+not touching it again until the end was reached. For nearly fifty
+years after the trade began, this character of the desert remained
+substantially unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which had rushed
+west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped at the bend, and though the
+trail continued, settlement would not follow it. The Indian country
+and the American desert remained intact, while the Santa FĂŠ trail, in
+advance of settlement, pointed the way of manifest destiny, as no one
+of the eastern trails had ever done. When the new states grew up on the
+Pacific, the desert became as an ocean traversed only by the prairie
+schooners in their beaten paths. Islands of settlement served but to
+accentuate the unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain West.
+
+The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the statesmen of the
+twenties as the limit of American advance. It might have continued thus
+had there really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of the trade
+to Santa FĂŠ created a new interest and a connecting road. In nearly
+the same years the call of the fur trade led to the tracing of another
+path in the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and the fur trade
+had stirred up so much interest beyond the Rockies that before Kearny
+marched his army into Santa FĂŠ another trail of importance equal to his
+had been run to Oregon.
+
+The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended upon the ability of
+the United States to keep whites out of the Indian Country. But with
+Oregon and Santa FĂŠ beyond, this could never be. The trails had already
+shown the fallacy of the frontier policy before it had become a fact in
+1840.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE OREGON TRAIL
+
+
+The Santa FĂŠ trade had just been started upon its long career when
+trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the
+forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy
+crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper
+Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage
+through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon.
+As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the
+Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over
+the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for
+new states. The Santa FĂŠ trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The
+Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.
+
+In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those
+nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of
+every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the
+surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded
+facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden,
+has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that
+carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they
+first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the
+period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of
+Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That
+they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite
+as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were
+generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence
+upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history
+is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the
+thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean
+at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat
+earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the
+fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct
+the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted,
+they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the
+century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the
+British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so
+confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up
+the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and
+allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.
+
+In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of
+the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading
+prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies.
+Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated
+the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a
+body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter
+year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable
+Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had
+become a household word through the combined reports of traders and
+missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the
+lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden
+might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an
+added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was
+approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when
+Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The
+thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis
+of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided
+an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the
+farthest West.
+
+A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government
+to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were
+in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the
+trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been
+ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task
+of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the
+father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the
+mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new
+son-in-law, John C. FrĂŠmont, a detail in command of an exploring party
+to the South Pass.
+
+The career of FrĂŠmont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great
+publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of
+this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from
+Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He
+shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte,
+and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in
+northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's
+he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the
+Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8,
+just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at
+Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially
+over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range,
+climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was
+back in St. Louis with his party.
+
+In the spring of 1843, FrĂŠmont started upon a second and more extended
+governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail
+along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence
+he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the
+Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon
+for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending
+part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while
+he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine
+Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before
+reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another
+detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked
+upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18,
+he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles
+of the Columbia.
+
+Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia
+and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with
+the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the
+trappers, had not yet received scientific record when FrĂŠmont started
+south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His
+march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under
+difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a
+stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento
+Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march
+carried him into southern California and around the sources of the
+Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of
+the country between the mountains and the Pacific.
+
+In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two
+expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of
+resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work
+turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems
+far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his
+earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English
+traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed
+over by Colonel FrĂŠmont was perfectly well known to the old trappers
+and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese
+pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man
+who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through
+these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the
+American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the _Platte
+(Missouri) Eagle_ in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser
+[_sic_] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific.
+Destiny has willed it."
+
+The year in which FrĂŠmont made his first expedition to the mountains
+was also the year of the first formal, conducted emigration to
+Oregon. Missionaries beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress
+the appointment of an American representative and magistrate for
+the country, with such effect that Dr. Elijah White, who had some
+acquaintance with Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the
+spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration of homeseekers
+that peopled Oregon during the next ten years. His emigration was not
+large, perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons; but it
+seems to have been larger than he expected, and large enough to raise
+doubt as to the practicability of taking so many persons across the
+plains at once. In the decade following, every May, when pasturage was
+fresh and green, saw pioneers gathering, with or without premeditation,
+at the bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence and its
+neighbor villages continued to be the posts of outfit. How many in
+the aggregate crossed the plains can never be determined, in spite of
+the efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record their names.
+The distinguishing feature of the emigration was its spontaneous
+individualistic character. Small parties, too late for the caravan,
+frequently set forth alone. Single families tried it often enough to
+have their wanderings recorded in the border papers. In the spring
+following the crossing of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds
+at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand in all is
+probably not too high. In 1844 the tide subsided a little, but in
+1845 it established a new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and
+in 1847 ran between four and five thousand. These were the highest
+figures, yet throughout the decade the current flowed unceasingly.
+
+The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years, may be taken as
+typical of the Oregon movement. Early in the year faces turned toward
+the Missouri rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and young, with
+wagons and cattle, household equipment, primitive sawmills, and all
+the impedimenta of civilization were to be found in the hopeful crowd.
+For some days after departure the unwieldy party, a thousand strong,
+with twice as many cattle and beasts of burden, held together under
+Burnett, their chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control soon
+split the company. In addition to the general fear that the number was
+dangerously high, the poorer emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some
+of the latter had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,
+and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian thieves during his
+long night watches he felt the injustice which compelled him to protect
+the property of another. Hence the party broke early in June. A "cow
+column" was formed of those who had many cattle and heavy belongings;
+the lighter body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting
+distance; and under two captains the procession moved on. The way was
+tedious rather than difficult, but habit soon developed in the trains
+a life that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the migrants of 1842
+had written, was a "great country for unmarried gals." Courtship and
+marriage began almost before the States were out of sight. Death and
+burial, crime and punishment, filled out the round of human experience,
+while Dr. Whitman was more than once called upon in his professional
+capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.
+
+[Illustration: FORT LARAMIE IN 1842
+
+From a sketch made to illustrate FrĂŠmont's report.]
+
+The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed in the
+United States. It started from the Missouri River anywhere between
+Independence and Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence was
+the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural frontier advanced
+through Iowa in the forties numerous new crossings and ferries were
+made further up the stream. From the various ferries the start began,
+as did the Santa FĂŠ trade, sometime in May. By many roads the wagons
+moved westward towards the point from which the single trail extended
+to the mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte River reaches
+its most southerly point, these routes from the border were nearly
+as numerous as the caravans, but here began the single highway along
+the river valley, on its southern side. At this point, in the years
+immediately after the Mexican War, the United States founded a military
+post to protect the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W. Kearny,
+commander of the Army of the West. From Fort Kearney (custom soon
+changed the spelling of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie
+Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork. Fort Laramie
+itself was bought from the fur company and converted into a military
+post which became a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.
+Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the trail to South Pass,
+where, through a gap twenty miles in width, the main commerce between
+the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go. Beyond
+South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the next post of importance on
+the road. From Fort Hall to Fort BoisĂŠ the trail continued down the
+Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to meet the Columbia
+near Walla Walla.
+
+The journey to Oregon took about five months. Its deliberate,
+domesticated progress was as different as might be from the commercial
+rush to Santa FĂŠ. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily get
+caught in the early mountain winter, but with a prompt start and a wise
+guide, or pilot, winter always found the homeseeker in his promised
+land. "This is the right manner to settle the Oregon question," wrote
+Niles, after he had counted over the emigrants of 1844.
+
+Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already
+there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional
+government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under
+the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable
+uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for
+future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed
+to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the
+British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early
+migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful
+also lest future American emigration might carry political control out
+of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance
+among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In
+May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon
+blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary
+association for government and adopted a code of laws.
+
+Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this
+newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White,
+"at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of
+Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of
+any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of
+Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events.
+"During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened,
+and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves
+during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost
+all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the
+measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts,
+securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse
+among the whites."
+
+A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension
+of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His
+journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,
+who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from
+abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called
+the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost,
+however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government
+settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws
+were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order
+prevailed.
+
+Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and
+annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners
+of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink
+was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier.
+"A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread,
+sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as
+corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present
+at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches,
+corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where
+two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent
+intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of
+the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of
+the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal
+right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to
+crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass
+meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of
+his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the
+distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock
+P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus
+well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were
+standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses.
+No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having
+resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset
+the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my
+measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the
+kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and
+every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and
+utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where
+our presence and report gave general joy."
+
+The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair
+degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional
+governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its
+courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was
+long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title
+to the country and could pass laws for it.
+
+The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly
+in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with
+deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with
+absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The
+stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the
+erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an
+intimate study of the Oregon trail.
+
+In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in
+practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the
+annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of
+slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern
+senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and
+Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive
+under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to
+cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern
+states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape
+with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could
+emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers,
+and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence,
+in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people,
+of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With
+a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was
+closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.
+
+Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish
+Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´.
+Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in
+British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of
+1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great
+Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should
+justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting
+countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim
+for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was
+entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness
+that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party
+was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with
+respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders
+of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the
+Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a
+westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with
+his British adversary quickly.
+
+Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's
+notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more
+pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of
+State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division
+instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the
+change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty
+which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49° from the
+Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater part
+of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to such
+legislation as Congress should prescribe.
+
+A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the
+establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All
+that the United States had secured in the division was given the
+popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,
+popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached
+American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country.
+The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined
+by wheel ruts and dĂŠbris along the sides that even the blind could
+scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient
+for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way
+for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and
+morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were
+prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A
+second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American
+desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that
+was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS
+
+
+The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon is but a small
+portion of the whole history of the Oregon trail. The trail was
+not only the road to Oregon, but it was the chief road across the
+continent. Santa FĂŠ dominated a southern route that was important in
+commerce and conquest, and that could be extended west to the Pacific.
+But the deep ravine of the Colorado River splits the United States into
+sections with little chance of intercourse below the fortieth parallel.
+To-day, in only two places south of Colorado do railroads bridge it;
+only one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The southern trail
+could not be compared in its traffic or significance with the great
+middle highway by South Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri
+River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to California and Great
+Salt Lake.
+
+Of the waves of influence that drew population along the trail, the
+Oregon fever came first; but while it was still raging, there came
+the Mormon trek that is without any parallel in American history.
+Throughout the lifetime of the trails the American desert extended
+almost unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to California and
+Oregon. The Mormon settlement in Utah became at once the most
+considerable colony within this area, and by its own fertility
+emphasized the barren nature of the rest.
+
+Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet, but it would be fair to
+ascribe the parentage of the sect to that emotional upheaval of the
+twenties and thirties which broke down barriers of caste and politics,
+ruptured many of the ordinary Christian churches, and produced new
+revelations and new prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely
+one of these, more astute perhaps than the others, having much of
+the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed had had before him, and able
+to direct and hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet might
+have been able to arouse. History teaches that it is easy to provoke
+religious enthusiasm, however improbable or fraudulent the guides or
+revelations may be; but that the founding of a church upon it is a task
+for greatest statesmanship.
+
+The discovery of the golden plates and the magic spectacles, and
+the building upon them of a militant church has little part in the
+conquest of the frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for
+the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other than as a joke,
+and its perpetrator as a successful charlatan. Mormon apologists and
+their enemies have gone over the details of its production without
+establishing much sure evidence on either side. The theological
+teaching of the church seems to put less stress upon it than its
+supposed miraculous origin would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain,
+with his light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome to
+read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of
+morals is unobjectionable--it is 'smouched' from the New Testament
+and no credit given." Converts came slowly to the new prophet at the
+start, for he was but one of many teachers crying in the wilderness,
+and those who had known him best in his youth were least ready to
+see in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring of 1830 it was
+possible to organize, in western New York, the body which Rigdon was
+later to christen the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
+By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where
+proselyting had proved to be successful in both religion and finance.
+
+Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new sect. Revelations came
+in upon the prophet rapidly, pointing out the details of organization
+and administration, the duty of missionary activity among the Indians
+and gentiles, and the future home further to the west. Scouts were sent
+to the Indian Country at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland
+the leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts who, by
+1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in hopeful numbers. The frontier of
+this decade was equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,
+banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates possessed the germ
+of leadership to take advantage of every chance. Until the panic
+of 1837 they flourished, apparently not always beyond reproach in
+financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had the right to throw
+the stone. Antagonism, already appearing against the church, was due
+partly to an essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors
+and partly to the whole-souled union between church and life which
+distinguished the Mormons from the other sects. Their political
+complexion was identical with their religion,--a combination which
+always has aroused resentment in America.
+
+For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract in Missouri, not far
+from Independence, close to the Indians whose conversion was a part of
+the Mormon duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa FĂŠ were by-words
+along the Missouri, the Mormons were getting a precarious foothold near
+the commencement of the trails. The population around Independence was
+distinctly inhospitable, with the result that petty violence appeared,
+in which it is hard to place the blame. There was a calm assurance
+among the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit the earth.
+Their neighbors maintained that poultry and stock were unsafe in their
+vicinity because of this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges of
+well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all the bickerings the
+sources of information are partisan and cloudy with prejudice, so that
+it is easier to see the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit.
+From the south side of the Missouri around Independence the Saints
+were finally driven across the river by armed mobs; a transaction in
+which the Missourians spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the
+peace. North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached in a few
+miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell County, they settled down at
+last, to build their tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of
+1838 their corner-stone was laid.
+
+Far West remained their goal in belief longer than in fact. Before
+1838 ended they had been forced to agree to leave Missouri; yet they
+returned in secret to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and
+continued to dream of this as their future home. Up to the time of
+their expulsion from Missouri in 1838 they are not proved to have been
+guilty of any crime that could extenuate the gross intolerance which
+turned them out. As individuals they could live among Gentiles in
+peace. It seems to have been the collective soul of the church that
+was unbearable to the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had
+facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled it from Missouri,
+in a few more years drove them again on their migrations. The cohesion
+of the church in politics, economics, and religion explains the
+opposition which it cannot well excuse.
+
+In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old Fort Madison ferry
+which led into the half-breed country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered
+a village of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement
+from which the business genius of Smith now purchased it on easy
+terms. It was occupied in 1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a
+new tabernacle was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken young
+clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet had now developed
+into a successful man of affairs, with ambitions that reached even to
+the presidency at Washington. With a strong sect behind him, money at
+his disposal, and supernatural powers in which all faithful saints
+believed, Joseph could go far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen
+thousand by the end of 1840.
+
+Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely contested presidential
+election, at a time when the state feared to lose its population in
+an emigration to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to
+be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the Mormons insured
+for themselves a hearty welcome from both Democrats and Whigs. A
+complaisant legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of
+privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so that the ideal
+of the Mormons of a state within the state was fully realized. The
+town council was emancipated from state control, its courts were
+independent, and its militia was substantially at the beck of Smith.
+Proselyting and good management built up the town rapidly. To an
+importunate creditor Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but
+to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of milk and honey.
+Here it began to be noticed that desertions from the church were not
+uncommon; that conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks. It
+was noised about that the wealthy convert had the warmest reception,
+but was led on to let his religious passion work his impoverishment for
+the good of the cause.
+
+Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the church took the decisive
+step that carried Mormonism beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable,
+religious sects. Rumors of immorality circulated among the Gentile
+neighbors. It was bad enough, they thought, to have the Mormons chronic
+petty thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail among the
+leaders was more than could be endured by a community that did not
+count this form of iniquity among its own excesses. The Mormons were in
+general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen until they took
+to this. At the time, all immorality was denounced and denied by the
+prophet and his friends, but in later years the church made public a
+revelation concerning celestial or plural marriage, with the admission
+that Joseph Smith had received it in the summer of 1843. Never does
+Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent as its enemies have
+charged. But no church countenancing the practice could hope to be
+endured by an American community. The odium of practising it was
+increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It was only a matter of
+time until the Mormons should resume their march.
+
+The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated by the murder of
+Joseph Smith, and Hyrum his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the
+summer of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an attack upon the
+Saints similar to that in Missouri. Under promise of protection the
+Smiths had surrendered themselves. Their martyrdom at once disgraced
+the state in which it could be possible, and gave to Mormonism in a
+murdered prophet a mighty bond of union. The reins of government fell
+into hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young succeeded Joseph
+Smith.
+
+Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a formal way president
+of the church, but his authority was complete in fact after the death
+of Joseph. A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain knew him, and
+has left an estimate of him which must be close to truth. He was "a man
+of great ability. Apparently deficient in education and refinement,
+he was fair and honest in his dealings, and seemed extremely liberal
+in conversation upon religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so
+Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates, "as anything but a
+religious fanatic or even enthusiast; but he knew how to make use of
+the fanaticism of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly after
+the murder of Joseph it became clear that Nauvoo must be abandoned, and
+Brigham began to consider an exodus across the plains so familiar by
+hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky Mountains beyond the limits
+of the United States. Persecution, for the persecuted can never see
+two sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened eviction came in the
+autumn of 1845. In 1846 the last great trek began.
+
+The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at Nauvoo as early as
+February, 1846. By the hundred, in the spring of the year, the wagons
+of the persecuted sect were ferried across the river. Five hundred and
+thirty-nine teams within a single week in May is the report of one
+observer. Property which could be commuted into the outfit for the
+march was carefully preserved and used. The rest, the tidy houses, the
+simple furniture, the careful farms (for the backbone of the church was
+its well-to-do middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced sale
+to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full of real estate vultures
+hoping to thrive upon the Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more
+abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple within the year.
+
+Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as Brigham Young liked to
+call his headquarters, advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer
+allowed. To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railway follows
+the Mormon road for many miles, but in 1846 the western half of Iowa
+territory was Indian Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and
+Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over, but who were in
+possession at this time. Along the line of march camps were built by
+advance parties to be used in succession by the following thousands.
+The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri River, near Council
+Bluffs, where as yet no city stood, to plant a crop of grain, since
+manna could not be relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of the
+population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter quarters not far above
+the present site of Omaha, preserving the orderly life of the society,
+and enduring hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate by gaiety
+and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi country of Iowa, opposite
+their winter quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all the
+way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the Platte Mormon detachments
+were scattered along the roads. The destination was yet in doubt.
+Westward it surely was, but it is improbable that even Brigham knew
+just where.
+
+The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted and driven westward
+like themselves, kindly at first, but discontent came as the winter
+residence was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha, west of the
+Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit Mormon settlement, but
+east, in the abandoned Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain
+Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several years. A permanent
+residence here was not desired even by the Mormons themselves. Spring
+in 1847 found them preparing to resume the march.
+
+In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance of no less a person
+than Brigham Young started out the Platte trail in search of Zion.
+One hundred and forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred and
+seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they took along, if
+the figures of one of their historians may be accepted. Under strict
+military order, the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is one of
+the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no sooner selected their abode
+beyond the line of the United States in their flight from persecution
+than conquest from Mexico extended the United States beyond them to the
+Pacific. They themselves aided in this defeat of their plan, since from
+among them Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army of
+invasion.
+
+Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and beyond, the
+prospectors followed the well-beaten trail. Oregon homeseekers had been
+cutting it deep in the prairie sod for five years. West of South Pass
+they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on the 24th of July, 1847,
+Brigham gazed upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious
+premeditation, so far as is known, and against the advice of one of the
+most experienced of mountain guides, this valley by a later-day Dead
+Sea was chosen for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground
+was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were commenced at
+once, and within a month the town site was baptized the City of the
+Great Salt Lake.
+
+Behind the advance guard the main body remained in winter quarters,
+making ready for their difficult search for the promised land; moving
+at last in the late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere
+would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph relied but little
+upon supernatural aid in keeping his flock under control. Commonly he
+depended upon human wisdom and executive direction. But upon the eve
+of his own departure from winter quarters he had made public, for the
+direction of the main body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will
+of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their Journeyings to the
+West." Such revelations as this, had they been repeated, might well
+have created or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration of
+the leader. The order given was such as a wise source of inspiration
+might have formed after constant intercourse with emigrants and traders
+upon the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers of the way.
+
+"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
+Saints, and those who journey with them," read the revelation, "be
+organized into companies, with a covenant and a promise to keep all
+the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God. Let the companies
+be organized with captains of hundreds, and captains of fifties, and
+captains of tens, with a president and counsellor at their head, under
+direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be our covenant, that
+we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord.
+
+"Let each company provide itself with all the teams, wagons,
+provisions, and all other necessaries for the journey that they can.
+When the companies are organized, let them go with all their might,
+to prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company, with their
+captains and presidents, decide how many can go next spring; then
+choose out a sufficient number of able-bodied and expert men to take
+teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers to prepare for
+putting in the spring crops. Let each company bear an equal proportion,
+according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the
+widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone
+with the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not
+up into the ears of the Lord against his people.
+
+"Let each company prepare houses and fields for raising grain for those
+who are to remain behind this season; and this is the will of the Lord
+concerning this people.
+
+"Let every man use all his influence and property to remove this people
+to the place where the Lord shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do
+this with a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed in
+your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields, and in your houses,
+and in your families...."
+
+The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk Horn River, whence the
+head of the procession moved late in June and early in July. In careful
+organization, with camps under guard and wagons always in corral at
+night, detachments moved on in quick succession. Kanesville and a
+large body remained behind for another year or longer, but before
+Brigham had laid out his city and started east the emigration of
+1847 was well upon its way. The foremost began to come into the city
+by September. By October the new city in the desert had nearly four
+thousand inhabitants. The march had been made with little suffering and
+slight mortality. No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the
+trail.
+
+The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to become an oasis in the
+American desert, supporting the only agricultural community existing
+therein during nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the Mormons at
+the start. In Illinois and Missouri they were used to wood and water;
+here they found neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to
+carry their water to their crops in a way in which their leader had
+more confidence than themselves. The urgency of Brigham in setting his
+first detachment to work on fields and crops was not unwise, since for
+two years there was a real question of food to keep the colony alive.
+Inexperience in irrigating agriculture and plagues of crickets kept
+down the early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its maintenance
+does still more credit to its skilful leadership. Its people, apart
+from foreign converts who came in later years, were of the stuff that
+had colonized the middle West and won a foothold in Oregon; but nowhere
+did an emigration so nearly create a land which it enjoyed as here.
+A paternal government dictated every effort, outlined the streets and
+farms, detailed parties to explore the vicinity and start new centres
+of life. Little was left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical
+success and a high state of general welfare rewarded the Saints for
+their implicit obedience to authority.
+
+Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became as common as that to
+Oregon in the years following 1847, but, except in the disastrous
+hand-cart episode of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial
+increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living in the West, who,
+walking all the way, with their own hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled
+carts from the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad
+management in handling proselytes the hand-cart catastrophe was chiefly
+due. From the beginning missionary activity had been pressed throughout
+the United States and even in Europe. In England and Scandinavia the
+lower classes took kindly to the promises, too often impracticable, it
+must be believed, of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon
+success abroad. The convert with property could pay his way to the
+Missouri border and join the ordinary annual procession. But the poor,
+whose wealth was not equal to the moderately costly emigration, were
+a problem until the emigration society determined to cut expenses by
+reducing equipment and substituting pushcarts and human power for the
+prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.
+
+In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants left Liverpool, at
+contract rates, for Iowa City, where the parties were to be organized
+and ample equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised
+to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found that slovenly
+management had not built enough of the carts. Delayed by the necessary
+construction of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the
+trail until late in the summer,--too late for a successful trip, as a
+few of their more cautious advisers had said. The earliest company got
+through to Salt Lake City in September with considerable success. It
+was hard and toilsome to push the carts; women and children suffered
+badly, but the task was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains
+broke down the last company. A friendly historian speaks of a loss of
+sixty-seven out of a party of four hundred and twenty. Throughout the
+United States the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling
+against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom, with
+clothing going and food quite gone, increased the conviction that the
+Mormon hierarchy was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.
+
+That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of the whole United States
+came to be believed as well. In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement
+three years old, Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending
+from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°, and the President
+had made Brigham Young its governor. The close association of the
+Mormon church and politics had prevented peaceful relations from
+existing between its people and the federal officers of the territory,
+while Washington prejudiced a situation already difficult by sending
+to Utah officers and judges, some of whom could not have commanded
+respect even where the sway of United States authority was complete.
+The vicious influence of politics in territorial appointments, which
+the territories always resented, was specially dangerous in the case
+of a territory already feeling itself persecuted for conscience' sake.
+Yet it was not impossible for a tactful and respectable federal officer
+to do business in Utah. For several years relations increased in bad
+temper, both sides appealing constantly to President and Congress,
+until it appeared, as was the fact, that the United States authority
+had become as nothing in Utah and with the church. Among the earliest
+of President Buchanan's acts was the preparation of an army which
+should reĂŤstablish United States prestige among the Mormons. Large
+wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1857,
+with an army under Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and
+again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.
+
+The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base, and operating in a
+desert against plainsmen of remarkable skill, the army was helpless.
+At will, the Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply trains,
+confining their attacks to property rather than to armed forces. When
+the army reached Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his
+people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned. With difficulty
+could the army of invasion have lived through the winter without aid.
+In the spring of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons, being
+invulnerable, were forgiven. The army marched down the trail again.
+
+The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the
+heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence.
+What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd
+leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving
+population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as
+the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold
+followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then
+in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West.
+The Mormons would have fared much worse had their leader not located
+his stake of Zion near the point where the trail to the Southwest
+deviated from the Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay
+tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through his oasis on
+their way to California.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS
+
+
+On his second exploring trip, John C. FrĂŠmont had worked his way south
+over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found
+himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in 1844 a small group
+of Americans had already been established for several years. Mexican
+California was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient
+central government that the province had almost fallen away of its
+own weight. John A. Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was
+the magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed a liberal
+hospitality to the Pathfinder's party.
+
+In 1845, FrĂŠmont started on his third trip, this time entering
+California by a southern route and finding himself at Sutter's early in
+1846. In some respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance
+of a filibustering party from the start. When it crossed the Rockies,
+it began to trespass upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with
+whom the United States was yet at peace. Whether the explorer was
+actually instructed to detach California from Mexico, or whether he
+only imagined that such action would be approved at home, is likely
+never to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were already under
+orders in the event of war to seize California at once; and Polk was
+from the start ambitious to round out the American territory on the
+Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were at variance with their
+Mexican neighbors, who resented the steady influx of foreign blood.
+Between 1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased. And in June,
+1846, certain of them, professing to believe that they were to be
+attacked, seized the Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors
+of what they called their Bear Flag Republic. FrĂŠmont, near at hand,
+countenanced and supported their act, if he did not suggest it.
+
+The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly after the American
+population in California had begun its little revolution. FrĂŠmont was
+in his glory for a time as the responsible head of American power
+in the province. Naval commanders under their own orders coĂśperated
+along the coast so effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,
+learned that the conquest was substantially complete, soon after
+he left Santa FĂŠ, and was able to send most of his own force back.
+California fell into American hands almost without a struggle, leaving
+the invaders in possession early in 1847. In January of that year the
+little village of Yerba Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the
+American occupants began the sale of lots along the water front and the
+construction of a great seaport.
+
+The relations of Oregon and California to the occupation of the West
+were much the same in 1847. Both had been coveted by the United States.
+Both had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come first because
+it was most easily reached by the great trail, and because it had
+no considerable body of foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It
+was, under the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field for
+colonization. But California had been the territory of Mexico and was
+occupied by a strange population. In the early forties there were from
+4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province, living the easy
+agricultural life of the Spanish colonist. The missions and the Indians
+had decayed during the past generation. The population was light
+hearted and generous. It quarrelled loudly, but had the Latin-American
+knack for bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized by long
+association with those trappers who had visited it since the twenties,
+and the settlers who had begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied
+foreign territory it had not invited American colonization as Oregon
+had done. Hence the Oregon movement had been going on three or four
+years before any considerable bodies of emigrants broke away from the
+trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out homes in California. If war had
+not come, American immigration into California would have progressed
+after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities would have
+allowed. As it was, the actual conquest removed the barrier, so that
+California migration in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon under
+the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement. The settlement of the
+Mormons at Salt Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at the
+head of the most perilous section of the California trail. Both Mormons
+and Californians profited by its traffic.
+
+With respect to California, the treaty which closed the Mexican War
+merely recognized an accomplished fact. By right of conquest California
+had changed hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid the penalty
+under that organic law of politics which forbids a nation to sit still
+when others are moving. In no conceivable way could the occupation
+of California have been prevented, and if the war over Texas had not
+come in 1846, a war over California must shortly have occurred. By the
+treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory which she
+had never been able to develop, and made way for the erection of the
+new America on the Pacific.
+
+Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in California was John
+A. Sutter, whose establishment on the Sacramento had been a centre
+of the new life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government he
+had erected his adobe buildings in the usual semi-fortified style
+that distinguished the isolated ranch. He was ready for trade, or
+agriculture, or war if need be, possessing within his own domain
+equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and supplies. As his
+ranch prospered, and as Americans increased in San Francisco and on the
+Sacramento, the prospects of Sutter steadily improved. In 1847 he made
+ready to reap an additional share of profit from the boom by building a
+sawmill on his estate. Among his men there had been for some months a
+shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W. Marshall, who had been chiefly
+carpenter while in Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall was
+sent out to find a place where timber and water-power should be near
+enough together to make a profitable mill site. He found his spot on
+the south bank of the American, which is a tributary of the Sacramento,
+some forty-five miles northeast of Sacramento.
+
+In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall came to their agreement
+by which the former was to furnish all supplies and the latter was to
+build the mill and operate it on shares. Construction was begun before
+the year ended, and was substantially completed in January, 1848.
+Experience showed the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too
+shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of turning the river
+into it by night to wash out earth and deepen the channel. Here it was
+that after one of these flushings, toward the end of January, he picked
+up glittering flakes which looked to him like gold.
+
+With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter, at the ranch.
+Together they tested the flakes in the apothecary's shop, proving the
+reality of the discovery before returning to the mill to prospect more
+fully.
+
+For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None could tell how large the
+field might be, but he saw clearly that once the news of the find got
+abroad, the whole population would rush madly to the diggings. His
+ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under way, all needed labor.
+But none would work for hire with free gold to be had for the taking.
+The discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks, but the news
+leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands in a few days, and reached
+even to San Francisco in the form of rumor before February was over. A
+new force had appeared to change the balance of the West and to excite
+the whole United States.
+
+The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two parts: the earlier
+including the population of California, near enough to hear of the find
+and get to the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the world, but
+could not start until the news had percolated by devious and tedious
+courses to centres of population thousands of miles away. The movement
+within California started in March and April.
+
+Further prospecting showed that over large areas around the American
+and Sacramento rivers free gold could be obtained by the simple
+processes of placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six or eight
+men was the most profitable tool, but a tin dishpan would do in an
+emergency. San Francisco was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and
+was not excited even by the first of April, but as nuggets and bags
+of dust appeared in quantity, the doubters turned to enthusiasts.
+Farms were abandoned, town houses were deserted, stores were closed,
+while every able-bodied man tramped off to the north to try his luck.
+The city which had flourished and expanded since the beginning of
+1847 became an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper is mute
+witness of the desertion, lapsing into silence for a month after May
+29th because its hands had disappeared. Farther south in California
+the news spread as spring advanced, turning by June nearly every face
+toward Sacramento.
+
+The public authorities took cognizance of the find during the summer.
+It was forced upon them by the wholesale desertions of troops who
+could not stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor Mason, who
+represented the sovereignty of the United States, visited the scenes in
+person and described the situation in their official letters home. The
+former got his news off to the Secretary of State by the 1st of June;
+the latter wrote on August 17; together they became the authoritative
+messengers that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk published
+some of their documents in his message to Congress in December, 1848.
+The rumors had reached the East as early as September, but now, writes
+Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."
+
+How to get to California became a great popular question in the winter
+of 1848-1849. The public mind was well prepared for long migrations
+through the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the journals
+for at least six years. Route, time, method, and cost were all to be
+considered. Migration, of a sort, began at once.
+
+Land and water offered a choice of ways to California. The former
+route was now closed for the winter and could not be used until spring
+should produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the impetuous and
+the well-to-do could start immediately by sea. All along the seaboard
+enterprising ship-owners announced sailings for California, by the Horn
+or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired hulks were called again into
+commission for the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many were
+willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery, Congress had arranged
+for a postal service, _via_ Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship
+Company had been organized to work the contracts. The _California_
+had left New York in the fall of 1848 to run on the western end of
+the route. It had sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news
+of gold on the South American coast, had begun to load up at Latin
+ports. When it reached Panama, a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many
+times beyond its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled over its
+accommodations. On February 28, 1849, it reached San Francisco at last,
+starting the influx from the world at large.
+
+The water route was too costly for most of the gold-seekers, who were
+forced to wait for spring, when the trails would be open. Various
+routes then guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most of all they
+crowded once more the great Platte trail. Oregon migration and the
+Mormon flight had familiarized this route to all the world. For its
+first stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any turnpike in
+our country."
+
+The usual crowd, which every May for several years had brought to
+the Missouri River crossings around Fort Leavenworth, was reĂŤnforced
+in 1849 and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle regiment of
+regulars was there, bound for Forts Laramie and Hall to erect new
+frontier posts. Lieutenant Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying
+party which was to prospect for a railway route to Salt Lake. By
+thousands and tens of thousands others came, tempted by the call of
+gold. This was the cheap and popular route. Every western farmer was
+ready to start, with his own wagons and his own stock. The townsman
+could easily buy the simple equipment of the plains. The poor could
+work their way, driving cattle for the better-off. Through inexperience
+and congestion the journey was likely to be hard, but any one might
+undertake it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850 wagons
+had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and 1500 more at the other ferries.
+
+Familiarity had done much to divest the overland journey of its
+terrors. We hear in this, and even in earlier years, of a sort of
+plains travel de luxe, of wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from
+the weather and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the world
+as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury, hurrying out in June
+and overtaking the trains, was impressed with the picturesque character
+of the emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in company with
+multitudes of emigrants the whole day," he wrote on June 12. "The road
+has been lined to a long extent with their wagons, whose white covers,
+glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a distance, ships upon the
+ocean.... We passed also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon, drawn
+by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household furniture. Behind
+followed a covered cart containing the wife, driving herself, and a
+host of babies--the whole bound to the land of promise, of the distance
+to which, however, they seemed to have not the most remote idea. To the
+tail of the cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls; two
+milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare, upon the back of which
+was perched a little, brown-faced, barefooted girl, not more than seven
+years old, while a small sucking colt brought up the rear." Travellers
+eastward bound, meeting the procession, reported the hundreds and
+thousands whom they met.
+
+The organization of the trains was not unlike that of the Oregonians
+and the Mormons, though generally less formal than either of these.
+The wagons were commonly grouped in companies for protection, little
+needed, since the Indians were at peace during most of 1849. At
+nightfall the long columns came to rest and worked their wagons into
+the corral which was the typical plains encampment. To form this the
+wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with its tongue overlapping
+the vehicle ahead, and each fastened to the next with the brake or yoke
+chains. An opening at one end allowed for driving in the stock, which
+could here be protected from stampede or Indian theft. In emergency
+the circle of wagons formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside
+ordinary Indian attacks. When the companies had been on the road for a
+few weeks the forming of the corral became an easy military manoeuvre.
+The itinerant circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of prairie
+schooners.
+
+The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by worse sufferings
+than the trail had yet known. Cholera broke out among the trains at the
+start. It stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five thousand
+graves, until they reached the hills beyond Fort Laramie. The price
+of inexperience, too, had to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock
+died. The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this. On July 27,
+Stansbury observed: "To-day we find additional and melancholy evidence
+of the difficulties encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before
+halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had been broken up, the
+spokes of the wheels taken to make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or
+otherwise destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with articles
+that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and steel, large blacksmiths'
+anvils and bellows, crowbars, drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels,
+axes, lead, trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,
+cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels, harness, clothing, bacon,
+and beans, were found along the road in pretty much the order in which
+they have been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen, lying
+in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained a part of the
+trouble." In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and
+twenty-seven dead oxen.
+
+Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In
+the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away,
+so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were
+forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.
+
+The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy.
+Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian
+who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached
+the gold fields.
+
+It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California after July,
+1849, when the overland folk began to arrive. All countries and all
+stations in society had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000
+or more whites who were there in the end of the year. The farmer, the
+amateur prospector, and the professional gambler mingled in the crowd.
+Loose women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who had come by
+sea contained an over-share of the undesirable element that proposed
+to live upon the recklessness and vices of the miners. The overland
+emigrants were largely of farmer stock; whether they had possessed
+frontier experience or not before the start, the 3000-mile journey
+toughened and seasoned all who reached California. Nearly all possessed
+the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.
+
+The experience of Oregon might point to the future of California when
+its strenuous population arrived upon the unprepared community. The
+Mexican government had been ejected by war. A military government
+erected by the United States still held its temporary sway, but
+felt out of place as the controlling power over a civilian American
+population. The new inhabitants were much in need of law, and had
+the American dislike for military authority. Immediately Congress
+was petitioned to form a territorial government for the new El
+Dorado. But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of slavery
+and freedom in the Southwest during its session of 1848-1849. It
+adjourned with nothing done for California. The mining population was
+irritated but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It had already
+organized its miners' courts and begun to execute summary justice in
+emergencies. It was quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion
+of its administrative officers and erect its state government without
+the consent of Congress. The military governor called the popular
+convention; the constitution framed during September, 1849, was
+ratified by popular vote on November 13; a few days later Governor
+Riley surrendered his authority into the hands of the elected governor,
+Burnett, and the officials of the new state. All this was done
+spontaneously and easily. There was no sanction in law for California
+until Congress admitted it in September, 1850, receiving as one of its
+first senators, John C. FrĂŠmont.
+
+The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon slavery in the Southwest,
+a compromise made necessary by the appearance on the Pacific of a new
+America. The "call of the West and the lust for gold" had done their
+work in creating a new centre of life beyond the quondam desert.
+
+The census of 1850 revealed something of the nature of this population.
+Probably 125,000 whites, though it was difficult to count them and
+impossible to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon and
+California. Nine-tenths of these were in the latter colony. More than
+11,000 were found in the settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many
+more than 3000 Americans were scattered among the Mexican population
+along the Rio Grande. The great trails had seen most of these
+home-seekers marching westward over the desert and across the Indian
+frontier which in the blindness of statecraft had been completed for
+all time in 1840.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER
+
+
+The long line separating the Indian and agricultural frontiers was
+in 1850 but little farther west than the point which it had reached
+by 1820. Then it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it
+remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung out during this
+generation, including Arkansas on the south and Iowa, Minnesota, and
+Wisconsin on the north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War the
+line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri at its bend. West
+of this spot it had been kept from going by the tradition of the desert
+and the pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind had filled up
+with population, Oregon and California had appeared across the desert,
+but the barrier had not been pushed away.
+
+Through the great trails which penetrated the desert accurate knowledge
+of the Far West had begun to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike
+and Long had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and covetous
+eyes had been cast upon the Indian lands across the border,--lands from
+which the tribes were never to be removed without their consent, and
+which were never to be included in any organized territory or state.
+Most of the traffic over the trails and through this country had been
+in defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes had granted
+rights of transit, but such privileges as were needed and used by the
+Oregon, and California, and Utah hordes were far in excess of these.
+Most of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon Indian lands as
+well as violators of treaty provisions. Trouble with the Indians had
+begun early in the migrations.
+
+[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1849
+
+Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The
+Southwest acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.]
+
+At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the Indian office had
+foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties have occurred during the
+spring of the last and present year [1845] from the passing of
+emigrants for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country. Large
+companies have frequently rendezvoused on the Indian lands for months
+previous to the period of their starting. The emigrants have two
+advantages in crossing into the Indian Country at an early period of
+the spring; one, the facility of grazing their stock on the rushes with
+which the lands abound; and the other, that they cross the Missouri
+River at their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be forced
+by the military to put back. This passing of the emigrants through
+the Indian Country without their permission must, I fear, result in
+an unpleasant collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the
+whites have no right to be in their country without their consent;
+and the upper tribes, who subsist on game, complain that the buffalo
+are wantonly killed and scared off, which renders their only means of
+subsistence every year more precarious." FrĂŠmont had seen, in 1842,
+that this invasion of the Indian Country could not be kept up safely
+without a show of military force, and had recommended a post at the
+point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.
+
+The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated the relations
+with the tribes, while the Indian agents continually called upon
+Congress to redress or stop the wrongs being done as often by
+panic-stricken emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate persuasion
+and force," wrote the Commissioner in 1854, "some of these tribes have
+been removed, step by step, from mountain to valley, and from river
+to plain, until they have been pushed halfway across the continent.
+They can go no further; on the ground they now occupy the crisis must
+be met, and their future determined.... [There] they are, and as they
+are, with outstanding obligations in their behalf of the most solemn
+and imperative character, voluntarily assumed by the government." But a
+relentless westward movement that had no regard for rights of Mexico in
+either Texas or California could not be expected to notice the rights
+of savages even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens rights
+not inferior to those conceded by the government "to wandering nations
+of savages." A shrewd and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who
+had the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in 1853. "But
+one course remains," he wrote, "which promises any permanent relief
+to them, or any lasting benefit to the country in which they dwell.
+That is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse laws' as
+will invite the residence of traders amongst them, and _open the whole
+Indian territory to settlement_. In this manner will be introduced
+amongst them those who will set the example of developing the resources
+of the soil, of which the Indians have not now the most distant idea;
+who will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial to their
+nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly, to those modes
+of life which can alone secure them from the miseries of penury.
+Trade is the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor
+of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of all hereafter....
+The present 'intercourse laws' too, so far as they are calculated to
+protect the Indians from the evils of civilized life--from the sale of
+ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals--are nothing more than a
+dead letter; while, so far as they contribute to exclude the benefits
+of civilization from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly
+enforced."
+
+In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress from the War
+Department to the Interior, with the idea that the Indians would be
+better off under civilian than military control, and shortly after
+this negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements with the
+tribes. The Sioux were persuaded in the summer of 1851 to make way for
+increasing population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the same
+year the tribes of the western plains were induced to make concessions.
+
+The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte agency at Fort Laramie in
+1851 were in the interest of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had
+spent the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho
+to the conference. Shoshoni were brought in from the West. From the
+north of the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara, Grosventres,
+and Crows. The treaties here concluded were never ratified in full,
+but for fifteen years Congress paid various annuities provided by
+them, and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right of the
+United States to make roads across the plains and to fortify them
+with military posts was fully agreed to, while the Indians pledged
+themselves to commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two years later,
+at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a conference with the plains Indians
+of the south, Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of faith, which
+the Indians did not have in the Government, nor the Government in them."
+
+Overland traffic was made more safe for several years by these
+treaties. Such friction and fighting as occurred in the fifties were
+due chiefly to the excesses and the fears of the emigrants themselves.
+But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern tribes
+along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were in constant danger of
+dispossession by the advance of the frontier itself.
+
+The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in the early fifties,
+was the impending danger threatening the peace of the border. There
+was not as yet any special need to extend colonization across the
+Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota were but
+sparsely inhabited. Settlers for years might be accommodated farther
+to the east. But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and aroused
+passions in both North and South. Motives were so thoroughly mixed
+that participants were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of
+themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge, political ambition,
+all mingled with pure philanthropy and a reasonable fear of outside
+interference with domestic institutions. The compromise had settled
+the future of the new lands, but between Missouri and the mountains
+lay the residue of the Louisiana purchase, divided truly by the
+Missouri compromise line of 36° 30', but not yet settled. Ambition to
+possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for freedom was
+stimulated by the debate and the fears of outside interference. The
+nearest part of the unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence it
+was that Kansas came within the public vision first.
+
+It is possible to trace a movement for territorial organization in
+the Indian Country back to 1850 or even earlier. Certain of the more
+intelligent of the Indian colonists had been able to read the signs
+of the times, with the result that organized effort for a territory
+of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot country and had besieged
+Congress between 1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment
+were the Indians and the laws. Experience had long demonstrated the
+unwisdom of permitting Indians and emigrants to live in the same
+districts. The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties based
+upon them, had guaranteed in particular that no territory or state
+should ever be organized in this country. Good faith and the physical
+presence of the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory could
+appear.
+
+The guarantee of permanency was based upon treaty, and in the eye of
+Congress was not so sacred that it could not be modified by treaty.
+As it became clear that the demand for the opening of these lands
+would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared for the inevitable
+by ordering, in March, 1853, a series of negotiations with the tribes
+west of Missouri with a view to the cession of more country. The
+Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, who later wrote a
+book on "Our Indian Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to the
+Indians the hard news that they were expected once more to vacate. He
+found the tribes uneasy and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering
+over their lands, had set them thinking. There had been no actual white
+settlement up to October, 1853, so Manypenny declared, but the chiefs
+feared that he was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The Indian
+mind had some difficulty in comprehending the difference between ceding
+their land by treaty and losing it by force.
+
+At a long series of council fires the Commissioner soothed away some of
+the apprehensions, but found a stubborn resistance when he came to talk
+of ceding all the reserves and moving to new homes. The tribes, under
+pressure, were ready to part with some of their lands, but wanted to
+retain enough to live on. When he talked to them of the Great Father
+in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony of the situation; the
+guarantee of permanency had been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged
+for a series of treaties in the following year.
+
+In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with most of the tribes
+fronting on Missouri between 37° and 42° 40'. Some of these had been
+persuaded to move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of
+the thirties. Others, always resident there, had accepted curtailed
+reserves. The Omaha faced the Missouri, north of the Platte. South of
+the Platte were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes of Missouri,
+the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas,
+and around Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization of a
+high order. The Shawnee, immediately south of the Kansas, were also
+well advanced in agriculture in the permanent home they had accepted.
+The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea and Piankashaw, and the
+Miami were further south. From those tribes more than thirteen million
+acres of land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered and
+reduced reserves the Indians retained for themselves about one-tenth
+of what they ceded. Generally, when the final signing came, under
+the persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the strange
+surroundings of Washington, the chiefs surrendered the lands outright
+and with no condition.
+
+Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to give title at once
+and held out for conditions of sale. The Iowa, the confederated minor
+tribes, and notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust to the
+United States, with the treaty pledge that the lands so yielded should
+be sold at public auction to the highest bidder, the remainders should
+then be offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre, and the
+final remnants should be disposed of by the United States, the accruing
+funds being held in trust by the United States for the Indians. By
+the end of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In July, 1854,
+Congress provided a land office for the territory of Kansas.
+
+While the Indian negotiations were in progress, Senator Douglas was
+forcing his Kansas-Nebraska bill at Washington. The bill had failed in
+1853, partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of the Indian
+agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the Democratic party carried it
+along relentlessly. With words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as
+Rhodes has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed by the
+westward movement, subversive of the national pledge, and, blind as he
+was, destructive as well of his party and his own political future.
+The support of President Pierce and the coĂśperation of Jefferson Davis
+were his in the struggle. It was not his intent, he declared, to
+legislate slavery into or out of the territories; he proposed to leave
+that to the people themselves. To this principle he gave the name of
+"popular sovereignty," "and the name was a far greater invention than
+the doctrine." With rising opposition all about him, he repealed the
+Missouri compromise which in 1820 had divided the Indian Country by
+the line of 36° 30' into free and slave areas, and created within these
+limits the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was signed
+by the President on May 30, 1854. In later years this day has been
+observed as a memorial to those who lost their lives in fighting the
+battle which he provoked.
+
+With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri compromise repealed,
+eager partisans prepared in the spring of 1854 to colonize the new
+territories in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the slavery
+side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the
+leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves
+and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these
+for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the
+future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of
+voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas,
+and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing
+the erection of a free state on her western boundary. The northern
+states had been stirred by the act as deeply as the South. In New
+England the bill was not yet passed when leaders of the abolition
+movement prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer, of Worcester, urged
+during the spring that friends of freedom could do no better work than
+aid in the colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own state, in
+April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, through
+which he proposed to aid suitable men to move into the debatable
+land. Churches and schools were to be provided for them. A stern New
+England abolition spirit was to be fostered by them. And they were
+not to be left without the usual border means of defence. Amos A.
+Lawrence, of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made Thayer's scheme
+financially possible. Dr. Charles Robinson was their choice for leader
+of emigration and local representative in Kansas.
+
+The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated little by the
+ordinary westward impulse but greatly by political ambition and
+sectional rivalry. As late as October, 1853, there had been almost no
+whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they began to come in,
+in increasing numbers. The Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at
+once, before the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before
+land offices had been opened. The approach was by the Missouri River
+steamers to Kansas City and Westport, near the bend of the river, where
+was the gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north of the Kansas
+River, was not yet open to legal occupation, but the Shawnee lands
+had been ceded completely and would soon be ready. So the New England
+companies worked their way on foot, or in hired wagons, up the right
+bank of the Kansas, hunting for eligible sites. About thirty miles west
+of the Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they picked their
+spot late in July. The town of Lawrence grew out of their cluster of
+tents and cabins.
+
+It was more than two months after the arrival of the squatters at
+Lawrence before the first governor of the new territory, Andrew H.
+Reeder, made his appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established civil
+government in Kansas. One of his first experiences was with the attempt
+of United States officers at the post to secure for themselves pieces
+of the Delaware lands which surrounded it. "While lying at the fort,"
+wrote a surveyor who left early in September to run the Nebraska
+boundary line, "we heard a great deal about those d--d squatters who
+were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None of the Delaware lands
+were open to settlement, since the United States had pledged itself to
+sell them all at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But certain
+speculators, including officers of the regular army, organized a town
+company to preĂŤmpt a site near the fort, where they thought they
+foresaw the great city of the West. They relied on the immunity which
+usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands, and seem even to have
+used United States soldiers to build their shanties. They had begun to
+dispose of their building lots "in this discreditable business" four
+weeks before the first of the Delaware trust lands were put on sale.
+
+However bitter toward each other, the settlers were agreed in their
+attitude toward the Indians, and squatted regardless of Indian
+rights or United States laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his
+legislature, first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort Riley ejected it;
+then at the Shawnee mission, close to Kansas City, where his presence
+and its were equally without authority of law. He established election
+precincts in unceded lands, and voting places at spots where no white
+man could go without violating the law. The legal snarl into which the
+settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the Indian policy. It
+is even intimated that Governor Reeder was interested in a land scheme
+at Pawnee similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.
+
+The fight for Kansas began immediately after the arrival of Governor
+Reeder and the earliest immigrants. The settlers actually in residence
+at the commencement of 1855 seem to have been about 8500. Propinquity
+gave Missouri an advantage at the start, when the North was not yet
+fully aroused. At an election for territorial legislature held on
+March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was revealed in all
+its fulness when more than 6000 votes were counted among a population
+which had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men had ridden over
+in organized bands to colonize the precincts and carry the election.
+The whole area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride of the
+Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that Governor Reeder disavowed
+certain of the results, yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July,
+1855, was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members, while the
+rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri code of law, thus laying the
+foundations for a slave state.
+
+The political struggle over Kansas became more intense on the border
+and more absorbing in the nation in the next four years. The free-state
+men, as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known, disavowed the
+first legislature on the ground of its fraudulent election, while
+President Pierce steadily supported it from Washington. Governor
+Reeder was removed during its session, seemingly because he had thrown
+doubts upon its validity. Protesting against it, the northerners held
+a series of meetings in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some
+twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and crystallized their
+opposition under Dr. Robinson. Their efforts culminated at Topeka
+in October in a spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary,
+convention which framed a free-state constitution for Kansas and
+provided for erecting a rival administration. Dr. Robinson became its
+governor.
+
+Before the first legislature under the Topeka constitution assembled,
+Kansas had still further trouble. Private violence and mob attacks
+began during the fall of 1855. What is known as the Wakarusa War
+occurred in November, when Sheriff Jones of Douglas County tried to
+arrest some free-state men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance
+reĂŤnforced with Sharpe rifles from New England. Governor Wilson
+Shannon, who had succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility
+continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly the centre of
+northern settlement and the object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri
+mob visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving presence, it is
+said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel and printing shop, and burned
+the residence of Dr. Robinson.
+
+In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river and attacked
+Lecompton, but within a week of the sacking of Lawrence retribution
+was visited upon the pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were
+murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by a group of fanatical
+free-state men. Just what provocation John Brown and his family had
+received which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In many instances
+individual anti-slavery men retaliated lawlessly upon their enemies.
+But the leaders of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring Brown
+and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts. It is certain that
+in this struggle the free-state party, in general, wanted peaceful
+settlement of the country, and were staking their fortunes and families
+upon it. They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression was no
+part of their platform.
+
+The course of Governor Shannon reached its end in the summer of 1856.
+He was disliked by the free-state faction, while his personal habits
+gave no respectability to the pro-slave cause. At the end of his
+rĂŠgime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka constitution was
+prevented by federal troops from convening in session at Topeka. A few
+weeks later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and established his
+seat of government in Lecompton, by this time a village of some twenty
+houses. It took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only six weeks to
+fall out with the pro-slave element and the federal land officers. He
+resigned in March, 1857.
+
+Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed Geary, the first official
+attempt at a constitution was entered upon. The legislature had already
+summoned a convention which sat at Lecompton during September and
+October. Its constitution, which was essentially pro-slavery, however
+it was read, was ratified before the end of the year and submitted to
+Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which called the convention had
+fallen into free-state hands, disavowed the constitution, and summoned
+another convention. At Leavenworth this convention framed a free-state
+constitution in March, which was ratified by popular vote in May,
+1858. Governor Walker had already resigned in December, 1857. Through
+holding an honest election and purging the returns of slave-state
+frauds he had enabled the free-state party to secure the legislature.
+Southerner though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty of the
+administration in Kansas. He had yielded to the evidence of his eyes,
+that the population of Kansas possessed a large free-state majority.
+But so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington. Even Senator
+Douglas, the patron of the popular sovereignty doctrine, had now broken
+with President Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to form
+their own institutions. No attention was ever paid by Congress to
+this Leavenworth constitution, but when the Lecompton constitution
+was finally submitted to the people by Congress, in August, 1858, it
+was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a total of 13,000. Kansas
+was henceforth in the hands of the actual settlers. A year later,
+at Wyandotte, it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last
+entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the Wyandotte Convention,"
+says one of the local historians, "there were a few Democrats and one
+or two cranks, and probably both were of some use in their way."
+
+There had been no white population in Kansas in 1853, and no special
+desire to create one. But the political struggle had advertised
+the territory on a large scale, while the whole West was under the
+influence of the agricultural boom that was extending settlement into
+Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found
+that about 8500 had come in since the erection of the territory. The
+rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles and the stories of
+Lawrence and Potawatomi, instead of frightening settlers away, drew
+them there in increasing thousands. Some few came from the South, but
+the northern majority was overwhelming before the panic of 1857 laid
+its heavy hand upon expansion. There was a white population of 106,390
+in 1860.
+
+The westward movement, under its normal influences, had extended the
+range of prosperous agricultural settlement into the Northwest in this
+past decade. It had coĂśperated in the extension into that part of the
+old desert now known as Kansas. But chiefly politics, and secondly the
+call of the West, is the order of causes which must explain the first
+westward advance of the agricultural frontier since 1820. Even in 1860
+the population of Kansas was almost exclusively within a three days'
+journey of the Missouri bend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"[2]
+
+    [2] This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The
+        Territory of Colorado" which was published in _The
+        American Historical Review_ in October, 1906.
+
+
+The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of
+the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land
+beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without any semblance of
+organization or law. Indeed within the area whites had been forbidden
+to enter, since here was the final abode of the Indians. But with the
+Kansas-Nebraska act all this was changed. In five years a series of
+amorphous territories had been provided for by law.
+
+Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct divisions.
+From the Canadian border to the fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended.
+Kansas lay between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the old Indian
+Country, now much reduced by partition, embraced the rest. The whole
+plains country, east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial
+projects. Indian Territory was without the government which its name
+implied, but popular parlance regarded it as the others and refused to
+see any difference among them.
+
+Beyond the mountain wall which formed the western boundary of Kansas
+and Nebraska lay four other territories equally without particular
+reason for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in 1846, had been
+divided in 1853 by a line starting at the mouth of the Columbia and
+running east to the Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its
+northern side. The Utah territory which figured in the compromise
+of 1850, and which Mormon migration had made necessary, extended
+between California and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42° to New Mexico
+at 37°. New Mexico, also of the compromise year, reached from Texas
+to California, south of 37°, and possessed at its northeast corner a
+panhandle which carried it north to 38° in order to leave in it certain
+old Mexican settlements.
+
+These divisions of the West embraced in 1854 the whole of the country
+between California and the states. As yet their boundaries were
+arbitrary and temporary, but they presaged movements of population
+which during the next quarter century should break them up still
+further and provide real colonies in place of the desert and the Indian
+Country. Congress had no formative part in the work. Population broke
+down barriers and showed the way, while laws followed and legalized
+what had been done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the
+mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains no prophecy of the four
+states which were shortly to appear.
+
+[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1854
+
+Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky
+Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.]
+
+For several decades the area of Kansas territory, and the southern
+part of Nebraska, had been well known as the range of the plains
+Indians,--Pawnee and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche
+and Apache. Through this range the caravans had gone. Here had been
+constant military expeditions as well. It was a common summer's
+campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort Leavenworth to
+the mountains by either the Arkansas or Platte route, to skirt the
+eastern slopes along the southern fork of the Platte, and return home
+by the other trail. Those military demonstrations, which were believed
+to be needed to impress the tribes, had made this march a regular
+performance. Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner and
+Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous others in between.
+A well-known trail had been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on
+the north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte at Cherry
+Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and on to Bent's Fort and the
+New Mexican towns. Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end.
+Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling over slavery, but they
+had scarcely scratched the soil for one-fourth of the length of the
+territory.
+
+The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme west of Kansas, lay
+between the great trails, so that it was off the course of the chief
+migrations, and none visited it for its own sake. The deviating trails,
+which commenced at the Missouri bend, were some 250 miles apart at the
+one hundred and third meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized
+in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose the hills around
+Pike's Peak, which rumor came in three years more to tip with gold.
+
+The discovery of gold in California prepared the public for similar
+finds in other parts of the West. With many of the emigrants
+prospecting had become a habit that sent small bands into the mountain
+valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories of success in various
+regions arose repeatedly during the fifties and are so reasonable that
+it is not possible to determine with certainty the first finds in many
+localities. Any mountain stream in the whole system might be expected
+to contain some gold, but deposits large enough to justify a boom were
+slow in coming.
+
+In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to Omaha from the
+mountains, confirmed the rumors of a new discovery that had been
+persistent for several months. The previous summer had seen organized
+attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region the deposits whose
+existence had been believed in, more or less, since 1850. Parties from
+the gold fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton are
+known to have been in the field and to have started various mushroom
+settlements. El Paso, near the present site of Colorado Springs,
+appeared, as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the South
+Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry Creek,--Montana, Auraria,
+Highland, and St. Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the
+States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by trifling finds,
+remained to occupy their flimsy cabins or to jump the claims of the
+absentees. In the sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold
+the finders and to start a small migration thither in the autumn. In
+the early winter the groups on Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the
+name of Denver City.
+
+The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri Valley at the
+strategic moment when the newness of Kansas had worn off, and the
+depression of 1857 had brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier.
+The adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to move, had been
+reĂŤnforced by individuals down on their luck and reduced to any sort of
+extremity. The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration to the new
+diggings which started in the fall of 1858 and assumed great volume in
+the spring of 1859.
+
+The edge of the border for these emigrants was not much farther west
+than it had been for emigrants of the preceding decade. A few miles
+from the Missouri River all traces of Kansas or Nebraska disappeared,
+whether one advanced by the Platte or the Arkansas, or by the
+intermediate routes of the Smoky Hill and Republican. The destination
+was less than half as far away as California had been. No mountains and
+no terrible deserts were to be crossed. The costs and hardships of the
+journey were less than any that had heretofore separated the frontier
+from a western goal. There is a glimpse of the bustling life around the
+head of the trails in a letter which General W. T. Sherman wrote to his
+brother John from Leavenworth City, on April 30, 1859: "At this moment
+we are in the midst of a rush to Pike's Peak. Steamboats arrive in twos
+and threes each day, loaded with people for the new gold region. The
+streets are full of people buying flour, bacon, and groceries, with
+wagons and outfits, and all around the town are little camps preparing
+to go west. A daily stage goes west to Fort Riley, 135 miles, and every
+morning two spring wagons, drawn by four mules and capable of carrying
+six passengers, start for the Peak, distance six hundred miles, the
+journey to be made in twelve days. As yet the stages all go out and
+don't return, according to the plan for distributing the carriages;
+but as soon as they are distributed, there will be two going and two
+returning, making a good line of stages to Pike's Peak. Strange to say,
+even yet, although probably 25,000 people have actually gone, we are
+without authentic advices of gold. Accounts are generally favorable
+as to words and descriptions, but no positive physical evidence comes
+in the shape of gold, and I will be incredulous until I know some
+considerable quantity comes in in way of trade."
+
+[Illustration: "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"
+
+Reproduced by permission of the Montana Historical Society, from the
+original handbill in its possession.]
+
+Throughout the United States newspapers gave full notice to the new
+boom, while a "Pike's Peak Guide," based on a journal kept by one of
+the early parties, found a ready sale. No single movement had ever
+carried so heavy a migration upon the plains as this, which in one
+year must have taken nearly 100,000 pioneers to the mountains. "Pike's
+Peak or Bust!" was a common motto blazoned on their wagon covers. The
+sawmill, the press, and the stage-coach were all early on the field.
+Byers, long a great editor in Denver, arrived in April to distribute
+an edition of his _Rocky Mountain News_, which he had printed on one
+side before leaving Omaha. Thenceforth the diggings were consistently
+advertised by a resident enthusiast. Early in May the first coach of
+the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company brought Henry Villard
+into Denver. In June came no less a personage than Horace Greeley to
+see for himself the new wonder. "Mine eyes have never yet been blessed
+with the sight of any floor whatever in either Denver or Auraria,"
+he could write of the village of huts which he inspected. The seal
+of approval which his letters set upon the enterprise did much to
+encourage it.
+
+With the rush of prospectors to the hills, numerous new camps quickly
+appeared. Thirty miles north along the foothills and mesas Boulder
+marked the exit of a mountain creek upon the plains. Behind Denver,
+in Clear Creek Valley, were Golden, at the mouth, and Black Hawk and
+Central City upon the north fork of the stream. Idaho Springs and
+Georgetown were on its south fork. Here in the Gregory district was the
+active life of the diggings. The great extent of the gold belt to the
+southwest was not yet fully known. Farther south was Pueblo, on the
+Arkansas, and a line of little settlements working up the valley, by
+Canyon City to Oro, where Leadville now stands.
+
+Reaction followed close upon the heels of the boom, beginning its work
+before the last of the outward bound had reached the diggings. Gold
+was to be found in trifling quantities in many places, but the mob of
+inexperienced miners had little chance for fortune. The great deposits,
+which were some months in being discovered, were in refractory quartz
+lodes, calling for heavy stamp mills, chemical processes, and, above
+all, great capital for their working. Even for laborers there was no
+demand commensurate with the number of the fifty-niners. Hence, more
+than half of these found their way back to the border before the year
+was over, bitter, disgusted, and poor, scrawling on deserted wagons, in
+answer to the outward motto, "Busted! By Gosh!"
+
+The problem of government was born when the first squatters ran the
+lines of Denver City. Here was a new settlement far away from the seat
+of territorial government, while the government itself was impotent.
+Kansas had no legislature competent to administer law at home--far less
+in outlying colonies. But spontaneous self-government came easily to
+the new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers in his diary,
+"that within two weeks of the arrival of a few dozen Americans in a
+wilderness, they set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States
+Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory! But we are of
+a fast race and in a fast age and must prod along." An early snow in
+November, 1858, had confined the miners to their cabins and started
+politics. The result had been the election of two delegates, one to
+Congress and one to Kansas legislature, both to ask for governmental
+direction. Kansas responded in a few weeks, creating five new counties
+west of 104°, and chartering a city of St. Charles, long after St.
+Charles had been merged into Denver. Congress did nothing.
+
+The prospective immigration of 1859 inspired further and more
+comprehensive attempts at local government. It was well understood
+that the news of gold would send in upon Denver a wave of population
+and perhaps a reign of lawlessness. The adjournment of Congress
+without action in their behalf made it certain that there could
+be no aid from this quarter for at least a year, and became the
+occasion for a caucus in Denver over which William Larimer presided
+on April 11, 1859. As a result of this caucus, a call was issued for
+a convention of representatives of the neighboring mining camps to
+meet in the same place four days later. On April 15, six camps met
+through their delegates, "being fully impressed with the belief, from
+early and recent precedents, of the power and benefits and duty of
+self-government," and feeling an imperative necessity "for an immediate
+and adequate government, for the large population now here and soon to
+be among us ... and also believing that a territorial government is not
+such as our large and peculiarly situated population demands."
+
+The deliberations thus informally started ended in a formal call for
+a constitutional convention to meet in Denver on the first Monday in
+June, for the purpose, as an address to the people stated, of framing
+a constitution for a new "state of Jefferson." "Shall it be," the
+address demanded, "the government of the knife and the revolver, or
+shall we unite in forming here in our golden country, among the ravines
+and gulches of the Rocky Mountains, and the fertile valleys of the
+Arkansas and the Platte, a new and independent State?" The boundaries
+of the prospective state were named in the call as the one hundred
+and second and one hundred and tenth meridians of longitude, and the
+thirty-seventh and forty-third parallels of north latitude--including
+with true frontier amplitude large portions of Utah and Nebraska and
+nearly half of Wyoming, in addition to the present state of Colorado.
+
+When the statehood convention met in Denver on June 6, the time was
+inopportune for concluding the movement, since the reaction had set in.
+The height of the gold boom was over, and the return migration left it
+somewhat doubtful whether any permanent population would remain in the
+country to need a state. So the convention met on the 6th, appointed
+some eight drafting committees, and adjourned, to await developments,
+until August 1. By this later date, the line had been drawn between
+the confident and the discouraged elements in the population, and for
+six days the convention worked upon the question of statehood. As to
+permanency there was now no doubt; but the body divided into two nearly
+equal groups, one advocating immediate statehood, the other shrinking
+from the heavy taxation incident to a state establishment and so
+preferring a territorial government with a federal treasury behind it.
+The body, too badly split to reach a conclusion itself, compromised by
+preparing the way for either development and leaving the choice to
+a public vote. A state constitution was drawn up on one hand; on the
+other, was prepared a memorial to Congress praying for a territorial
+government, and both documents were submitted to a vote on September
+5. Pursuant to the memorial, which was adopted, another election was
+held on October 3, at which the local agent of the new Leavenworth
+and Pike's Peak Express Company, Beverly D. Williams, was chosen as
+delegate to Congress.
+
+The adoption of the territorial memorial failed to meet the need for
+immediate government or to prevent the advocates of such government
+from working out a provisional arrangement pending the action of
+Congress. On the day that Williams was elected, these advocates chose
+delegates for a preliminary territorial constitutional convention
+which met a week later. "Here we go," commented Byers, "a regular
+triple-headed government machine; south of 40 deg. we hang on to the
+skirts of Kansas; north of 40 deg. to those of Nebraska; straddling
+the line, we have just elected a Delegate to the United States
+Congress from the 'Territory of Jefferson,' and ere long we will have
+in full blast a provisional government of Rocky Mountain growth and
+manufacture." In this convention of October 10, 1859, the name of
+Jefferson was retained for the new territory; the boundaries of April
+15 were retained, and a government similar to the highest type of
+territorial establishment was provided for. If the convention had met
+on the authority of an enabling act, its career could not have been
+more dignified. Its constitution was readily adopted, while officers
+under it were chosen in an orderly election on October 24. Robert
+W. Steele, of Ohio, became its governor. On November 7 he met his
+legislature and delivered his first inaugural address.
+
+The territory of Jefferson which thus came into existence in the Pike's
+Peak region illustrates well the spirit of the American frontier. The
+fundamental principle of American government which Byers expressed in
+connection with it is applicable at all times in similar situations.
+"We claim," he wrote in his _Rocky Mountain News_, "that any body,
+or community of American citizens, which from any cause or under
+any circumstance is cut off from, or from isolation is so situated
+as not to be under, any active and protecting branch of the central
+government, have a right, if on American soil, to frame a government,
+and enact such laws and regulations as may be necessary for their own
+safety, protection, and happiness, always with the condition precedent,
+that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central government
+shall extend an _effective_ organization and laws over them, give it
+their unqualified support and obedience." The life of the spontaneous
+commonwealth thus called into existence is a creditable witness to the
+American instinct for orderly government.
+
+When Congress met in December, 1859, the provisional territory of
+Jefferson was in operation, while its delegates in Washington were
+urging the need for governmental action. To their influence, President
+Buchanan added, on February 20, 1860, a message transmitting the
+petition from the Pike's Peak country. The Senate, upon April 3,
+received a report from the Committee on Territories introducing Senate
+Bill No. 366, for the erection of Colorado territory, while Grow of
+Pennsylvania reported to the House on May 10 a bill to erect in the
+same region a territory of Idaho. The name of Jefferson disappeared
+from the project in the spring of 1860, its place being taken by sundry
+other names for the same mountain area. Several weeks were given,
+in part, to debate over this Colorado-Idaho scheme, though as usual
+the debate turned less upon the need for this territorial government
+than upon the attitude which the bill should take toward the slavery
+issue. The slavery controversy prevented territorial legislation in
+this session, but the reasonableness of the Colorado demand was well
+established.
+
+The territory of Jefferson, as organized in November, 1859, had
+been from the first recognized as merely a temporary expedient. The
+movement for it had gained weight in the summer of that year from
+the probability that it need not be maintained for many months. When
+Congress, however, failed in the ensuing session of 1859-1860 to grant
+the relief for which the pioneers had prayed, the wisdom of continuing
+for a second year the life of a government admitted to be illegal came
+into question. The first session of its legislature had lasted from
+November 7, 1859, to January 25, 1860. It had passed comprehensive
+laws for the regulation of titles in lands, water, and mines, and had
+adopted civil and criminal codes. Its courts had been established
+and had operated with some show of authority. But the service and
+obedience to the government had been voluntary, no funds being on
+hand for the payment of salaries and expenses. One of the pioneers
+from Vermont wrote home, "There is no hopes [_sic_] of perfect quiet
+in our governmental matters until we are securely under the wing of
+our National Eagle." In his proclamation calling the second election
+Governor Steele announced that "all persons who expect to be elected
+to any of the above offices should bear in mind that there will be no
+salaries or per diem allowed from this territory, but that the General
+Government will be memorialized to aid us in our adversity."
+
+Upon this question of revenue the territory of Jefferson was wrecked.
+Taxes could not be collected, since citizens had only to plead grave
+doubts as to the legality in order to evade payment. "We have tried a
+Provisional Government, and how has it worked," asked William Larimer
+in announcing his candidacy for the office of territorial delegate.
+"It did well enough until an attempt was made to tax the people to
+support it." More than this, the real need for the government became
+less apparent as 1860 advanced, for the scattered communities learned
+how to obtain a reasonable peace without it. American mining camps
+are peculiarly free from the need for superimposed government. The
+new camp at once organizes itself on a democratic basis, and in mass
+meeting registers claims, hears and decides suits, and administers
+summary justice. Since the Pike's Peak country was only a group of
+mining camps, there proved to be little immediate need for a central
+government, for in the local mining-district organizations all of
+the most pressing needs of the communities could be satisfied. So
+loyalty to the territory of Jefferson, in the districts outside
+of Denver, waned during 1860, and in the summer of that year had
+virtually disappeared. Its administration, however, held together.
+Governor Steele made efforts to rehabilitate its authority, was himself
+reĂŤlected, and met another legislature in November.
+
+When the thirty-sixth Congress met for its second session in December,
+1860, the Jefferson organization was in the second year of its life,
+yet in Congress there was no better prospect of quick action than there
+had been since 1857. Indeed the election of Lincoln brought out the
+eloquence of the slavery question with a renewed vigor that monopolized
+the time and strength of Congress until the end of January. Had not
+the departure of the southern members to their states cleared the way
+for action, it is highly improbable that even this session would have
+produced results of importance.
+
+Grow had announced in the beginning of the session a territorial
+platform similar to that which had been under debate for three
+years. Until the close of January the southern valedictories held
+the floor, but at last the admission of Kansas, on January 29, 1861,
+revealed the fact that pro-slavery opposition had departed and that
+the long-deferred territorial scheme could have a fair chance. On the
+very day that Kansas was admitted, with its western boundary at the
+twenty-fifth meridian from Washington, the Senate revived its bill No.
+366 of the last session and took up its deliberation upon a territory
+for Pike's Peak. Only by chance did the name Colorado remain attached
+to the bill. Idaho was at one time adopted, but was amended out in
+favor of the original name when the bill at last passed the Senate. The
+boundaries were cut down from those which the territory had provided
+for itself. Two degrees were taken from the north of the territory, and
+three from the west. In this shape, between 37° and 41° north latitude,
+and 25° and 32° of longitude west of Washington, the bill received the
+signature of President Buchanan on February 28. The absence of serious
+debate in the passage of this Colorado act is excellent evidence of the
+merit of the scheme and the reasons for its being so long deferred.
+
+President Buchanan, content with approving the bill, left the
+appointment of the first officials for Colorado to his successor. In
+the multitude of greater problems facing President Lincoln, this
+was neglected for several weeks, but he finally commissioned General
+William Gilpin as the first governor of the territory. Gilpin had long
+known the mountain frontier; he had commanded a detachment on the
+Santa FĂŠ trail in the forties, and he had written prophetic books upon
+the future of the country to which he was now sent. His loyalty was
+unquestioned and his readiness to assume responsibility went so far as
+perhaps to cease to be a virtue. He arrived in Denver on May 29, 1861,
+and within a few days was ready to take charge of the government and to
+receive from the hands of Governor Steele such authority as remained in
+the provisional territory of Jefferson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA
+
+
+The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of mining episodes which,
+within fifteen years of the discoveries in California, let in the
+light of exploration and settlement upon hundreds of valleys scattered
+over the whole of the Rocky Mountain West. The men who exploited
+California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by
+bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class,
+mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which
+permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced
+before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for
+gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana.
+Activity was constant during these years all along the continental
+divide. New camps were being born overnight, old ones were abandoned by
+magic. Here and there cities rose and remained to mark success in the
+search. Abandoned huts and half-worked diggings were scars covering a
+fourth of the continent.
+
+Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the largest of migrations,
+but while Denver was being settled there began, farther west, a boom
+which for the present outdid it in significance. The old California
+trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada desert and entered California
+by various passes through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts had
+been planted along this trail by Mormons and others during the fifties,
+until in 1854 the legislature of Utah had created a Carson County in
+the west end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements along
+the river of the same name. Small discoveries of gold were enough to
+draw to this district a floating population which founded a Carson City
+as early as 1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement
+until after the finding of a marvellously rich vein of silver near Gold
+Hill in the spring of 1859. Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a
+few miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the famous Comstock
+lode, upon which it was possible within five years to build a state.
+
+The California population, already rushing about from one boom to
+another in perpetual prospecting, seized eagerly upon this new district
+in western Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and Placerville
+was crowded beyond capacity, while hundreds marched over the mountains
+on foot. "There was no difficulty in reaching the newly discovered
+region of boundless wealth," asserted a journalistic visitor. "It lay
+on the public highway to California, on the borders of the state. From
+Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake,
+the tide of emigration poured in. Transportation from San Francisco was
+easy. I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead of winter, when
+the mountains were covered with snow." Carson City had existed before
+the great discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade southerner,
+nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed it, while the typical population of
+the mining camps piled in around the two.
+
+In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The new pony express ran
+through the heart of the fields and aided in advertising them east and
+west. Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye. Both camps
+obtained their territorial acts within the same week, that of Nevada
+receiving Buchanan's signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west of
+the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became the new territory
+which, through the need of the union for loyal votes, gained its
+admission as a state in three more years.
+
+[Illustration: THE MINING CAMP
+
+From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the
+Montana Historical Society.]
+
+The rush to Carson valley drew attention away from another mining
+enterprise further south. In the western half of New Mexico, between
+the Rio Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful mining ever
+since the acquisition of the territory. The southwest boundary of the
+United States after the Mexican War was defined in words that could
+not possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This fact, together
+with knowledge that an easy railway grade ran south of the Gila River,
+had led in 1853 to the purchase of additional land from Mexico and
+the definition of a better boundary in the Gadsden treaty. In these
+lands of the Gadsden purchase old mines came to light in the years
+immediately following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles D. Poston were most
+active in promoting the mining companies which revived abandoned claims
+and developed new ones near the old Spanish towns of Tubac and Tucson.
+The region was too remote and life too hard for the individual miner
+to have much chance. Organized mining companies here took the place of
+the detached prospector of Colorado and Nevada. Disappointed miners
+from California came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee of San
+Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines.
+Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.... It
+was literally a paradise of devils." Excessive dryness, long distances,
+and Apache depredation discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys of the
+early fifties and the passage of the overland mail through the camps in
+1858 advertised the Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.
+
+The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the time the Mowry
+mines and others in the Santa Cruz Valley, holding them in check till
+a second mineral area in western New Mexico should be found. United
+States army posts were abandoned, confederate agents moved in, and
+Indians became bold. The federal authority was not reĂŤstablished until
+Colonel J. H. Carleton led his California column across the Colorado
+and through New Mexico to Tucson early in 1862. During the next two
+years he maintained his headquarters at Santa FĂŠ, carried on punitive
+campaigns against the Navaho and the Apache, and encouraged mining.
+
+The Indian campaigns of Carleton and his aides in New Mexico have
+aroused much controversy. There were no treaty rights by which the
+United States had privileges of colonization and development. It
+was forcible entry and retention, maintained in the face of bitter
+opposition. Carleton, with Kit Carson's assistance, waged a war
+of scarcely concealed extermination. They understood, he reported
+to Washington, "the direct application of force as a law. If its
+application be removed, that moment they become lawless. This has been
+tried over and over and over again, and at great expense. The purpose
+now is never to relax the application of force with a people that can
+no more be trusted than you can trust the wolves that run through
+their mountains; to gather them together little by little, on to a
+reservation, away from the haunts, and hills, and hiding-places of
+their country, and then to be kind to them; there teach their children
+how to read and write, teach them the arts of peace; teach them the
+truths of Christianity. Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas,
+new modes of life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them
+all the latent longings for murdering and robbing; the young ones will
+take their places without these longings; and thus, little by little,
+they will become a happy and contented people."
+
+Mowry's mines had been seized by Carleton at the start, as tainted with
+treason. The whole Tucson district was believed to be so thoroughly
+in sympathy with the confederacy that the commanding officer was much
+relieved when rumors came of a new placer gold field along the left
+bank of the Colorado River, around Bill Williams Creek. Thither the
+population of the territory moved as fast as it could. Teamsters and
+other army employees deserted freely. Carleton deliberately encouraged
+surveying and prospecting, and wrote personally to General Halleck and
+Postmaster-general Blair, congratulating them because his California
+column had found the gold with which to suppress the confederacy. "One
+of the richest gold countries in the world," he described it to be,
+destined to be the centre of a new territorial life, and to throw into
+the shade "the insignificant village of Tucson."
+
+The population of the silver camp had begun to urge Congress to
+provide a territory independent of New Mexico, immediately after the
+development of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had been sent
+to Washington in the usual style. But congressional indifference to
+new territories had blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened the
+case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian wards and their rights,
+the Superintendent of Indian Affairs had told of the sad peril of the
+"unprotected miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear title.
+They would offer to the "numerous and warlike tribes" an irresistible
+opportunity. The territorial act was finally passed on February 24,
+1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart of the new gold
+field, at Fort Whipple, near which the city of Prescott soon appeared.
+
+The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by the erection of a
+territorial government. There never came in a population large enough
+to intimidate the tribes, while bad management from the start provoked
+needless wars. Most serious were the Apache troubles which began in
+1861 and ceased only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies.
+In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp Grant in 1871, when
+citizens of Tucson, with careful premeditation, murdered in cold
+blood more than eighty Apache, men, women, and children. The degree
+of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry
+has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice
+of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache.
+A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their
+haunts--hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be
+surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled--by white
+flags, or any other method, human or divine--and then put to death.
+If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual who thinks himself
+a philanthropist, I can only say that I pity without respecting his
+mistaken sympathy. A man might as well have sympathy for a rattlesnake
+or a tiger."
+
+The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by climate and
+inaccessibility, brought life into the extreme Southwest. Those of
+Nevada worked the partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old
+Oregon country gave out its gold in these same years as miners opened
+up the valleys of the Snake and the head waters of the Missouri River.
+Right on the crest of the continental divide appeared the northern
+group of mining camps.
+
+The territory of Washington had been cut away from Oregon at its own
+request and with Oregon's consent in 1853. It had no great population
+and was the subject of no agricultural boom as Oregon had been, but
+the small settlements on Puget Sound and around Olympia were too far
+from the Willamette country for convenient government. When Oregon was
+admitted in 1859, Washington was made to include all the Oregon country
+outside the state, embracing the present Washington and Idaho, portions
+of Montana and Wyoming, and extending to the continental divide.
+Through it ran the overland trail from Fort Hall almost to Walla Walla.
+Because of its urging Congress built a new wagon road that was passable
+by 1860 from Fort Benton, on the upper Missouri, to the junction of the
+Columbia and Snake. Farther east the active business of the American
+Fur Company had by 1859 established steamboat communication from St.
+Louis to Fort Benton, so that an overland route to rival the old Platte
+trail was now available.
+
+In eastern Washington the most important of the Indians were the Nez
+PercĂŠs, whose peaceful habits and friendly disposition had been noted
+since the days of Lewis and Clark, and who had permitted their valley
+of the Snake to become a main route to Oregon. Treaties with these had
+been made in 1855 by Governor Stevens, in accordance with which most of
+the tribe were in 1860 living on their reserve at the junction of the
+Clearwater and Snake, and were fairly prosperous. Here as elsewhere was
+the specific agreement that no whites save government employees should
+be allowed in the Indian Country; but in the summer of 1861 the news
+that gold had been found along the Clearwater brought the agreement to
+naught. Gold had actually been discovered the summer before. In the
+spring of 1861 pack trains from Walla Walla brought a horde of miners
+east over the range, while steamboats soon found their way up the
+Snake. In the fork between the Clearwater and Snake was a good landing
+where, in the autumn of 1861, sprang up the new Lewiston, named in
+honor of the great explorer, acting as centre of life for five thousand
+miners in the district, and showing by its very existence on the Indian
+reserve the futility of treaty restrictions in the face of the gold
+fever. The troubles of the Indian department were great. "To attempt
+to restrain miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to restrain
+the whirlwind," reported Superintendent Kendall. "The history of
+California, Australia, Frazer river, and even of the country of which I
+am now writing, furnishes abundant evidence of the attractive power of
+even only reported gold discoveries.
+
+"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed fact, and are equalled
+in richness by few recorded discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility
+of preventing miners from going to the mines, I have refrained from
+taking any steps which, by certain want of success, would tend to
+weaken the force of the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided
+giving any consent to unauthorized statements, and verbally instructed
+the agent in charge that, while he might not be able to enforce the
+laws for want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt to lay
+out a town at the juncture of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, as he
+had expressed a desire of doing."
+
+Continued developments proved that Lewiston was in the centre of a
+region of unusual mineral wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed
+closely by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary of the
+Snake, a little farther south. The BoisĂŠ mines came on the heels of
+this boom, being followed by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of
+the great bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured the usual
+flood of miners from the whole West. Before 1862 was over eastern
+Washington had outgrown the bounds of the territorial government on
+Puget Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the placers of the
+Colorado Valley, and the Carson and Virginia City camps, these called
+for and received a new territorial establishment.
+
+In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska had met along a
+common boundary at the top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington
+was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape under the pressure
+of a small but active population north of its seat of government. The
+centres of population in Nebraska north of the Platte River represented
+chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota. Emigrating from these
+states farmers had by 1860 opened the country on the left bank of the
+Missouri, in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri traffic had
+developed both shores of the river past Fort Pierre and Fort Union
+to Fort Benton, by 1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people
+here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along the line of the
+Missouri and the forty-third parallel. Dakota had been created out of
+the country thus cut loose and in two years more shared in the fate
+of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in 1863 to provide home
+rule for the miners of the new mineral region. It included a great
+rectangle, on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah and
+Nebraska, west to its present western boundary at Oregon and 117°,
+east to 104°, the present eastern line of Montana and Wyoming. Dakota
+and Washington were cut down for its sake.
+
+It seemed, in 1862 and 1863, as though every little rivulet in the
+whole mountain country possessed its treasures to be given up to the
+first prospector with the hardihood to tickle its soil. Four important
+districts along the upper course of the Snake, not to mention hundreds
+of minor ones, lent substance to this appearance. Almost before Idaho
+could be organized its area of settlement had broadened enough to make
+its own division in the near future a certainty. East of the Bitter
+Root Mountains, in the head waters of the Missouri tributaries, came a
+long series of new booms.
+
+When the American Fur Company pushed its little steamer _Chippewa_ up
+to the vicinity of Fort Benton in 1859, none realized that a new era
+for the upper Missouri had nearly arrived. For half a century the fur
+trade had been followed in this region and had dotted the country with
+tiny forts and palisades, but there had been no immigration, and no
+reason for any. The Mullan road, which Congress had authorized in 1855,
+was in course of construction from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, but as
+yet there were few immigrants to follow the new route. Considerably
+before the territory of Idaho was created, however, the active
+prospectors of the Snake Valley had crossed the range and inspected
+most of the Blackfoot country in the direction of Fort Benton. They
+had organized for themselves a Missoula County, Washington territory,
+in July, 1862, an act which may be taken as the beginning of an
+entirely new movement.
+
+Two brothers, James and Granville Stuart, were the leaders in
+developing new mineral areas east of the main range. After experience
+in California and several years of life along the trails, they settled
+down in the Deer Lodge Valley, and began to open up their mines in
+1861. They accomplished little this year since the steamboat to Fort
+Benton, carrying supplies, was burned, and their trip to Walla Walla
+for shovels and picks took up the rest of the season. But early in
+1862 they were hard and successfully at work. ReĂŤnforcements, destined
+for the Salmon River mines farther west, came to them in June; one
+party from Fort Benton, the other from the Colorado diggings, and both
+were easily persuaded to stay and join in organizing Missoula County.
+Bannack City became the centre of their operations.
+
+Alder Gulch and Virginia City were, in 1863, a second focus for the
+mines of eastern Idaho. Their deposits had been found by accident
+by a prospecting party which was returning to Bannack City after an
+unsuccessful trip. The party, which had been investigating the Big
+Horn Mountains, discovered Alder Gulch between the Beaver Head and
+Madison rivers, early in June. With an accurate knowledge of the
+mining population, the discoverers organized the mining district and
+registered their own claims before revealing the location of the new
+diggings. Then came a stampede from Bannack City which gave to Virginia
+City a population of 10,000 by 1864.
+
+Another mining district, in Last Chance Gulch, gave rise in 1864 to
+Helena, the last of the great boom towns of this period. Its situation
+as well as its resources aided in the growth of Helena, which lay a
+little west of the Madison fork of the Missouri, and in the direct line
+from Bannack and Virginia City to Fort Benton. Only 142 miles of easy
+staging above the head of Missouri River navigation, it was a natural
+post on the main line of travel to the northwest fields.
+
+The excitement over Bannack and Virginia and Helena overlapped in years
+the period of similar boom in Idaho. It had begun even before Idaho had
+been created. When this was once organized, the same inconveniences
+which had justified it, justified as well its division to provide home
+rule for the miners east of the Bitter Root range. An act of 1864
+created Montana territory with the boundaries which the state possesses
+to-day, while that part of Idaho south of Montana, now Wyoming, was
+temporarily reattached to Dakota. Idaho assumed its present form. The
+simultaneous development in all portions of the great West of rich
+mining camps did much to attract public attention as well as population.
+
+In 1863 nearly all of the camps were flourishing. The mountains were
+occupied for the whole distance from Mexico to Canada, while the trails
+were crowded with emigrants hunting for fortune. The old trails bore
+much of the burden of migration as usual, but new spurs were opened
+to meet new needs. In the north, the Mullan road had made easy travel
+from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, and had been completed since 1862.
+Congress authorized in 1864 a new road from eastern Nebraska, which
+should run north of the Platte trail, and the war department had sent
+out personally conducted parties of emigrants from the vicinity of St.
+Paul. The Idaho and Montana mines were accessible from Fort Hall, the
+former by the old emigrant road, the latter by a new northeast road to
+Virginia City. The Carson mines were on the main line of the California
+road. The Arizona fields were commonly reached from California, by way
+of Fort Yuma.
+
+The shifting population which inhabited the new territories invites
+and at the same time defies description. It was made up chiefly of
+young men. Respectable women were not unknown, but were so few in
+number as to have little measurable influence upon social life. In
+many towns they were in the minority, even among their sex, since the
+easily won wealth of the camps attracted dissolute women who cannot
+be numbered but who must be imagined. The social tone of the various
+camps was determined by the preponderance of men, the absence of
+regular labor, and the speculative fever which was the justification
+of their existence. The political tone was determined by the nature
+of the population, the character of the industry, and the remoteness
+from a seat of government. Combined, these factors produced a type of
+life the like of which America had never known, and whose picturesque
+qualities have blinded the thoughtless into believing that it was
+romantic. It was at best a hard bitter struggle with the dark places
+only accentuated by the tinsel of gambling and adventure.
+
+A single street meandering along a valley, with one-story huts
+flanking it in irregular rows, was the typical mining camp. The saloon
+and the general store, sometimes combined, were its representative
+institutions. Deep ruts along the street bore witness to the heavy
+wheels of the freighters, while horses loosely tied to all available
+posts at once revealed the regular means of locomotion, and by the
+careless way they were left about showed that this sort of property
+was not likely to be stolen. The mining population centring here lived
+a life of contrasts. The desolation and loneliness of prospecting and
+working claims alternated with the excitement of coming to town. Few
+decent beings habitually lived in the towns. The resident population
+expected to live off the miners, either in way of trade, or worse.
+The bar, the gambling-house, the dance-hall have been made too common
+in description to need further account. In the reaction against
+loneliness, the extremes of drunkenness, debauchery, and murder were
+only too frequent in these places of amusement.
+
+That the camps did not destroy themselves in their own frenzy is a
+tribute to the solid qualities which underlay the recklessness and
+shiftlessness of much of the population. In most of the camps there
+came a time when decency finally asserted itself in the only possible
+way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity with which these camps had
+drawn their hundreds and their thousands into the fastnesses of the
+territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary law and regular
+institutions. Law and the politician followed fast enough, but there
+was generally an interval after the discovery during which such peace
+prevailed as the community itself demanded. In absence of sheriff and
+constable, and jail in which to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance
+committee was the only protection of the new camp. Such summary justice
+as these committees commonly executed is evidence of innate tendency
+toward law and order, not of their defiance. The typical camp passed
+through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start, then came
+an era of invasion by hordes of miners and disreputable hangers-on,
+with accompanying violence and crime. Following this, the vigilance
+committee, in its stern repression of a few of the crudest sins, marks
+the beginning of a reign of law.
+
+The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized the United
+States with the whole area of the nation, and dispelled most of the
+remaining tradition of desert which hung over the mountain West. They
+attracted a large floating population, they secured the completion of
+the political map through the erection of new territories, and they
+emphasized loudly the need for national transportation on a larger
+scale than the trail and the stage coach could permit. But they did
+not directly secure the presence of permanent population in the new
+territories. Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants as soon
+as the first flush of discovery was over. Montana, Idaho, and Colorado
+declined rapidly to a fraction of their largest size. None of them was
+successful in securing a large permanent population until agriculture
+had gained firm foothold. Many indeed who came to mine remained to
+plough, but the permanent populating of the Far West was the work
+of railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the mining camps
+had served their purpose in revealing the nature of the whole of the
+national domain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE OVERLAND MAIL
+
+
+Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized
+traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all
+the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri
+border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and
+left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not
+self-supporting for a decade or more; few of them were independent
+within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand for necessities
+and luxuries which must be hauled from the states to the new market
+by the routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled. Greater
+than their need for material supplies was that for intellectual
+stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and the regular carriage of the mails
+were constantly demanded of the express companies and the post-office
+department. To meet this pressure there was organized in the fifties
+a great system of wagon traffic. In the years from 1858 to 1869 it
+reached its mighty culmination; while its possibilities of speed,
+order, and convenience had only just come to be realized when the
+continental railways brought this agency of transportation to an end.
+
+The individual emigrant who had gathered together his family, his
+flocks, and his household goods, who had cut away from the life at
+home and staked everything on his new venture, was the unit in the
+great migrations. There was no regular provision for going unless one
+could form his own self-contained and self-supporting party. Various
+bands grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence, but the
+characteristic feature of the emigration was private initiative. The
+home-seekers had no power in themselves to maintain communication
+with the old country, yet they had no disposition to be forgotten or
+to forget. Professional freighting companies and carriers of mails
+appeared just as soon as the traffic promised a profit.
+
+A water mail to California had been arranged even before the gold
+discovery lent a new interest to the Pacific Coast. From New York
+to the Isthmus, and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be
+carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which sent the
+nucleus of its fleet around Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The
+arrival of the first mail in San Francisco in February, 1849, commenced
+the regular public communication between the United States and the
+new colonies. For the places lying away from the coast, mails were
+hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and
+California were given a measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.
+
+There is little interest in the earlier phases of the overland mail
+service save in that they foreshadowed greater things. A stage line
+was started from Independence to Santa FĂŠ in the summer of 1849;
+another contract was let to a man named Woodson for a monthly carriage
+to Salt Lake City. Neither of the carriers made a serious attempt to
+stock his route or open stations. Their stages advanced under the same
+conditions, and with little more rapidity than the ordinary emigrant
+or freighter. Mormon interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley
+Carrying Company at about this time. For four or five years both
+government and private industry were experimenting with the problems of
+long-distance wagon traffic,--the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the
+stations, the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort made in 1856,
+by the War Department, to acclimate the Saharan camel on the American
+desert as a beast of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the
+experiment, in execution of which Secretary Davis sent Lieutenant H. C.
+Wayne to the Levant to purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels
+were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio. There is a long
+congressional document filled with the correspondence of this attempt
+and embellished with cuts of types of camels and equipment.
+
+While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas plains, Congress made
+a more definite movement towards supplying the Pacific Slope with
+adequate service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in 1857 to call
+for bids for an overland mail which, in a single organization, should
+join the Missouri to Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run
+at a high scheduled speed. The service which the Postmaster-general
+invited in his advertisement was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or
+semi-monthly at his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years;
+it was to carry through the mails in four-horse wagons in not more
+than twenty-five days. A long list of bidders, including most of the
+firms engaged in plains freighting, responded with their bids and
+itineraries; from them the department selected the offer of a company
+headed by one John Butterfield, and explained to the public in 1857 the
+reasons for its choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract
+was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made a junction near the
+western border of Arkansas, and proceeded thence through Preston,
+Texas, El Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails the company was
+to receive $600,000 a year. The choice of the most southern of routes
+required considerable explanation, since the best-known road ran
+by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this latter route the
+Postmaster-general pointed out the cold and snow of winter, and claimed
+that the experience of the department during seven years proved the
+impossibility of maintaining a regular service here. A second available
+road had been revealed by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across
+northern Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but this was
+likewise too long and too severe. The best route, in his mind--the one
+open all the year, through a temperate climate, suitable for migration
+as well as traffic--was this southern route, via El Paso. It is well to
+remember that the administration which made this choice was democratic
+and of strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific railway was
+expected to follow the course of the overland mail.
+
+The first overland coaches left the opposite ends of the line on
+September 15, 1858. The east-bound stage carried an agent of the
+Post-office Department, whose report states that the through trip to
+Tipton, Missouri, and thence by rail to St. Louis, was made in 20 days,
+18 hours, 26 minutes, actual time. "I cordially congratulate you upon
+the result," wired President Buchanan to Butterfield. "It is a glorious
+triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon follow
+the course of the road, and the East and West will be bound together
+by a chain of living Americans which can never be broken." The route
+was 2795 miles long. For nearly all the way there was no settlement
+upon which the stages could rely. The company built such stations as it
+needed.
+
+The vehicle of the overland mail, the most interesting vehicle of
+the plains, was the coach manufactured by the Abbott-Downing Company
+of Concord, New Hampshire. No better wagon for the purpose has been
+devised. Its heavy wheels, with wide, thick tires, were set far apart
+to prevent capsizing. Its body, braced with iron bands, and built of
+stout white oak, was slung on leather thoroughbraces which took the
+strain better and were more nearly unbreakable than any other springs.
+Inside were generally three seats, for three passengers each, though
+at times as many as fourteen besides the driver and messenger were
+carried. Adjustable curtains kept out part of the rain and cold. High
+up in front sat the driver, with a passenger or two on the box and a
+large assortment of packages tucked away beneath his seat. Behind the
+body was the triangular "boot" in which were stowed the passengers'
+boxes and the mail sacks. The overflow of mail went inside under the
+seats. Mr. Clemens tells of filling the whole body three feet deep with
+mail, and of the passengers being forced to sprawl out on the irregular
+bed thus made for them. Complaining letter-writers tell of sacks
+carried between the axles and the body, under the coach, and of the
+disasters to letters and contents resulting from fording streams. Drawn
+by four galloping mules and painted a gaudy red or green, the coach
+was a visible emblem of spectacular western advance. Horace Greeley's
+coach, bright red, was once charged by a herd of enraged buffaloes and
+overturned, to the discomfort and injury of the venerable editor.
+
+It was no comfortable or luxurious trip that the overland passenger
+had, with all the sumptuous equipment of the new route. The time
+limit was twenty-five days, reduced in practice to twenty-two or
+twenty-three, at the price of constant travel day and night, regardless
+of weather or convenience. One passenger who declined to follow this
+route has left his reason why. The "Southern, known as the Butterfield
+or American Express, offered to start me in an ambulance from St.
+Louis, and to pass me through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on the
+Gila River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate portion
+of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and nights--twenty-five being
+schedule time--must be spent in that ambulance; passengers becoming
+crazy by whiskey, mixed with want of sleep, are often obliged to be
+strapped to their seats; their meals, despatched during the ten-minute
+halts, are simply abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate
+malarious; lamps may not be used at night for fear of non-existent
+Indians: briefly there is no end to this Via Mala's miseries." But the
+alternative which confronted this traveller in 1860 was scarcely more
+pleasant. "You may start by stage to the gold regions about Denver City
+or Pike's Peak, and thence, if not accidentally or purposely shot, you
+may proceed by an uncertain ox train to Great Salt Lake City, which
+latter part cannot take less than thirty-five days."
+
+Once upon the road, the passenger might nearly as well have been at
+sea. There was no turning back. His discomforts and dangers became
+inevitable. The stations erected along the trail were chiefly for the
+benefit of the live stock. Horses and mules must be kept in good shape,
+whatever happened to passengers. Some of the depots, "home stations,"
+had a family in residence, a dwelling of logs, adobe, or sod, and
+offered bacon, potatoes, bread, and coffee of a sort, to those who were
+not too squeamish. The others, or "swing" stations, had little but a
+corral and a haystack, with a few stock tenders. The drivers were often
+drunk and commonly profane. The overseers and division superintendents
+differed from them only in being a little more resolute and dangerous.
+Freighting and coaching were not child's play for either passengers or
+employees.
+
+The Butterfield Overland Express began to work its six year contract
+in September, 1858. Other coach and mail services increased the number
+of continental routes to three by 1860. From New Orleans, by way of
+San Antonio and El Paso, a weekly service had been organized, but its
+importance was far less than that of the great route, and not equal to
+that by way of the Great Salt Lake.
+
+Staging over the Platte trail began on a large scale with the discovery
+of gold near Pike's Peak in 1858. The Mormon mails, interrupted by the
+Mormon War, had been revived; but a new concern had sprung up under the
+name of the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company. The firm of
+Jones and Russell, soon to give way to Russell, Majors, and Waddell,
+had seen the possibilities of the new boom camps, and had inaugurated
+regular stage service in May, 1859. Henry Villard rode out in the
+first coach. Horace Greeley followed in June. After some experimenting
+in routes, the line accepted a considerable part of the Platte trail,
+leaving the road at the forks of the river. Here Julesburg came into
+existence as the most picturesque home station on the plains. It was
+at this station that Jack Slade, whom Mark Twain found to be a mild,
+hospitable, coffee-sharing man, cut off the ears of old Jules, after
+the latter had emptied two barrels of bird-shot into him. It was
+"celebrated for its desperadoes," wrote General Dodge. "No twenty-four
+hours passed without its contribution to Boots Hill (the cemetery whose
+every occupant was buried in his boots), and homicide was performed in
+the most genial and whole-souled way."
+
+Before the Denver coach had been running for a year another enterprise
+had brought the central route into greater prominence. Butterfield had
+given California news in less than twenty-five days from the Missouri,
+but California wanted more even than this, until the electric telegraph
+should come. Senator Gwin urged upon the great freight concern the
+starting of a faster service for light mails only. It was William H.
+Russell who, to meet this supposed demand, organized a pony express,
+which he announced to a startled public in the end of March. Across the
+continent from Placerville to St. Joseph he built his stations from
+nine to fifteen miles apart, nearly two hundred in all. He supplied
+these with tenders and riders, stocked them with fodder and fleet
+American horses, and started his first riders at both ends on the 3d of
+April, 1860.
+
+Only letters of great commercial importance could be carried by the
+new express. They were written on tissue paper, packed into a small,
+light saddlebag, and passed from rider to rider along the route. The
+time announced in the schedule was ten days,--two weeks better than
+Butterfield's best. To make it called for constant motion at top
+speed, with horses trained to the work and changed every few miles.
+The carriers were slight men of 135 pounds or under, whose nerve and
+endurance could stand the strain. Often mere boys were employed in the
+dangerous service. Rain or snow or death made no difference to the
+express. Dangers of falling at night, of missing precipitous mountain
+roads where advance at a walk was perilous, had to be faced. When
+Indians were hostile, this new risk had to be run. But for eighteen
+months the service was continued as announced. It ceased only when the
+overland telegraph, in October, 1861, declared its readiness to handle
+through business.
+
+In the pony express was the spectacular perfection of overland service.
+Its best record was some hours under eight days. It was conducted along
+the well-known trail from St. Joseph to Forts Kearney, Laramie, and
+Bridger; thence to Great Salt Lake City, and by way of Carson City to
+Placerville and Sacramento. It carried the news in a time when every
+day brought new rumors of war and disunion, in the pregnant campaign
+of 1860 and through the opening of the Civil War. The records of its
+riders at times approached the marvellous. One lad, William F. Cody,
+who has since lived to become the personal embodiment of the Far West
+as Buffalo Bill, rode more than 320 consecutive miles on a single
+tour. The literature of the plains is full of instances of courage and
+endurance shown in carrying through the despatches.
+
+The Butterfield mail was transferred to the central route of the pony
+express in the summer of 1861. For two and a half years it had run
+steadily along its southern route, proving the entire practicability
+of carrying on such a service. But its expense had been out of all
+proportion to its revenue. In 1859 the Postmaster-general reported
+that its total receipts from mails had been $27,229.94, as against a
+cost of $600,000. It is not unlikely that the fast service would have
+been dropped had not the new military necessity of 1861 forbidden any
+act which might loosen the bonds between the Pacific and the Atlantic
+states. Congress contemplated the approach of war and authorized early
+in 1861 the abandonment of the southern route through the confederate
+territory, and the transfer of the service to the line of the pony
+express. To secure additional safety the mails were sent by way of
+Davenport, Iowa, and Omaha, to Fort Kearney a few times, but Atchison
+became the starting-point at last, while military force was used to
+keep the route free from interference. The transfer worked a shortening
+of from five to seven days over the southern route.
+
+In the autumn of 1861, when the overland mail and the pony express were
+both running at top speed along the Platte trail, the overland service
+reached its highest point. In October the telegraph brought an end to
+the express. "The Pacific to the Atlantic sends greeting," ran the
+first message over the new wire, "and may both oceans be dry before a
+foot of all the land that lies between them shall belong to any other
+than one united country." Probably the pony express had done its share
+in keeping touch between California and the Union. Certainly only its
+national purpose justified its existence, since it was run at a loss
+that brought ruin to Russell, its backer, and to Majors and Waddell,
+his partners.
+
+Russell, Majors, and Waddell, with the biggest freighting business of
+the plains, had gone heavily into passenger and express service in
+1859-1860. Russell had forced through the pony express against the
+wishes of his partners, carried away from practical considerations
+by the magnitude of the idea. The transfer of the southern overland
+to their route increased their business and responsibility. The
+future of the route steadily looked larger. "Every day," wrote the
+Postmaster-general, "brings intelligence of the discovery of new
+mines of gold and silver in the region traversed by this mail route,
+which gives assurance that it will not be many years before it will
+be protected and supported throughout the greater part of the route
+by a civilized population." Under the name of the Central Overland,
+California, and Pike's Peak Express the firm tried to keep up a
+struggle too great for them. "Clean out of Cash and Poor Pay" is said
+to have been an irreverent nickname coined by one of their drivers.
+As their embarrassments steadily increased, their notes were given to
+a rival contractor who was already beginning local routes to reach
+the mining camps of eastern Washington. Ben Holladay had been the
+power behind the company for several months before the courts gave him
+control of their overland stage line in 1862. The greatest names in
+this overland business are first Butterfield, then Russell, Majors, and
+Waddell, and then Ben Holladay, whose power lasted until he sold out
+to Wells, Fargo, and Company in 1866. Ben Holladay was the magnate of
+the plains during the early sixties. A hostile critic, Henry Villard,
+has written that he was "a genuine specimen of the successful Western
+pioneer of former days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful,
+false, and cunning." In later days he carried his speculation into
+railways and navigation, but already his was the name most often heard
+in the West. Mark Twain, who has left in "Roughing It" the best picture
+of life in the Far West in this decade, speaks lightly of him when he
+tells of a youth travelling in the Holy Land with a reverend preceptor
+who was impressing upon him the greatness of Moses, "'the great guide,
+soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot where
+we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in
+extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children
+of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over
+the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and
+landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot. It
+was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack. Think of it!"
+
+"'Forty years? Only three hundred miles?'" replied Jack. "'Humph! Ben
+Holladay would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!'"
+
+Under Holladay's control the passenger and express service were
+developed into what was probably the greatest one-man institution in
+America. He directed not only the central overland, but spur lines with
+government contracts to upper California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.
+He travelled up and down the line constantly himself, attending in
+person to business in Washington and on the Pacific. The greatest
+difficulties in his service were the Indians and progress as stated in
+the railway. Man and nature could be fought off and overcome, but the
+life of the stage-coach was limited before it was begun.
+
+The Indian danger along the trails had steadily increased since the
+commencement of the migrations. For many years it had not been large,
+since there was room for all and the emigrants held well to the beaten
+track. But the gold camps had introduced settlers into new sections,
+and had sent prospectors into all the Indian Country. The opening of
+new roads to the Pacific increased the pressure, until the Indians
+began to believe that the end was at hand unless they should bestir
+themselves. The last years of the overland service, between 1862 and
+1868, were hence filled with Indian attacks. Often for weeks no coach
+could go through. Once, by premeditation, every station for nearly two
+hundred miles was destroyed overnight, Julesburg, the greatest of them
+all, being in the list. The presence of troops to defend seemed only to
+increase the zeal of the red men to destroy.
+
+Besides these losses, which lessened his profits and threatened ruin,
+Holladay had to meet competition in his own trade, and detraction as
+well. Captain James L. Fiske, who had broken a new road through from
+Minnesota to Montana, came east in 1863, "by the 'overland stage,'
+travelling over the saline plains of Laramie and Colorado Territory
+and the sand deserts of Nebraska and Kansas. The country was strewed
+with the skeletons and carcases of cattle, and the graves of the early
+Mormon and California pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst
+emigrant route that I have ever travelled; much of the road is through
+deep sand, feed is very scanty, a great deal of the water is alkaline,
+and the snows in winter render it impassable for trains. The stage line
+is wretchedly managed. The company undertake to furnish travellers with
+meals, (at a dollar a meal,) but very frequently on arriving at a
+station there was nothing to eat, the supplies had not been sent on. On
+one occasion we fasted for thirty-six hours. The stages were sometimes
+in a miserable condition. We were put into a coach one night with only
+two boards left in the bottom. On remonstrating with the driver, we
+were told to hold on by the sides."
+
+At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay controlled a monopoly
+in stage service between the Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The
+express companies and railways met him at the ends of his link, but had
+to accept his terms for intermediate traffic. In the summer of 1865
+a competing firm started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on
+the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that Indian dangers here
+were greater than along the Platte, and it learned how near it was to
+bankruptcy when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had sent
+his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand a more detailed
+statement of resources and conditions than the Overland Despatch itself
+possessed. He purchased easily at his own price and so ended this
+danger of competition.
+
+Such was the character of the overland traffic that any day might
+bring a successful rival, or loss by accident. Holladay seems to have
+realized that the advantages secured by priority were over, and that
+the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866 he sold out his
+lines to the greatest of his competitors, Wells, Fargo, and Company.
+He sold out wisely. The new concern lost on its purchase through the
+rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the Pacific railway had
+advanced so far that the end of the mail route was moved to Fort
+Kearney in November. By May, 1869, some years earlier than Wells, Fargo
+had estimated, the road was done. And on the completion of the Union
+and Central Pacific railways the great period of the overland mail was
+ended.
+
+Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland freight that lacked
+the seeming romance of the former, but possessed quite as much of
+real significance. No one has numbered the trains of wagons that
+supplied the Far West. Santa FĂŠ wagons they were now; Pennsylvania
+or Pittsburg wagons they had been called in the early days of the
+Santa FĂŠ trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the remoter time
+of the trans-Alleghany migrations. But whatever their name, they
+retained the characteristics of the wagons and caravans of the earlier
+period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons, organized in trains
+of twenty-six, from the Butterfield Overland Despatch in 1866. Six
+thousand were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in 1865. One
+of the drivers on the overland mail, Frank Root, relates that Russell,
+Majors, and Waddell owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height of
+their business. The long trains, crawling along half hidden in their
+clouds of dust, with the noises of the animals and the profanity of
+the drivers, were the physical bond between the sections. The mail and
+express served politics and intellect; the freighters provided the
+comforts and decencies of life.
+
+The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the first migrations.
+Its growth during the fifties and its triumphant period in the sixties
+were great arguments in favor of the construction of railways to take
+its place. It came to an end when the first continental railroad
+was completed in 1869. For decades after this time the stages still
+found useful service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional
+exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the railways were following
+them closely, for a new period of American history had begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER
+
+
+In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented
+the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the
+Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus
+and had advocates throughout its section of the country. The list of
+claimants is a catalogue of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans,
+Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Duluth were all
+entered in the competition. By 1860 the idea had received general
+acceptance; no one in the future need urge its adoption, but the
+greatest part of the work remained to be done.
+
+Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway was of
+uncertain origin and parentage. Just so soon as there was a railroad
+anywhere, it was inevitable that some enterprising visionary should
+project one in imagination to the extremity of the continent. The
+railway speculation, with which the East was seething during the
+administrations of Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West,
+so that the group of men advocating a railway to connect the oceans
+were but the product of their time.
+
+Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant
+interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the
+Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be
+possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none
+had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted
+a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that
+"the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate
+nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned
+Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that
+the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated
+persistently for his project.
+
+The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest, coming in the years
+immediately after the commencement of Whitney's advocacy, gave new
+point to arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional
+element. So long as Oregon constituted the whole American frontage on
+the Pacific it was idle to debate railway routes south of South Pass.
+This was the only known, practicable route, and it was the course
+recommended by all the projectors, down to Whitney. But with California
+won, the other trails by El Paso and Santa FĂŠ came into consideration
+and at once tempted the South to make the railway tributary to its own
+interests.
+
+Chief among the politicians who fell in with the growing railway
+movement was Senator Benton, who tried to place himself at its
+head. "The man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I
+say (without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October, 1844,
+"who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific
+Ocean--entering the Oregon River--climbing the western slopes of the
+Rocky Mountains--issuing from its gorges--and spreading its fertilizing
+streams over our wide-extended Union!" After this date there was no
+subject closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy
+was constant. His last word in the Senate was concerning it. In 1849
+he carried off its feet the St. Louis railroad convention with his
+eloquent appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron road, and
+make it from sea to sea--States and individuals making it east of
+the Mississippi, the nation making it west. Let us ... rise above
+everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ... build the great
+road ... which shall be adorned with ... the colossal statue of the
+great Columbus--whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass
+of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road ... pointing
+with outstretched arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying
+passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"
+
+By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad could be built along
+the Platte route, and it was believed that the mountains could be
+penetrated in several other places, but the process of surveying
+with reference to a particular railway had not yet been begun. It
+is possible and perhaps instructive to make a rough grouping, in two
+classes divided by the year 1842, of the explorations before 1853.
+So late as FrĂŠmont's day it was not generally known whether a great
+river entered the Pacific between the Columbia and the Colorado.
+Prior to 1842 the explorations are to be regarded as "incidents"
+and "adventures" in more or less unknown countries. The narratives
+were popular rather than scientific, representing the experiences of
+parties surveying boundary lines or locating wagon roads, of troops
+marching to remote posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and
+casual explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed a large mass
+of detailed but unorganized information concerning the country where
+the continental railway must run. But Lieutenant FrĂŠmont, in 1842,
+commenced the effort by the United States to acquire accurate and
+comprehensive knowledge of the West. In 1842, 1843, and 1845 FrĂŠmont
+conducted the three Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him
+for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by Charles Preuss for his
+second expedition, confined itself in strict scientific fashion to the
+facts actually observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the best
+map made before 1853. The individual expeditions which in the later
+forties filled in the details of portions of the FrĂŠmont map are too
+numerous for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before 1853, all
+serving to extend both general and particular knowledge of the West. To
+these was added a great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants
+and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific knowledge of
+nearly all the West, and accurate information concerning some portions
+of it. The railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction in
+which the roads must run, but no road could well be located without a
+more comprehensive survey than had yet been made.
+
+The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was founded almost
+exclusively upon general and inaccurate knowledge of the West. The
+exact location of the line was naturally left for the professional
+civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself with general
+principles. Frequently these were sufficient, yet, as in the case
+of Benton, misinformation led to the waste of strength upon routes
+unquestionably bad. But there was slight danger of the United States
+being led into an unwise route, since in the diversity of routes
+suggested there was deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as
+the idea was received with unanimity, the routes were fought with
+increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved in 1852 when the choice of
+routes had become more important than the method of construction.
+
+In 1852-1853 Congress worked upon one of the many bills to construct
+the much-desired railway to the Pacific. It was discovered that an
+absolute majority in favor of the work existed, but the enemies of the
+measure, virulent in proportion as they were in the minority, were
+able to sow well-fertilized dissent. They admitted and gloried in
+the intrigue which enabled them to command through the time-honored
+method of division. They defeated the road in this Congress. But when
+the army appropriation bill came along in February, 1853, Senator
+Gwin asked for an amendment for a survey. He doubted the wisdom of a
+survey, since, "if any route is reported to this body as the best,
+those that may be rejected will always go against the one selected."
+But he admitted himself to be as a drowning man who "will catch at
+straws," and begged that $150,000 be allowed to the President for a
+survey of the best routes from the Mississippi to the Pacific, the
+survey to be conducted by the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the
+regular army. To a non-committal measure like this the opposition could
+make slight resistance. The Senate, by a vote of 31 to 16, added this
+amendment to the army appropriation bill, while the House concurred in
+nearly the same proportion. The first positive official act towards the
+construction of the road was here taken.
+
+Under the orders of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, well-organized
+exploring parties took to the field in the spring of 1853. Farthest
+north, Isaac I. Stevens, bound for his post as first governor of
+Washington territory, conducted a line of survey to the Pacific between
+the parallels of 47° and 49°, north latitude. South of the Stevens
+survey, four other lines were worked out. Near the parallels of 41° and
+42°, the old South Pass route was again examined. FrÊmont's favorite
+line, between 38° and 39°, received consideration. A thirty-fifth
+parallel route was examined in great detail, while on this and another
+along the thirty-second parallel the most friendly attentions of the
+War Department were lavished. The second and third routes had few
+important friends. Governor Stevens, because he was a first-rate
+fighter, secured full space for the survey in his charge. But the
+thirty-second and thirty-fifth parallel routes were those which were
+expected to make good.
+
+Governor Stevens left Washington on May 9, 1853, for St. Louis, where
+he made arrangements with the American Fur Company to transport a large
+part of his supplies by river to Fort Union. From St. Louis he ascended
+the Mississippi by steamer to St. Paul, near which city Camp Pierce,
+his first organized camp, had been established. Here he issued his
+instructions and worked into shape his party,--to say nothing of his
+172 half-broken mules. "Not a single full team of broken animals could
+be selected, and well broken riding animals were essential, for most of
+the gentlemen of the scientific corps were unaccustomed to riding." One
+of the engineers dislocated a shoulder before he conquered his steed.
+
+The party assigned to Governor Stevens's command was recruited with
+reference to the varied demands of a general exploring and scientific
+reconnaissance. Besides enlisted men and laborers, it included
+engineers, a topographer, an artist, a surgeon and naturalist, an
+astronomer, a meteorologist, and a geologist. Its two large volumes of
+report include elaborate illustrations and appendices on botany and
+seven different varieties of zoĂślogy in addition to the geographical
+details required for the railway.
+
+The expedition, in its various branches, attacked the northernmost
+route simultaneously in several places. Governor Stevens led the
+eastern division from St. Paul. A small body of his men, with much of
+the supplies, were sent up the Missouri in the American Fur Company's
+boat to Fort Union, there to make local observations and await the
+arrival of the governor. United there the party continued overland
+to Fort Benton and the mountains. Six years later than this it would
+have been possible to ascend by boat all the way to Fort Benton, but
+as yet no steamer had gone much above Fort Union. From the Pacific end
+the second main division operated. Governor Stevens secured the recall
+of Captain George B. McClellan from duty in Texas, and his detail in
+command of a corps which was to proceed to the mouth of the Columbia
+River and start an eastward survey. In advance of McClellan, Lieutenant
+Saxton was to hurry on to erect a supply depot in the Bitter Root
+Valley, and then to cross the divide and make a junction with the main
+party.
+
+From Governor Stevens's reports it would seem that his survey was a
+triumphal progress. To his threefold capacities as commander, governor,
+and Indian superintendent, nature had added a magnifying eye and
+an unrestrained enthusiasm. No formal expedition had traversed his
+route since the day of Lewis and Clark. The Indians could still be
+impressed by the physical appearance of the whites. His vanity led him
+at each success or escape from accident to congratulate himself on the
+antecedent wisdom which had warded off the danger. But withal, his
+report was thorough and his party was loyal. The _voyageurs_ whom he
+had engaged received his special praise. "They are thorough woodsmen
+and just the men for prairie life also, going into the water as
+pleasantly as a spaniel, and remaining there as long as needed."
+
+Across the undulating fertile plains the party advanced from St. Paul
+with little difficulty. Its draught animals steadily improved in health
+and strength. The Indians were friendly and honest. "My father," said
+Old Crane of the Assiniboin, "our hearts are good; we are poor and have
+not much.... Our good father has told us about this road. I do not
+see how it will benefit us, and I fear my people will be driven from
+these plains before the white men." In fifty-five days Fort Union was
+reached. Here the American Fur Company maintained an extensive post
+in a stockade 250 feet square, and carried on a large trade with "the
+Assiniboines, the Gros Ventres, the Crows, and other migratory bands
+of Indians." At Fort Union, Alexander Culbertson, the agent, became
+the guide of the party, which proceeded west on August 10. From Fort
+Union it was nearly 400 miles to Fort Benton, which then stood on the
+left bank of the Missouri, some eighteen miles below the falls. The
+country, though less friendly than that east of the Missouri, offered
+little difficulty to the party, which covered the distance in three
+weeks. A week later, September 8, a party sent on from Fort Benton met
+Lieutenant Saxton coming east.
+
+The chief problems of the Stevens survey lay west of Fort Benton,
+in the passes of the continental divide. Lieutenant Saxton had left
+Vancouver early in July, crossed the Cascades with difficulty, and
+started up the Columbia from the Dalles on July 18. He reached Fort
+Walla Walla on the 27th, and proceeded thence with a half-breed guide
+through the country of the Spokan and the Coeur d'Alene. Crossing the
+Snake, he broke his only mercurial barometer and was forced thereafter
+to rely on his aneroid. Deviating to the north, he crossed Lake Pend
+d'Oreille on August 10, and reached St. Mary's village, in the Bitter
+Root Valley, on August 28. St. Mary's village, among the Flatheads, had
+been established by the Jesuit fathers, and had advanced considerably,
+as Indian civilization went. Here Saxton erected his supply depot,
+from which he advanced with a smaller escort to join the main party.
+Always, even in the heart of the mountains, the country exceeded his
+expectations. "Nature seemed to have intended it for the great highway
+across the continent, and it appeared to offer but little obstruction
+to the passage of a railroad."
+
+Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced his party at Fort
+Benton, stored much of his government property there, and started
+west with a pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved on
+September 22, anxious lest snow should catch him in the mountains. At
+Fort Benton he left a detachment to make meteorological observations
+during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left another under Lieutenant
+Mullan. On October 7 he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley
+for Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's party, which had been
+spending a difficult season in the passes of the Cascade range. Because
+of overcautious advice which McClellan here gave him, and since his
+animals were tired out with the summer's hardships, he practically
+ended his survey for 1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia
+to Olympia and his new territory.
+
+The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to make one of the first
+of the Pacific railway reports. His was the only survey from the
+Mississippi to the ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30, 1854,
+it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled reports. In 1859 he
+submitted his "narrative and final report" which the Senate ordered
+Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February of
+that year. This document is printed as supplement to Volume I, but
+really consists of two large volumes which are commonly bound together
+as Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes of the reports,
+his are filled with lithographs and engravings of fauna, flora, and
+topography.
+
+The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by Lieutenant E. G.
+Beckwith, of the third artillery, in the summer of 1854. East of Fort
+Bridger, the War Department felt it unnecessary to make a special
+survey, since FrĂŠmont had traversed and described the country several
+times and Stansbury had surveyed it carefully as recently as 1849-1850.
+At the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt Lake. During
+April he visited the Green River Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by
+his surveys the entire practicability of railway construction here.
+In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake and passed along
+the Humboldt to the Sacramento Valley. He had no important adventures
+and was impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians, whose
+grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups" were frequently seen. As
+his band approached the Indians would fearfully cache their belongings
+in the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed a novel and ludicrous
+sight of wretchedness to see them approach their bush and attempt,
+slyly (for they still tried to conceal from me what they were about),
+to repossess themselves of their treasures, one bringing out a piece
+of old buckskin, a couple of feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn;
+another a half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition,
+sewed together, which he would swing over his shoulders by a
+string--his only blanket or clothing; while a third brought out a blue
+string, which he girded about him and walked away in full dress--one
+of the lords of the soil." It needed no special emphasis in Beckwith's
+report to prove that a railway could follow this middle route, since
+thousands of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.
+
+[Illustration: FORT SNELLING
+
+From an old photograph, loaned by Horace B. Hudson, of Minneapolis.]
+
+Beckwith, who started his forty-second parallel survey from Salt Lake
+City, had reached that point as one of the officers in Gunnison's
+unfortunate party. Captain J. W. Gunnison had followed Governor Stevens
+into St. Louis in 1853. His field of exploration, the route of 38°-39°,
+was by no means new to him since he had been to Utah with Stansbury
+in 1849 and 1850, and had already written one of the best books upon
+the Mormon settlement. He carried his party up the Missouri to a
+fitting-out camp just below the mouth of the Kansas River, five miles
+from Westport. Like other commanders he spent much time at the start
+in "breaking in wild mules," with which he advanced in rain and mud on
+June 23. For more than two weeks his party moved in parallel columns
+along the Santa FĂŠ road and the Smoky Hill fork of the Kansas. Near
+Walnut creek on the Santa FĂŠ road they united, and soon were following
+the Arkansas River towards the mountains. At Fort Atkinson they found a
+horde of the plains Indians waiting for Major Fitzpatrick to make a
+treaty with them. Always their observations were taken with regularity.
+One day Captain Gunnison spent in vain efforts to secure specimens of
+the elusive prairie dog. On August 1, when they were ready to leave the
+Arkansas and plunge southwest into the Sangre de Cristo range, they
+were gratified "by a clear and beautiful view of the Spanish Peaks."
+
+This thirty-ninth parallel route, which had been a favorite with
+FrĂŠmont, crossed the divide near the head of the Rio Grande. Its
+grades, which were difficult and steep at best, followed the Huerfano
+Valley and Cochetopa Pass. Across the pass, Gunnison began his descent
+of the arid alkali valley of the Uncompahgre,--a valley to-day about
+to blossom as the rose because of the irrigation canal and tunnel
+bringing to it the waters of the neighboring Gunnison River. With
+heavy labor, intense heat, and weakening teams, Gunnison struggled on
+through September and October towards Salt Lake in Utah territory. Near
+Sevier Lake he lost his life. Before daybreak, on October 26, he and a
+small detachment of men were surprised by a band of young Paiute. When
+the rest of his party hurried up to the rescue, they found his body
+"pierced with fifteen arrows," and seven of his men lying dead around
+him. Beckwith, who succeeded to the command, led the remainder of the
+party to Salt Lake City, where public opinion was ready to charge the
+Mormons with the murder. Beckwith believed this to be entirely false,
+and made use of the friendly assistance of Brigham Young, who persuaded
+the chiefs of the tribe to return the instruments and records which had
+been stolen from the party.
+
+The route surveyed by Captain Gunnison passed around the northern end
+of the ravine of the Colorado River, which almost completely separates
+the Southwest from the United States. Farther south, within the United
+States, were only two available points at which railways could cross
+the caĂąon, at Fort Yuma and near the Mojave River. Towards these
+crossings the thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallel surveys were
+directed.
+
+Second only to Governor Stevens's in its extent was the exploration
+conducted by Lieutenant A. W. Whipple from Fort Smith on the Arkansas
+to Los Angeles along the thirty-fifth parallel. Like that of Governor
+Stevens this route was not the channel of any regular traffic, although
+later it was to have some share in the organized overland commerce.
+Here also was found a line that contained only two or three serious
+obstacles to be overcome. Whipple's instructions planned for him to
+begin his observations at the Mississippi, but he believed that the
+navigable Arkansas River and the railways already projected in that
+state made it needless to commence farther east than Fort Smith, on the
+edge of the Indian Country. He began his survey on July 14, 1853. His
+westward march was for two months up the right bank of the Canadian
+River, as it traversed the Choctaw and Chickasaw reserves, to the
+hundredth meridian, where it emerged from the panhandle of Texas, and
+across the panhandle into New Mexico. After crossing the upper waters
+of the Rio Pecos he reached the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, where his
+party tarried for a month or more, working over their observations,
+making local explorations, and sending back to Washington an account
+of their proceedings thus far. Towards the middle of November they
+started on toward the Colorado Chiquita and the Bill Williams Fork,
+through "a region over which no white man is supposed to have passed."
+The severest difficulties of the trip were found near the valley of the
+Colorado River, which was entered at the junction of the Bill Williams
+Fork and followed north for several days. A crossing here was made near
+the supposed mouth of the Mojave River at a place where porphyritic
+and trap dykes, outcropping, gave rise to the name of the Needles.
+The river was crossed February 27, 1854, three weeks before the party
+reached Los Angeles.
+
+South of the route of Lieutenant Whipple, the thirty-second parallel
+survey was run to the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. No
+attempt was made in this case at a comprehensive survey under a single
+leader. Instead, the section from the Rio Grande at El Paso to the
+Red River at Preston, Texas, was run by John Pope, brevet captain in
+the topographical engineers, in the spring of 1854. Lieutenant J. G.
+Parke carried the line at the same time from the Pimas villages on the
+Gila to the Rio Grande. West of the Pimas villages to the Colorado,
+a reconnoissance made by Lieutenant-colonel Emory in 1847 was drawn
+upon. The lines in California were surveyed by yet a different party.
+Here again an easy route was discovered to exist. Within the states of
+California and Oregon various connecting lines were surveyed by parties
+under Lieutenant R. S. Williamson in 1855.
+
+The evidence accumulated by the Pacific railway surveys began to pour
+in upon the War Department in the spring of 1854. Partial reports
+at first, elaborate and minute scientific articles following later,
+made up a series which by the close of the decade filled the twelve
+enormous volumes of the published papers. Rarely have efforts so great
+accomplished so little in the way of actual contribution to knowledge.
+The chief importance of the surveys was in proving by scientific
+observation what was already a commonplace among laymen--that the
+continent was traversable in many places, and that the incidental
+problems of railway construction were in finance rather than in
+engineering. The engineers stood ready to build the road any time and
+almost anywhere.
+
+The Secretary of War submitted to Congress the first instalment of his
+report under the resolution of March 3, 1853, on February 27, 1855. As
+yet the labors of compilation and examination of the field manuscripts
+were by no means completed, but he was able to make general statements
+about the probability of success. At five points the continental
+divide had been crossed; over four of these railways were entirely
+practicable, although the shortest of the routes to San Francisco ran
+by the one pass, Cochetopa, where it would be unreasonable to construct
+a road.
+
+From the routes surveyed, Secretary Davis recommended one as "the most
+practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi
+River to the Pacific Ocean." In all cases cost, speed of construction,
+and ease in operation needed to be ascertained and compared. The
+estimates guessed at by the parties in the field, and revised by the
+War Department, pointed to the southernmost as the most desirable
+route. To reach this conclusion it was necessary to accuse Governor
+Stevens of underestimating the cost of labor along his northern line;
+but the figures as taken were conclusive. On this thirty-second
+parallel route, declared the Secretary of War, "the progress of the
+work will be regulated chiefly by the speed with which cross-ties
+and rails can be delivered and laid.... The few difficult points ...
+would delay the work but an inconsiderable period.... The climate on
+this route is such as to cause less interruption to the work than on
+any other route. Not only is this the shortest and least costly route
+to the Pacific, but it is the shortest and cheapest route to San
+Francisco, the greatest commercial city on our western coast; while
+the aggregate length of railroad lines connecting it at its eastern
+terminus with the Atlantic and Gulf seaports is less than the aggregate
+connection with any other route."
+
+The Pacific railway surveys had been ordered as the only step which
+Congress in its situation of deadlock could take. Senator Gwin had long
+ago told his fears that the advocates of the disappointed routes would
+unite to hinder the fortunate one. To the South, as to Jefferson Davis,
+Secretary of War, the thirty-second parallel route was satisfactory;
+but there was as little chance of building a railway as there had been
+in 1850. In days to come, discussion of railways might be founded upon
+facts rather than hopes and fears, but either unanimity or compromise
+was in a fairly remote future. The overland traffic, which was assuming
+great volume as the surveys progressed, had yet nearly fifteen years
+before the railway should drive it out of existence. And no railway
+could even be started before war had removed one of the contesting
+sections from the floor of Congress.
+
+Yet in the years since Asa Whitney had begun his agitation the railways
+of the East had constantly expanded. The first bridge to cross the
+Mississippi was under construction when Davis reported in 1855. The
+Illinois Central was opened in 1856. When the Civil War began, the
+railway frontier had become coterminous with the agricultural frontier,
+and both were ready to span the gap which separated them from the
+Pacific.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD
+
+
+It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of the Union Pacific
+Railroad that the period of agitation was approaching probable success
+when the latter was deferred because of the rivalry of sections and
+localities into which the scheme was thrown. From about 1850 until 1853
+it indeed seemed likely that the road would be built just so soon as
+the terminus could be agreed upon. To be sure, there was keen rivalry
+over this; yet the rivalry did not go beyond local jealousies and might
+readily be compromised. After the reports of the surveys were completed
+and presented to Congress the problem took on a new aspect which
+promised postponement until a far greater question could be solved.
+Slavery and the Pacific railroad are concrete illustrations of the two
+horns of the national dilemma.
+
+As a national project, the railway raised the problem of its
+construction under national auspices. Was the United States, or
+should it become, a nation competent to undertake the work? With no
+hesitation, many of the advocates of the measure answered yes. Yet
+even among the friends of the road the query frequently evoked the
+other answer. Slavery had already taken its place as an institution
+peculiar to a single section. Its defence and perpetuation depended
+largely upon proving the contrary of the proposition that the Pacific
+railroad demanded. For the purposes of slavery defence the United
+States must remain a mere federation, limited in powers and lacking in
+the attributes of sovereignty and nationality. Looking back upon this
+struggle, with half a century gone by, it becomes clear that the final
+answer upon both questions, slavery and railway, had to be postponed
+until the more fundamental question of federal character had been
+worked out. The antitheses were clear, even as Lincoln saw them in
+1858. Slavery and localism on the one hand, railway and nationalism on
+the other, were engaged in a vital struggle for recognition. Together
+they were incompatible. One or the other must survive alone. Lincoln
+saw a portion of the problem, and he sketched the answer: "I do not
+expect the Union to be dissolved,--I do not expect the house to fall,
+but I do expect it will cease to be divided."
+
+The stages of the Pacific railroad movement are clearly marked
+through all these squabbles. Agitation came first, until conviction
+and acceptance were general. This was the era of Asa Whitney.
+Reconnoissance and survey followed, in a decade covering approximately
+1847-1857. Organization came last, beginning in tentative schemes which
+counted for little, passing through a long series of intricate debates
+in Congress, and being merged in the larger question of nationality,
+but culminating finally in the first Pacific railroad bills of 1862 and
+1864.
+
+When Congress began its session of 1853-1854, most of the surveying
+parties contemplated by the act of the previous March were still in
+the field. The reports ordered were not yet available, and Congress
+recognized the inexpediency of proceeding farther without the facts.
+It is notable, however, that both houses at this time created select
+committees to consider propositions for a railway. Both of these
+committees reported bills, but neither received sanction even in the
+house of its friends. The next session, 1854-1855, saw the great
+struggle between Douglas and Benton.
+
+Stephen A. Douglas, who had triumphantly carried through his
+Kansas-Nebraska bill in the preceding May, started a railway bill in
+the Senate in 1855. As finally considered and passed by the Senate,
+his bill provided for three railroads: a Northern Pacific, from the
+western border of Wisconsin to Puget Sound; a Southern Pacific, from
+the western border of Texas to the Pacific; and a Central Pacific,
+from Missouri or Iowa to San Francisco. They were to be constructed by
+private parties under contracts to be let jointly by the Secretaries
+of War and Interior and the Postmaster-general. Ultimately they were
+to become the property of the United States and the states through
+which they passed. The House of Representatives, led by Benton in the
+interests of a central road, declined to pass the Douglas measure.
+Before its final rejection, it was amended to please Benton and his
+allies by the restriction to a single trunk line from San Francisco,
+with eastern branches diverging to Lake Superior, Missouri or Iowa, and
+Memphis.
+
+During the two years following the rejection of the Douglas scheme
+by the allied malcontents, the select committees on the Pacific
+railways had few propositions to consider, while Congress paid little
+attention to the general matter. Absorbing interest in politics,
+the new Republican party, and the campaign of 1856 were responsible
+for part of the neglect. The conviction of the dominant Democrats
+that the nation had no power to perform the task was responsible
+for more. The transition from a question of selfish localism to one
+of national policy which should require the whole strength of the
+nation for its solution was under way. The northern friends of the
+railway were disheartened by the southern tendencies of the Democratic
+administration which lasted till 1861. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary
+of War, was followed by Floyd, of Virginia, who believed with his
+predecessor that the southern was the most eligible route. At the same
+time, Aaron V. Brown, of Tennessee, Postmaster-general, was awarding
+the postal contract for an overland mail to Butterfield's southern
+route in spite of the fact that Congress had probably intended the
+central route to be employed.
+
+Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress show the difficulties
+under which the railroad labored. Many bills were started, but few
+could get through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed a bill. In
+1860 the House passed one which the Senate amended to death. In the
+session of 1860-1861 its serious consideration was crowded out by the
+incipiency of war.
+
+Through the long years of debate over the organization of the road, the
+nature of its management and the nature of its governmental aid were
+much in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the United States had
+undertaken no such scheme, while the Cumberland road, vastly less in
+magnitude than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties to
+last a generation. That there must be some connection between the road
+and the public lands had been seen even before Whitney commenced his
+advocacy. The nature of that connection was worked out incidentally to
+other movements while the Whitney scheme was under fire.
+
+The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements in transportation
+had been hinted at as far back as the admission of Ohio, but it had not
+received its full development until the railroad period began. To some
+extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands had been allotted to
+the states to aid in canal building, but when the railroad promoters
+started their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the history
+of the public domain was commenced. The definitive fight over the
+issue of land grants for railways took place in connection with the
+Illinois Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years from 1847 to
+1850.
+
+The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made its appearance
+before the panic of 1837. The northwest states were now building their
+own railroads, and this enterprise was designed to connect the Galena
+lead country with the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi by a road
+running parallel to the Mississippi through the whole length of the
+state of Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran naturally from
+east to west, seeking termini on the Mississippi and at the Alleghany
+crossings. This one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making
+useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a country where yet
+the prairie hen held uncontested sway. There was little population
+or freight to justify it, and hence the project, though it guised
+itself in at least three different corporate garments before 1845,
+failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse railways, on
+whose junctions it had counted, crossed its right-of-way before 1850.
+La Salle, Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its line
+worth marking on a large-scale map, while Chicago was yet under forty
+thousand in population.
+
+Men who in the following decade led the Pacific railway agitation
+promoted the Illinois Central idea in the years immediately preceding
+1850. Both Breese and Douglas of Illinois claimed the parentage of the
+bill which eventually passed Congress in 1850, and by opening the way
+to public aid for railway transportation commenced the period of the
+land-grant railroads. Already in some of the canal grants the method
+of aid had been outlined, alternate sections of land along the line
+of the canal being conveyed to the company to aid it in its work. The
+theory underlying the granting of alternate sections in the familiar
+checker-board fashion was that the public lands, while inaccessible,
+had slight value, but once reached by communication the alternate
+sections reserved by the United States would bring a higher price than
+the whole would have done without the canal, while the construction
+company would be aided without expense to any one. The application of
+this principle to railroads came rather slowly in a Congress somewhat
+disturbed by a doubt as to its power to devote the public resources to
+internal improvements. The sectional character of the Illinois Central
+railway was against it until its promoters enlarged the scheme into a
+Lake-to-Gulf railway by including plans for a continuation to Mobile
+from the Ohio. With southern aid thus enticed to its support, the bill
+became a law in 1850. By its terms, the alternate sections of land in
+a strip ten miles wide were given to the interested states to be used
+for the construction of the Illinois Central and the Mobile and Ohio.
+The grants were made directly to the states because of constitutional
+objections to construction within a state without its consent and
+approval. It was twelve years before Congress was ready to give the
+lands directly to the railroad company.
+
+The decade following the Illinois Central grant was crowded with
+applications from other states for grants upon the same terms. In this
+period of speculative construction before the panic of 1857, every
+western state wanted all the aid it could get. In a single session
+seven states asked for nearly fourteen million acres of land, while
+before 1857 some five thousand miles of railway had been aided by land
+grants.
+
+When Asa Whitney began his agitation for the Pacific railway, he asked
+for a huge land grant, but the machinery and methods of the grants had
+not yet become familiar to Congress. During the subsequent fifteen
+years of agitation and survey the method was worked out, so that when
+political conditions made it possible to build the road, there had
+ceased to be great difficulty in connection with its subsidy.
+
+The sectional problem, which had reached its full development in
+Congress by 1857, prevented any action in the interest of a Pacific
+railway so long as it should remain unchanged. As the bickerings
+widened into war, the railway still remained a practical impossibility.
+But after war had removed from Congress the representatives of the
+southern states the way was cleared for action. When Congress met in
+its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in favor of southern
+routes was silenced by disunion. It remained only to choose among the
+routes lying north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize the
+construction along one of them of the railway which all admitted to be
+possible of construction, and to which military need in preservation of
+the union had now added an imperative quality.
+
+The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a Pacific railway,
+and handed them over to the regular session of 1861-1862 as unfinished
+business. In the lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah, a
+young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave powerful aid to the
+final settlement of route and means. Judah had come east in the autumn
+in company with one of the newly elected California representatives.
+During the long sea voyage he had drilled into his companion, who
+happily was later appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of
+the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem which he had acquired
+in his advocacy of the railway on the Pacific Coast. California had
+begun the construction of local railways several years before the war
+broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant need and prayer. Her own
+corporations were planned with reference to the time when tracks from
+the East should cross her border and find her local creations waiting
+for connections with them.
+
+When the advent of war promised an early maturity for the scheme, a few
+Californians organized the most significant of the California railways,
+the Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company was incorporated,
+having for its leading spirits Judah, its chief engineer, and Collis
+Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford,
+soon to be governor of the state. Its founders were all men of moderate
+means, but they had the best of that foresight and initiative in which
+the frontier was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861 Judah
+prospected for routes across the mountains into Utah territory, where
+the new silver fields around Carson indicated the probable course of a
+route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on to Washington in the
+fall to aid in the quick settlement of the long-debated question.
+
+Judah's interest in a special California road coincided well with the
+needs and desires of Congress. Already various bills were in the hands
+of the select committees of both houses. The southern interest was
+gone. The only remaining rivalries were among St. Louis, Chicago, and
+the new Minnesota; while the first of these was tainted by the doubtful
+loyalty of Missouri, and the last was embarrassed by the newness of its
+territory and its lack of population. The Sioux were yet in control of
+much of the country beyond St. Paul. Out of this rivalry Chicago and a
+central route could emerge triumphant.
+
+The spring of 1862 witnessed a long debate over a Union Pacific
+railroad to meet the new military needs of the United States as well
+as to satisfy the old economic necessities. Why it was called "Union"
+is somewhat in doubt. Bancroft thinks its name was descriptive of the
+various local roads which were bound together in the single continental
+scheme. Davis, on the contrary, is inclined to believe that the name
+was in contrast to the "Disunion" route of the thirty-second parallel,
+since the route chosen was to run entirely through loyal territory.
+Whatever the reason, however, the Union Pacific Railroad Company was
+incorporated on the 1st of July, 1862.
+
+Under the act of incorporation a continental railway was to be
+constructed by several companies. Within the limits of California, the
+Central Pacific of California, already organized and well managed,
+was to have the privilege. Between the boundary line of California
+and Nevada and the hundredth meridian, the new Union Pacific was
+to be the constructing company. On the hundredth meridian, at some
+point between the Republican River in Kansas and the Platte River in
+Nebraska, radiating lines were to advance to various eastern frontier
+points, somewhat after the fashion of Benton's bill of 1855. Thus
+the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western of Kansas was authorized to
+connect this point with the Missouri River, south of the mouth of the
+Kansas, with a branch to Atchison and St. Joseph in connection with
+the Hannibal and St. Joseph of Missouri. The Union Pacific itself was
+required to build two more connections; one to run from the hundredth
+meridian to some point on the west boundary of Iowa, to be fixed by
+the President of the United States, and another to Sioux City, Iowa,
+whenever a line from the east should reach that place.
+
+The aid offered for the construction of these lines was more generous
+than any previously provided by Congress. In the first place, the
+roads were entitled to a right-of-way four hundred feet wide, with
+permission to take material for construction from adjacent parts of the
+public domain. Secondly, the roads were to receive ten sections of land
+for each mile of track on the familiar alternate section principle.
+Finally, the United States was to lend to the roads bonds to the
+amount of $16,000 per mile, on the level, $32,000 in the foothills,
+and $48,000 in the mountains, to facilitate construction. If not
+completed and open by 1876, the whole line was to be forfeited to the
+United States. If completed, the loan of bonds was to be repaid out of
+subsequent earnings.
+
+The Central Pacific of California was prompt in its acceptance of the
+terms of the act of July 1, 1862. It proceeded with its organization,
+broke ground at Sacramento on February 22, 1863, and had a few miles of
+track in operation before the next year closed. But the Union Pacific
+was slow. "While fighting to retain eleven refractory states," wrote
+one irritated critic of the act, "the nation permitted itself to be
+cozened out of territory sufficient to form twelve new republics." Yet
+great as were the offered grants, eastern capital was reluctant to put
+life into the new route across the plains. That it could ever pay, was
+seriously doubted. Chances for more certain and profitable investment
+in the East were frequent in the years of war-time prosperity. Although
+the railroad organized according to the terms of the law, subscribers
+to the stock of the Union Pacific were hard to find, and the road
+lay dormant for two more years until Congress revised its offer and
+increased its terms.
+
+In the session of 1863-1864 the general subject was again approached.
+Writes Davis, "The opinion was almost universal that additional
+legislation was needed to make the Act of 1862 effective, but the
+point where the limit of aid to patriotic capitalists should be set
+was difficult to determine." It was, and remained, the belief of the
+opponents of the bill now passed that "lobbyists, male and female,
+... shysters and adventurers" had much to do with the success of the
+measure. In its most essential parts, the new bill of 1864 increased
+the degree of government aid to the companies. The land grant was
+doubled from ten sections per mile of track to twenty, and the road
+was allowed to borrow of the general public, on first mortgage bonds,
+money to the amount of the United States loan, which was reduced by a
+self-denying ordinance to the status of a second mortgage. With these
+added inducements, the Union Pacific was finally begun.
+
+The project at last under way in 1864-1865, as Davis graphically
+pictures it, "was thoroughly saturated and fairly dripping with the
+elements of adventure and romance." But he overstates his case when he
+goes on to remark that, "Before the building of the Pacific railway
+most of the wide expanse of territory west of the Missouri was _terra
+incognita_ to the mass of Americans." For twenty years the railway had
+been under agitation; during the whole period population had crossed
+the great desert in increasing thousands; new states had banked up
+around its circumference, east, west, and south, while Kansas had been
+thrust into its middle; new camps had dotted its interior. The great
+West was by no means unknown, but with the construction of the railway
+the American frontier entered upon its final phase.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR
+
+
+That the fate of the outlying colonies of the United States should
+have aroused grave concerns at the beginning of the Civil War is not
+surprising. California and Oregon, Carson City, Denver, and the other
+mining camps were indeed on the same continent with the contending
+factions, but the degree of their isolation was so great that they
+might as well have been separated by an ocean. Their inhabitants were
+more mixed than those of any portion of the older states, while in
+several of the communities the parties were so evenly divided as to
+raise doubts of the loyalty of the whole. "The malignant secession
+element of this Territory," wrote Governor Gilpin of Colorado, in
+October, 1861, "has numbered 7,500. It has been ably and secretly
+organized from November last, and requires extreme and extraordinary
+measures to meet and control its onslaught." At best, the western
+population was scanty and scattered over a frontier that still
+possessed its virgin character in most respects, though hovering at
+the edge of a period of transition. An English observer, hopeful for
+the worst, announced in the middle of the war that "When that 'late
+lamented institution,' the once United States, shall have passed
+away, and when, after this detestable and fratricidal war--the most
+disgraceful to human nature that civilization ever witnessed--the New
+World shall be restored to order and tranquility, our shikaris will
+not forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel suffices to
+transport them from fallow deer and pheasant shooting to the haunts of
+the bison and the grizzly bear. There is little chance of these animals
+being 'improved off' the Prairies, or even of their becoming rare
+during the lifetime of the present generation." The factors of most
+consequence in shaping the course of the great plains during the Civil
+War were those of mixed population, of ever present Indian danger, and
+of isolation. Though the plains had no effect upon the outcome of the
+war, the war furthered the work already under way of making known the
+West, clearing off the Indians, and preparing for future settlement.
+
+Like the rest of the United States the West was organized into
+military divisions for whose good order commanding officers were made
+responsible. At times the burden of military control fell chiefly upon
+the shoulders of territorial governors; again, special divisions were
+organized to meet particular needs, and generals of experience were
+detached from the main armies to direct movements in the West.
+
+Among the earliest of the episodes which drew attention to the western
+departments was the resignation of Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding
+the Department of the Pacific, and his rather spectacular flight
+across New Mexico, to join the confederate forces. From various
+directions, federal troops were sent to head him off, but he succeeded
+in evading all these and reaching safety at the Rio Grande by August
+1. Here he could take an overland stage for the rest of his journey.
+The department which he abandoned included the whole West beyond the
+Rockies except Utah and present New Mexico. The country between the
+mountains and Missouri constituted the Department of the West. As the
+war advanced, new departments were created and boundaries were shifted
+at convenience. The Department of the Pacific remained an almost
+constant quantity throughout. A Department of the Northwest, covering
+the territory of the Sioux Indians, was created in September, 1862, for
+the better defence of Minnesota and Wisconsin. To this command Pope was
+assigned after his removal from the command of the Army of Virginia.
+Until the close of the war, when the great leaders were distributed and
+Sheridan received the Department of the Southwest, no detail of equal
+importance was made to a western department.
+
+The fighting on the plains was rarely important enough to receive
+the dignified name of battle. There were plenty of marching and
+reconnoitring, much police duty along the trails, occasional skirmishes
+with organized troops or guerrillas, aggressive campaigns against
+the Indians, and campaigns in defence of the agricultural frontier.
+But the armies so occupied were small and inexperienced. Commonly
+regiments of local volunteers were used in these movements, or returned
+captives who were on parole to serve no more against the confederacy.
+Disciplined veterans were rarely to be found. As a consequence of the
+spasmodic character of the plains warfare and the inferior quality
+of the troops available, western movements were often hampered and
+occasionally made useless.
+
+The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important as any of the military
+operations on the plains. At the beginning of the war the confederate
+forces seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear the way
+for Johnston as he hurried east. The Tucson country was occupied about
+the same time, so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts
+were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the Rio Grande, with New
+Mexico, Utah, and Colorado threatened. In December General Henry
+Hopkins Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops in the upper
+Rio Grande, while Colonel E. R. S. Canby, from Fort Craig, organized
+the resistance against further extension of the confederate power.
+
+Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio Grande country,
+around Santa FĂŠ and Albuquerque, aroused federal apprehensions in the
+winter of 1862. Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened at
+the danger within his own territory, and scarcely needed the order
+which came from Fort Leavenworth through General Hunter to reĂŤnforce
+Canby and look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility easily,
+drew upon the federal treasury for funds which had not been allowed
+him, and shortly had the first Colorado, and a part of the second
+Colorado volunteers marching south to join the defensive columns. It is
+difficult to define this march in terms applicable to movements of war.
+At least one soldier in the second Colorado took with him two children
+and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the regiment and
+praising the chivalry of the soldiers, apparently oblivious of the fact
+that it is not a soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's
+family. But with wife and children, and the degree of individualism and
+insubordination which these imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched
+south to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was sure.
+
+As Sibley pushed up the river, passing Fort Craig and brushing aside
+a small force at Valverde, the Colorado forces reached Fort Union.
+Between Fort Union and Albuquerque, which Sibley entered easily, was
+the turning-point in the campaign. On March 26, 1862, Major J. M.
+Chivington had a successful skirmish at Johnson's ranch in Apache
+CaĂąon, about twenty miles southeast of Santa FĂŠ. Two days later, at
+Pigeon's ranch, a more decisive check was given to the confederates,
+but Colonel John P. Slough, senior volunteer in command, fell back upon
+Fort Union after the engagement, while the confederates were left
+free to occupy Santa FĂŠ. A few days later Slough was deposed in the
+Colorado regiment, Chivington made colonel, and the advance on Santa FĂŠ
+begun again. Sibley, now caught between Canby advancing from Fort Craig
+and Chivington coming through Apache CaĂąon from Fort Union, evacuated
+Santa FĂŠ on April 7, falling back to Albuquerque. The union troops,
+taking Santa FĂŠ on April 12, hurried down the Rio Grande after Sibley
+in his final retreat. New Mexico was saved, and its security brought
+tranquillity to Colorado. The Colorado volunteers were back in Denver
+for the winter of 1862-1863, but Gilpin, whose vigorous and independent
+support had made possible their campaign, had been dismissed from his
+post as governor.
+
+Along the frontier of struggle campaigns of this sort occurred from
+time to time, receiving little attention from the authorities who were
+directing weightier movements at the centre. Less formal than these,
+and more provocative of bitter feeling, were the attacks of guerrillas
+along the central frontier,--chiefly the Missouri border and eastern
+Kansas. Here the passions of the struggle for Kansas had not entirely
+cooled down, southern sympathizers were easily found, and communities
+divided among themselves were the more intense in their animosities.
+
+The Department of Kansas, where the most aggravated of these
+guerrilla conflicts occurred, was organized in November, 1861, under
+Major-general Hunter. From his headquarters at Leavenworth the
+commanding officer directed the affairs of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota,
+Colorado, and "the Indian Territory west of Arkansas." The department
+was often shifted and reshaped to meet the needs of the frontier. A
+year later the Department of the Northwest was cut away from it, after
+the Sioux outbreak, its own name was changed to Missouri, and the
+states of Missouri and Arkansas were added to it. Still later it was
+modified again. But here throughout the war continued the troubles
+produced by the mixture of frontier and farm-lands, partisan whites and
+Indians.
+
+Bushwhacking, a composite of private murder and public attack, troubled
+the Kansas frontier from an early period of the war. It was easily
+aroused because of public animosities, and difficult to suppress
+because its participating parties retired quickly into the body of
+peace-professing citizens. In it, asserted General Order No. 13, of
+June 26, 1862, "rebel fiends lay in wait for their prey to assassinate
+Union soldiers and citizens; it is therefore ... especially directed
+that whenever any of this class of offenders shall be captured, they
+shall not be treated as prisoners of war but be summarily tried by
+drumhead court-martial, and if proved guilty, be executed ... on the
+spot."
+
+In August, 1863, occurred Quantrill's notable raid into Kansas to
+terrify the border which was already harassed enough. The old border
+hatred between Kansas and Missouri had been intensified by the
+"murders, robberies, and arson" which had characterized the irregular
+warfare carried on by both sides. In western Missouri, loyal unionists
+were not safe outside the federal lines; here the guerrillas came and
+went at pleasure; and here, about August 18, Quantrill assembled a
+band of some three hundred men for a foray into Kansas. On the 20th he
+entered Kansas, heading at once for Lawrence, which he surprised on the
+21st. Although the city arsenal contained plenty of arms and the town
+could have mustered 500 men on "half an hour's notice," the guerrilla
+band met no resistance. It "robbed most of the stores and banks, and
+burned one hundred and eighty-five buildings, including one-fourth
+of the private residences and nearly all of the business houses of
+the town, and, with circumstances of the most fiendish atrocity,
+murdered 140 unarmed men." The retreat of Quantrill was followed by
+a vigorous federal pursuit and a partial devastation of the adjacent
+Missouri counties. Kansas, indignant, was in arms at once, protesting
+directly to President Lincoln of the "imbecility and incapacity" of
+Major-general John M. Schofield, commanding the Department of the
+Missouri, "whose policy has opened Kansas to invasion and butchery."
+Instead of carrying out an unimpeded pursuit of the guerrillas,
+Schofield had to devote his strength to keeping the state of Kansas
+from declaring war against and wreaking indiscriminate vengeance upon
+the state of Missouri. A year after Quantrill's raid came Price's
+Missouri expedition, with its pitched battles near Kansas City and
+Westport, and its pursuit through southern Missouri, where confederate
+sympathizers and the partisan politics of this presidential year made
+punitive campaigns anything but easy.
+
+Carleton's march into New Mexico has already been described in
+connection with the mining boom of Arizona. The silver mines of the
+Santa Cruz Valley had drawn American population to Tubac and Tucson
+several years before the war; while the confederate successes in the
+upper Rio Grande in the summer of 1861 had compelled federal evacuation
+of the district. Colonel E. R. S. Canby devoted the small force at his
+command to regaining the country around Albuquerque and Santa FĂŠ, while
+the relief of the forts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado was
+intrusted to Carleton's California Column. After May, 1862, Carleton
+was firmly established in Tucson, and later he was given command of
+the whole Department of New Mexico. Of fighting with the confederates
+there was almost none. He prosecuted, instead, Apache and Navaho wars,
+and exploited the new gold fields which were now found. In much of
+the West, as in his New Mexico, occasional ebullitions of confederate
+sympathizers occurred, but the military task of the commanders was easy.
+
+The military problem of the plains was one of police, with the
+extinction of guerrilla warfare and the pacification of Indians as its
+chief elements. The careers of Canby, Carleton, and Gilpin indicate
+the nature of the western strategic warfare, Schofield's illustrates
+that of guerrilla fighting, the Minnesota outbreak that of the Indian
+relations.
+
+In the Northwest, where the agricultural expansion of the fifties
+had worked so great changes, the pressure on the tribes had steadily
+increased. In 1851 the Sioux bands had ceded most of their territory in
+Minnesota, and had agreed upon a reduced reserve in the St. Peter's,
+or Minnesota, Valley. But the terms of this treaty had been delayed
+in enforcement, while bad management on the part of the United States
+and the habitual frontier disregard of Indian rights created tense
+feelings, which might break loose at any time. No single grievance
+of the Indians caused more trouble than that over traders' claims.
+The improvident savages bought largely of the traders, on credit, at
+extortionate prices. The traders could afford the risk because when
+treaties of cession were made, their influence was generally able to
+get inserted in the treaty a clause for satisfying claims against
+individuals out of the tribal funds before these were handed over to
+the savages. The memory of the savage was short, and when he found that
+his allowance, the price for his lands, had gone into the traders'
+pockets, he could not realize that it had gone to pay his debts, but
+felt, somehow, defrauded. The answer would have been to prevent trade
+with the Indians on credit. But the traders' influence at Washington
+was great. It would be an interesting study to investigate the
+connection between traders' bills and agitation for new cessions, since
+the latter generally meant satisfaction of the former.
+
+Among the Sioux there were factional feelings that had aroused the
+apprehensions of their agents before the war broke out. The "blanket"
+Indians continually mocked at the "farmers" who took kindly to the
+efforts of the United States for their agricultural civilization. There
+was civil strife among the progressives and irreconcilables which made
+it difficult to say what was the disposition of the whole nation. The
+condition was so unstable that an accidental row, culminating in the
+murder of five whites at Acton, in Meeker County, brought down the most
+serious Indian massacre the frontier had yet seen.
+
+There was no more occasion for a general uprising in 1862 than there
+had been for several years. The wiser Indians realized the futility
+of such a course. Yet Little Crow, inclined though he was to peace,
+fell in with the radicals as the tribe discussed their policy; and
+he determined that since a massacre had been commenced they had best
+make it as thorough as possible. Retribution was certain whether they
+continued war or not, and the farmer Indians were unlikely to be
+distinguished from the blankets by angry frontiersmen. The attack fell
+first upon the stores at the lower agency, twenty miles above Fort
+Ridgely, whence refugee whites fled to Fort Ridgely with news of the
+outbreak. All day, on the 18th of August, massacres occurred along
+the St. Peter's, from near New Ulm to the Yellow Medicine River. The
+incidents of Indian war were all there, in surprise, slaughter of women
+and children, mutilation and torture.
+
+The next day, Tuesday the 19th, the increasing bands fell upon the
+rambling village of New Ulm, twenty-eight miles above Mankato, where
+fugitives had gathered and where Judge Charles E. Flandrau hastily
+organized a garrison for defence. He had been at St. Peter's when
+the news arrived, and had led a relief band through the drenching
+rain, reaching New Ulm in the evening. On Wednesday afternoon Little
+Crow, his band still growing--the Sioux could muster some 1300
+warriors--surprised Fort Ridgely, though with no success. On Thursday
+he renewed the attack with a force now dwindling because of individual
+plundering expeditions which drew his men to various parts of the
+neighboring country. On Friday he attacked once more.
+
+On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the river again to renew
+his fight upon New Ulm, which, unmolested since Tuesday, had been
+increasing its defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites in
+a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen, cool and
+determined, of unerring aim; but most were German settlers, recently
+arrived, and often terrified by their new experiences. During the week
+of horrors the depredations covered the Minnesota frontier and lapped
+over into Iowa and Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated,
+or led captive into the wilderness, were common. Stories of those who
+survived these dangers form a large part of the local literature of
+this section of the Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become so
+desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the town and led its
+whole remaining population to safety at Mankato.
+
+Long before the week of suffering was over, aid had been started to
+the harassed frontier. Governor Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to
+Mendota, and there organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota
+Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from him of Rio Grande
+fame, commanded the column and reached St. Peter's with his advance
+on Friday. By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the panic
+and restore peace and repopulate the deserted country. He was now
+joined by Ignatius Donnelly, Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater
+speed. The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th, they had reached
+Fort Ridgely, passing through country "abandoned by the inhabitants;
+the houses, in many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture
+undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors or through the
+cultivated fields." The country had been settled up to the very edge
+of the Fort Ridgely reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only
+partially devastated. Donnelly commented in his report upon the
+prayer-books and old German trunks of "Johann Schwartz," strewn upon
+the ground in one place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored,
+and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent, Thomas J. Galbraith,
+who was at Fort Ridgely during the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737
+whites were known to have been massacred.
+
+Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at first to reconnoitre
+and bury the dead, then to follow the Indians and rescue the captives.
+More than once the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off
+prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify or prevent
+punishment for the original outbreak. Early in September there were
+pitched battles at Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake.
+At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was able not only
+to defeat the tribes and take nearly 2000 prisoners, but to release
+227 women and children, who had been the "prime object," from whose
+"pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The Indians were handed
+over under arrest to Agent Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower
+Agency, and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.
+
+The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's massacre at Spirit
+Lake was still remembered and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in
+battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders escaped. In 1863,
+Pope, who had been called to command a new department in the Northwest,
+organized a general campaign against the tribes, sending Sibley up the
+Minnesota River to drive them west, and Sully up the Missouri to head
+them off, planning to catch and crush them between the two columns.
+The manoeuvre was badly timed and failed, while punishment drifted
+gradually into a prolonged war.
+
+Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with judicial irony, on
+the farmer Sioux who had been drawn reluctantly into the struggle.
+At the Lower Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while
+more than four hundred of their men were singled out for trial for
+murder. Nothing is more significant of the anomalous nature of the
+Indian relation than this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The
+United States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt free to
+punish individuals as though they were citizens of the United States.
+The military commission sat at Redwood for several weeks with the
+missionary and linguist, Rev. S. R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand Jury
+of the court." Three hundred and three were condemned to death by
+the court for murder, rape, and arson, their condemnation starting a
+wave of protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner,
+W. P. Dole. To the indignation of the frontier, naturally revengeful
+and never impartial, President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the
+case of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of them were hanged on
+a single scaffold at Mankato on December 26, 1862. The innocent and
+uncondemned were punished also, when Congress confiscated all their
+Minnesota reserve in 1863, and transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson
+on the Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found for them.
+
+All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota to the Rio Grande,
+were problems that drew the West into the movement of the Civil War.
+The situation was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere did
+the Indians suffer between the millstones as they did in the Indian
+Territory, where the Cherokee and Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and
+Seminole, had been colonized in the years of creation of the Indian
+frontier. For a generation these nations had resided in comparative
+peace and advancing civilization, but they were undone by causes which
+they could not control.
+
+The confederacy was no sooner organized than its commissioners demanded
+of the tribes colonized west of Arkansas their allegiance and support,
+professing to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the
+United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized and better, this
+demand raised difficulties which would have been a strain on any
+diplomacy. If they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate
+forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and already coveting their
+lands, would cut them to pieces. If they adhered to the confederacy and
+the latter lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the United
+States. Yet they were too weak to stand alone and were forced to go
+one way or other. The resulting policy was temporizing and brought to
+them a large measure of punishment from both sides, and the heavy
+subsequent wrath of the United States.
+
+John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation, tried to maintain
+his neutrality at the commencement of the conflict, but the fiction
+of Indian nationality was too slight for his effort to be successful.
+During the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against the
+confederate control to which he succumbed by August, when confederate
+troops had overrun most of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents
+had surrendered United States property to the enemy. The war which
+followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts of Kansas, with the addition
+of the Indian element.
+
+By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate control. When
+the Indian Territory forts--Gibson, Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb--fell
+into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their homes and sought
+protection within the United States lines. Almost the only way to
+fight a war in which a population is generally divided, is by means of
+depopulation and concentration. Along the Verdigris River, in southeast
+Kansas, these Indian refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number
+of 6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as best he could, and
+organized them to fight when that was possible. With the return of
+federal success in the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas
+during the next two years, the natives began to return to their homes.
+But the relation of their tribes to the United States was tainted. The
+compulsory cession of their western lands which came at the close of
+the conflict belongs to a later chapter and the beginnings of Oklahoma.
+Here, as elsewhere, the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.
+
+The great plains and the Far West were only the outskirts of the Civil
+War. At no time did they shape its course, for the Civil War was, from
+their point of view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East,
+and merely an episode in the grander development of the United States.
+The way is opening ever wider for the historian who shall see in this
+material development and progress of civilization the central thread
+of American history, and in accordance with it, retail the story.
+But during the years of sectional strife the West was occasionally
+connected with the struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly
+into a period in which it came to be the admitted centre of interest.
+The last stand of the Indians against the onrush of settlement is a
+warfare with an identity of its own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE CHEYENNE WAR
+
+
+It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous restlessness of
+the Indians during and after the Civil War to the evil machinations of
+the Confederacy. It has been plausible to charge that agents of the
+South passed among the tribes, inciting them to outbreak by pointing
+out the preoccupation of the United States and the defencelessness of
+the frontier. Popular narratives often repeat this charge when dealing
+with the wars and depredations, whether among the Sioux of Minnesota,
+or the Northwest tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians of
+the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus to harass the enemy it
+is not improbable that it would have done it. It is not impossible that
+it actually did it. But at least the charge has not been proved. No one
+has produced direct evidence to show the existence of agents or their
+connection with the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general
+belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs have admitted,
+regretfully, their inability to add incitement of Indians to the
+charges against the South. If such a cause were needed to explain the
+increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth while to search
+further in the hope of establishing it, but nothing occurred in these
+wars which cannot be accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and
+well authenticated.
+
+Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly on friendly terms
+with the United States. Occasional wars broke this friendship, and
+frequent massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another,
+for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the frontiersman was
+reckless and inconsiderate. But the outbreaks were exceptional, they
+were easily put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By 1865
+this condition had changed over most of the West. Warfare had become
+systematic and widely spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks
+in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or at least similar
+reactions from similar provocations. From 1865, for nearly five years,
+these wars continued with only intervals of truce, or professed peace;
+while during a long period after 1870, when most of the tribes were
+suppressed and well policed, upheavals occurred which were clearly to
+be connected with the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from
+peace to war has caused many to charge it to the South. It is, however,
+connected with the culmination of the westward movement, which more
+than explains it.
+
+For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement of the events before
+1861 is needed. By 1840 the agricultural frontier of the United States
+had reached the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes, with
+plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains. In the generation
+following appeared the heavy traffic along the overland trails, the
+advance of the frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific railway
+surveys. Each of these served to compress the Indians and restrict
+their range. Accompanying these came curtailing of reserves, shifting
+of residences to less desirable grounds, and individual maltreatment to
+a degree which makes marvellous the incapacity, weakness, and patience
+of the Indians. Occasionally they struggled, but always they lost. The
+scalped and mutilated pioneer, with his haystacks burning and his stock
+run off, is a vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic
+than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable, and moving to
+let the white man in.
+
+The necessary results of white encroachment were destruction of game
+and education of the Indian to the luxuries and vices of the white man.
+At a time when starvation was threatening because of the disappearance
+of the buffalo and other food animals, he became aware of the
+superior diet of the whites and the ease with which robbery could be
+accomplished. In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier than ever.
+The railway surveys reached nearly every corner of the Indian Country.
+In the next few years came the prospectors who started hundreds of
+mining camps beyond the line of settlements, while the engineers
+began to stick the advancing heads of railways out from the Missouri
+frontier and into the buffalo range.
+
+Even the Indian could see the approaching end. It needed no confederate
+envoy to assure him that the United States could be attacked. His
+own hunger and the white peril were persuading him to defend his
+hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the widespread Indian wars of the
+later sixties, uniformity of action came without much previous
+coĂśperation. A general Indian league against the whites was never
+raised. The general war, upon dissection and analysis, breaks up into a
+multitude of little wars, each having its own particular causes, which,
+in many instances, if the word of the most expert frontiersmen is to be
+believed, ran back into cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.
+
+The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of the general wars,
+with causes rising from the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux
+in 1851. The plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly
+stated in this year. "We are constrained to say," wrote the men who
+made these treaties, "that in our opinion _the time has come_ when the
+extinguishment of the Indian title to this region should no longer
+be delayed, if government would not have the mortification, on the
+one hand, of confessing its inability to protect the Indian from
+encroachment; or be subject to the painful necessity, upon the other,
+of ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a land which they
+desire to make their homes, and which, without their occupancy and
+labor, will be comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties
+concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie were equally the fountains
+of discontent which boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at
+last to one of the most horrible incidents of the plains war.
+
+In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt to partition the
+plains among the tribes was made. The lines agreed upon recognized
+existing conditions to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in
+consideration of which the savages agreed to stay at peace, to allow
+free migration along the trails, and to keep within their boundaries.
+The Sioux here agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The
+Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as lying between the Platte
+and the Arkansas, the mountains and, roughly, the hundred and first
+meridian. For ten years after these treaties the last-named tribes kept
+the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon settlers or emigrants. They
+even allowed the Senate in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the
+term of the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.
+
+In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians lay off the beaten tracks
+and apart from contact with the whites. Their home was in the triangle
+between the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them that
+offered almost insuperable obstacles to those who would cross the
+continent through their domain. The Gunnison railroad survey, which
+was run along the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa
+Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range at this point.
+Accordingly, a decade which built up Oregon and California made little
+impression on this section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry
+Creek. Then came the deluge.
+
+Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on crossed the plains to
+the Pike's Peak country in 1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst
+of the Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than the right of
+transit over these lands," admitted the Peace Commissioners in 1868.
+Yet they "took possession of them for the purpose of mining, and,
+against the protest of the Indians, founded cities, established farms,
+and opened roads. Before 1861 the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven
+from the mountain regions down upon the waters of the Arkansas, and
+were becoming sullen and discontented because of this violation of
+their rights." The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in their
+possession, pledging the United States to prevent depredations by the
+whites, but here, as in most similar cases, the guarantees had no
+weight in the face of a population under way. The Indians were brushed
+aside, the United States agents made no real attempts to enforce the
+treaty, and within a few months the settlers were demanding protection
+against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw their former homes and
+hunting grounds overrun by a greedy population, thirsting for gold,"
+continued the Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east to the
+plains, and soon found themselves the objects of jealousy and hatred.
+They too must go. The presence of the injured is too often painful to
+the wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of guilt. It now
+became apparent that what had been taken by force must be retained
+by the ravisher, and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a
+treaty consecrating the act."
+
+Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho and Cheyenne strove to
+defend their lands and to drive out the intruders, a war in which the
+United States ought to have coĂśperated with the Indians, a treaty of
+cession followed. On February 18, 1861, at Fort Wise, which was the new
+name for Bent's old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed by
+which these tribes gave up much of the great range reserved for them in
+1851, and accepted in its place, with what were believed to be greater
+guarantees, a triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by Sand
+Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by the Arkansas and Purgatory
+rivers; and extending west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand
+Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the Ute on the other
+side of the range, not long after this, are another part of the same
+story of mining aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed to
+remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from under the feet of the restless
+prospectors. For years they had kept the peace in the face of great
+provocation. For three years more they put up with white encroachment
+before their war began.
+
+The Colorado miners, like those of the other boom camps, had been loud
+in their demand for transportation. To satisfy this, overland traffic
+had been organized on a large scale, while during 1862 the stage and
+freight service of the plains fell under the control of Ben Holladay.
+Early in August, 1864, Holladay was nearly driven out of business.
+About the 10th of the month, simultaneous attacks were made along
+his mail line from the Little Blue River to within eighty miles of
+Denver. In the forays, stations were sacked and burned, isolated farms
+were wiped out, small parties on the trails were destroyed. At Ewbank
+Station, a family of ten "was massacred and scalped, and one of the
+females, besides having suffered the latter inhuman barbarity, was
+pinned to the earth by a stake thrust through her person, in a most
+revolting manner; ... at Plum Creek ... nine persons were murdered,
+their train, consisting of ten wagons, burnt, and two women and two
+children captured.... The old Indian traders ... and the settlers ...
+abandoned their habitations." For a distance of 370 miles, Holladay's
+general superintendent declared, every ranch but one was "deserted and
+the property abandoned to the Indians."
+
+Fifteen years after the destruction of his stations, Holladay was still
+claiming damages from the United States and presenting affidavits from
+his men which revealed the character of the attacks. George H. Carlyle
+told how his stage was chased by Indians for twenty miles, how he had
+helped to bury the mutilated bodies of the Plum Creek victims, and how
+within a week the route had to be abandoned, and every ranch from Fort
+Kearney to Julesburg was deserted. The division agent told how property
+had been lost in the hurried flight. To save some of the stock, fodder
+and supplies had to be sacrificed,--hundreds of sacks of corn, scores
+of tons of hay, besides the buildings and their equipment. Nowhere
+were the Indians overbold in their attacks. In small bands they waited
+their time to take the stations by surprise. Well-armed coaches might
+expect to get through with little more than a few random shots, but
+along the hilltops they could often see the savages waiting in safety
+for them to pass. Indian warfare was not one of organized bodies and
+formal manoeuvres. Only when cornered did the Indian stand to fight.
+But in wild, unexpected descents the tribes fell upon the lines of
+communication, reducing the frontier to an abject terror overnight.
+
+The destruction of the stage route was not the first, though it was the
+most general hostility which marked the commencement of a new Indian
+war. Since the spring of 1864 events had occurred which in the absence
+of a more rigorous control than the Indian Department possessed, were
+likely to lead to trouble. The Cheyenne had been dissatisfied with the
+Fort Wise treaty ever since its conclusion. The Sioux were carrying on
+a prolonged war. The Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were ready to be
+started on the war-path. It was the old story of too much compression
+and isolated attacks going unpunished. Whatever the merits of an
+original controversy, the only way to keep the savages under control
+was to make fair retribution follow close upon the commission of an
+outrage. But the punishment needed to be fair.
+
+In April, 1864, a ranchman named Ripley came into one of the camps on
+the South Platte and declared that some Indians had stolen his stock.
+Perhaps his statement was true; but it must be remembered that the
+ranchman whose stock strayed away was prone to charge theft against
+the Indians, and that there is only Ripley's own word that he ever had
+any stock. Captain Sanborn, commanding, sent out a troop of cavalry
+to recover the animals. They came upon some Indians with horses which
+Ripley claimed as his, and in an attempt to disarm them, a fight
+occurred in which the troop was driven off. Their lieutenant thought
+the Indians were Cheyenne.
+
+A few weeks after this, Major Jacob Downing, who had been in Camp
+Sanborn inspecting troops, came into Denver and got from Colonel
+Chivington about forty men, with whom "to go against the Indians."
+Downing later swore that he found the Cheyenne village at Cedar Bluffs.
+"We commenced shooting; I ordered the men to commence killing them....
+They lost ... some twenty-six killed and thirty wounded.... I burnt up
+their lodges and everything I could get hold of.... We captured about
+one hundred head of stock, which was distributed among the boys."
+
+On the 12th of June, a family living on Box Elder Creek, twenty miles
+east of Denver, was murdered by the Indians. Hungate, his wife, and
+two children were killed, the house burned, and fifty or sixty head
+of stock run off. When the "scalped and horribly mangled bodies" were
+brought into Denver, the population, already uneasy, was thrown into
+panic by this appearance of danger so close to the city. Governor Evans
+began at once to organize the militia for home defence and to appeal to
+Washington for help.
+
+By the time of the attack upon the stage line it was clear that an
+Indian war existed, involving in varying degrees parts of the Arapaho,
+Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the causes which
+provoked it were considerably in doubt. On the frontier there was no
+hesitation in charging it all to the innate savagery of the tribes.
+Governor Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the Indians
+might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a general peace on the
+plains, until after a severe chastisement of the Indians for these
+depredations."
+
+In restoring tranquillity the frontier had to rely largely upon its own
+resources. Its own Second Colorado was away doing duty in the Missouri
+campaign, while the eastern military situation presented no probability
+of troops being available to help out the West. Colonel Chivington and
+Governor John Evans, with the long-distance aid of General Curtis,
+were forced to make their own plans and execute them.
+
+As early as June, Governor Evans began his corrective measures,
+appealing first to Washington for permission to raise extra troops,
+and then endeavoring to separate the friendly and warlike Indians in
+order that the former "should not fall victims to the impossibility
+of soldiers discriminating between them and the hostile, upon whom
+they must, to do any good, inflict the most severe chastisement." To
+this end, and with the consent of the Indian Department, he sent out
+a proclamation, addressed to "the friendly Indians of the Plains,"
+directing them to keep away from those who were at war, and as
+evidence of friendship to congregate around the agencies for safety.
+Forts Lyons, Laramie, Larned, and Camp Collins were designated as
+concentration points for the several tribes. "None but those who intend
+to be friendly with the whites must come to these places. The families
+of those who have gone to war with the whites must be kept away
+from among the friendly Indians. The war on hostile Indians will be
+continued until they are all effectually subdued." The Indians, frankly
+at war, paid no attention to this invitation. Two small bands only
+sought the cover of the agencies, and with their exception, so Governor
+Evans reported on October 15, the proclamation "met no response from
+any of the Indians of the plains."
+
+The war parties became larger and more general as the summer advanced,
+driving whites off the plains between the two trails for several
+hundred miles. But as fall approached, the tribes as usual sought
+peace. The Indians' time for war was summer. Without supplies, they
+were unable to fight through the winter, so that autumn brought them
+into a mood well disposed to peace, reservations, and government
+rations. Major Colley, the agent on the Sand Creek reserve at Fort
+Lyon, received an overture early in September. In a letter written for
+them on August 29, by a trader, Black Kettle, of the Cheyenne, and
+other chiefs declared their readiness to make a peace if all the tribes
+were included in it. As an olive branch, they offered to give up seven
+white prisoners. They admitted that five war parties, three Cheyenne
+and two Arapaho, were yet in the field.
+
+Upon receipt of Black Kettle's letter, Major E. W. Wynkoop, military
+commander at Fort Lyon, marched with 130 men to the Cheyenne camp at
+Bend of Timbers, some eighty miles northeast of Fort Lyons. Here he
+found "from six to eight hundred Indian warriors drawn up in line
+of battle and prepared to fight." He avoided fighting, demanded and
+received the prisoners, and held a council with the chiefs. Here he
+told them that he had no authority to conclude a peace, but offered to
+conduct a group of chiefs to Denver, for a conference with Governor
+Evans.
+
+On September 28, Governor Evans held a council with the Cheyenne and
+Arapaho chiefs brought in by Major Wynkoop; Black Kettle and White
+Antelope being the most important. Black Kettle opened the conference
+with an appeal to the governor in which he alluded to his delivery of
+the prisoners and Wynkoop's invitation to visit Denver. "We have come
+with our eyes shut, following his handful of men, like coming through
+the fire," Black Kettle went on. "All we ask is that we may have peace
+with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand. You are our father.
+We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever
+since the war began. These braves who are with me are all willing to do
+what I say. We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they
+may sleep in peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers
+here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace,
+that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies." To him Governor Evans
+responded that this submission was a long time coming, and that the
+nation had gone to war, refusing to listen to overtures of peace. This
+Black Kettle admitted.
+
+"So far as making a treaty now is concerned," continued Governor
+Evans, "we are in no condition to do it.... You, so far, have had the
+advantage; but the time is near at hand when the plains will swarm with
+United States soldiers. I have learned that you understand that as the
+whites are at war among themselves, you think you can now drive the
+whites from this country; but this reliance is false. The Great Father
+at Washington has men enough to drive all the Indians off the plains,
+and whip the rebels at the same time. Now the war with the whites is
+nearly through, and the Great Father will not know what to do with all
+his soldiers, except to send them after the Indians on the plains. My
+proposition to the friendly Indians has gone out; [I] shall be glad
+to have them all come in under it. I have no new proposition to make.
+Another reason that I am not in a condition to make a treaty is that
+war is begun, and the power to make a treaty of peace has passed to
+the great war chief." He further counselled them to make terms with
+the military authorities before they could hope to talk of peace.
+No prospect of an immediate treaty was given to the chiefs. Evans
+disclaimed further powers, and Colonel Chivington closed the council,
+saying: "I am not a big war chief, but all the soldiers in this
+country are at my command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians
+is to fight them until they lay down their arms and submit." The same
+evening came a despatch from Major-general Curtis, at Fort Leavenworth,
+confirming the non-committal attitude of Evans and Chivington: "I want
+no peace till the Indians suffer more.... I fear Agent of the Interior
+Department will be ready to make presents too soon.... No peace must be
+made without my directions."
+
+The chiefs were escorted home without their peace or any promise of it,
+Governor Evans believing that the great body of the tribes was still
+hostile, and that a decisive winter campaign was needed to destroy
+their lingering notion that the whites might be driven from the plains.
+Black Kettle had been advised at the council to surrender to the
+soldiers, Major Wynkoop at Fort Lyon being mentioned as most available.
+Many of his tribe acted on the suggestion, so that on October 20 Agent
+Colley, their constant friend, reported that "nearly all the Arapahoes
+are now encamped near this place and desire to remain friendly, and
+make reparation for the damages committed by them."
+
+The Indians unquestionably were ready to make peace after their fashion
+and according to their ability. There is no evidence that they were
+reconciled to their defeat, but long experience had accustomed them
+to fighting in the summer and drawing rations as peaceful in the
+winter. The young men, in part, were still upon the war-path, but the
+tribes and the head chiefs were anxious to go upon a winter basis.
+Their interpreter who had attended the conference swore that they left
+Denver, "perfectly contented, deeming that the matter was settled,"
+that upon their return to Fort Lyon, Major Wynkoop gave them permission
+to bring their families in under the fort where he could watch them
+better; and that "accordingly the chiefs went after their families and
+villages and brought them in, ... satisfied that they were in perfect
+security and safety."
+
+While the Indians gathered around the fort, Major Wynkoop sent to
+General Curtis for advice and orders respecting them. Before the
+orders arrived, however, he was relieved from command and Major Scott
+J. Anthony, of the First Colorado Cavalry, was detailed in his place.
+After holding a conference with the Indians and Anthony, in which the
+latter renewed the permission for the bands to camp near the fort, he
+left Fort Lyons on November 26. Anthony meanwhile had become convinced
+that he was exceeding his authority. First he disarmed the savages,
+receiving only a few old and worn-out weapons. Then he returned these
+and ordered the Indians away from Fort Lyons. They moved forty miles
+away and encamped on Sand Creek.
+
+The Colorado authorities had no idea of calling it a peace. Governor
+Evans had scolded Wynkoop for bringing the chiefs in to Denver. He had
+received special permission and had raised a hundred-day regiment for
+an Indian campaign. If he should now make peace, Washington would think
+he had misrepresented the situation and put the government to needless
+expense. "What shall I do with the third regiment, if I make peace?" he
+demanded of Wynkoop. They were "raised to kill Indians, and they must
+kill Indians."
+
+Acting on the supposition that the war was still on, Colonel Chivington
+led the Third Colorado, and a part of the First Colorado Cavalry, from
+900 to 1000 strong, to Fort Lyons in November, arriving two days
+after Wynkoop departed. He picketed the fort, to prevent the news of
+his arrival from getting out, and conferred on the situation with
+Major Anthony, who, swore Major Downing, wished he would attack the
+Sand Creek camp and would have done so himself had he possessed troops
+enough. Three days before, Anthony had given a present to Black Kettle
+out of his own pocket. As the result of the council of war, Chivington
+started from Fort Lyon at nine o'clock, on the night of the 28th.
+
+About daybreak on November 29 Chivington's force reached the Cheyenne
+village on Sand Creek, where Black Kettle, White Antelope, and some
+500 of their band, mostly women and children, were encamped in the
+belief that they had made their peace. They had received no pledge of
+this, but past practice explained their confidence. The village was
+surrounded by troops who began to fire as soon as it was light. "We
+killed as many as we could; the village was destroyed and burned,"
+declared Downing, who further professed, "I think and earnestly
+believe the Indians to be an obstacle to civilization, and should be
+exterminated." White Antelope was killed at the first attack, refusing
+to leave the field, stating that it was the fault of Black Kettle,
+others, and himself that occasioned the massacre, and that he would
+die. Black Kettle, refusing to leave the field, was carried off by his
+young men. The latter had raised an American flag and a white flag in
+his effort to stop the fight.
+
+The firing began, swore interpreter Smith, on the northeast side of
+Sand Creek, near Black Kettle's lodge. Driven thence, the disorderly
+horde of savages retreated to War Bonnet's lodge at the upper end of
+the village, some few of them armed but most making no resistance. Up
+the dry bottom of Sand Creek they ran, with the troops in wild charge
+close behind. In the hollows of the banks they sought refuge, but the
+soldiers dragged them out, killing seventy or eighty with the worst
+barbarities Smith had seen: "All manner of depredations were inflicted
+on their persons; they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men
+used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked
+them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated
+their bodies in every sense of the word." The affidavits of soldiers
+engaged in the attack are printed in the government documents. They are
+too disgusting to be more than referred to elsewhere.
+
+Here at last was the culmination of the plains war of 1864 in the
+"Chivington massacre," which has been the centre of bitter controversy
+ever since its heroes marched into Denver with their bloody trophies.
+It was without question Indian fighting at its worst, yet it was
+successful in that the Indian hostilities stopped and a new treaty was
+easily obtained by the whites in 1865. The East denounced Chivington,
+and the Indian Commissioner described the event in 1865 as a butchery
+"in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States."
+"Comment cannot magnify the horror," said the _Nation_. The heart of
+the question had to do with the matter of good faith. At no time did
+the military or Colorado authorities admit or even appear to admit that
+the war was over. They regarded the campaign as punitive and necessary
+for the foundation of a secure peace. The Indians, on the other hand,
+believed that they had surrendered and were anxious to be let alone.
+Too often their wish in similar cases had been gratified, to the
+prolongation of destructive wars. What here occurred was horrible from
+any standard of civilized criticism. But even among civilized nations
+war is an unpleasant thing, and war with savages is most merciful, in
+the long run, when it speaks the savages' own tongue with no uncertain
+accent. That such extreme measures could occur was the result of the
+impossible situation on the plains. "My opinion," said Agent Colley,
+"is that white men and wild Indians cannot live in the same country
+in peace." With several different and diverging authorities over
+them, with a white population wanting their reserves and anxious
+for a provocation that might justify retaliation upon them, little
+difficulties were certain to lead to big results. It was true that the
+tribes were being dispossessed of lands which they believed to belong
+to them. It was equally true that an Indian war could terrify a whole
+frontier and that stern repression was its best cure. The blame which
+was accorded to Chivington left out of account the terror in Colorado,
+which was no less real because the whites were the aggressors. The
+slaughter and mutilation of Indian women and children did much to
+embitter Eastern critics, who did not realize that the only way to
+crush an Indian war is to destroy the base of supplies,--the camp
+where the women are busy helping to keep the men in the field; and who
+overlooked also the fact that in the mĂŞlĂŠe the squaws were quite as
+dangerous as the bucks. Indiscriminate blame and equally indiscriminate
+praise have been accorded because of the Sand Creek affair. The
+terrible event was the result of the orderly working of causes over
+which individuals had little control.
+
+In October, 1865, a peace conference was held on the Little Arkansas at
+which terms were agreed upon with Apache, Kiowa and Comanche, Arapaho
+and Cheyenne, while the last named surrendered their reserve at Sand
+Creek. For four years after this, owing to delays in the Senate and
+ambiguity in the agreements, they had no fixed abode. Later they were
+given room in the Indian Territory in lands taken from the civilized
+tribes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE SIOUX WAR
+
+
+The struggle for the possession of the plains worked the displacement
+of the Indian tribes. At the beginning, the invasion of Kansas had
+undone the work accomplished in erecting the Indian frontier. The
+occupation of Minnesota led surely to the downfall and transportation
+of the Sioux of the Mississippi. Gold in Colorado attracted multitudes
+who made peace impossible for the Indians of the southern plains. The
+Sioux of the northern plains came within the influence of the overland
+march in the same years with similar results.
+
+The northern Sioux, commonly known as the Sioux of the plains, and
+distinguished from their relatives the Sioux of the Mississippi, had
+participated in the treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, had granted rights
+of transit to the whites, and had been recognized themselves as nomadic
+bands occupying the plains north of the Platte River. Heretofore they
+had had no treaty relations with the United States, being far beyond
+the frontier. Their people, 16,000 perhaps, were grouped roughly in
+various bands: BrulĂŠ, Yankton, Yanktonai, Blackfoot, Hunkpapa, Sans
+Arcs, and Miniconjou. Their dependence on the chase made them more
+dependent on the annuities provided them at Laramie. As the game
+diminished the annuity increased in relative importance, and scarcely
+made a fair equivalent for what they lost. Yet on the whole, they
+imitated their neighbors, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and kept the peace.
+
+Almost the only time that the pledge was broken was in the autumn of
+1854. Continual trains of immigrants passing through the Sioux country
+made it nearly impossible to prevent friction between the races in
+which the blame was quite likely to fall upon the timorous homeseekers.
+On August 17, 1854, a cow strayed away from a band of Mormons encamped
+a few miles from Fort Laramie. Some have it that the cow was lame, and
+therefore abandoned; but whatever the cause, the cow was found, killed,
+and eaten by a small band of hungry Miniconjou Sioux. The charge of
+theft was brought into camp at Laramie, not by the Mormons, but by The
+Bear, chief of the BrulĂŠ, and Lieutenant Grattan with an escort of
+twenty-nine men, a twelve-pounder and a mountain howitzer, was sent out
+the next day to arrest the Indian who had slaughtered the animal. At
+the Indian village the culprit was not forthcoming, Grattan's drunken
+interpreter roughened a diplomacy which at best was none too tactful,
+and at last the troops fired into the lodge which was said to contain
+the offender. No one of the troops got away from the enraged Sioux,
+who, after their anger had led them to retaliate, followed it up by
+plundering the near-by post of the fur company. Commissioner Manypenny
+believed that this action by the troops was illegal and unnecessary
+from the start, since the Mormons could legally have been reimbursed
+from the Indian funds by the agent.
+
+No general war followed this outbreak. A few braves went on the
+war-path and rumors of great things reached the East, but General
+Harney, sent out with three regiments to end the Sioux war in 1855,
+found little opposition and fought only one important battle. On the
+Little Blue Water, in September, 1855, he fell upon Little Thunder's
+band of BrulĂŠ Sioux and killed or wounded nearly a hundred of them.
+There is some doubt whether this band had anything to do with the
+Grattan episode, or whether it was even at war, but the defeat was,
+as Agent Twiss described it, "a thunderclap to them." For the first
+time they learned the mighty power of the United States, and General
+Harney made good use of this object lesson in the peace council which
+he held with them in March, 1856. The treaty here agreed upon was
+never legalized, and remained only a sort of _modus vivendi_ for the
+following years. The Sioux tribes were so loosely organized that the
+authority of the chiefs had little weight; young braves did as they
+pleased regardless of engagements supposed to bind the tribes. But the
+lesson of the defeat lasted long in the memory of the plains tribes,
+so that they gave little trouble until the wars of 1864 broke out.
+Meanwhile Chouteau's old Fort Pierre on the Missouri was bought by the
+United States and made a military post for the control of these upper
+tribes.
+
+Before the plains Sioux broke out again, the Minnesota uprising had led
+the Mississippi Sioux to their defeat. Some were executed in the fall
+of 1862, others were transported to the Missouri Valley; still others
+got away to the Northwest, there to continue a profitless war that kept
+up fighting for several years. Meanwhile came the plains war of 1864
+in which the tribes south of the Platte were chiefly concerned, and in
+which men at the centre of the line thought there were evidences of
+an alliance between northern and southern tribes. Thus Governor Evans
+wrote of "information furnished me, through various sources, of an
+alliance of the Cheyenne and a part of the Arapahoe tribes with the
+Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians of the south, and the great family
+of the Sioux Indians of the north upon the plains," and the Indian
+Commissioner accepted the notion. But, like the question of intrigue,
+this was a matter of belief rather than of proof; while local causes to
+account for the disorder are easily found. Yet it is true that during
+1864 and 1865 the northern Sioux became uneasy.
+
+During 1865, though the causes likely to lead to hostilities were in
+no wise changed, efforts were made to reach agreements with the plains
+tribes. The Cheyenne, humbled at Sand Creek, were readily handled at
+the Little Arkansas treaty in October. They there surrendered to the
+United States all their reserve in Colorado and accepted a new one,
+which they never actually received, south of the Arkansas, and bound
+themselves not to camp within ten miles of the route to Santa FĂŠ. On
+the other side, "to heal the wounds caused by the Chivington affair,"
+special appropriations were made by the United States to the widows and
+orphans of those who had been killed. The Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche
+joined in similar treaties. During the same week, in 1865, a special
+commission made treaties of peace with nine of the Sioux tribes,
+including the remnants of the Mississippi bands. "These treaties were
+made," commented the Commissioner, "and the Indians, in spite of the
+great suffering from cold and want of food endured during the very
+severe winter of 1865-66, and consequent temptation to plunder to
+procure the absolute necessaries of life, faithfully kept the peace."
+
+In September, 1865, the steamer _Calypso_ struggled up the shallow
+Missouri River, carrying a party of commissioners to Fort Sully, there
+to make these treaties with the Sioux. Congress had provided $20,000
+for a special negotiation before adjourning in March, 1865, and General
+Sully, who was yet conducting the prolonged Sioux War, had pointed out
+the place most suitable for the conference. The first council was held
+on October 6.
+
+The military authorities were far from eager to hold this council.
+Already the breach between the military power responsible for policing
+the plains and the civilian department which managed the tribes was
+wide. Thus General Pope, commanding the Department of the Missouri,
+grumbled to Grant in June that whenever Indian hostilities occurred,
+the Indian Department, which was really responsible, blamed the
+soldiers for causing them. He complained of the divided jurisdiction
+and of the policy of buying treaties from the tribes by presents made
+at the councils. In reference to this special treaty he had "only to
+say that the Sioux Indians have been attacking everybody in their
+region of country; and only lately ... attacked in heavy force Fort
+Rice, on the upper Missouri, well fortified and garrisoned by four
+companies of infantry with artillery. If these things show any desire
+for peace, I confess I am not able to perceive it."
+
+In future years this breach was to become wider yet. At Sand Creek the
+military authorities had justified the attack against the criticism of
+the local Indian agents and Eastern philanthropists. There was indeed
+plenty of evidence of misconduct on both sides. If the troops were
+guilty on the charge of being over-ready to fight--and here the words
+of Governor Evans were prophetic, "Now the war ... is nearly through,
+and the Great Father will not know what to do with all his soldiers,
+except to send them after the Indians on the plains,"--the Indian
+agents often succumbed to the opportunity for petty thieving. The case
+of one of the agents of the Yankton Sioux illustrates this. It was his
+custom each year to have the chiefs of his tribe sign general receipts
+for everything sent to the agency. Thus at the end of the year he could
+turn in Indians' vouchers and report nothing on hand. But the receipt
+did not mean that the Indian had got the goods; although signed for,
+these were left in the hands of the agent to be given out as needed.
+The inference is strong that many of the supplies intended for and
+signed for by the Indians went into the pocket of the agent. During the
+third quarter of 1863 this agent claimed to have issued to his charges:
+"One pair of bay horses, 7 years old; ... 1 dozen 17-inch mill files;
+... 6 dozen Seidlitz powders; 6 pounds compound syrup of squills; 6
+dozen Ayer's pills; ... 3 bottles of rose water; ... 1 pound of wax;
+... 1 ream of vouchers; ... 1/2 M 6434 8-1/2-inch official envelopes;
+... 4 bottles 8-ounce mucilage." So great was this particular agent's
+power that it was nearly impossible to get evidence against him. "If
+I do, he will fix it so I'll never get anything in the world and he
+will drive me out of the country," was typical of the attitude of his
+neighbors.
+
+With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for it quarrelling, it
+is no wonder that the charges suffered. But the ill results came more
+from the impossible situation than from abuse on either side. It needs
+often to be reiterated that the heart of the Indian question was in the
+infiltration of greedy, timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who
+could not be restrained by any process known to American government. In
+the conflict between two civilizations, the lower must succumb. Neither
+the War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible for most of
+the troubles; yet of the two, the former, through readiness to fight
+and to hold the savage to a standard of warfare which he could not
+understand, was the greater offender. It was not so great an offender,
+however, as the selfish interests of those engaged in trading with the
+Indians would make it out to be.
+
+The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty signed on October
+10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory. Many of the western Sioux did
+not come at all. Even the eastern were only partially represented.
+And among tribes in which the central authority of the chiefs was
+weak, full representation was necessary to secure a binding peace. The
+commissioners, after most pacific efforts, were "unable to ascertain
+the existence of any really amicable feeling among these people towards
+the government." The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the treaty
+which resulted did little more than repeat the terms of the treaty of
+1851, binding the Indians to permit roads to be opened through their
+country and to keep away from the trails.
+
+It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were bound by the
+treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie treaty of 1851 had never had full
+force of law because the Senate had added amendments to it, which
+all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although Congress had
+appropriated the annuities specified in the treaty the binding force
+of the document was not great on savages. The Fort Sully treaty was
+deficient in that it did not represent all of the interested tribes.
+In making Indian treaties at all, the United States acted upon a
+convenient fiction that the Indians had authorities with power to bind;
+whereas the leaders had little control over their followers and after
+nearly every treaty there were many bands that could claim to have
+been left out altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed,
+and the United States proceeded in 1865 and 1866 to use its specified
+rights in opening roads through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.
+
+The mines of Montana and Idaho, which had attracted notice and
+emigration in the early sixties, were still the objective points of
+a large traffic. They were somewhat off the beaten routes, being
+accessible by the Missouri River and Fort Benton, or by the Platte
+trail and a northern branch from near Fort Hall to Virginia City. To
+bring them into more direct connection with the East an available route
+from Fort Laramie was undertaken in 1865. The new trail left the main
+road near Fort Laramie, crossed to the north side of the Platte, and
+ran off to the northwest. Shortly after leaving the Platte the road got
+into the charming foothill country where the slopes "are all covered
+with a fine growth of grass, and in every valley there is either a
+rushing stream or some quiet babbling brook of pure, clear snow-water
+filled with trout, the banks lined with trees--wild cherry, quaking
+asp, some birch, willow, and cottonwood." To the left, and not far
+distant, were the Big Horn Mountains. To the right could sometimes be
+seen in the distance the shadowy billows of the Black Hills. Running to
+the north and draining the valley were the Powder and Tongue rivers,
+both tributaries of the Yellowstone. Here were water, timber, and
+forage, coal and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the Indians,
+"the very heart of their hunting-grounds." In a single day's ride were
+seen "bear, buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens."
+With little exaggeration it was described as a "natural source of
+recuperation and supply to moving, hunting, and roving bands of all
+tribes, and their lodge trails cross it in great numbers from north to
+south." Through this land, keeping east of the Big Horn Mountains and
+running around their northern end into the Yellowstone Valley, was to
+run the new Powder River road to Montana. The Sioux treaties were to
+have their severest testing in the selection of choice hunting-grounds
+for an emigrant road, for it was one of the certainties in the opening
+of new roads that game vanished in the face of emigration.
+
+While the commissioners were negotiating their treaty at Fort Sully,
+the first Powder River expedition, in its attempt to open this new road
+by the short and direct route from Fort Laramie to Bozeman and the
+Montana mines, was undoing their work. In the summer of 1865 General
+Patrick E. Connor, with a miscellaneous force of 1600, including a
+detachment of ex-Confederate troops who had enlisted in the United
+States army to fight Indians, started from Fort Laramie for the mouth
+of the Rosebuds on the Yellowstone, by way of the Powder River. Old
+Jim Bridger, the incarnation of this country, led them, swearing
+mightily at "these damn paper-collar soldiers," who knew so little of
+the Indians. There was plenty of fighting as Connor pushed into the
+Yellowstone, but he was relieved from command in September and the
+troops were drawn back, so that there were no definitive results of the
+expedition of 1865.
+
+In 1866, in spite of the fact that the Sioux of this region, through
+their leader Red Cloud, had refused to yield the ground or even to
+treat concerning it, Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered by General
+Pope to command the Mountain District, Department of the Platte, and to
+erect and garrison posts for the control of the Powder River road. On
+December 21 of this year, Captain W. J. Fetterman, of his command, and
+seventy-eight officers and men were killed near Fort Philip Kearney in
+a fight whose merits aroused nearly as much acrimonious discussion as
+the Sand Creek massacre.
+
+[Illustration: RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH
+
+From a cut lent by Professor Warren K. Moorehead, of Andover, Mass.]
+
+The events leading up to the catastrophe at Fort Philip Kearney, a
+catastrophe so complete that none of its white participants escaped
+to tell what happened, were connected with Carrington's work in
+building forts. He had been detailed for the work in the spring, and
+after a conference at Fort Kearney, Nebraska, with General Sherman,
+had marched his men in nineteen days to Fort Laramie. He reached Fort
+Reno, which became his headquarters, on June 28. On the march, if his
+orders were obeyed, his soldiers were scrupulous in their regard for
+the Indians. His orders issued for the control of emigrants passing
+along the Powder River route were equally careful. Thirty men were
+to constitute the minimum single party; these were to travel with a
+military pass, which was to be scrutinized by the commanding officer
+of each post. The trains were ordered to hold together and were
+warned that "nearly all danger from Indians lies in the recklessness
+of travellers. A small party, when separated, either sell whiskey to
+or fire upon scattering Indians, or get into disputes with them, and
+somebody is hurt. An insult to an Indian is resented by the Indians
+against the first white men they meet, and innocent travellers suffer."
+
+Carrington's orders were to garrison Fort Reno and build new forts
+on the Powder, Big Horn, and Yellowstone rivers, and cover the road.
+The last-named fort was later cut away because of his insufficient
+force, but Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith were located
+during July and August. The former stood on a little plateau formed
+between the two Pineys as they emerge from the Big Horn Mountains.
+Its site was surveyed and occupied on July 15. Already Carrington was
+complaining that he had too few men for his work. With eight companies
+of eighty men each, and most of these new recruits, he had to garrison
+his long line, all the while building and protecting his stockades
+and fortifications. "I am my own engineer, draughtsman, and visit
+my pickets and guards nightly, with scarcely a day or night without
+attempts to steal stock." Worse than this, his military equipment was
+inadequate. Only his band, specially armed for the expedition, had
+Spencer carbines and enough ammunition. His main force, still armed
+with Springfield rifles, had under fifty rounds to the man.
+
+The Indians, Cheyenne and Sioux, were, all through the summer, showing
+no sign of accepting the invasion of the hunting-grounds without a
+fight. Yet Carrington reported on August 29 that he was holding them
+off; that Fort C. F. Smith on the Big Horn had been occupied; that
+parties of fifty well-armed men could get through safely if they were
+careful. The Indians, he said, "are bent on robbery; they only fight
+when assured of personal security and remunerative stealings; they are
+divided among themselves."
+
+With the sites for forts C. F. Smith and Philip Kearney selected,
+the work of construction proceeded during the autumn. A sawmill,
+sent out from the states, was kept hard at work. Wood was cut on the
+adjacent hills and speedily converted into cabins and palisades
+which approached completion before winter set in. It was construction
+during a state of siege, however. Instead of pacifying the valley
+the construction of the forts aggravated the Sioux hostility so that
+constant watchfulness was needed. That the trains sent out to gather
+wood were not seriously injured was due to rigorous discipline. The
+wagons moved twenty or more at a time, with guards, and in two parallel
+columns. At first sight of Indians they drove into corral and signalled
+back to the lookouts at the fort for help. Occasionally men were indeed
+cut out by the Indians, who in turn suffered considerable loss; but
+Carrington reduced his own losses to a minimum. Friendly Indians were
+rarely seen. They were allowed to come to the fort, by the main road
+and with a white flag, but few availed themselves of the privilege. The
+Sioux were up in arms, and in large numbers hung about the Tongue and
+Powder river valleys waiting for their chance.
+
+Early in December occurred an incident revealing the danger of
+annihilation which threatened Carrington's command. At one o'clock on
+the afternoon of the sixth a messenger reported to the garrison at Fort
+Philip Kearney that the wood train was attacked by Indians four miles
+away. Carrington immediately had every horse at the post mounted. For
+the main relief he sent out a column under Brevet Lieutenant-colonel
+Fetterman, who had just arrived at the fort, while he led in person a
+flanking party to cut off the Indians' retreat. The mercury was below
+zero. Carrington was thrown into the water of Peno Creek when his
+horse stumbled through breaking ice. Fetterman's party found the wood
+train in corral and standing off the attack with success. The savages
+retreated as the relief approached and were pursued for five miles,
+when they turned and offered battle. Just as the fighting began, most
+of the cavalry broke away from Fetterman, leaving him and some fourteen
+others surrounded by Indians and attacked on three sides. He held them
+off, however, until Carrington came in sight and the Indians fled.
+Why Lieutenant Bingham retreated with his cavalry and left Fetterman
+in such danger was never explained, for the Indians killed him and
+one of his non-commissioned officers, while several other privates
+were wounded. The Indians, once the fight was over, disappeared among
+the hills, and Carrington had no force with which to follow them. In
+reporting the battle that night he renewed his requests for men and
+officers. He had but six officers for the six companies at Fort Philip
+Kearney. He was totally unable to take the aggressive because of the
+defences which had constantly to be maintained.
+
+In this fashion the fall advanced in the Powder River Valley. The forts
+were finished. The Indian hostilities increased. The little, overworked
+force of Carrington, chopping, building, guarding, and fighting,
+struggled to fulfil its orders. If one should criticise Carrington,
+the attack would be chiefly that he looked to defensive measures in the
+Indian war. He did indeed ask for troops, officers, and equipment, but
+his despatches and his own vindication show little evidence that he
+realized the need for large reĂŤnforcements for the specific purpose of
+a punitive campaign. More skilful Indian fighters knew that the Indians
+could and would keep up indefinitely this sort of filibustering against
+the forts, and that a vigorous move against their own villages was the
+surest means to secure peace. In Indian warfare, even more perhaps
+than in civilized, it is advantageous to destroy the enemy's base of
+supplies.
+
+The wood train was again attacked on December 21. About eleven o'clock
+that morning the pickets reported the train "corralled and threatened
+by Indians on Sullivant Hills, a mile and a half from the fort." The
+usual relief party was at once organized and sent out under Fetterman,
+who claimed the right to command it by seniority, and who was not
+highest in the confidence of Colonel Carrington. He had but recently
+joined the command, was full of enthusiasm and desire to hunt Indians,
+and needed the admonition with which he left the fort: that he was
+"fighting brave and desperate enemies who sought to make up by cunning
+and deceit all the advantage which the white man gains by intelligence
+and better arms." He was ordered to support and bring in the wood
+train, this being all Carrington believed himself strong enough to do
+and keep on doing. Any one could have had a fight at any time, and
+Carrington was wise to issue the "peremptory and explicit" orders to
+avoid pursuit beyond the summit of Lodge Trail Ridge, as needless and
+unduly dangerous. Three times this order was given to Fetterman; and
+after that, "fearing still that the spirit of ambition might override
+prudence," says Carrington, "I crossed the parade and from a sentry
+platform halted the cavalry and again repeated my precise orders."
+
+With these admonitions, Fetterman started for the relief, leading a
+party of eighty-one officers and men, picked and all well armed. He
+crossed the Lodge Trail Ridge as soon as he was out of sight of the
+fort and disappeared. No one of his command came back alive. The wood
+train, before twelve o'clock, broke corral and moved on in safety,
+while shots were heard beyond the ridge. For half an hour there was a
+constant volleying; then all was still. Meanwhile Carrington, nervous
+at the lack of news from Fetterman, had sent a second column, and two
+wagons to relieve him, under Captain Ten Eyck. The latter, moving
+along cautiously, with large bands of Sioux retreating before him,
+came finally upon forty-nine bodies, including that of Fetterman.
+The evidence of arrows, spears, and the position of bodies was that
+they had been surrounded, surprised, and overwhelmed in their defeat.
+The next day the rest of the bodies were reached and brought back.
+Naked, dismembered, slashed, visited with indescribable indignities,
+they were buried in two great graves; seventy-nine soldiers and two
+civilians.
+
+The Fetterman massacre raised a storm in the East similar in volume
+to that following Sand Creek, two years before. Who was at fault, and
+why, were the questions indignantly asked. Judicious persons were well
+aware, wrote the _Nation_, that "our whole Indian policy is a system of
+mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse." The military
+authorities tried to place the blame on Carrington, as plausible,
+energetic, and industrious, but unable to maintain discipline or
+inspire his officers with confidence. Unquestionably a part of this
+was true, yet the letter which made the charge admitted that often the
+Indians were better armed than the troops, and the critic himself,
+General Cooke, had ordered Carrington: "You can only defend yourself
+and trains, and emigrants, the best you can." The Indian Commissioner
+charged it on the bad disposition of the troops, always anxious to
+fight.
+
+The issue broke over the number of Indians involved. Current reports
+from Fort Philip Kearney indicated from 3000 to 5000 hostile
+warriors, chiefly Sioux and led by Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe. The
+Commissioner pointed out that such a force must imply from 21,000 to
+35,000 Indians in all--a number that could not possibly have been in
+the Powder River country. It is reasonable to believe that Fetterman
+was not overwhelmed by any multitude like this, but that his own
+rash disobedience led to ambush and defeat by a force well below
+3000. Upon him fell the immediate responsibility; above him, the War
+Department was negligent in detailing so few men for so large a task;
+and ultimately there was the impossibility of expecting savage Sioux to
+give up their best hunting-grounds as a result of a treaty signed by
+others than themselves.
+
+The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of transition in Indian
+warfare. Even here the Indians were mostly armed with bows and arrows,
+and were relying upon their superior numbers for victory. Yet a change
+in Indian armament was under way, which in a few years was to convert
+the Indian from a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in
+the world." He was being armed with rifles. As the game diminished
+the tribes found that the old methods of hunting were inadequate and
+began the pressure upon the Indian Department for better weapons. The
+department justified itself in issuing rifles and ammunition, on the
+ground that the laws of the United States expected the Indians to
+live chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure by the older
+means. Hence came the anomalous situation in which one department
+of the United States armed and equipped the tribes for warfare
+against another. If arms were cut down, the tribes were in danger of
+extinction; if they were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the
+Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that the hostile Sioux
+were merely hungry, because the War Department had caused the issuing
+of guns to be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with bad
+temper and suspicion on both sides.
+
+A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud tried again to wreck
+a wood train near Fort Philip Kearney. But this time the escort erected
+a barricade with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety of army
+wagon, and though deserted by most of his men, Major James Powell, with
+one other officer, twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind
+their fortification and repelled charge after charge from some 800
+Sioux and Cheyenne. With little loss to himself he inflicted upon the
+savages a lesson that lasted many years.
+
+The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the chain of Indian outbreaks
+that stretched across the path of the westward movement, the overland
+traffic and the continental railways. The Pacific railways had been
+chartered just as the overland telegraph had been opened to the
+Pacific coast. With this last, perhaps from reverence for the nearly
+supernatural, the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway advanced,
+increasing compression and repression stirred the tribes to a series of
+hostilities. The first treaties which granted transit--meaning chiefly
+wagon transit--broke down. A new series of conferences and a new policy
+were the direct result of these wars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY
+
+
+The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may
+fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter
+of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous
+fifteen years the causes had been shaping through the development of
+the use of the trails, the opening of the mining territories, and
+the agitation for a continental railway. Now the railway was not
+only authorized and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon its
+completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted the Union Pacific
+to build west and the Central Pacific to build east until the two
+lines should meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the roads
+were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis of the Indian problem
+was speedily reached. In the fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of
+the overland freighting and sold out. In November the terminus of the
+overland mail route was moved west to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither
+the Union Pacific had now arrived in its course of construction. No
+wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke out in protest.
+
+As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion among those who
+must handle the tribes became apparent. The question of the management
+by the War Department or the Interior was in the air, and was raised
+again and again in Congress. More fundamental was the question of
+policy, upon which the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as
+any. "I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William, in 1867,
+"that Indian wars will not cease until all the Indian tribes are
+absorbed in our population, and can be controlled by constables instead
+of soldiers." Upon another phase of management Francis A. Walker
+wrote a little later: "There can be no question of national dignity
+involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest
+Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him.... With wild men,
+as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run is a
+question merely of what is safest or easiest in the situation given."
+That responsibility for some decided action lay heavily upon the whites
+may be implied from the admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the
+frontier well--"that, during more than a third of a century passed on
+the plains and in the mountains, he has never known of a war with the
+hostile tribes that was not caused by broken faith on the part of the
+United States or its agents." A professional Indian fighter, like Kit
+Carson, declared on oath that "as a general thing, the difficulties
+arise from aggressions on the part of the whites."
+
+In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian problem found
+spokesmen. The War and Interior departments had ample representation;
+the Western members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of the
+frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian sentiment that
+saw much good in the Indian and much evil in his treatment. But withal,
+when it came to special action upon any situation, Congress felt its
+lack of information. The departments best informed were partisan and
+antagonistic. Even to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship
+to determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and responsibility
+in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak, and the Chivington or the
+Fetterman massacre. To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness
+in the midst of interested parties Congress raised a committee of
+seven, three of the Senate and four of the House, in March, 1865, to
+investigate and report on the condition of the Indian tribes. The joint
+committee was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed debate
+on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne war ended and the Sioux
+broke out; the committee reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its
+investigation it divided itself into three groups to visit the Pacific
+Slope, the southern plains, and the northern plains. Its report, with
+the accompanying testimony, fills over five hundred pages. In all the
+storm centres of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and
+questioned.
+
+The _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_ gave a doleful view
+of the future from the Indians' standpoint. General Pope was quoted
+to the effect that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars,
+cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration, "and by
+steady and resistless encroachments of the white emigration towards
+the west, which is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits,
+and driving off or killing the game, their only means of subsistence."
+To this catalogue of causes General Carleton, who must have believed
+his war of Apache and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of
+providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty originates, when in
+their appointed time He wills that one race of man--as in races of
+lower animals--shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place
+to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced out by Himself,
+which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The
+races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed
+away; the red man of America is passing away!"
+
+The committee believed that the wars with their incidents of slaughter
+and extermination by both sides, as occasion offered, were generally
+the result of white encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing
+opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed over to the War
+Department, but recommended instead a system of visiting boards, each
+including a civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner,
+for the regular inspection of the tribes. The recommendation of the
+committee came to naught in Congress, but the information it gathered,
+supplementing the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs
+and the special investigations of single wars, gave much additional
+weight to the belief that a crisis was at hand.
+
+Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne and Sioux wars dragged
+on. The Powder River country continued to be a field of battle, with
+Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867. In the spring of 1867
+General Hancock destroyed a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern
+opinion came to demand more forcefully that this fighting should stop.
+Western opinion was equally insistent that the Indian must go, while
+General Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand was due to
+a desire for "the profit resulting from military occupation." Certain
+it was that war had lasted for several years with no definite results,
+save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of the Indians, and
+the philanthropy of the East. The army had had its chance. Now the time
+had come for general, real attempts at peace.
+
+The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March 4, 1867, actually
+began its session at that time. Ordinarily it would have waited until
+December, but the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his
+reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early as the law allowed.
+Among the most significant of its measures in this extra session was
+"Mr. Henderson's bill for establishing peace with certain Indian
+tribes now at war with the United States," which, in the view of the
+_Nation_, was a "practical measure for the security of travel through
+the territories and for the selection of a new area sufficient to
+contain all the unsettled tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator
+Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect of this law, and the
+General had replied: "The fact is, this contact of the two races has
+caused universal hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered
+bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and hitting little
+parties who are off their guard. I have a much heavier force on the
+plains, but they are so large that it is impossible to guard at all
+points, and the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented our
+being able to collect a large force to go into the country where we
+believe the Indians have hid their families; viz. up on the Yellowstone
+and down on the Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than in
+treating at this time, yet he went on the commission erected by the
+act of July 20, 1867. By this law four civilians, including the Indian
+Commissioner, and three generals of the army, were appointed to collect
+and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects in view:
+to remove the existing causes of complaint, to secure the safety of
+the various continental railways and the overland routes, and to work
+out some means for promoting Indian civilization without impeding the
+advance of the United States. To this last end they were to hunt for
+permanent homes for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all
+the railways then chartered,--the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific,
+and the Atlantic and Pacific.
+
+The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for fifteen months. When
+it rose at last, it had opened the way for the railways, so far as
+treaties could avail. It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and
+more remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations the breach
+between military and civil control had widened, so that the Commission
+was at the end divided against itself.
+
+On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at St. Louis and discussed
+plans for getting into touch with the tribes with whom it had to treat.
+"The first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview with
+the chiefs and leading warriors of these hostile tribes. They were
+roaming over an immense country, thousands of miles in extent, and much
+of it unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white race. Small
+war parties constantly emerging from this vast extent of unexplored
+country would suddenly strike the border settlements, killing the men
+and carrying off into captivity the women and children. Companies of
+workmen on the railroads, at points hundreds of miles from each other,
+would be attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour. Overland
+mail coaches could not be run without military escort, and railroad
+and mail stations unguarded by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All
+safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without soldiers was
+hazardous in the extreme; to go with them forbade reasonable hope of
+securing peaceful interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace
+Commission contained within itself the most useful of assistants.
+General Sherman and Commissioner Taylor sent out word to the Indians
+through the military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the tribes
+that the Commissioners desired to confer with them near Fort Laramie in
+September and Fort Larned in October.
+
+The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during the summer of 1867.
+After inspecting conditions on the upper Missouri the Commissioners
+proceeded to Omaha in September and thence to North Platte station
+on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they met Swift Bear of the BrulĂŠ
+Sioux and learned that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them until
+November. The Powder River War was still being fought by chiefs who
+could not be reached easily and whose delegations must be delayed. When
+the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie in November, they found
+matters little better. Red Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the
+Oglala and BrulĂŠ Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne, refused even
+to see the envoys, and sent them word: "that his war against the whites
+was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground
+left to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us that whenever
+the military garrisons at Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith
+were withdrawn, the war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the
+Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no savages except a few
+non-hostile Crows, and having summoned Red Cloud to meet them during
+the following summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of hostilities
+until the council could be held."
+
+The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine Lodge Creek some eighty
+miles south of the Arkansas River. Before the Commissioners arrived
+here General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his place being taken
+by General C. C. Augur, whose name makes the eighth signature to the
+published report. For some time after the Commissioners arrived the
+Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained in their camp forty miles
+away from Medicine Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache came to
+an agreement, while the others held off. On the 21st of October these
+ceded all their rights to occupy their great claims in the Southwest,
+the whole of the two panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to
+confine themselves to a new reserve in the southwestern part of Indian
+Territory, between the Red River and the Washita, on lands taken from
+the Choctaw and Chickasaw in 1866.
+
+The Commissioners could not greatly blame the Arapaho and Cheyenne for
+their reluctance to treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular
+Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been massacred by
+Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly or not, they believed themselves
+betrayed, and the Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand
+Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in Kansas and Indian
+Territory, which was amended to nothingness when the Senate added to
+the treaty the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within the
+state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve; the new one had not
+been given them; yet for two years after 1865 they had generally kept
+the peace. Sherman travelled through this country in the autumn of 1866
+and "met no trouble whatever," although he heard rumors of Indian wars.
+In 1867, General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages on the
+Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation, the Indians believed.
+After this there had been admitted war. The Indians had been on the
+war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and dodging the military
+parties, and were unable for some weeks to realize that the Peace
+Commissioners offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded
+to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October 28, a treaty
+at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve was a bit of barren land nearly
+destitute of wood and water, and containing many streams that were
+either brackish or dry during most of the year. It was in the Cherokee
+Outlet, between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers.
+
+The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of the summer's
+negotiations. The Peace Commission returned to Fort Laramie in the
+following spring to meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the
+Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were allied with them, made
+peace after the Commissioners had assented to the terms laid down by
+Red Cloud in 1867. They had convinced themselves that the occupation of
+the Powder River Valley was both illegal and unjust, and accordingly
+the garrisons had been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger of
+Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic pusillanimity," wrote
+one of the pioneers, years later, denouncing the act, "the government
+ordered all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel." In the
+new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868, it was specifically agreed
+that the country east of the Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as
+unceded Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves to occupy
+as their permanent home the lands west of the Missouri, between the
+parallels of 43° and 46°, and east of the 104th meridian--an area
+coinciding to-day with the western end of South Dakota. Thus was begun
+the actual compression of the Sioux of the plains.
+
+The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners were the most important,
+but were not the only treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the
+relinquishment by the Indians of lands along the railroad's right
+of way. It had been found that rights of transit through the Indian
+Country, such as those secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient.
+The Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of travel, for
+peace and his own good.
+
+Most important of the other tribes shoved away from the route were the
+Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock, whose country lay across the great trail
+just west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their name to the
+territory of Utah, were to be found south of the trail, between it and
+the lower waters of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest
+in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most important being
+on the Uintah River in northeast Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute
+began to treat in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until
+1868, when the southwestern third of Colorado was set apart for them.
+Active life in Colorado territory was at the start confined to the
+mountains in the vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were pushed
+down the slopes of the range on both sides. But as the eastern Sand
+Creek reserve soon had to be abolished, so Colorado began to growl at
+the western Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages were
+given better treatment than white citizens. The Shoshoni and Bannock
+ranged from Fort Hall to the north and were visited by General Augur
+at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results of his gifts
+and diplomacy the former were pushed up to the Wind River reserve in
+Wyoming territory, while the latter were granted a home around Fort
+Hall.
+
+The friction with the Indians was heaviest near the line of the old
+Indian frontier and tended to be lighter towards the west. It was
+natural enough that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the
+tribes had been colonized and where Indian population was most dense,
+the difficulties should be greatest. Indeed the only wars which were
+sufficiently important to count as resistance to the westward movement
+were those of the plains tribes and were fought east of the continental
+divide. The mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated from the
+main movements. Yet these great plains that now had to be abandoned
+had been set aside as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of
+Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners all agreed
+that the time had come to change it.
+
+The influence of the humanitarians dominated the report of the
+Commissioners, which was signed in January, 1868. Wherever possible,
+the side of the Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was an
+"indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled in the "records of
+the Indian barbarity"; General Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the
+Cheyenne at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to the existence
+of a war: Fetterman had been killed because "the civil and military
+departments of our government cannot, or will not, understand each
+other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility, and the "revolting"
+history of the removal policy was described. It had been the result of
+this policy to promote barbarism rather than civilization. "But one
+thing then remains to be done with honor to the nation, and that is to
+select a district, or districts of country, as indicated by Congress,
+on which all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be gathered.
+For each district let a territorial government be established, with
+powers adapted to the ends designed. The governor should be a man of
+unquestioned integrity and purity of character; he should be paid
+such salary as to place him above temptation." He should be given
+adequate powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of progressive
+civilization. The belief that under American conditions the Indian
+problem was insoluble was confirmed by this report of the Peace
+Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as they were. After
+their condemnation of an existing removal policy, the only remedy which
+they could offer was another policy of concentration and removal.
+
+The Commissioners recommended that the Indians should be colonized on
+two reserves, north and south of the railway lines respectively. The
+southern reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized tribes,
+known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners thought a total of
+86,000 could be settled within a few years. A northern district might
+be located north of Nebraska, within the area which they later allotted
+to the Sioux; 54,000 could be colonized here. Individual savages might
+be allowed to own land and be incorporated among the citizens of the
+Western states, but most of the tribes ought to be settled in the two
+Indian territories, while this removal policy should be the last.
+
+Upon the vexed question of civilian or military control the
+Commissioners were divided. They believed that both War and Interior
+departments were too busy to give proper attention to the wards, and
+recommended an independent department for the Indians. In October,
+1868, they reversed this report and, under military influence,
+spoke strongly for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the
+War Department. "We have now selected and provided reservations for
+all, off the great roads," wrote General Sherman to his brother in
+September, 1868. "All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are
+hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort
+of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the
+indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so
+large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a
+single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances
+and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the
+tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near
+the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together.
+
+The way across the continent was opened by these treaties of 1867 and
+1868, and the Union Pacific hurried to take advantage of it. The other
+Pacific railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific, were so
+slow in using their charters that hope in their construction was
+nearly abandoned, but the chief enterprise neared completion before the
+inauguration of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming, rather
+than the statue of Columbus which Benton had foreseen, was perched upon
+the summit of the Rockies as its monument.
+
+Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping pace with western
+development during the decade of the Civil War. The United States
+itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and
+allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a
+thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and
+army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general
+public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the
+Mississippi," lamented the _Nation_ in 1868, but "there is no book
+of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a
+mass of very desultory information. Few men have more than the most
+unconnected and unmethodical knowledge of the vast expanse of territory
+which lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth must have
+ceased to be in the West; probably, as we write, Denver has become an
+Eastern city, and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the
+marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life.... A man talks to us
+of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and while he is talking,
+the Territory of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor his
+auditors have before heard."
+
+[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1863
+
+The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the
+Southwest. In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming
+followed in 1868.]
+
+In that division of the plains which was sketched out in the fifties,
+the great amorphous eastern territories of Kansas and Nebraska met on
+the summit of the Rockies the great western territories of Washington,
+Utah, and New Mexico. The gold booms had broken up all of these.
+Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found their
+excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada entered the Union, with
+Nebraska following in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first
+parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide. To the north, in the
+region of the great river valleys,--Green, Big Horn, Powder, Platte,
+and Sweetwater,--the precious metals were not found in quantities which
+justified exploitation earlier than 1867. But in that year moderate
+discoveries on the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal camps of
+the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a scheme for a new territory.
+
+The Sweetwater mines, without causing any great excitement, brought a
+few hundred men to the vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was
+established, a county was organized, a newspaper was brought into life
+at Fort Bridger. If the railway had not appeared at the same time, the
+foundation for a territory would probably have been too slight. But the
+Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg early in 1867, extended its
+terminus to a new town, Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in
+the spring of 1868.
+
+Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the Union Pacific advanced
+to its site. It had a better prospect of life than had most of the
+mushroom cities that accompanied the westward course of the railroad,
+because it was the natural junction point for Denver trade. Colorado
+had been much disappointed at its own failure to induce the Union
+Pacific managers to put Denver City on the main line of the road, and
+felt injured when compelled to do its business through Cheyenne. But
+just because of this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a
+rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an orderly or reputable
+population that it had during the first months of its existence, but,
+to its good fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off the
+worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868. Cheyenne was left with
+an overlarge town site, but with some real excuse for existence. Most
+of the terminal towns vanished completely when the railroad moved on.
+
+A new territory for the country north of Colorado had been talked about
+as early as 1861. Since the creation of Montana territory in 1864, this
+area had been attached, obviously only temporarily, to Dakota. Now,
+with the mining and railway influences at work, the population made
+appeal to the Dakota legislature and to Congress for independence.
+"Without opposition or prolonged discussion," as Bancroft puts it, the
+new territory was created by Congress in July, 1868. It was called
+Wyoming, just escaping the names of Lincoln and Cheyenne, and received
+as bounds the parallels of 41° and 45°, and the meridians of 27° and
+34°, west of Washington.
+
+For several years after the Sioux treaties of 1868 and the erection of
+Wyoming territory, the Indians of the northern plains kept the peace.
+The routes of travel had been opened, the white claim to the Powder
+River Valley had been surrendered, and a great northern reserve had
+been created in the Black Hills country of southern Dakota. All these,
+by lessening contact, removed the danger of Indian friction. But
+the southern tribes were still uneasy,--treacherous or ill-treated,
+according as the sources vary,--and one more war was needed before they
+could be compelled to settle down.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID
+
+
+Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations determined the
+condition of the frontier, none admitted that it desired to provoke
+Indian wars. The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish to
+be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian agents lost their authority
+and many of their perquisites during war time. The army and the
+frontiersmen denied that they were belligerent. "I assert," wrote
+Custer, "and all candid persons familiar with the subject will sustain
+the assertion, that of all classes of our population the army and
+the people living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of an
+Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices to avoid
+its horrors." To fix the responsibility for the wars which repeatedly
+occurred, despite the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls
+for the examination of individual episodes in large number. It is
+easier to acquit the first two classes than the last two. There are
+enough instances in which the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep
+the peace to establish the belief that a policy combining benevolence,
+equity, and relentless firmness in punishing wrong-doers, white or red,
+could have maintained friendly relations with ease. The Indian agents
+were hampered most by their inability to enforce the laws intrusted
+to them for execution, and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying
+agreements and of Congress in voting supplies. The frontiersmen, with
+their isolated homesteads lying open to surprise and destruction,
+would seem to be sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly
+they thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted Indian
+title, while their personal relations with the red men were commonly
+marked by fear and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and better
+administration than the Indian Bureau, overdid its work, being unable
+to think of the Indians as anything but public enemies and treating
+them with an arbitrary curtness that would have been dangerous even
+among intelligent whites. The history of the southwest Indians, after
+the Sand Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially
+ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances which led to their
+destruction.
+
+After the battle at Sand Creek, the southwest tribes agreed to a
+series of treaties in 1865 by which new reserves were promised them
+on the borderland of Kansas and Indian Territory. These treaties were
+so amended by the Senate that for a time the tribes had no admitted
+homes or rights save the guaranteed hunting privileges on the plains
+south of the Platte. They seem generally to have been peaceful during
+1866, in spite of the rather shabby treatment which the neglect
+of Congress procured for them. In 1867 uneasiness became apparent.
+Agent E. W. Wynkoop, of Sand Creek fame, was now in charge of the
+Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache tribes in the vicinity of Fort Larned,
+on the Santa FĂŠ trail in Kansas. In 1866 they had "complained of the
+government not having fulfilled its promises to them, and of numerous
+impositions practised upon them by the whites." Some of their younger
+braves had gone on the war-path. But Wynkoop claimed to have quieted
+them, and by March, 1867, thought that they were "well satisfied and
+quiet, and anxious to retain the peaceful relations now existing."
+
+The military authorities at Fort Dodge, farther up the Arkansas and
+near the old Santa FĂŠ crossing, were less certain than Wynkoop that
+the Indians meant well. Little Raven, of the Arapaho, and Satanta,
+"principal chief" of the Kiowa, were reported as sending in insulting
+messages to the troops, ordering them to cut no more wood, to leave
+the country, to keep wagons off the Santa FĂŠ trail. Occasional thefts
+of stock and forays were reported along the trail. Custer thought that
+there was "positive evidence from the agents themselves" that the
+Indians were guilty, the trouble only being that Wynkoop charged the
+guilt on the Kiowa and Comanche, while J. H. Leavenworth, agent for
+these tribes, asserted their innocence and accused the wards of Wynkoop.
+
+The Department of the Missouri, in which these tribes resided, was
+under the command of Major-general Winfield Scott Hancock in the spring
+of 1867. With a desire to promote the tranquillity of his command,
+Hancock prepared for an expedition on the plains as early as the roads
+would permit. He wrote of this intention to both of the agents, asking
+them to accompany him, "to show that the officers of the government are
+acting in harmony." His object was not necessarily war, but to impress
+upon the Indians his ability "to chastise any tribes who may molest
+people who are travelling across the plains." In each of the letters he
+listed the complaints against the respective tribes--failure to deliver
+murderers, outrages on the Smoky Hill route in 1866, alliances with
+the Sioux, hostile incursions into Texas, and the specially barbarous
+Box murder. In this last affair one James Box had been murdered by the
+Kiowas, and his wife and five daughters carried off. The youngest of
+these, a baby, died in a few days, the mother stated, and they "took
+her from me and threw her into a ravine." Ultimately the mother and
+three of the children were ransomed from the Kiowas after Mrs. Box and
+her eldest daughter, Margaret, had been passed around from chief to
+chief for more than two months. Custer wrote up this outrage with much
+exaggeration, but the facts were bad enough.
+
+With both agents present, Hancock advanced to Fort Larned. "It is
+uncertain whether war will be the result of the expedition or not,"
+he declared in general orders of March 26, 1867, thus admitting that
+a state of war did not at that time exist. "It will depend upon the
+temper and behavior of the Indians with whom we may come in contact. We
+go prepared for war and will make it if a proper occasion presents."
+The tribes which he proposed to visit were roaming indiscriminately
+over the country traversed by the Santa FĂŠ trail, in accordance with
+the treaties of 1865, which permitted them, until they should be
+settled upon their reserves, to hunt at will over the plains south
+of the Platte, subject only to the restriction that they must not
+camp within ten miles of the main roads and trails. It was Hancock's
+intention to enforce this last provision, and more, to insist "upon
+their keeping off the main lines of travel, where their presence is
+calculated to bring about collisions with the whites."
+
+The first conference with the Indians was held at Fort Larned, where
+the "principal chiefs of the Dog Soldiers of the Cheyennes" had been
+assembled by Agent Wynkoop. Leavenworth thought that the chiefs here
+had been very friendly, but Wynkoop criticised the council as being
+held after sunset, which was contrary to Indian custom and calculated
+"to make them feel suspicious." At this council General Hancock
+reprimanded the chiefs and told them that he would visit their village,
+occupied by themselves and an almost equal number of Sioux; which
+village, said Wynkoop, "was 35 miles from any travelled road." "Why
+don't he confine the troops to the great line of travel?" demanded
+Leavenworth, whose wards had the same privilege of hunting south of the
+Arkansas that those of Wynkoop had between the Arkansas and the Platte.
+So long as they camped ten miles from the roads, this was their right.
+
+Contrary to Wynkoop's urgings, Hancock led his command from Fort
+Larned on April 13, 1867, moving for the main Arapaho, Cheyenne, and
+Sioux village on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles west of the post. With
+cavalry, infantry, artillery, and a pontoon train, it was hard for him
+to assume any other appearance than that of war. Even the General's
+particular assurance, as Custer puts it, "that he was not there to
+make war, but to promote peace," failed to convince the chiefs who had
+attended the night council. It was not a pleasant march. The snow was
+nearly a foot deep, fodder was scarce, and the Indian disposition was
+uncertain. Only a few had come in to the Fort Larned conference, and
+none appeared at camp after the first day's march. After this refusal
+to meet him, Hancock marched on to the village, in front of which he
+found some three hundred Indians drawn up in battle array. Fighting
+seemed imminent, but at last Roman Nose, Bull Bear, and other chiefs
+met Hancock between the lines and agreed upon an evening conference. It
+developed that the men alone were left at the Indian camp. Women and
+children, with all the movables they could handle, had fled out upon
+the snowy plains at the approach of the troops. Fear of another Sand
+Creek had caused it, said Wynkoop. But Hancock chose to regard this
+as evidence of a treacherous disposition, demanded that the fugitives
+return at once, and insisted upon encamping near the village against
+the protest of the chiefs. Instead of bringing back their people, the
+men themselves abandoned the village that evening, while Hancock,
+learning of the flight, surrounded and took possession of it. The next
+morning, April 15, Custer was sent with cavalry in pursuit of the
+flying bands. Depredations occurring to the north of Pawnee Fork within
+a day or two, Hancock burned the village in retaliation and proceeded
+to Fort Dodge. Wynkoop insisted that the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been
+entirely innocent and that these injuries had been committed by the
+Sioux. "I have no doubt," he wrote, "but that they think that war has
+been forced upon them."
+
+When Hancock started upon the plains, there was no war, but there was
+no doubt about its existence as the spring advanced. When the Peace
+Commissioners of this year came with their protestations of benevolence
+for the Great Father, it was small wonder that the Cheyenne and Arapaho
+had to be coaxed into the camp on the Medicine Lodge Creek. And when
+the treaties there made failed of prompt execution by the United
+States, the war naturally dragged on in a desultory way during 1868 and
+1869.
+
+In the spring of 1868 General Sheridan, who had succeeded Hancock in
+command of the Department of the Missouri, visited the posts at Fort
+Larned and Fort Dodge. Here on Pawnee and Walnut creeks most of the
+southwest Indians were congregated. Wynkoop, in February and April,
+reported them as happy and quiet. They were destitute, to be sure, and
+complained that the Commissioners at Medicine Lodge had promised them
+arms and ammunition which had not been delivered. Indeed, the treaty
+framed there had not yet been ratified. But he believed it possible to
+keep them contented and wean them from their old habits. To Sheridan
+the situation seemed less happy. He declined to hold a council with
+the complaining chiefs on the ground that the whole matter was yet in
+the hands of the Peace Commission, but he saw that the young men were
+chafing and turbulent and that frontier hostilities would accompany the
+summer buffalo hunt.
+
+There is little doubt of the destitution which prevailed among the
+plains tribes at this time. The rapid diminution of game was everywhere
+observable. The annuities at best afforded only partial relief, while
+Congress was irregular in providing funds. Three times during the
+spring the Commissioner prodded the Secretary of the Interior, who in
+turn prodded Congress, with the result that instead of the $1,000,000
+asked for $500,000 were, in July, 1868, granted to be spent not by the
+Indian Office, but by the War Department. Three weeks later General
+Sherman created an organization for distributing this charity, placing
+the district south of Kansas in command of General Hazen. Meanwhile,
+the time for making the spring issues of annuity goods had come. It
+was ordered in June that no arms or ammunition should be given to the
+Cheyenne and Arapaho because of their recent bad conduct; but in July
+the Commissioner, influenced by the great dissatisfaction on the part
+of the tribes, and fearing "that these Indians, by reason of such
+non-delivery of arms, ammunition, and goods, will commence hostilities
+against the whites in their vicinity, modified the order and
+telegraphed Agent Wynkoop that he might use his own discretion in the
+matter: "If you are satisfied that the issue of the arms and ammunition
+is necessary to preserve the peace, and that no evil will result from
+their delivery, let the Indians have them." A few days previously on
+July 20, Wynkoop had issued the ordinary supplies to his Arapaho and
+Apache, his Cheyenne refusing to take anything until they could have
+the guns as well. "They felt much disappointed, but gave no evidence of
+being angry ... and would wait with patience for the Great Father to
+take pity upon them." The permission from the Commissioner was welcomed
+by the agent, and approved by Thomas Murphy, his superintendent. Murphy
+had been ordered to Fort Larned to reĂŤnforce Wynkoop's judgment. He
+held a council on August 1 with Little Raven and the Arapaho and
+Apache, and issued them their arms. "Raven and the other chiefs then
+promised that these arms should never be used against the whites, and
+Agent Wynkoop then delivered to the Arapahoes 160 pistols, 80 Lancaster
+rifles, 12 kegs of powder, 1-1/2 keg of lead, and 15,000 caps; and to
+the Apaches he gave 40 pistols, 20 Lancaster rifles, 3 kegs of powder,
+1/2 keg of lead, and 5000 caps." The Cheyenne came in a few days later
+for their share, which Wynkoop handed over on the 9th. "They were
+delighted at receiving the goods," he reported, "particularly the
+arms and ammunition, and never before have I known them to be better
+satisfied and express themselves as being so well contented." The
+fact that within three days murders were committed by the Cheyenne on
+the Solomon and Saline forks throws doubt upon the sincerity of their
+protestations.
+
+The war party which commenced the active hostilities of 1868 at a time
+so well calculated to throw discredit upon the wisdom of the Indian
+Office, had left the Cheyenne village early in August, "smarting
+under their _supposed_ wrongs," as Wynkoop puts it. They were mostly
+Cheyenne, with a small number of Arapaho and a few visiting Sioux,
+about 200 in all. Little Raven's son and a brother of White Antelope,
+who died at Sand Creek, were with them; Black Kettle is said to have
+been their leader. On August 7 some of them spent the evening at Fort
+Hays, where they held a powwow at the post. "Black Kettle loves his
+white soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he meets them
+and shakes their hands in friendship," is the way the post-trader,
+Hill P. Wilson, reported his speech. "The white soldiers ought to be
+glad all the time, because their ponies are so big and so strong,
+and because they have so many guns and so much to eat.... All other
+Indians may take the war trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep
+friendship with his white brothers." Three nights later they began to
+kill on Saline River, and on the 11th they crossed to the Solomon. Some
+fifteen settlers were killed, and five women were carried off. Here
+this particular raid stopped, for the news had got abroad, and the
+frontier was instantly in arms. Various isolated forays occurred, so
+that Sheridan was sure he had a general war upon his hands. He believed
+nearly all the young men of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche
+to be in the war parties, the old women, men, and children remaining
+around the posts and professing solicitous friendship. There were 6000
+potential warriors in all, and that he might better devote himself to
+suppressing them, Sheridan followed the Kansas Pacific to its terminus
+at Fort Hays and there established his headquarters in the field.
+
+The war of 1868 ranged over the whole frontier south of the Platte
+trail. It influenced the Peace Commission, at its final meeting in
+October, 1868, to repudiate many of the pacific theories of January
+and recommend that the Indians be handed over to the War Department.
+Sheridan, who had led the Commission to this conclusion, was in the
+field directing the movement. His policy embraced a concentration of
+the peaceful bands south of the Arkansas, and a relentless war against
+the rest. It is fairly clear that the war need not have come, had it
+not been for the cross-purposes ever apparent between the Indian Office
+and the War Department, and even within the War Department itself.
+
+At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared for war. He had, at the start, about
+2600 men, nearly equally divided among cavalry and infantry. Believing
+his force too small to cover the whole plains between Fort Hays and
+Denver, he called for reĂŤnforcements, receiving a part of the Fifth
+Cavalry and a regiment of Kansas volunteers. With enthusiasm this last
+addition was raised among the frontiersmen, where Indian fighting was
+popular; the governor of the state resigned his office to become its
+colonel. September and October were occupied in getting the troops
+together, keeping the trails open for traffic, and establishing, about
+a hundred miles south of Fort Dodge, a rendezvous which was known
+as Camp Supply. It was the intention to protect the frontier during
+the autumn, and to follow up the Indian villages after winter had
+fallen, catching the tribes when they would be concentrated and at a
+disadvantage.
+
+On October 15, 1868, Sherman, just from the Chicago meeting of the
+Peace Commissioners and angry because he had there been told that the
+army wanted war, gave Sheridan a free hand for the winter campaign. "As
+to 'extermination,' it is for the Indians themselves to determine. We
+don't want to exterminate or even to fight them.... The present war ...
+was begun and carried on by the Indians in spite of our entreaties and
+in spite of our warnings, and the only question to us is, whether we
+shall allow the progress of our western settlements to be checked, and
+leave the Indians free to pursue their bloody career, or accept their
+war and fight them.... We ... accept the war ... and hereby resolve to
+make its end final.... I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain
+our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow
+no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their
+hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these
+Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not
+again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind
+of pretext that they may choose to allege."
+
+The plan of campaign provided that the main column, Custer in immediate
+command, should march from Fort Hays directly against the Indians, by
+way of Camp Supply; two smaller columns were to supplement this, one
+marching in on Indian Territory from New Mexico, and the other from
+Fort Lyon on the old Sand Creek reserve. Detachments of the chief
+column began to move in the middle of November, Custer reaching the
+depot at Camp Supply ahead of the rest, while the Kansas volunteers
+lost themselves in heavy snow-storms. On November 23 Custer was ordered
+out of Camp Supply, on the north fork of the Canadian, to follow a
+fresh trail which led southwest towards the Washita River, near the
+eastern line of Texas. He pushed on as rapidly as twelve inches of snow
+would allow, discovering in the early morning of November 27 a large
+camp in the valley of the Washita.
+
+It was Black Kettle's camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho that they had found
+in a strip of heavy timber along the river. After reconnoitring Custer
+divided his force into four columns for simultaneous attacks upon the
+sleeping village. At daybreak "my men charged the village and reached
+the lodges before the Indians were aware of our presence. The moment
+the charge was ordered the band struck up 'Garry Owen,' and with cheers
+that strongly reminded me of scenes during the war, every trooper,
+led by his officer, rushed towards the village." For several hours a
+promiscuous fight raged up and down the ravine, with Indians everywhere
+taking to cover, only to be prodded out again. Fifty-one lodges in
+all fell into Custer's hands; 103 dead Indians, including Black
+Kettle himself, were found later. "We captured in good condition 875
+horses, ponies, and mules; 241 saddles, some of very fine and costly
+workmanship; 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins for lodges, 160
+untanned robes, 210 axes, 140 hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535
+pounds of powder, 1050 pounds of lead, 4000 arrows and arrowheads, 75
+spears, 90 bullet moulds, 35 bows and quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds
+of bullets, 775 lariats, 940 buckskin saddle-bags, 470 blankets, 93
+coats, 700 pounds of tobacco."
+
+As the day advanced, Custer's triumph seemed likely to turn into
+defeat. The Cheyenne village proved to be only the last of a long
+string of villages that extended down the Washita for fifteen miles
+or more, and whose braves rode up by hundreds to see the fight. A
+general engagement was avoided, however, and with better luck and more
+discretion than he was one day to have, Custer marched back to Camp
+Supply on December 3, his band playing gayly the tune of battle, "Garry
+Owen." The commander in his triumphal procession was followed by his
+scouts and trailers, and the captives of his prowess--a long train of
+Indian widows and orphans.
+
+The decisive blow which broke the power of the southwest tribes had
+been struck, and Black Kettle had carried on his last raid,--if indeed
+he had carried on this one at all--but as the reports came in it became
+evident that the merits of the triumph were in doubt. The Eastern
+humanitarians were shocked at the cold-blooded attack upon a camp of
+sleeping men, women, and children, forgetting that if Indians were to
+be fought this was the most successful way to do it, and was no shock
+to the Indians' own ideals of warfare and attack. The deeper question
+was whether this camp was actually hostile, whether the tribes had not
+abandoned the war-path in good faith, whether it was fair to crush a
+tribe that with apparent earnestness begged peace because it could not
+control the excesses of some of its own braves. It became certain, at
+least, that the War Department itself had fallen victim to that vice
+with which it had so often reproached the Indian Office--failure to
+produce a harmony of action among several branches of the service.
+
+The Indian Office had no responsibility for the battle of the Washita.
+It had indeed issued arms to the Cheyenne in August, but only with
+the approval of the military officer commanding Forts Larned and
+Dodge, General Alfred Sully, "an officer of long experience in Indian
+affairs." In the early summer all the tribes had been near these forts
+and along the Santa FĂŠ trail. After Congress had voted its half million
+to feed the hungry, Sherman had ordered that the peaceful hungry among
+the southern tribes should be moved from this locality to the vicinity
+of old Fort Cobb, in the west end of Indian Territory on the Washita
+River.
+
+During September, while Sheridan was gathering his armament at Fort
+Hays, Sherman was ordering the agents to take their peaceful charges
+to Fort Cobb. With the major portion of the tribes at war it would
+be impossible for the troops to make any discrimination unless there
+should be an absolute separation between the well-disposed and the
+warlike. He proposed to allow the former a reasonable time to get to
+their new abode and then beg the President for an order "declaring all
+Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations" to be outlaws.
+He believed that by going to war these tribes had violated their
+hunting rights. Superintendent Murphy thought he saw another Sand Creek
+in these preparations. Here were the tribes ordered to Fort Cobb; their
+fall annuity goods were on the way thither for distribution; and now
+the military column was marching in the same direction.
+
+In the meantime General W. B. Hazen had arrived at Fort Cobb on
+November 7 and had immediately voiced his fear that "General Sheridan,
+acting under the impression of hostiles, may attack bands of Comanche
+and Kiowa before they reach this point." He found, however, most of
+these tribes, who had not gone to war this season, encamped within
+reach on the Canadian and Washita rivers,--5000 of the Comanche and
+1500 of the Kiowa. Within a few days Cheyenne and Arapaho began to join
+the settlements in the district, Black Kettle bringing in his band to
+the Washita, forty miles east of Antelope Hills, and coming in person
+to Fort Cobb for an interview with General Hazen on November 20.
+
+"I have always done my best," he protested, "to keep my young men
+quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have
+not been able to keep them all at home. But we all want peace." To
+which added Big Mouth, of the Arapaho: "I came to you because I wish
+to do right.... I do not want war, and my people do not, but although
+we have come back south of the Arkansas, the soldiers follow us and
+continue fighting, and we want you to send out and stop these soldiers
+from coming against us."
+
+To these, General Hazen, fearful as he was of an unjust attack,
+responded with caution. Sherman had spoken of Fort Cobb in his orders
+to Sheridan, as "aimed to hold out the olive branch with one hand
+and the sword in the other. But it is not thereby intended that any
+hostile Indians shall make use of that establishment as a refuge from
+just punishment for acts already done. Your military control over
+that reservation is as perfect as over Kansas, and if hostile Indians
+retreat within that reservation, ... they may be followed even to
+Fort Cobb, captured, and punished." It is difficult to see what could
+constitute the fact of peaceful intent if coming in to Fort Cobb did
+not. But Hazen gave to Black Kettle cold comfort: "I am sent here as
+a peace chief; all here is to be peace; but north of the Arkansas is
+General Sheridan, the great war chief, and I do not control him; and he
+has all the soldiers who are fighting the Arapahoes and Cheyennes....
+If the soldiers come to fight, you must remember they are not from me,
+but from that great war chief, and with him you must make peace....
+I cannot stop the war.... You must not come in again unless I send
+for you, and you must keep well out beyond the friendly Kiowas and
+Comanches." So he sent the suitors away and wrote, on November 22,
+to Sherman for more specific instructions covering these cases. He
+believed that Black Kettle and Big Mouth were themselves sincere, but
+doubted their control over their bands. These were the bands which
+Custer destroyed before the week was out, and it is probable that
+during the fight they were reĂŤnforced by braves from the friendly
+lodges of Satanta's Kiowa and Little Raven's Arapaho.
+
+Whatever might have been a wise policy in treating semi-hostile Indian
+tribes, this one was certainly unsatisfactory. It is doubtful whether
+the war was ever so great as Sherman imagined it. The injured tribes
+were unquestionably drawn to Fort Cobb by a desire for safety; the army
+was in the position of seeming to use the olive branch to assemble
+the Indians in order that the sword might the better disperse them.
+There is reasonable doubt whether Black Kettle had anything to do with
+the forays. Murphy believed in him and cited many evidences of his
+friendly disposition, while Wynkoop asserted positively that he had
+been encamped on Pawnee Fork all through the time when he was alleged
+to have been committing depredations on the Saline. The army alone had
+been no more successful in producing obvious justice than the army and
+Indian Office together had been. Yet whatever the merits of the case,
+the power of the Cheyenne and their neighbors was permanently gone.
+
+During the winter of 1868-1869 Sheridan's army remained in the
+vicinity of Fort Cobb, gathering the remnants of the shattered tribes
+in upon their reservation. The Kiowa and Comanche were placed at last
+on the lands awarded them at the Medicine Lodge treaties, while the
+Arapaho and Cheyenne once more had their abiding-place changed in
+August, 1869, and were settled down along the upper waters of the
+Washita, around the valley of their late defeat.
+
+The long controversy between the War and Interior departments over the
+management of the tribes entered upon a new stage with the inauguration
+of Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his administration
+was a bill erecting a board of civilian Indian commissioners to advise
+the Indian Department and promote the civilization of the tribes. A
+generous grant of two millions accompanied the act. More care was used
+in the appointment of agents than had hitherto been taken, and the
+immediate results seemed good when the Commissioner wrote his annual
+report in December, 1869. But the worst of the troubles with the
+Indians of the plains was over, so that without special effort peace
+could now have been the result.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS
+
+
+Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last
+stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun;
+ten years before, Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic
+Whitney and the leadership of more practical men, had provided for a
+survey of railroad routes along the trails; on the eve of the struggle
+the earliest continental railway had received its charter; and the
+struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in 1867, sent out its
+Peace Commission to prepare an open way. That the tribes must yield
+was as inevitable as it was that their yielding must be ungracious and
+destructive to them. Too weak to compel their enemy to respect their
+rights, and uncertain what their rights were, they were too low in
+intelligence to realize that the more they struggled, the worse would
+be their suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in which
+the iron band was put across the continent. Its completion and their
+subjection came in 1869.
+
+After years of tedious debate the earliest of the Pacific railways was
+chartered in 1862. The withdrawal of southern claims had made possible
+an agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality engendered
+by the Civil War gave to the project its final impetus. Under the
+management of the Central Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and
+two or three border railways, provision was made for a road from the
+Iowa border to California. Land grants and bond subsidies were for two
+years dangled before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt to
+entice them to construct it. Only after these were increased in 1864
+did active organization begin, while at the end of 1865 but forty miles
+of the Union Pacific had been built.
+
+Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was
+easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In
+their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania
+Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of
+these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled
+along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across
+plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains.
+Worse yet, the road could hope for little aid from the country through
+which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson, Salt Lake, and
+Denver, the last of which it missed by a hundred miles, its course lay
+through unsettled wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the
+trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected themselves across
+the continent, relying, up to the moment of joining, upon the firm
+anchorage of the termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California.
+Equally trying, though different in variety, were the difficulties
+attendant upon construction at either end.
+
+The impetus which Judah had given to the Central Pacific had started
+the western end of the system two years ahead of the eastern, but had
+not produced great results at first. It was hard work building east
+into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging, tunnelling,
+filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade down and the curvature out.
+Twenty miles a year only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865,
+thirty in 1866, and forty-six in 1867--one hundred and thirty-six
+miles during the first five years of work. Nature had done her best
+to impede the progress of the road by thrusting mountains and valleys
+across its route. But she had covered the mountains with timber and
+filled them with stone, so that materials of construction were easily
+accessible along all of the costliest part of the line. Bridges and
+trestles could be built anywhere with local material. The labor problem
+vexed the Central Pacific managers at the start. It was a scanty
+and inefficient supply of workmen that existed in California when
+construction began. Like all new countries, California possessed more
+work than workmen. Economic independence was to be had almost for the
+asking. Free land and fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work
+for hire. The slight results of the first five years were due as much
+to lack of labor as to refractory roadway or political opposition. But
+by 1865 the employment of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported
+by the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker, who was the
+most active constructor, brought a new rapidity into construction. "I
+used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull," Crocker
+dictated to Bancroft's stenographer, "stopping along wherever there
+was anything amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not
+up to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles began. California
+could manufacture no iron. Rolling stock and rails had to be imported
+from Europe or the East, and came to San Francisco after the costly sea
+voyage, _via_ Panama or the Horn. But the men directing the Central
+Pacific--Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and the rest--rose to the
+difficulties, and once they had passed the mountains, fairly romped
+across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.
+
+The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the
+California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached
+Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union
+Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri
+River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across
+Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the
+Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri
+steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway
+connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less
+great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union
+Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail,
+flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could
+do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could
+deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and
+trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood
+lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood
+as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had
+to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern
+terminus.
+
+The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with
+the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no
+trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union
+Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were
+most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees
+contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently
+discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief
+engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their
+arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and
+fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves.
+The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief
+constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced
+officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five
+years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket
+in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had
+passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians
+had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its
+crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal,"
+with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I
+called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every
+man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was
+a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the
+command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had
+seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."
+
+By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much to accelerate the
+construction of the road. Heretofore the junction point had been in the
+Nevada Desert, a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line.
+It was now provided that each road might build until it met the other.
+Since the mountain section, with the highest accompanying subsidies,
+was at hand, each of the companies was spurred on by its desire to get
+as much land and as many bonds as possible. The race which began in the
+autumn of 1866 ended only with the completion of the track in 1869. A
+mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start; seven or eight a
+day were laid before the end.
+
+The English traveller, Bell, who published his _New Tracks in North
+America_ in 1869, found somewhere an enthusiastic quotation admirably
+descriptive of the process. "Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a
+science," it read, "and we pundits of the Far East stood upon that
+embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed
+westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives with mingled
+feelings of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came.
+A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its
+load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the
+rest of the gang taking hold by twos until it is clear of the car. They
+come forward at a run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in
+its place, right side up, with care, while the same process goes on at
+the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each
+gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say, but
+the fellows on the U. P. are tremendously in earnest. The moment the
+car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next
+loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a sight
+to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full
+gallop at the end of 60 or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu,
+who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers,
+spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand
+Anvil Chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.
+It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes
+to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San
+Francisco. That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one million
+times are those sledges to be swung--twenty-one million times are they
+to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of
+modern America is complete!"
+
+Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built
+the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the
+Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and
+Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon
+which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental
+railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to
+carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as
+their general offices.
+
+An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and
+seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards,
+furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city.
+"The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform,
+called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of
+the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that
+was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its
+tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the
+head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving
+across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had
+rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight
+train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its
+vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at
+Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring.
+Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of
+the railroad.
+
+In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of
+the _Springfield Republican_, appropriately designated the terminal
+town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from
+Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very
+midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the
+town stood dusty white--"a new arrival with black clothes looked like
+nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel."
+A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within
+two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with
+ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice
+ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the
+road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet
+constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning
+of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the
+similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.
+
+The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John
+H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five
+dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling
+and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution
+was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness,
+called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by
+forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and
+gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry
+alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in
+full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in
+what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people,
+and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would
+appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they
+must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its
+highest seats and most diabolical service."
+
+Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads,
+were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction
+gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation
+for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling
+in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly
+shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the
+great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on,
+the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the
+street lines and dĂŠbris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle
+thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied
+about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of
+their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied
+together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their
+relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they
+quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the
+future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to
+get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some
+consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point
+to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other
+one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.
+
+The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough.
+At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years
+before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track,
+to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty
+laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while
+in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868,
+the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to
+its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide,
+making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776
+miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the
+continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a
+half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been
+systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great.
+
+Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the
+building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was
+scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had
+written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the
+men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press
+their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention
+no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name
+your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's
+first administration the _CrĂŠdit Mobilier_ scandal proved that men,
+high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose
+success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of
+indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of
+their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more
+prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national
+conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever
+disregarded in the past.
+
+The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been
+variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open
+to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it
+might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two
+rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake,
+where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel
+for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree
+upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to
+bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest
+of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was
+celebrated in due form.
+
+Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the
+Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of
+a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May,
+1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction
+of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short
+notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the
+Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come
+to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last
+Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General
+Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how
+at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie
+of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few
+beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic
+taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the
+United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the
+leading paragraph of the _Nation_ of the Thursday after. "So far as
+we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the
+speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down
+under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them
+to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to
+get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man
+says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with
+questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will
+say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being
+offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with
+a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying.
+The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was
+celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country.
+Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting,
+fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity;
+Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled
+Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of
+a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the
+Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between
+the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the
+perpetuity of the Union as it is."
+
+No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater
+significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this
+act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question
+that all were framing:--
+
+      "What was it the Engines said,
+      Pilots touching, head to head
+      Facing on the single track,
+      Half a world behind each back?"
+
+But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine
+retorted to the eastern:--
+
+      "'You brag of the East! _You_ do?
+      Why, _I_ bring the East to _you_!
+      All the Orient, all Cathay,
+      Find through me the shortest way;
+      And the sun you follow here
+      Rises in my hemisphere.
+      Really,--if one must be rude,--
+      Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"
+
+The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the
+men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying
+beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more
+important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the
+road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific
+Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert
+and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised
+a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the
+railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading
+upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the
+Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national
+assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as
+other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap
+between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE NEW INDIAN POLICY
+
+
+Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868,
+and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the
+plains had been cleanly split into two main groups which had their
+centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest Dakota and the old Indian
+Territory. The advance of a new wave of population had followed along
+the road thus opened, pushing settlements into central Nebraska and
+Kansas. Through the latter state the Union Pacific, Eastern Division,
+better known as the Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver,
+where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this advance of civilized
+life upon the plains it became clear that the old Indian policy
+was gone for good, and that the idea of a permanent country, where
+the tribes, free from white contact, could continue their nomadic
+existence, had broken down. The old Indian policy had been based upon
+the permanence of this condition, but with the white advance troops
+for police had been added, while the loud bickerings between the
+military authorities, thus superimposed, and the Indian Office, which
+regarded itself as the rightful custodian of the problem, proved
+to be the overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first annual
+message in 1869: "No matter what ought to be the relations between
+such [civilized] settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do
+not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end.
+A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible
+for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all
+Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life
+and the rights of others, dangerous to society. I see no substitute for
+such a system, except in placing all the Indians on large reservations,
+as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection
+there."
+
+The vexed question of civilian or military control had reached the
+bitterest stage of its discussion when Grant became President. For five
+years there had been general wars in which both departments seemed
+to be badly involved and for which responsibility was hard to place.
+There were many things to be said in favor of either method of control.
+Beginning with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in
+1832, the office had been run by the War Department for seventeen
+years. In this period the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been
+carried out; the frontier had been established in an unbroken line of
+reserves from Texas to Green Bay; and the migration across the plains
+had begun. But with the creation of the Interior Department in 1849
+the Indian Bureau had been transferred to civilian hands. As yet the
+Indian war was so exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments in
+favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly too, though the
+results make this conviction hard to hold, to treat the Indian well,
+to keep the peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they would
+permit it. However the government failed in practice and in controlling
+the men of the frontier, there is no doubt about the sincerity of its
+general intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California, no mines
+and no railways, and no mixture of slavery and politics, the hope might
+not have failed of realization. Even as it was, the civilian bureau
+had little trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years after
+its organization. In general the military power was called upon when
+disorder passed beyond the control of the agent; short of that time the
+agent remained in authority.
+
+As a means of introducing civilization among the tribes the agents
+were more effective than army officers could be. They were, indeed,
+underpaid, appointed for political reasons, and often too weak to
+resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty; but they were
+civilians. Their ideals were those of industry and peace. Their terms
+of service were often too short for them to learn the business, but
+they were not subject to the rapid shifting and transfer which made up
+a large part of army life. Army officers were better picked and trained
+than the agents, but their ambitions were military, and they were
+frequently unable to understand why breaches of formal discipline were
+not always matters of importance.
+
+The strong arguments in favor of military control were founded largely
+on the permanency of tenure in the army. Political appointments were
+fewer, the average of personal character and devotion was higher. Army
+administration had fewer scandals than had that of the Indian Bureau.
+The partisan on either side in the sixties was prone to believe that
+his favorite branch of the service was honest and wise, while the
+other was inefficient, foolish, and corrupt. He failed to see that
+in the earliest phase of the policy, when there was no friction, and
+consequently little fighting, the problem was essentially civilian;
+that in the next period, when constant friction was provoking wars,
+it had become military; and that finally, when emigration and
+transportation had changed friction into overwhelming pressure, the
+wars would again cease. A large share of the disputes were due to
+the misunderstandings as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes
+should be under the bureau or the army. On the whole, even when the
+tribes were hostile, army control tended to increase the cost of
+management and the chance of injustice. There never was a time when
+a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals of police rather than
+those of soldiers, could not have done better than the army did. But
+the student, attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve it
+fully and justly as were its immediate custodians. He can at most steer
+in between the badly biassed "Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson,
+and the outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier, that the
+Indian must go.
+
+The demand of the army for the control of the Indians was never
+gratified. Around 1870 its friends were insistent that since the army
+had to bear the knocks of the Indian policy,--knocks, they claimed,
+generally due to mistakes of the bureau,--it ought to have the whole
+responsibility and the whole credit. The inertia which attaches to
+federal reforms held this one back, while the Indian problem itself
+changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary. Once the great
+wars of the sixties were done the tribes subsided into general peace.
+Their vigorous resistance was confined to the years when the last great
+wave of the white advance was surging over them. Then, confined to
+their reservations, they resumed the march to civilization.
+
+From the commencement of his term, Grant was willing to aid in at once
+reducing the abuses of the Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy
+on the plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done good work, which
+would have been more effective had coĂśperation between the army and the
+bureau been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted two millions
+to be used in maintaining peace on the plains, "among and with the
+several tribes ... to promote civilization among said Indians, bring
+them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve their necessities,
+and encourage their efforts at self-support." The President was
+authorized at the same time to erect a board of not more than ten men,
+"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy," who should, with the
+Secretary of the Interior, and without salary, exercise joint control
+over the expenditures of this or any money voted for the use of the
+Indian Department.
+
+The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed to give greater wisdom
+to the administration of the Indian policy and to minimize peculation
+in the bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of the peace
+party over the army. "The gentlemen who wrote the reports of the
+Commissioners revelled in riotous imaginations and discarded facts,"
+sneered a friend of military control; but there was, more or less, a
+distinct improvement in the management of the reservation tribes after
+1869; although, as the exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption
+was by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners and Grant
+sought to elevate the tone of agency control was through the religious,
+charitable, and missionary societies. These organizations, many of
+which had long maintained missionary schools among the more civilized
+tribes, were invited to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians
+for appointment by the bureau. On the whole these appointments were
+an improvement over the men whom political influence had heretofore
+brought to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner and the board
+were again complaining of the character of the agents; but there was an
+increasing standard of criticism.
+
+In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869,
+and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In
+1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to
+civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable
+spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and
+Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of
+Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without
+occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers
+whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872,
+"the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity
+has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly
+improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their
+own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over
+them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult
+Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its _38th Annual
+Report_, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last
+thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their
+education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their
+admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes,
+upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may
+justly be proud."
+
+The board of Indian Commissioners believed that most of the obvious
+improvement in the Indian condition was due to the substitution of
+a peace policy for a policy of something else. It made a mistake in
+assuming that there had ever been a policy of war. So far as the United
+States government had been concerned the aim had always been peace
+and humanity, and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the
+Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy been administered.
+Even then it was distinctly temporary. The events of the sixties
+had involved such continuous friction and necessitated such severe
+repression that contemporaries might be pardoned for thinking that war
+was the policy rather than the cure. But the resistance of the tribes
+would generally have ceased by 1870, even without the new peace policy.
+Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for
+resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The
+Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific,
+and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads
+like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande,
+the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ, and the Missouri, Kansas, and
+Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet
+the board was right in that its influence in bringing closer harmony
+between public opinion and the Indian Bureau, and in improving the
+tone of the bureau, had made the transformation of the savage into the
+citizen farmer more rapid.
+
+Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian Commissioners
+Congress took another long step towards a better condition by
+ordering that no more treaties with the Indian tribes should be made
+by President and Senate. For more than two years before 1871 no
+treaty had been made and ratified, and now the policy was definitely
+changed. For ninety years the Indians had been treated as independent
+nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had been concluded with
+various tribes, the United States only once repudiating any of them.
+In 1863, after the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the
+tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had not applied
+to Indian relations the rule of international law that war terminates
+all existing treaties. The relation implied by the treaty had been
+anomalous. The tribes were at once independent and dependent. No
+foreign nation could treat with them; hence they were not free. No
+state could treat with them, and the Indian could not sue in United
+States courts; hence they were not Americans. The Supreme Court in the
+Cherokee cases had tried to define their unique status, but without
+great success. It was unfortunate for the Indians that the United
+States took their tribal existence seriously. The agreements had always
+a greater sanctity in appearance than in fact. Indians honestly unable
+to comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and often denying that they
+were in any wise bound by it, were held to fulfilment by the power
+of the United States. The United States often believed that treaty
+violation represented deliberate hostility of the tribes, when it
+signified only the unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to
+follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce treaties thus
+violated led constantly to wars whose justification the Indian could
+not see.
+
+The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making of any Indian treaty in
+the future. Hereafter when agreements became necessary, they were to be
+made, much as they had been in the past, but Congress was the ratifying
+power and not the Senate. The fiction of an independence which had held
+the Indians to a standard which they could not understand was here
+abandoned; and quite as much to the point, perhaps, the predominance of
+the Senate in Indian affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a
+whole. In no other branch of internal administration would the Senate
+have been permitted to make binding agreements, but here the fiction
+had given it a dominance ever since the organization of the government.
+
+In the thirty-five years following the abandonment of the Indian
+treaties the problems of management changed with the ascending
+civilization of the national wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian
+Commissioner in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day of deliverance
+from the fear of Indian hostilities," while his successors in office
+saw his prophecy fulfilled. Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary
+of the Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement of
+management and the drafting of a positive policy. His application
+of the merit system to Indian appointments, which was a startling
+innovation in national politics, worked a great change after the petty
+thievery which had flourished in the presidency of General Grant.
+Grant had indeed desired to do well, and conditions had appreciably
+bettered, yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians to
+continue their peculations in instances which ranged from humble agents
+up to the Cabinet itself. Schurz not only corrected much of this,
+but the first report of his Commissioner, E. A. Hayt, outlined the
+preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides the continuance
+of concentration and education there were four policies which stood
+out in this report--economy in the administration of rations, that
+the Indians might not be pauperized; a special code of law for the
+Indian reserves; a well-organized Indian police to enforce the laws;
+and a division of reserve lands into farms which should be assigned to
+individual Indians in severalty. The administration of Secretary Schurz
+gave substance to all these policies.
+
+The progress of Indian education and civilization began to be a
+real thing during Hayes's presidency. Most of the wars were over,
+permanency in residence could be relied on to a considerable degree,
+the Indians could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In
+1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department, the Indian
+Office reported an Indian population of 256,127 for the United
+States, excluding Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing
+citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read. Among them had been
+erected both boarding and day schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the
+latter. "Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement,
+showing an increased and more regular attendance of pupils and a
+growing interest in education on the part of parents." Interest in
+the problem of Indian education had been aroused in the East as well
+as among the tribes during the preceding year or two, because of the
+experiment with which the name of R. H. Pratt was closely connected.
+The non-resident boarding school, where the children could be taken
+away from the tribe and educated among whites, had become a factor in
+Carlisle, Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt had opened the
+first of these with 147 students in November, 1879. His design had been
+to give to the boys and girls the rudiments of education and training
+in farming and mechanic arts. His experience had already, in 1880,
+shown this to be entirely practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled
+as soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals, marched to the
+music of their own band. Both sexes had exhibited at the Cumberland
+County Agricultural Fair, where prizes were awarded to many of them for
+quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness, tinware, and penmanship.
+Many of the students had increased their knowledge of white customs by
+going out in the summers to work in the fields or kitchens of farmers
+in the East. Here, too, they had shown the capacity for education and
+development which their bitterest frontier enemies had denied. In 1906
+there were twenty-five of these schools with more than 9000 students in
+attendance.
+
+It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away
+from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another
+to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The
+ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive
+to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or
+Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade,
+and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for
+rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but
+the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana Crows, for
+instance, were, in 1904, encouraged into agricultural rivalry by a
+county fair. Their congenital love for gambling was converted into
+competition over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906 they had not been
+drawing rations for nearly two years. While their settling down was
+but a single incident in tribal education and not a general reform,
+it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian conditions since
+the warlike sixties. The brilliant green placard which announced their
+county fair for 1906 bears witness to this:--
+
+                          "CROWS, WAKE UP!
+
+          "Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.
+                    "Begin Planting for it Now.
+                       "Plant a Good Garden.
+                      "Put in Wheat and Oats.
+  Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to
+                             the Fair.
+   Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best
+                             Exhibits.
+    "Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.
+
+  "_Committee._"
+
+A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence
+for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their
+relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership
+of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no
+attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them,
+while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of
+this on their own account. Individual attempts at progress were often
+checked by the fact that crime went unpunished in the Indian Country.
+An Indian police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in 1880,
+but the law respecting trespassers on Indian lands was inadequate, and
+Congress was slow in providing codes and courts for the reservations.
+The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts on his own
+authority in 1883; Congress extended certain laws over the tribes in
+1885; and a little later provided salaries for the officials of the
+agency courts.
+
+An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in severalty by
+Indians marked a great step towards solidifying Indian civilization.
+There had been no greater obstacle to this civilization than communal
+ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of hunting, with
+agriculture as an incidental and rather degrading feature. Few of
+the tribes had any recognition of individual ownership. The educated
+Indian and the savage alike were forced into economic stagnation by the
+system. Education could accomplish little in face of it. The changes of
+the seventies brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated
+requests that Congress begin the breaking down of the tribal system
+through the substitution of Indian ownership.
+
+In isolated cases and by special treaty provisions a few of the Indians
+had been permitted to acquire lands and be blended in the body of
+American citizens. But no general statute existed until the passage
+of the Dawes bill in February, 1887. In this year the Commissioner
+estimated that there were 243,299 Indians in the United States,
+occupying a total of 213,117 square miles of land, nearly a section
+apiece. By the Dawes bill the President was given authority to divide
+the reserves among the Indians located on them, distributing the
+lands on the basis of a quarter section or 160 acres to each head
+of a family, an eighth section to single adults and orphans, and a
+sixteenth to each dependent child. It was provided also that when the
+allotments had been made, tribal ownership should cease, and the title
+to each farm should rest in the individual Indian or his heirs. But to
+forestall the improvident sale of this land the owner was to be denied
+the power to mortgage or dispose of it for at least twenty-five years.
+The United States was to hold it in trust for him for this time.
+
+Besides allowing the Indian to own his farm and thus take his
+step toward economic independence, the Dawes bill admitted him to
+citizenship. Once the lands had been allotted, the owners came within
+the full jurisdiction of the states or territories where they lived,
+and became amenable to and protected by the law as citizens of the
+United States.
+
+The policy which had been recommended since the time of Schurz became
+the accepted policy of the United States in 1887. "I fail to comprehend
+the full import of the allotment act if it was not the purpose of the
+Congress which passed it and the Executive whose signature made it
+a law ultimately to dissolve all tribal relations and to place each
+adult Indian on the broad platform of American citizenship," wrote
+the Commissioner in 1887. For the next twenty years the reports of
+the office were filled with details of subdivision of reserves and
+the adjustment of the legal problems arising from the process. And in
+the twenty-first year the old Indian Country ceased to exist as such,
+coming into the Union as the state of Oklahoma.
+
+The progress of allotment under the Dawes bill steadily broke down the
+reserves of the so-called Indian Territory. Except the five civilized
+tribes, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, the
+inhabitants who had been colonized there since the Civil War wanted to
+take advantage of the act. The civilized tribes preferred a different
+and more independent system for themselves, and retained their tribal
+identity until 1906. In the transition it was found that granting
+citizenship to the Indian in a way increased his danger by opening him
+to the attack of the liquor dealer and depriving him of some of the
+special protection of the Indian Office. To meet this danger, as the
+period of tribal extinction drew near, the Burke act of 1906 modified
+and continued the provisions of the Dawes bill. The new statute
+postponed citizenship until the expiration of the twenty-five-year
+period of trust, while giving complete jurisdiction over the allottee
+to the United States in the interim. In special cases the Secretary of
+the Interior was allowed to release from the period of guardianship
+and trusteeship individual Indians who were competent to manage their
+own affairs, but for the generality the period of twenty-five years
+was considered "not too long a time for most Indians to serve their
+apprenticeship in civic responsibilities."
+
+Already the opening up to legal white settlement had begun. In the
+Dawes bill it was provided that after the lands had been allotted in
+severalty the undivided surplus might be bought by the United States
+and turned into the public domain for entry and settlement. Following
+this, large areas were purchased in 1888 and 1889, to be settled in
+1890. The territory of Oklahoma, created in this year in the western
+end of Indian Territory, and "No Man's Land," north of Texas, marked
+the political beginning of the end of Indian Territory. It took nearly
+twenty years to complete it, through delays in the process of allotment
+and sale; but in these two decades the work was done thoroughly, the
+five civilized tribes divided their own lands and abandoned tribal
+government, and in November, 1908, the state of Oklahoma was admitted
+by President Roosevelt.
+
+The Indian relations, which were most belligerent in the sixties, had
+changed completely in the ensuing forty years. In part the change was
+due to a greater and more definite desire at Washington for peace, but
+chiefly it was environmental, due to the progress of settlement and
+transportation which overwhelmed the tribes, destroying their capacity
+to resist and embedding them firmly in the white population. Oklahoma
+marked the total abandonment of Monroe's policy of an Indian Country.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE LAST STAND OF CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL
+
+
+The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians ceased with the
+termination of the Indian wars of the sixties. Here the resistance had
+most closely resembled a general war with the tribes in close alliance
+against the invader. With this obstacle overcome, the work left to
+be done in the conquest of the continent fell into two main classes:
+terminating Indian resistance by the suppression of sporadic outbreaks
+in remote byways and letting in the population. The new course of the
+Indian problem after 1869 led it speedily away from the part it had
+played in frontier advance until it became merely one of many social or
+race problems in the United States. It lost its special place as the
+great illustration of the difficulties of frontier life. But although
+the new course tended toward chronic peace, there were frequent
+relapses, here and there, which produced a series of Indian flurries
+after 1869. Never again do these episodes resemble, however remotely, a
+general Indian war.
+
+Human nature did not change with the adoption of the so-called peace
+policy. The government had constantly to be on guard against the
+dishonest agent, while improved facilities in communication increased
+the squatters' ability to intrude upon valuable lands. The Sioux treaty
+of 1868, whereby the United States abandoned the Powder River route and
+erected the great reserve in Dakota, west of the Missouri River, was
+scarcely dry before rumors of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills
+turned the eyes of prospectors thither.
+
+Early in 1870 citizens of Cheyenne and the territory of Wyoming
+organized a mining and prospecting company that professed an intention
+to explore the Big Horn country in northern Wyoming, but was believed
+by the Sioux to contemplate a visit to the Black Hills within their
+reserve. The local Sioux agent remonstrated against this, and General
+C. C. Augur was sent to Cheyenne to confer with the leaders of the
+expedition. He found Wyoming in a state of irritation against the
+Sioux treaty, which left the Indians in control of their Powder River
+country--the best third of the territory. He sympathized with the
+frontiersmen, but finally was forced by orders from Washington to
+prevent the expedition from starting into the field. Four years later
+this deferred reconnoissance took place as an official expedition under
+General Custer, with "great excitement among the whole Sioux." The
+approach from the northeast of the Northern Pacific, which had reached
+a landing at Bismarck on the Missouri before the panic of 1873, still
+further increased the apprehension of the tribes that they were to be
+dispossessed. The Indian Commissioner, in the end of 1874, believed
+that no harm would come of the expedition since no great gold finds
+had been made, but the Montana historian was nearer the truth when
+he wrote: "The whole Sioux nation was successfully defied." It was a
+clear violation of the tribal right, and necessarily emboldened the
+frontiersmen to prospect on their own account.
+
+[Illustration: POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN
+
+From a photograph made by Mr. W. R. Bowlin, of Chicago, and reproduced
+by his permission]
+
+Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give countenance to the
+disgruntled warrior bands that resented the treaties already made, came
+the mismanagement of the Red Cloud agency. Professor O. C. Marsh, of
+Yale College, was stopped by Red Cloud, while on a geological visit to
+the Black Hills, in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the
+Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington samples of decayed
+flour and inferior rations which the Indian agent was issuing to the
+Oglala Sioux. With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded
+to study the new problem thus brought to his notice, and accumulated
+a mass of evidence which seemed to him to prove the existence of big
+plots to defraud the government, and mismanagement extending even to
+the Secretary of the Interior. He published his charges in pamphlet
+form, and wrote letters of protest to the President, in which he
+maintained that the Indian officials were trying harder to suppress
+his evidence than to correct the grievances of the Sioux. He managed
+to stir up so much interest in the East that the Board of Indian
+Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate the affairs
+of the Red Cloud agency. The report of the committee in October, 1875,
+whitewashed many of the individuals attacked by Professor Marsh, and
+exonerated others of guilt at the expense of their intelligence,
+but revealed abuses in the Indian Office which might fully justify
+uneasiness among the Sioux.
+
+To these tribes, already discontented because of their compression
+and sullen because of mismanagement, the entry of miners into the
+Black Hills country was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners
+were there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating disturbances
+and exaggerating in the Indian mind the value of the reserve, so that
+an attempt by the Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn
+came to nothing. The natural tendency of these forces was to drive the
+younger braves off the reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty
+bands that roamed at will and were scornful of those that lived in
+peace. Most important of the leaders of these bands was Sitting Bull.
+
+In December the Indian Commissioner, despite the Sioux privilege to
+pursue the chase, ordered all the Sioux to return to their reserves
+before February 1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile. As
+yet the mutterings had not broken out in war, and the evidence does not
+show that conflict was inevitable. The tribes could not have got back
+on time had they wanted to; but their failure to return led the Indian
+Office to turn the Sioux over to the War Department. The army began by
+destroying a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested not
+by an enemy of the army, but by General H. H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who
+himself had fought the Sioux with marked success in 1862.
+
+With war now actually begun, three columns were sent into the field to
+arrest and restrain the hostile Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook,
+Gibbon, and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic of fighters.
+He was already well known for his Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier
+book. Sherman had described him in 1867 as "young, _very_ brave, even
+to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer," and as "ready and
+willing now to fight the Indians." La Barge, who had carried some
+of Custer's regiment on his steamer _De Smet_, in 1873, saw him as
+"an officer ... clad in buckskin trousers from the seams of which a
+large fringe was fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large
+gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited animal." His showy
+vanity and his admitted courage had already got him into more than one
+difficulty; now on June 25, 1876, his whole column of five companies,
+excepting only his battle horse, Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was
+destroyed in a battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had lived,
+he might perhaps have been cleared of the charge of disobedience, as
+Fetterman might ten years before, but, as it turned out, there were
+many to lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended before 1876
+was over, though Sitting Bull with a small band escaped to Canada,
+where he worried the Dominion Government for several years. "I know of
+no instance in history," wrote Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, "where a
+great nation has so shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux
+were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the disappointed tribes
+settled down to another decade of quiescence.
+
+In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull a hero in the
+Centennial year was transferred to Chief Joseph, leader of the
+non-treaty Nez PercĂŠs, in the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been
+a friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since the expedition
+of Lewis and Clark. Living in the valleys of the Snake and its
+tributaries, it could easily have hindered the course of travel along
+the Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was always good.
+In 1855 it had begun to treat with the United States and had ceded
+considerable territory at the conference held by Governor Stevens with
+Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.
+
+The exigencies of the Civil War, failure of Congress to fulfil treaty
+stipulations, and the discovery of gold along the Snake served to
+change the character of the Nez PercĂŠs. Lawyer's annuity of five
+hundred dollars, as Principal Chief, was at best not royal, and when
+its vouchers had to be cashed in greenbacks at from forty-five to
+fifty cents on the dollar, he complained of hardship. It was difficult
+to persuade the savage that a depreciated greenback was as good as
+money. Congress was slow with the annuities promised in 1855. In 1861,
+only one Indian in six could have a blanket, while the 4393 yards of
+calico issued allowed under two yards to each Indian. The Commissioner
+commented mildly upon this, to the effect that "Giving a blanket to one
+Indian works no satisfaction to the other five, who receive none." The
+gold boom, with the resulting rise of Lewiston, in the heart of the
+reserve, brought in so many lawless miners that the treaty of 1855 was
+soon out of date.
+
+In 1863 a new treaty was held with Chief Lawyer and fifty other
+headmen, by which certain valleys were surrendered and the bounds of
+the Lapwai reserve agreed upon. Most of the Nez PercĂŠs accepted this,
+but Chief Joseph refused to sign and gathered about him a band of
+unreconciled, non-treaty braves who continued to hunt at will over the
+Wallowa Valley, which Lawyer and his followers had professed to cede.
+It was an interesting legal point as to the right of a non-treaty chief
+to claim to own lands ceded by the rest of his tribe. But Joseph,
+though discontented, was not dangerous, and there was little friction
+until settlers began to penetrate into his hunting-grounds. In 1873,
+President Grant created a Wallowa reserve for Joseph's Nez PercĂŠs,
+since they claimed this chiefly as their home. But when they showed no
+disposition to confine themselves to its limits, he revoked the order
+in 1875. The next year a commission, headed by the Secretary of the
+Interior, Zachary Chandler, was sent to persuade Joseph to settle down,
+but returned without success. Joseph stood upon his right to continue
+to occupy at pleasure the lands which had always belonged to the Nez
+PercĂŠs, and which he and his followers had never ceded. The commission
+recommended the segregation of the medicine-men and dreamers,
+especially Smohalla, who seemed to provide the inspiration for Joseph,
+and the military occupation of the Wallowa Valley in anticipation of an
+outbreak by the tribe against the incoming white settlers. These things
+were done in part, but in the spring of 1877, "it becoming evident to
+Agent Monteith that all negotiations for the peaceful removal of Joseph
+and his band, with other non-treaty Nez PercĂŠ Indians, to the Lapwai
+Indian reservation in Idaho must fail of a satisfactory adjustment,"
+the Indian Office gave it up, and turned the affair over to General O.
+O. Howard and the War Department.
+
+The conferences held by Howard with the leaders, in May, made it clear
+to them that their alternatives were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight.
+At first Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass and White
+Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater to which the tribe agreed to
+remove at once; but just before the day fixed for the removal, the
+murder of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge directed
+against the whites and the massacre of several. War immediately
+followed, for the next two months covering the borderland of Idaho
+and Montana with confusion. A whole volume by General Howard has been
+devoted to its details. Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the
+_North American Review_ in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically in
+his _Massacres of the Mountains_, and the Montana Historical Society
+has published many articles concerning it. Considerably less is known
+of the more important wars which preceded it than of this struggle of
+the Nez PercĂŠs. In August the fighting turned to flight, Chief Joseph
+abandoning the Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone
+Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased him 1321 miles, across the
+Yellowstone Park toward the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve.
+Along the swift flight there were running battles from time to time,
+while the fugitives replenished their stores and stock from the country
+through which they passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front
+Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them off. Miles caught
+their trail in the end of September after they had crossed the Missouri
+River and had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting Bull had
+found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised the Nez PercĂŠ camp on Snake
+Creek, capturing six hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's
+band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later the stubborn chief
+surrendered to Colonel Miles.
+
+"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner Hayt asked at the end of
+1877. For once an Indian band had conducted a war on white principles,
+obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation and torture.
+Joseph had by his sheer military skill won the admiration and respect
+of his military opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated the
+war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho. To exile they were sent,
+and Joseph's uprising ended as all such resistances must. The forcible
+invasion of the territory by the whites was maintained; the tribe was
+sent in punishment to malarial lands in Indian Territory, where they
+rapidly dwindled in number. There has been no adequate defence of the
+policy of the United States from first to last.
+
+The Modoc of northern California, and the Apache of Arizona and New
+Mexico fought against the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez
+PercĂŠs. The former broke out in resistance in the winter of 1872-1873,
+after they had long been proscribed by California opinion. In March of
+1873 they made their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General E.
+R. S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent to confer with them.
+In the war which resulted the Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced
+Charley, were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava beds of the
+Modoc country until regular soldiers finally corralled them all. Jack
+was hanged for murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley lived to
+settle down and reform with a portion of the tribe in Indian Territory.
+
+The Apache had always been a thorn in the flesh of the trifling
+population of Arizona and New Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and
+Indian Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard decade with
+Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had quieted down during the seventies
+and advanced towards economic independence. But the Apache were long
+in learning the virtues of non-resistance. Bell had found in Arizona
+a young girl whose adventures as a fifteen-year-old child served to
+explain the attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by Indians
+who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped her naked, knocked her
+senseless with a tomahawk, pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg
+with one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon her. The
+child had come to, and without food, clothes, or water, had found her
+way home over thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily
+inspired the white population with fear and hatred, while the continued
+residence of the sufferers in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the
+persistence of the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes in
+the end. Tucson had retaliated against such excesses of the red men
+by equal excesses of the whites. Without any immediate provocation,
+fourscore Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated under military
+supervision at Camp Grant, were massacred in cold blood.
+
+General George Crook alone was able to bring order into the Arizona
+frontier. From 1871 to 1875 he was there in command,--"the beau-ideal
+Indian fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged in constant
+campaigns against the "incorrigibly hostile," but before 1873 was over
+he had most of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police
+supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a brass identification
+check, so that it might be easier for his police to watch them. The
+tribes were passed back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook
+was transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately the Indian
+Commissioner commenced to concentrate the scattered tribes, but was
+hindered by hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as bitter as
+their hatred for the whites. First Victorio, and then Geronimo was the
+centre of the resistance to the concentration which placed hereditary
+enemies side by side. They protested against the sites assigned them,
+and successfully defied the Commissioner to carry out his orders. Crook
+was brought back to the department in 1882, and after another long war
+gradually established peace.
+
+Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876, returned to Dakota in the
+early eighties in time to witness the rapid settlement of the northern
+plains and the growth of the territories towards statehood. After his
+revolt the Black Hills had been taken away from the tribe, as had
+been the vague hunting rights over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood
+advanced in the later eighties, and as population piled up around the
+edges of the reserve, the time was ripe for the medicine-men to preach
+the coming of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his personal
+following. Bad crops which in these years produced populism in Kansas
+and Nebraska, had even greater menace for the half-civilized Indians.
+Agents and army officers became aware of the undercurrent of danger
+some months before trouble broke out.
+
+The state of South Dakota was admitted in November, 1889. Just a year
+later the Bureau turned the Sioux country over to the army, and General
+Nelson A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in the vicinity
+of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies. The arrest of Sitting Bull,
+who claimed miraculous powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts"
+were supposed to give invulnerability to his followers, was attempted
+in December. The troops sent out were resisted, however, and in the
+mĂŞlĂŠe the prophet was killed. The war which followed was much noticed,
+but of little consequence. General Miles had plenty of troops and
+Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph stations conveyed news easily and safely.
+But when orders were issued two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull
+to disarm the camp at Wounded Knee, the savages resisted. The troops
+within reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their rapid-fire guns,
+regardless of age or sex, with such effect that more than two hundred
+Indian bodies, mostly women and children, were found dead upon the
+field.
+
+With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among the Indians,
+important enough to be called resistance, came to an end. There had
+been many other isolated cases of outbreak since the adoption of the
+peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and individual murders
+long after 1890. But there were, and could be, no more Indian wars.
+Many of the tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while lands
+in severalty had changed the point of view of many tribesmen. The
+relative strength of the two races was overwhelmingly in favor of the
+whites.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+LETTING IN THE POPULATION[3]
+
+    [3] This chapter follows, in part, F. L. Paxson, "The Pacific
+        Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in
+        America," in Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol.
+        I, pp. 105-118.
+
+      "Veil them, cover them, wall them round--
+        Blossom, and creeper, and weed--
+      Let us forget the sight and the sound,
+        The smell and the touch of the breed!"
+
+
+Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle," upon the Indian village.
+The forces of nature were turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled
+at the growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and the wild
+pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the thatched huts dissolved in
+the torrents, and "by the end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle
+in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months
+before." The white man worked the opposite of this on what remained of
+the American desert in the last fifteen years of the history of the old
+frontier. In a decade and a half a greater change came over it than the
+previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890, it is fair to say that
+the frontier was no more.
+
+The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary line separating the
+farm lands and the unused West, had become nearly a circle before
+the compromise of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks
+it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the last generation.
+The flanks had widened out in the thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri,
+and Iowa had received their population. In the next ten years Texas
+and the Pacific settlements had carried the line further west until
+the circular shape of the frontier was clearly apparent by the middle
+of the century. And thus it stood, with changes only in detail, for a
+generation more. In whatever sense the word "frontier" is used, the
+fact is the same. If it be taken as the dividing line, as the area
+enclosed, or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the frontier
+of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier of 1850.
+
+The pressure on the frontier line had increased steadily during these
+thirty years. Population moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War.
+The agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in size and
+wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that became clearer as more
+citizens settled along it. East and south, it was close to the rainfall
+line which divides easy farming country from the semi-arid plains;
+west, it was a mountain range. In either case the country enclosed was
+too refractory to yield to the piecemeal process which had conquered
+the wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to expansion
+and hindrance to communication became of increasing consequence as
+population grew.
+
+Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural frontier was pressing
+against it. By 1860 the railway frontier had reached it. The former
+could not cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture
+offered by the lands beyond; the latter was restrained by the
+prohibitive cost of building railways through an entirely unsettled
+district. Private initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the
+continent; the one remaining task called for direct national aid.
+
+The influences operating upon this frontier of the Far West, though
+not making it less of a barrier, made it better known than any of the
+earlier frontiers. In the first place, the trails crossed it, with the
+result that its geography became well known throughout the country.
+No other frontier had been the site of a thoroughfare for many years
+before its actual settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the
+later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge of the West, and
+scattered groups of inhabitants here and there, without populating it
+in any sense. Finally the Indian friction produced the series of Indian
+wars which again called the wild West to the centre of the stage for
+many years.
+
+All of these forces served to advertise the existence of this frontier
+and its barrier character. They had coĂśperated to enlarge the railway
+movement, as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union Pacific
+was authorized to meet the new demand; and while the Union Pacific
+was under construction, other roads to meet the same demands were
+chartered and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled the
+final barrier.
+
+Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation of the
+entire frontier between 1862 and 1871. The charter acts of the Northern
+Pacific, the Atlantic and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern
+Pacific at once opened the way for some five new continental lines and
+closed the period of direct federal aid to railway construction. The
+Northern Pacific received its charter on the same day that the Union
+Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864. It was authorized to
+join the waters of Lake Superior and Puget Sound, and was to receive a
+land grant of twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in the
+territories through which it should run. In the summer of 1866 a third
+continental route was provided for in the South along the line of the
+thirty-fifth parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific, was to
+build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico,
+to the Pacific, and to connect, near the eastern line of California,
+with the Southern Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised
+twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the territories.
+The Texas Pacific was chartered March 3, 1871, as the last of the land
+grant railways. It received the usual grant, which was applicable only
+west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana and El Paso, it
+could receive no federal aid since in Texas there were no public lands.
+Its charter called for construction to San Diego, but the Southern
+Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico, headed it off at El
+Paso, and it got no farther.
+
+To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways, Congress
+added others in the form of local or state grants in the same years,
+so that by 1871 all that the companies could ask for the future was
+lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the first time the
+federal government had taken an active initiative in providing for
+the destruction of a frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no
+longer with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence of a
+realization of the approaching frontier change.
+
+The new Pacific railways began to build just as the Union Pacific was
+completed and opened to traffic. In the cases of all, the development
+was slow, since the investing public had little confidence in the
+existence of a business large enough to maintain four systems,
+or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert. The first period of
+construction of all these roads terminated in 1873, when panic brought
+transportation projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of
+five years.
+
+Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done much to establish public
+credit during the war and had created a market of small buyers
+for investment securities on the strength of United States bonds,
+popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869 and 1870. Within two years he
+is said to have raised thirty millions for the construction of the
+road, making its building a financial possibility. And although he
+may have distorted the isotherm several degrees in order to picture
+his farm lands as semi-tropical in their luxuriance, as General
+Hazen charged, he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul her
+opportunity, and had run the main line of track through Fargo, on the
+Red, to Bismarck, on the Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty
+miles from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought expansion
+to an end.
+
+For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern Pacific was of
+fundamental importance. The railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota,
+Dakota, and much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential grain
+fields of the Red River region were virgin forest, and on the main
+line of the new road, for two thousand miles, hardly a trace of
+settled habitation existed. The panic of 1873 caught the Union
+Pacific at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable
+track extending in advance of the railroad frontier. The Atlantic
+and Pacific and Texas Pacific were less seriously overbuilt, but not
+less effectively checked. The former, starting from Springfield,
+had constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita, in Indian
+Territory, where it arrived in the fall of 1871. It had meanwhile
+acquired some of the old Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track
+into St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita remained its
+terminus for several years, and when it emerged from the receiver's
+hands, it bore the new name of St. Louis and San Francisco.
+
+The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of local lines which
+expected, through federal incorporation, to reach the dignity of a
+continental railroad. It began its construction towards El Paso from
+Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state line, and reached
+the vicinity of Dallas and Fort Worth before the panic. It planned to
+get into St. Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern, and
+into New Orleans over the New Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas,
+Arkansas, and Missouri became through these lines a centre of railway
+development, while in the near-by grazing country the meat-packing
+industries shortly found their sources of supply.
+
+The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated in 1873 could
+scarcely have been deferred for many years. The waste of the Civil War
+period, and the enthusiasm for economic development which followed it,
+invited the retribution that usually follows continued and widespread
+inflation. Already the completion of a national railway system was
+foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had been for railways at
+any cost, but the Granger activities following the panic gave warning
+of an approaching period when this should be changed into a demand for
+regulation of railroads. But as yet the frontier remained substantially
+intact, and until its railway system should be completed the Granger
+demand could not be translated into an effective movement for federal
+control. It was not until 1879 that the United States recovered from
+the depression following the crisis. In that year resumption marked the
+readjustment of national currency, reconstruction was over, and the
+railways entered upon the last five years of the culminating period in
+the history of the frontier. When the five years were over, five new
+continental routes were available for transportation.
+
+The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress across Texas when
+checked by the panic in the vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived,
+it pushed its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by a land
+grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never built. Corporations of
+California, Arizona, and New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern
+Pacific, constructed the line across the Colorado River and along the
+Gila, through lands acquired by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains
+were running over its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to
+New Orleans by the following October. In the course of this Southern
+Pacific construction, connection had been made with the Atchison,
+Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but
+through lack of harmony between the roads their junction was of little
+consequence.
+
+[Illustration: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884
+
+This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads
+in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads which existed
+everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower
+Missouri valleys.]
+
+The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an additional line through
+southern Texas in the beginning of 1883. Around the Galveston,
+Harrisburg, and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other lines
+and begun double construction from San Antonio west, and from El Paso,
+or more accurately Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra
+Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new line and the Texas
+and Pacific used the same track. In later years the line through San
+Antonio and Houston became the main line of the Southern Pacific.
+
+A third connection of the Southern Pacific across Texas was operated
+before the end of 1883 over its Mojave extension in California and the
+Atlantic and Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic
+and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership, and come out
+as St. Louis and San Francisco. But its land grant had remained unused,
+while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ had reached Albuquerque and
+had exhausted its own land grant, received through the state of Kansas
+and ceasing at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter had
+passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch along the old Santa FĂŠ trail
+to Santa FĂŠ and Albuquerque. Here it came to an agreement with the
+St. Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were to build
+jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise, from Albuquerque
+into California. They built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not
+relishing a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege
+to meet the new road on the eastern boundary of California. Hence its
+Mojave branch was waiting at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific
+arrived there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the completion of
+bridges over the Colorado and Rio Grande this third eastern connection
+of the Southern Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were running
+through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.
+
+The names of Billings and Villard are most closely connected with the
+renascence of the Northern Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at
+the Missouri River, although it had built a few miles in Washington
+territory, around its new terminal city of Tacoma. The illumination of
+crisis times had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay
+Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in his palmy days. The
+existence of various land grant railways in Washington and Oregon made
+the revival difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer
+competition by both water and rail along the Columbia River, below
+Walla Walla. Under the presidency of Frederick Billings construction
+revived about 1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri,
+and from Wallula, at the junction of the Columbia and Snake. From
+these points lines were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri
+divisions towards the continental divide. Below Wallula, the Columbia
+Valley traffic was shared by agreement with the Oregon Railway and
+Navigation Company, which, under the presidency of Henry Villard, owned
+the steamship and railway lines of Oregon. As the time for opening the
+through lines approached, the question of Columbia River competition
+increased in serious aspect. Villard solved the problem through the
+agency of his famous blind pool, which still stands remarkable in
+railway finance. With the proceeds of the pool he organized the Oregon
+and Transcontinental as a holding company, and purchased a controlling
+interest in the rival roads. With harmony of plan thus insured, he
+assumed the presidency of the Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to
+complete and celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His
+celebration was elaborate, yet the _Nation_ remarked that the "mere
+achievement of laying a continuous rail across the continent has long
+since been taken out of the realm of marvels, and the country can
+never feel again the thrill which the joining of the Central and Union
+Pacific lines gave it."
+
+The land grant railways completed these four eastern connections across
+the frontier in the period of culmination. Private capital added a
+fifth in the new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled by the
+Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the Denver and Rio Grande. The
+Burlington, built along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had
+competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of that point since
+June, 1882. West of Denver the narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio
+Grande had been advancing since 1870.
+
+General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia capitalists had,
+in 1870, secured a Colorado charter for their Denver and Rio Grande.
+Started in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at Colorado Springs
+that autumn, and had continued south in later years. Like other roads
+it had progressed slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had been met at
+Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ. From Pueblo it contested
+successfully with this rival for the grand caĂąon of the Arkansas,
+and built up that valley through the Gunnison country and across the
+old Ute reserve, to Grand Junction. From the Utah line it had been
+continued to Ogden by an allied corporation. A through service to
+Ogden, inaugurated in the summer of 1883, brought competition to the
+Union Pacific throughout its whole extent.
+
+The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had
+threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different
+lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to
+cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer
+could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach
+of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in
+its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and
+through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and
+political unit. "As the railroads overtook the successive lines of
+isolated frontier posts, and settlements spread out over country no
+longer requiring military protection," wrote General P. H. Sheridan in
+1882, "the army vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into
+remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its pioneer work.
+In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and
+cabins of the frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful
+houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who
+knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The
+civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly
+approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening
+strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old
+Mexico, yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines will
+entirely disappear and the mingling settlements absorb the remnants
+of the once powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly
+attempted to forbid the destined progress of the age." The deluge of
+population realized by Sheridan, and let in by the railways, had, by
+1890, blotted the uninhabited frontier off the map. Local spots yet
+remained unpeopled, but the census of 1890 revealed no clear division
+between the unsettled West and the rest of the United States.
+
+New states in plains and mountains marked the abolition of the last
+frontier as they had the earlier. In less than ten years the gap
+between Minnesota and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and South
+Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington. In 1890, for the
+first time, a solid band of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific.
+Farther south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new pressure. The
+Dawes bill released a fertile acreage to be distributed to the land
+hungry who had banked up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and
+Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890, while in eighteen
+more years, swallowing up the whole Indian Country, it had taken its
+place as a member of the Union. Between the northern tier of states
+and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and
+Colorado, the last creating eleven new counties in its eastern third
+in 1889, had seen their population densify under the stimulus of easy
+transportation. Much of the settlement had been premature, inviting
+failure, as populism later showed, but it left no area in the United
+States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large enough to be regarded as a
+national frontier. The last frontier, the same that Long had described
+as the American Desert in 1820, had been won.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE ON THE SOURCES
+
+
+The fundamental ideas upon which all recent careful work in western
+history has been based were first stated by Frederick J. Turner, in
+his paper on _The Significance of the Frontier in American History_,
+in the _Annual Report of the Am. Hist. Assn._, 1893. No comprehensive
+history of the trans-Mississippi West has yet appeared; Randall
+Parrish, _The Great Plains_ (2d ed., Chicago, 1907), is at best only a
+brief and superficial sketch; the histories of the several far western
+states by Hubert Howe Bancroft remain the most useful collection of
+secondary materials upon the subject. R. G. Thwaites, _Rocky Mountain
+Exploration_ (N.Y., 1904); O. P. Austin, _Steps in the Expansion of
+our Territory_ (N.Y., 1903); H. Gannett, _Boundaries of the United
+States and of the Several States and Territories_ (_Bulletin of the
+U.S. Geological Survey_, No. 226, 1904); and _Organic Acts for the
+Territories of the United States with Notes thereon_ (56th Cong., 1st
+sess., Sen. Doc. 148), are also of use.
+
+The local history of the West must yet be collected from many varieties
+of sources. The state historical societies have been active for many
+years, their more important collections comprising: _Publications of
+the Arkansas Hist. Assn._, _Annals of Iowa_, _Iowa Hist. Record_, _Iowa
+Journal of Hist. and Politics_, _Collections of the Minnesota Hist.
+Soc._, _Trans. of the Kansas State Hist. Soc._, _Trans. and Rep. of
+the Nebraska Hist. Soc._, _Proceedings of the Missouri Hist. Soc._,
+_Contrib. to the Hist. Soc. of Montana_, _Quart. of the Oregon Hist.
+Soc._, _Quart. of the Texas State Hist. Assn._, _Collections of the
+Wisconsin State Hist. Soc._ The scattered but valuable fragments to be
+found in these files are to be supplemented by the narratives contained
+in the histories of the single states or sections, the more important
+of these being: T. H. Hittell, _California_; F. Hall, _Colorado_; J.
+C. Smiley, _Denver_ (an unusually accurate and full piece of local
+history); W. Upham, _Minnesota in Three Centuries_; G. P. Garrison,
+_Texas_; E. H. Meany, _Washington_; J. Schafer, _Hist. of the Pacific
+Northwest_; R. G. Thwaites, _Wisconsin_, and the _Works_ of H. H.
+Bancroft.
+
+The comprehensive collection of geographic data for the West is
+the _Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad from the
+Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean_, made by the War Department and
+published by Congress in twelve huge volumes, 1855-. The most important
+official predecessors of this survey left the following reports: E.
+James, _Account of an Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains,
+performed in the Years 1819, 1820, ... under the Command of Maj. S.
+H. Long_ (Phila., 1823); J. C. FrĂŠmont, _Report of the Exploring
+Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and
+North California in the Years 1843-'44_ (28th Cong., 2d sess., Sen.
+Doc. 174); W. H. Emory, _Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Ft.
+Leavenworth ... to San Diego ..._ (30th Cong., 1st sess., Ex. Doc.
+41); H. Stansbury, _Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great
+Salt Lake of Utah ..._ (32d Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Ex. Doc. 3). From
+the great number of personal narratives of western trips, those of
+James O. Pattie, John B. Wyeth, John K. Townsend, and Joel Palmer may
+be selected as typical and useful. All of these, as well as the James
+narrative of the Long expedition, are reprinted in the monumental R.
+G. Thwaites, _Early Western Travels_, which does not, however, give
+any aid for the period after 1850. Later travels of importance are J.
+I. Thornton, _Oregon and California in 1848 ..._ (N.Y., 1849); Horace
+Greeley, _An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the
+Summer of 1859_ (N.Y., 1860); R. F. Burton, _The City of the Saints,
+and across the Rocky Mountains to California_ (N.Y., 1862); R. B.
+Marcy, _The Prairie Traveller, a Handbook for Overland Expeditions_
+(edited by R. F. Burton, London, 1863); F. C. Young, _Across the
+Plains in '65_ (Denver, 1905); Samuel Bowles, _Across the Continent_
+(Springfield, 1861); Samuel Bowles, _Our New West, Records of Travels
+between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean_ (Hartford, 1869);
+W. A. Bell, _New Tracks in North America_ (2d ed., London, 1870); J.
+H. Beadle, _The Undeveloped West, or Five Years in the Territories_
+(Phila., 1873).
+
+The classic account of traffic on the plains is Josiah Gregg, _Commerce
+of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa FĂŠ Trader_ (many editions,
+and reprinted in Thwaites); H. M. Chittenden, _History of Steamboat
+Navigation on the Missouri River_ (N.Y., 1903), and _The American Fur
+Trade of the Far West_ (N.Y., 1902), are the best modern accounts. A
+brilliant sketch is C. F. Lummis, _Pioneer Transportation in America,
+Its Curiosities and Romance_ (_McClure's Magazine_, 1905). Other works
+of use are Henry Inman, _The Old Santa FĂŠ Trail_ (N.Y., 1898); Henry
+Inman and William F. Cody, _The Great Salt Lake Trail_ (N.Y., 1898);
+F. A. Root and W. E. Connelley, _The Overland Stage to California_
+(Topeka, 1901); F. G. Young, _The Oregon Trail_, in _Oregon Hist. Soc.
+Quarterly_, Vol. I; F. Parkman, _The Oregon Trail_.
+
+Railway transportation in the Far West yet awaits its historian.
+Some useful antiquarian data are to be found in C. F. Carter, _When
+Railroads were New_ (N.Y., 1909), and there are a few histories
+of single roads, the most valuable being J. P. Davis, _The Union
+Pacific Railway_ (Chicago, 1894), and E. V. Smalley, _History
+of the Northern Pacific Railroad_ (N.Y., 1883). L. H. Haney, _A
+Congressional History of Railways in the United States to 1850_; J.
+B. Sanborn, _Congressional Grants of Lands in Aid of Railways_, and
+B. H. Meyer, _The Northern Securities Case_, all in the _Bulletins_
+of the University of Wisconsin, contain much information and useful
+bibliographies. The local historical societies have published many
+brief articles on single lines. There is a bibliography of the
+continental railways in F. L. Paxson, _The Pacific Railroads and the
+Disappearance of the Frontier in America_, in _Ann. Rep. of the Am.
+Hist. Assn._, 1907. Their social and political aspects may be traced in
+J. B. Crawford, _The CrĂŠdit Mobilier of America_ (Boston, 1880) and E.
+W. Martin, _History of the Granger Movement_ (1874). The sources, which
+are as yet uncollected, are largely in the government documents and the
+files of the economic and railroad periodicals.
+
+For half a century, during which the Indian problem reached and
+passed its most difficult places, the United States was negligent
+in publishing compilations of Indian laws and treaties. In 1837 the
+Commissioner of Indian Affairs published in Washington, _Treaties
+between the United States of America and the Several Indian Tribes,
+from 1778 to 1837: with a copious Table of Contents_. After this date,
+documents and correspondence were to be found only in the intricate
+sessional papers and the _Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian
+Affairs_, which accompanied the reports of the Secretary of War,
+1832-1849, and those of the Secretary of the Interior after 1849. In
+1902 Congress published C. J. Kappler, _Indian Affairs, Laws, and
+Treaties_ (57th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc. 452). Few historians have
+made serious use of these compilations or reports. Two other government
+documents of great value in the history of Indian negotiations are,
+Thomas Donaldson, _The Public Domain_ (47th Cong., 2d sess., H. Misc.
+Doc. 45, Pt. 4), and C. C. Royce, _Indian Land Cessions in the United
+States_ (with many charts, in 18th _Ann. Rep. of the Bureau of Am.
+Ethnology_, Pt. 2, 1896-1897). Most special works on the Indians
+are partisan, spectacular, or ill informed; occasionally they have
+all these qualities. A few of the most accessible are: A. H. Abel,
+_History of the Events resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the
+Mississippi_ (in _Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn._, 1906, an elaborate
+and scholarly work); J. P. Dunn, _Massacres of the Mountains, a
+History of the Indian Wars of the Far West_ (N.Y., 1886; a relatively
+critical work, with some bibliography); R. I. Dodge, _Our Wild Indians
+..._ (Hartford, 1883); G. E. Edwards, _The Red Man and the White Man
+in North America from its Discovery to the Present Time_ (Boston,
+1882; a series of Lowell Institute lectures, by no means so valuable
+as the pretentious title would indicate); I. V. D. Heard, _History
+of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863_ (N.Y., 1863; a
+contemporary and useful narrative); O. O. Howard, _Nez Perce Joseph,
+an Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his Confederates, his Enemies,
+his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and Capture_ (Boston, 1881; this
+is General Howard's personal vindication); Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson,
+_A Century of Dishonor, a Sketch of the United States Government's
+Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes_ (N.Y., 1881; highly colored
+and partisan); G. W. Manypenny, _Our Indian Wards_ (Cincinnati, 1880;
+by a former Indian Commissioner); L. E. Textor, _Official Relations
+between the United States and the Sioux Indians_ (Palo Alto, 1896; one
+of the few scholarly and dispassionate works on the Indians); F. A.
+Walker, _The Indian Question_ (Boston, 1874; three essays by a former
+Indian Commissioner); C. T. Brady, _Indian Fights and Fighters_ and
+_Northwestern Fights and Fighters_ (N.Y., 1907; two volumes in his
+series of _American Fights and Fighters_, prepared for consumers of
+popular sensational literature, but containing much valuable detail,
+and some critical judgments).
+
+Nearly every incident in the history of Indian relations has been made
+the subject of investigations by the War and Interior departments. The
+resulting collections of papers are to be found in the congressional
+documents, through the indexes. They are too numerous to be listed
+here. The searcher should look for reports from the Secretary of
+War, the Secretary of the Interior, or the Postmaster-general, for
+court-martial proceedings, and for reports of special committees of
+Congress. Dunn gives some classified lists in his _Massacres of the
+Mountains_.
+
+There is a rapidly increasing mass of individual biography and
+reminiscence for the West during this period. Some works of this class
+which have been found useful here are: W. M. Meigs, _Thomas Hart
+Benton_ (Phila., 1904); C. W. Upham, _Life, Explorations, and Public
+Services of John Charles FrĂŠmont_ (40th thousand, Boston, 1856); S.
+B. Harding, _Life of George B. Smith, Founder of Sedalia, Missouri_
+(Sedalia, 1907); P. H. Burnett, _Recollections and Opinions of an Old
+Pioneer_ (N.Y., 1880; by one who had followed the Oregon trail and
+had later become governor of California); A. Johnson, _S. A. Douglas_
+(N.Y., 1908; one of the most significant biographies of recent years);
+H. Stevens, _Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens_ (Boston, 1900); R. S.
+Thorndike, _The Sherman Letters_ (N.Y., 1894; full of references
+to frontier conditions in the sixties); P. H. Sheridan, _Personal
+Memoirs_ (London, 1888; with a good map of the Indian war of 1867-1868,
+which the later edition has dropped); E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke,
+Financier of the Civil War_ (Phila., 1907; with details of Northern
+Pacific railway finance); H. Villard, _Memoirs_ (Boston, 1904; the life
+of an active railway financier); Alexander Majors, _Seventy Years on
+the Frontier_ (N.Y., 1893; the reminiscences of one who had belonged
+to the great firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell); G. R. Brown,
+_Reminiscences of William M. Stewart of Nevada_ (1908).
+
+Miscellaneous works indicating various types of materials which
+have been drawn upon are: O. J. Hollister, _The Mines of Colorado_
+(Springfield, 1867; a miners' handbook); S. Mowry, _Arizona and Sonora_
+(3d ed., 1864; written in the spirit of a mining prospectus); T. B.
+H. Stenhouse, _The Rocky Mountain Saints_ (London, 1874; a credible
+account from a Mormon missionary who had recanted without bitterness);
+W. A. Linn, _The Story of the Mormons_ (N.Y., 1902; the only critical
+history of the Mormons, but having a strong Gentile bias); T. J.
+Dimsdale, _The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky
+Mountains_ (2d ed., Virginia City, 1882; a good description of the
+social order of the mining camp).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Acton, Minnesota, Sioux massacre at, 235.
+
+  Alder Gulch mines, Idaho, 168.
+
+  Anthony, Major Scott J., 259.
+
+  Apache Indians, 247, 267, 268, 292, 312;
+    treaty of 1853 with, 124;
+    troubles with, in Arizona, 162-163;
+    last struggles of, against whites, 368-369.
+
+  Arapaho Indians, 247, 248, 252, 256 ff., 263, 267, 292;
+    Medicine Lodge treaty with, 292-293;
+    issue of arms to, 312-313;
+    join in war of 1868, 313-318;
+    Custer's defeat of, 317-318.
+
+  Arapahoe, county of, 141.
+
+  Arickara Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.
+
+  Arizona, beginnings of, 158 ff.;
+    erection of territory of, 162.
+
+  Arkansas, boundaries of, 28-29;
+    admission as a state, 40.
+
+  Army, question of control of Indian affairs by, 324-344.
+
+  Assiniboin Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.
+
+  Atchison, Senator, 129.
+
+  Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ Railway, 347, 384.
+
+  Atlantic and Pacific Railway, 375, 376, 377;
+    becomes the St. Louis and San Francisco, 378.
+
+  Augur, General C. C., 292, 295, 359.
+
+  Auraria settlement, Colorado, 142.
+
+
+  Bannack City, mining centre, 168.
+
+  Bannock Indians, 295.
+
+  Beadle, John H., on western railways and their builders, 332-333, 335.
+
+  Bear Flag Republic, the, 105.
+
+  Becknell, William, 56.
+
+  Beckwith, Lieut. E. G., Pacific railway survey by, 203-206.
+
+  Bell, English traveller, on railway building in the West, 329-331.
+
+  Benton, Thomas Hart, 58;
+    interest of, in railways, 193-194.
+
+  Bent's Fort, 65, 66.
+
+  Billings, Frederick, 382.
+
+  Blackfoot Indians, 264.
+
+  Black Hawk, Colorado, village of, 145.
+
+  Black Hawk, Indian chief, 17.
+
+  Black Hawk War, 21, 25-26, 37.
+
+  Black Hills, discovery of gold in, 359;
+    troubles with Indians resulting from discovery, 361 ff.
+
+  Black Kettle, Indian chief, 255-261;
+    leads war party in 1868, 313;
+    death of, 317.
+
+  Blind pool, Villard's, 383.
+
+  BoisĂŠ mines, 165.
+
+  Boulder, Colorado, 145.
+
+  Bowles, Samuel, on railway terminal towns, 332, 333.
+
+  Box family outrage, 307.
+
+  Bridge across the Mississippi, the first, 210.
+
+  Bridger, "Jim," 274.
+
+  Brown, John, murder of Kansans by, 134.
+
+  BrulĂŠ Sioux Indians, 264, 266.
+
+  Bull Bear, Indian chief, 309.
+
+  Bureau of Indian Affairs, 31, 123, 341 ff.
+
+  Burlington, capital of Iowa territory, 45;
+    description of, in 1840, 47-48.
+
+  Burnett, governor of California, 117.
+
+  Bushwhacking in Kansas during Civil War, 231.
+
+  Butterfield, John, mail and express route of, 177 ff.
+
+  Byers, Denver editor, 144;
+    quoted, 149, 150.
+
+
+  Caddo Indians, 28.
+
+  California, early American designs on, 104-105;
+    becomes American possession, 105;
+    discovery of gold in, and results, 108-113;
+    population in 1850, 117;
+    local railways constructed in, 219;
+    Central Pacific Railway in, 220, 222.
+
+  Camels, experiment with, in Texas, 176.
+
+  Camp Grant massacre, 162.
+
+  Canals, land grants in aid of, 215, 217.
+
+  Canby, E. R. S., 228, 233;
+    murder of, 367.
+
+  Carleton, Colonel J. H., 160, 233.
+
+  Carlyle, George H., 250-251.
+
+  Carrington, Colonel Henry B., 274-275.
+
+  Carson, Kit, 285.
+
+  Carson City, 157-158.
+
+  Carson County, 157.
+
+  Cass, Lewis, 21, 23.
+
+  Census of Indians, in 1880, 351.
+
+  Central City, Colorado, 145.
+
+  Central Overland, California, and Pike's Peak Express, 186.
+
+  Central Pacific of California Railway, 220, 222;
+    description of construction of, 325-335.
+
+  Cherokee Indians, 28-29.
+
+  Cherokee Neutral Strip, 29.
+
+  Cheyenne, founding of, 301;
+    consequence of, as a railway junction, 334.
+
+  Cheyenne Indians, massacre of, at Sand Creek, 260-261;
+    assigned lands in Indian Territory, 263;
+    Medicine Lodge treaty with, 292-293;
+    issue of arms to, 312-313;
+    begin war against whites in 1868, 313;
+    Custer's defeat of, 317-318.
+
+  Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway, 383.
+
+  Chickasaw Indians, 28-29.
+
+  Chief Joseph, leader of Nez PercĂŠ Indians, 363-365;
+    military skill shown by, in retreat of Nez PercĂŠs, 366-367.
+
+  Chief Lawyer, 363-364.
+
+  Chinese labor for railway building, 326-327.
+
+  Chippewa Indians, 26-27.
+
+  Chittenden, Hiram Martin, 70-71, 93.
+
+  Chivington, J. M., 229-230, 257;
+    massacre of Indians at Sand Creek by, 260-261.
+
+  Civil War, the West during the, 225 ff.
+
+  Claims associations, 47.
+
+  Clark, Governor, 20, 21, 25.
+
+  Clemens, S. L., quoted, 186-187.
+
+  Cody, William F., 184.
+
+  Colley, Major, Indian agent, 255, 258, 262.
+
+  Colorado, first settlements in, 142-145;
+    movement for separate government for, 146 ff.;
+    Senate bill for erection of territory of, 151, 154;
+    boundaries of, 154;
+    admission of, and first governor, 154-155;
+    during the Civil War, 228-230.
+
+  Colorado-Idaho plan, 151.
+
+  Comanche Indians, 28, 124, 252, 253, 263, 267, 268, 292.
+
+  Comstock lode, the, 157.
+
+  Conestoga wagons, 41, 64.
+
+  Connor, General Patrick E., 274.
+
+  Cooke, Jay, railway promotion and later failure of, 376-377.
+
+  Cooper, Colonel, 57.
+
+  Council Bluffs, importance of, as a railway terminus, 334.
+
+  Council Grove, rendezvous of Santa FĂŠ traders, 59, 63-64.
+
+  _CrĂŠdit Mobilier_, the, 335.
+
+  Creek Indians, 28-29.
+
+  Crocker, Charles, 220;
+    activity of, as a railway builder, 327.
+
+  Crook, General George, 368-369.
+
+  Crow Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.
+
+  Culbertson, Alexander, 200.
+
+  Cumberland Road, 41, 215, 325.
+
+  Custer, General, 304, 306, 307 ff., 310, 316, 359;
+    commands in attack on Cheyenne, 316-318;
+    romantic character of, and death in Sioux war, 362.
+
+
+  Dakota, erection and growth of territory of, 166-167;
+    Idaho created from a part of, 167.
+
+  Dawes bill of 1887, for division of lands among Indians, 354-355;
+    effect of, on Indian reserves, 356.
+
+  Delaware Indians, settlement of, in the West, 24, 127.
+
+  Demoine County created, 42.
+
+  Denver, settlement of, 142;
+    early caucuses and conventions at, 147-149.
+
+  Denver and Rio Grande Railway, 383-384.
+
+  Desert, tradition of a great American, 11-13;
+    disappearance of tradition, 119;
+    Kansas formed out of a portion of, 137;
+    final conquest by railways of region known as, 384-386.
+
+  Digger Indians, 203-204.
+
+  Dillon, President, 336.
+
+  Dodge, Henry, 35-36, 37-38, 44, 328-329.
+
+  Dole, W. P., Indian Commissioner, 239.
+
+  Donnelly, Ignatius, 237.
+
+  Douglas, Stephen A., 128, 213-214.
+
+  Downing, Major Jacob, 252, 260.
+
+  Dubuque, lead mines at, 34;
+    as a mining camp, 42.
+
+  Dubuque County created, 42.
+
+
+  Education of Indians, 351-352.
+
+  Emigrant Aid Society, 130.
+
+  Emory, Lieut.-Col., survey by, 208.
+
+  Erie Canal, 10, 21, 24, 38, 325.
+
+  Evans, Governor, war against Indians conducted by, 253 ff.;
+    quoted, 269.
+
+  Ewbank Station massacre, 250.
+
+
+  Fairs, agricultural, for Indians, 352-353.
+
+  Falls line, 5.
+
+  Far West, Mormon headquarters at, 90.
+
+  Fetterman, Captain W. J., 274, 277-278, 279;
+    slaughter of, by Indians, 280-281.
+
+  Fiske, Captain James L., 188.
+
+  Fitzpatrick, Indian agent, 122-124.
+
+  Fort Armstrong, purchase at, of Indian lands, 26.
+
+  Fort Benton, 163, 164.
+
+  Fort Bridger, 301.
+
+  Fort C. F. Smith, 275-277.
+
+  Fort Hall, 74.
+
+  Fort Kearney, 78.
+
+  Fort Laramie, 78, 121;
+    treaties with Indians signed at, in 1851, 123-124;
+    conference of Peace Commission with Indians held at (1867), 291.
+
+  Fort Larned, conference with Indians at, 308.
+
+  Fort Leavenworth, 24, 59.
+
+  Fort Philip Kearney, Indian fight at (1866), 274-275;
+    extermination of Fetterman's party at, 280-282.
+
+  Fort Pierre, 267.
+
+  Fort Ridgely, Sioux attack on, 235-236.
+
+  Fort Snelling, 33-34, 48.
+
+  Fort Sully conference, 271-272, 273.
+
+  Fort Whipple, 162.
+
+  Fort Winnebago, 35.
+
+  Fort Wise, treaty with Indians signed at, 249.
+
+  Forty-niners, 109-118.
+
+  Fox Indians, 21, 25, 26, 127.
+
+  Flandrau, Judge Charles E., 236-237.
+
+  Franklin, town of, 63.
+
+  Freighting on the plains, 174 ff.
+
+  FrĂŠmont, John C., 58;
+    explorations of, beyond the Rockies, 73-75, 195;
+    senator from California, 117.
+
+  Fur traders, pioneer western, 70-71.
+
+
+  Galbraith, Thomas J., Indian agent, 238.
+
+  Geary, John W., 135.
+
+  Georgetown, Colorado, 145.
+
+  Geronimo, Indian chief, 369.
+
+  Gilpin, William, first governor of Colorado Territory, 155;
+    quoted, 225;
+    responsibility assumed by, during the Civil War, 228-229.
+
+  Gold, discovery of, in California, 108-113;
+    in Pike's Peak region, 141-142;
+    in the Black Hills, 359-361.
+
+  Grattan, Lieutenant, 265.
+
+  Great American desert. _See_ Desert.
+
+  Great Salt Lake. _See_ Salt Lake.
+
+  Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company, 176.
+
+  Greeley, Horace, western adventures of, 145, 179, 182.
+
+  Gregg, Josiah, 61-62.
+
+  Grosventre Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.
+
+  Guerrilla conflicts during the Civil War, 230-233.
+
+  Gunnison, Captain J. W., 204-205.
+
+
+  Hancock, General W. S., 306-311.
+
+  Hand-cart incident in Mormon emigration, 100-101.
+
+  Harney, General, 266.
+
+  Harte, Bret, verses by, 338.
+
+  Hayt, E. A., Indian Commissioner, 350.
+
+  Hazen, General W. B., 320-321.
+
+  Helena, growth of city of, 169.
+
+  Highland settlement, Colorado, 142.
+
+  Holladay, Ben, 186-190, 284;
+    losses from Indians by, 250.
+
+  Hopkins, Mark, 220.
+
+  Howard, General O. O., 365-366.
+
+  Hungate family, murder of, by Indians, 253.
+
+  Hunkpapa Indians, 264.
+
+  Hunter, General, in charge of Department of Kansas during Civil War,
+      230-231.
+
+  Huntington, Collis P., 220.
+
+
+  Idaho, proposed name for Colorado, 151, 154;
+    establishment of territory of, 166-167.
+
+  Idaho Springs, settlement of, 145.
+
+  Illinois, opening of, to whites, 21.
+
+  Illinois Central Railroad, 210, 216-218.
+
+  Independence, town of, 63;
+    outfitting post of traders, 71;
+    Mormons at, 89-90.
+
+  Indian agents, position of, in regard to Indian affairs, 304-305;
+    question regarding, as opposed to military control of Indians,
+        342-343.
+
+  Indian Bureau, creation of, 31;
+    transference from War Department to the Interior, 123;
+    history of the, 341 ff.
+
+  Indian Commissioners, Board of, created in 1869, 345.
+
+  Indian Intercourse Act, 31.
+
+  Indian Territory, position of Indians in, during the Civil War,
+        240-241;
+    breaking up of, following allotment of lands to individual Indians,
+        357.
+
+  Indians, numbers of, in United States, 14;
+    governmental policy regarding, 16 ff.;
+    Monroe's policy of removal of, to western lands, 18-19;
+    treaties of 1825 with, 19-20;
+    allotment of territory among, on western frontier, 20-30;
+    troubles with, resulting from Oregon, California, and Mormon
+        emigrations, 119-123;
+    fresh treaties with at Upper Platte agency in 1851, 123-124;
+    further cession of lands in Indian Country by, in 1854, 127;
+    treatment of, by Arizona settlers, 162-163;
+    danger to overland mail and express business from, 187-188, 250;
+    Digger Indians, 203-204;
+    the Sioux war in Minnesota, 234 ff.;
+    effect of the Civil War on, 240-242;
+    causes of restlessness of, during Civil War, 234 ff.;
+    antagonism of, aroused by advance westward of whites, 244-252;
+    conditions leading to Sioux war, 264 ff.;
+    war with plains Sioux (1866), 273-283;
+    the discussion as to proper treatment of, 284-288;
+    appointment of Peace Commissioner of 1867 to end Cheyenne and Sioux
+        troubles, 289-290;
+    Medicine Lodge treaties concluded with, 292-293;
+    report and recommendations of Peace Commission, 296-298;
+    interval of peace with, 302-303;
+    continued troubles with, and causes, 304 ff.;
+    war begun by Arapahoes and Cheyenne in 1868, 313;
+    war of 1868, 313-318;
+    President Grant appoints board of civilian Indian commissioners,
+        323, 341 ff.;
+    railway builders' troubles with, 328-329;
+    question of civilian or military control of, 342-344;
+    Board of Commissioners, appointed for (1869), 345;
+    Congress decides to make no more treaties with, 348;
+    mistaken policy of treaties, 348-349;
+    census of, in 1880, 351;
+    agricultural fairs for, 352-353;
+    individual ownership of land by, 354-357;
+    effect of allotment of lands among, on Indian reserves, 356-357;
+    end of Monroe's policy, 357;
+    last struggles of the Sioux, Nez PercĂŠs, and Apaches, 361-371.
+
+  Inkpaduta's massacre, 51.
+
+  Inman, Colonel Henry, quoted, 285.
+
+  Iowa, Indian lands out of which formed, 26;
+    territory of, organized, 45.
+
+  Iowa Indians, 127.
+
+
+  Jackson, Helen Hunt, work by, 344.
+
+  Jefferson, early name of state of Colorado, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155.
+
+  Johnston, Albert Sidney, commands army against Mormons, 102;
+    escapes to the South, on opening of the Civil War, 226-227.
+
+  Jones and Russell, firm of, 181.
+
+  Judah, Theodore D., 219, 220, 326.
+
+  Julesburg, station on overland mail route, 182, 331.
+
+
+  Kanesville, Iowa, founding of, 95.
+
+  Kansa Indians, 19, 20, 24.
+
+  Kansas, reasons for settlement of, 124-125;
+    creation of territory of, 129;
+    the slavery struggle in, 129-131;
+    squatters on Indian lands in, 131-132;
+    further contests between abolition and pro-slave parties, 132-136;
+    admission to the union in 1861, 136;
+    boundaries of, 138;
+    during the Civil War, 230-233.
+
+  Kansas-Nebraska bill, 128-129.
+
+  Kansas Pacific Railway, 340.
+
+  Kaskaskia Indians, 30, 127.
+
+  Kaw Indians. _See_ Kansa Indians.
+
+  Kearny, Stephen W., 65-66, 78.
+
+  Kendall, Superintendent of Indian department, quoted, 165.
+
+  Keokuk, Indian chief, 25.
+
+  Kickapoo Indians, 24, 127.
+
+  Kiowa Indians, 252, 253, 263, 267, 268, 292, 306.
+
+  Kirtland, Ohio, temporary headquarters of Mormons, 88.
+
+  Labor question in railway construction, 326-327.
+
+  Lake-to-Gulf railway scheme, 217.
+
+  Land, allotment of, to Indians as individuals, 354-357.
+
+  Land grants in aid of railways, 215-218, 222, 325, 329, 336, 375.
+
+  Land titles, pioneers' difficulties over, 46-47.
+
+  Larimer, William, 147, 152.
+
+  Last Chance Gulch, Idaho, mining district, 169.
+
+  Lawrence, Amos A., 130.
+
+  Lawrence, Kansas, settlement of, 130-131;
+    visit of Missouri mob to, 134;
+    Quantrill's raid on, 232.
+
+  Lead mines about Dubuque, 34-35.
+
+  Leavenworth, J. H., Indian agent, 306, 308-309.
+
+  Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company, 181.
+
+  Leavenworth constitution, 135-136.
+
+  Lecompton constitution, 135-136.
+
+  Lewiston, Washington, founding of, 164.
+
+  Linn, Senator, 72-73.
+
+  Liquor question in Oregon, 81-82.
+
+  Little Big Horn, battle of the, 362.
+
+  Little Blue Water, defeat of BrulĂŠ Sioux at, 266.
+
+  Little Crow, Sioux chief, 235-239.
+
+  Little Raven, Indian chief, 306.
+
+  Long, Major Stephen H., 11.
+
+
+  McClellan, George B., survey for Pacific railway by, 199.
+
+  Madison, Wisconsin, development of, 44, 45.
+
+  Mails, carriage of, to frontier points, 174 ff.
+
+  Manypenny, George W., 126, 266.
+
+  Marsh, O. C., bad treatment of Indians revealed by, 360-361.
+
+  Marshall, James W., 108-109.
+
+  Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, 130.
+
+  Medicine Lodge Creek, conference with Indians at, 292-293.
+
+  Menominee Indians, 27.
+
+  Methodist missionaries to western Indians, 72.
+
+  Mexican War, Army of the West in the, 65-66.
+
+  Miami Indians, 30, 127.
+
+  Michigan, territory and state of, 39-40.
+
+  Miles, General Nelson A., as an Indian fighter, 366, 370.
+
+  Milwaukee, founding of, 44.
+
+  Mines, trails leading to, 169-170.
+
+  Miniconjou Indians, 265.
+
+  Mining, lead, 34-35, 42;
+    gold, 108-113, 141-142, 156-157, 359-361;
+    silver, 157 ff.
+
+  Mining camps, description of, 170-173.
+
+  Minnesota, organization of, as a territory, 48-49;
+    Sioux war in, in 1862, 234 ff.
+
+  Missionaries, pioneer, 72;
+    civilization and education of Indians by, 345-346.
+
+  Missoula County, Washington Territory, 168.
+
+  Missouri Indians, 127.
+
+  Modoc Indians, last war of the, 367.
+
+  Modoc Jack, 367.
+
+  Mojave branch of Southern Pacific Railway, 381-382.
+
+  Monroe's policy toward Indians, 18-19;
+    end of, 357.
+
+  Montana, creation of territory of, 169.
+
+  Montana settlement, Colorado, 142.
+
+  Monteith, Indian Agent, 365.
+
+  Mormons, the, 86 ff., 102.
+
+  Mowry, Sylvester, 159, 161.
+
+  Mullan Road, the, 167, 170.
+
+  Murphy, Thomas, Indian superintendent, 312.
+
+
+  Nauvoo, Mormon settlement of, 91-94.
+
+  Navaho Indians, 243, 368.
+
+  Nebraska, movement for a territory of, 125;
+    creation of territory of, 129;
+    boundaries of, 138.
+
+  Neutral Line, the, 21.
+
+  Nevada, beginnings of, 156-158;
+    territory of, organized, 158.
+
+  New Mexico, the early trade to, 53-69;
+    boundaries of, in 1854, 139;
+    during the Civil War, 229-230.
+
+  New Ulm, Minnesota, fight with Sioux Indians at, 236-237.
+
+  Nez PercĂŠ Indians, 164, 363-365;
+    precipitation of war with, in 1877, 365-366;
+    defeat and disposal of tribe, 366-367.
+
+  Niles, Hezekiah, 60, 79.
+
+  Noland, Fent, 42-43.
+
+  No Man's Land, 357.
+
+  Northern Pacific Railway, 375, 376, 377, 382-383.
+
+
+  Oglala Sioux, 281, 291, 360.
+
+  Oklahoma, 357, 386.
+
+  Omaha, cause of growth of, 334.
+
+  Omaha Indians, 25.
+
+  Oregon, fur traders and early pioneers, in, 70-72;
+    emigration to, in 1844-1847, 75-76;
+    provisional government organized by settlers in, 79-80;
+    region included under name, 83-84;
+    territory of, organized (1848), 85;
+    population in 1850, 117;
+    boundaries of, in 1854, 139;
+    territory of Washington cut from, 163;
+    railway lines in, 382-383.
+
+  Oregon trail, 70-85;
+    course of the, 78-79;
+    the Mormons on the, 86 ff.
+
+  Osage Indians, 19, 20.
+
+  Oto Indians, 127.
+
+  Ottawa Indians, 27.
+
+  Overland mail, the, 174 ff.
+
+  Owyhee mining district, 165.
+
+
+  Paiute Indians, murder of Captain Gunnison by, 205.
+
+  Palmer, General William J., 383.
+
+  Panic, of 1837, 43-44;
+    of 1857, 51-52;
+    of 1873, 377-379.
+
+  Parke, Lieut. J. G., survey for Pacific railway by, 207-208.
+
+  Peace Commission of 1867, to conclude Cheyenne and Sioux wars,
+      289-290;
+    Medicine Lodge treaties concluded by, 292-293;
+    report of, quoted, 296-298.
+
+  Pennsylvania Portage Railway, 325.
+
+  Peoria Indians, 30, 127.
+
+  Piankashaw Indians, 30, 127.
+
+  Pike, Zebulon M., 19, 34, 55.
+
+  Pike's Peak, discovery of gold about, 141-142;
+    the rush to, 142-145;
+    reaction from boom, 145-146;
+    origin of Colorado Territory in the Pike's Peak boom, 146-155.
+
+  "Pike's Peak Guide," the, 144.
+
+  Plum Creek massacre, 250.
+
+  Pony express, 158, 182-185.
+
+  Pope, Captain John, survey by, 207.
+
+  Popular sovereignty, doctrine of, 128.
+
+  Poston, Charles D., 159.
+
+  Potawatomi Indians, 26-27.
+
+  Powder River expedition, 273-274.
+
+  Powder River war with Indians, 276-283.
+
+  Powell, Major James, 283.
+
+  Prairie du Chien, treaty made with Indians at, 20-21;
+    second treaty of (1830), 25.
+
+  Prairie schooners, 64.
+
+  Pratt, R. H., education of Indians attempted by, 351.
+
+  Price's Missouri expedition, 233.
+
+
+  Quantrill's raid into Kansas, 231-232.
+
+  Quapaw Indians, 29.
+
+
+  Railways, early craze for building, 40;
+    advance of, in the fifties, 51;
+    first thoughts about a Pacific road, 192 ff.;
+    surveys for Pacific, 192 ff., 197-203;
+    bearing of slavery question on transcontinental, 211-214;
+    Senator Douglas's bill, 213-214;
+    land grants in aid of, 215-218, 222, 325, 329, 336, 375;
+    Indian hostilities caused by advance of the, 283;
+    description of construction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific
+        roads, 325-335;
+    scandals connected with building of roads, 335;
+    description of formal junction of Central Pacific and Union
+        Pacific, 336-337;
+    effect of roads in bringing peace upon the plains, 347;
+    charter acts of the Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas
+        Pacific, and Southern Pacific, 375;
+    slow development of the later Pacific roads, 376;
+    the five new continental routes and their connections, 379-382;
+    Northern Pacific, 382-383;
+    Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, 383;
+    Denver and Rio Grande, 383-384;
+    disappearance of frontier through extension of lines of, and
+        conquest of Great American Desert, 384-386.
+
+  Ration system, pauperization of Indians by, 352.
+
+  Real estate speculation along western railways, 333-334.
+
+  Red Cloud, Indian chief, 274, 281, 283, 291-292, 294, 360.
+
+  Reeder, Andrew H., governor of Kansas Territory, 131-133.
+
+  _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_, 286-287.
+
+  Rhodes, James Ford, cited, 128.
+
+  Riggs, Rev. S. R., 239.
+
+  Riley, Major, 59-60.
+
+  Rio Grande, struggle for the, in Civil War, 228-230.
+
+  Robinson, Dr. Charles, 130;
+    elected governor of Kansas, 133.
+
+  _Rocky Mountain News_, the, 144, 150.
+
+  Roman Nose, Indian chief, 309.
+
+  Ross, John, Cherokee chief, 241.
+
+  Russell, William H., 181, 182, 185.
+
+  Russell, Majors, and Waddell, firm of, 181.
+
+
+  St. Charles settlement, Colorado, 142;
+    merged into Denver, 146.
+
+  St. Paul, Sioux Indian reserve at, 19;
+    early fort near site of, 33-34;
+    first settlement at, 49.
+
+  Saline River raid by Indians, 313, 314.
+
+  Salt Lake, FrĂŠmont's visit to, 74;
+    settlement of Mormons at, 96;
+    population of, in 1850, 117-118.
+
+  Sand Creek, massacre of Cheyenne Indians at, 260-261.
+
+  Sans Arcs Indians, 264.
+
+  Santa FĂŠ, trade with, 53-69.
+
+  Santa FĂŠ trail, Indians along the, 20;
+    beginnings of the (1822), 56-58;
+    course of the, 64-65.
+
+  Satanta, Kiowa Indian chief, 306.
+
+  Sauk Indians, 21, 25, 26, 127.
+
+  Saxton, Lieutenant, 199, 201.
+
+  Scandals, railway-building, 335.
+
+  Scar-faced Charley, Modoc Indian leader, 367.
+
+  Schofield, General John M., 232.
+
+  Schools for Indians, 351-352.
+
+  Schurz, Carl, policy of, toward Indians, 350.
+
+  Seminole Indians, 28-29.
+
+  Seneca Indians, 29.
+
+  Shannon, Wilson, governor of Kansas, 133, 134.
+
+  Shawnee Indians, 23-24, 127.
+
+  Sheridan, General, in command against Indians, 310-323;
+    quoted, 384-385.
+
+  Sherman, John, quoted on Indian matters, 285, 289.
+
+  Sherman, W. T., quoted, 143-144, 298;
+    instructions issued to Sheridan by, in Indian war of 1868, 316.
+
+  Shoshoni Indians, 123-124, 295.
+
+  Sibley, General H. H., 228, 237-238, 362.
+
+  Silver mining, 157 ff.
+
+  Sioux Indians, treaty of 1825 affecting the, 21;
+    location of, in 1837, 27;
+    surrender of lands in Minnesota by, 49;
+    treaties of 1851 with, 123-124;
+    war with, in Minnesota, in 1862, 234 ff.;
+    trial and punishment of, for Minnesota outrages, 239-240;
+    bands composing the plains Sioux, 264-265;
+    war with the plains Sioux in 1866, 264-283;
+    lands assigned to, by Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, 294;
+    sources of irritation between white settlers and, in 1870, 359;
+    disturbance of, by discovery of gold in the Black Hills, 359, 361;
+    war with, in 1876, 362-363;
+    crushing of, by United States forces, 363.
+
+  Sitting Bull, 361;
+    career of, as leader of insurgent Sioux, 362-363;
+    settles in Canada, 363;
+    returns to United States, 369;
+    death of, 370.
+
+  Slade, Jack, 182.
+
+  Slavery question, in territories, 128 ff.;
+    bearing of, on transcontinental railway question, 211-214.
+
+  Slough, Colonel John P., 229-230.
+
+  Smith, Joseph, 87, 90-93.
+
+  Smohalla, medicine-man, 365.
+
+  Sod breaking, Iowa, 46.
+
+  Solomon River raid, 313, 314.
+
+  Southern Pacific Railway, 375-376, 379, 381.
+
+  South Pass, the gateway to Oregon, 70.
+
+  Southport, founding of, 44.
+
+  Spirit Lake massacre, 51.
+
+  Stanford, Leland, 220, 336.
+
+  Stansbury, Lieutenant, survey by, 112, 113, 203;
+    quoted, 114-115.
+
+  Steamboats as factors in emigration, 40-41, 49.
+
+  Steele, Robert W., governor of Jefferson Territory (Colorado), 150,
+      152, 153, 155.
+
+  Stevens, Isaac I., 197-203.
+
+  Stuart, Granville and James, 168.
+
+  Subsidies to railways, 222, 325, 329, 375.
+    _See_ Land grants.
+
+  Sully, General Alfred, 268, 319.
+
+  Surveys for Pacific railway, 192 ff.
+
+  Sutter, John A., 104, 107-109.
+
+  Sweetwater mines, 301.
+
+
+  Telegraph system, inauguration of transcontinental, 185;
+    freedom of, from Indian interference, 283.
+
+  Ten Eyck, Captain, 280.
+
+  Texas, railway building in, 375-376, 377 ff.
+
+  Texas Pacific Railway, 375-376, 378, 379.
+
+  Thayer, Eli, 129-130.
+
+  Tippecanoe, battle of, 17.
+
+  Topeka constitution, 133.
+
+  Traders, wrongs done to Indians by, 234-235.
+
+  Treaties with Indians, 19-20, 123-124, 292-293;
+    fallacy of, 348-349.
+    _See_ Indians.
+
+  Tucson, 159, 160.
+
+
+  Union Pacific Railway, the, 211 ff.;
+    reason for name, 221;
+    incorporation of company, 221;
+    route of, 221-222;
+    land grants in aid of, 222 (_see_ Land grants);
+    financing of project, 222-223;
+    progress in construction of, 298-299, 301;
+    description of construction of, 325-335.
+
+  Utah, territory of, organized, 101-102;
+    boundaries of, 139;
+    partition of Nevada from, 157 ff.;
+    derivation of name from Ute Indians, 295.
+
+
+  Victorio, Indian chief, 369.
+
+  Vigilance committees in mining camps, 172.
+
+  Villard, Henry, 145, 182, 186, 382-383.
+
+  Vinita, terminus of Atlantic and Pacific road, 377.
+
+  Virginia City, 158, 168-169.
+
+
+  Wagons, Conestoga, 41, 64;
+    overland mail coaches, 178-179;
+    numbers employed in overland freight business, 190.
+
+  Wakarusa War, 133-134.
+
+  Walker, General Francis A., 285, 349.
+
+  Walker, Robert J., 135.
+
+  Washington, creation of territory of, 163;
+    mining in, 164-166;
+    a part of Idaho formed from, 166-167.
+
+  Washita, battle of the, 317-318.
+
+  Wayne, Anthony, 8, 17.
+
+  Wea Indians, 30, 127.
+
+  Wells, Fargo, and Company, 186, 190.
+
+  Whipple, Lieut. A. W., survey for Pacific railway by, 206-207.
+
+  White, Dr. Elijah, 75-76.
+
+  White Antelope, Indian chief, 256, 260, 313.
+
+  Whitman, Marcus, 72, 77, 80-81.
+
+  Whitney, Asa, 193, 212.
+
+  Willamette provisional government, 79-80.
+
+  Williams, Beverly D., 149.
+
+  Williamson, Lieut. R. S., survey by, 208.
+
+  Wilson, Hill P., Indian trader, 314.
+
+  Winnebago Indians, 26.
+
+  Wisconsin, opening of, to whites, 21;
+    territory of, organized, 44.
+
+  Wounded Knee, Indian fight at, 370.
+
+  Wyeth, Nathaniel J., 72.
+
+  Wynkoop, E. W., 255-259, 306, 310, 312-313.
+
+  Wyoming, territory of, 299, 302.
+
+
+  Yankton Sioux, the, 25, 166, 264.
+
+  Yerba Buena, village of, later San Francisco, 105.
+
+  Young, Brigham, 93-94, 96, 97 ff., 206;
+    made governor of Utah Territory, 101-102.
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcribers' note:
+
+Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
+predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were
+not changed.
+
+Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unpaired
+quotation marks were retained. For example, the paragraph beginning
+on page 311 with "There is little doubt" and ending on page 313 with
+"sincerity of their protestations" contains an unpaired quotation
+mark.
+
+Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
+
+Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.
+
+Text uses both "reconnaissance" and "reconnoissance"; both retained.
+
+Text mostly uses "Santa FĂŠ", so three occurrences of "Sante FĂŠ" have
+been changed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45699 ***
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-<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Last American Frontier, by Frederic L.

-(Frederic Logan) Paxson</h1>

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-<p>Title: The Last American Frontier</p>

-<p>Author: Frederic L. (Frederic Logan) Paxson</p>

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-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-<h4 class="center">E-text prepared by Melissa McDaniel, Charlie Howard,<br />

-    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />

-    (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net">http://www.pgdp.net</a>)<br />

-    from page images generously made available by<br />

-    Internet Archive<br />

-    (<a href="https://archive.org">https://archive.org</a>)</h4>

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10">

-  <tr>

-    <td valign="top">

-      Note:

-    </td>

-    <td>

-      Images of the original pages are available through

-      Internet Archive. See

-      <a href="https://archive.org/details/fronlastamerican00paxsrich">

-      https://archive.org/details/fronlastamerican00paxsrich</a>

-    </td>

-  </tr>

-</table>

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-<hr class="full" />

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-

-<div id="i_cover" class="figcenter" style="width: 542px;"><img class="nobdr" src="images/cover.jpg" width="542" height="800" alt="cover" /></div>

-

-<h1>STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY</h1>

-

-<hr />

-

-<div id="if_i-002" class="figcenter" style="width: 108px;"><img class="newpage p4 nobdr" src="images/i-002.jpg" width="108" height="34" alt="" /></div>

-

-<p class="center">

-THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />

-<span class="small">NEW YORK ˇ BOSTON ˇ CHICAGO<br />

-ATLANTA ˇ SAN FRANCISCO</span></p>

-

-<p class="center"><span class="smcap">MACMILLAN &amp; CO., Limited</span><br />

-<span class="small">LONDON ˇ BOMBAY ˇ CALCUTTA<br />

-MELBOURNE</span></p>

-

-<p class="center"><span class="smcap">THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.</span><br />

-<span class="small">TORONTO</span></p>

-

-<div id="i_frontis" class="figcenter" style="width: 521px;"><img class="newpage p4" src="images/i-004.jpg" width="521" height="357" alt="" /></div>

-

-<p class="newpage p4 center vspace xlarge bold">

-THE<br />

-LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER</p>

-

-<p class="p2 center vspace">BY<br />

-<span class="large">FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON</span><br />

-<span class="smaller">JUNIOR PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY<br />

-IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN</span></p>

-

-<p class="p2 center"><i>ILLUSTRATED</i></p>

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-

-<p class="p2 center vspace">New York<br />

-<span class="larger">THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</span><br />

-1910<br />

-<span class="smaller"><i>All rights reserved</i></span></p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p class="newpage p4 center small vspace">

-<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1910,<br />

-By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</span><br />

-<span class="smaller">Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.</span></p>

-

-<p class="p2 center small">Norwood Press<br />

-J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.<br />

-Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">v</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</a></h2>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p class="sigright">FREDERIC L. PAXSON.</p>

-

-<p class="smaller"><span class="smcap">Ann Arbor</span>, August 7, 1909.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">vii</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h2>

-

-<div class="center">

-<table summary="Contents">

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td></tr>

-  <tr class="small">

-    <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr">PAGE</td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Westward Movement</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Indian Frontier</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Iowa and the New Northwest</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Santa Fé Trail</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Oregon Trail</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Overland with the Mormons</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">California and the Forty-niners</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Kansas and the Indian Frontier</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl">"<span class="smcap">Pike's Peak or Bust!</span>"</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">viii</a></span></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">From Arizona to Montana</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Overland Mail</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Engineers' Frontier</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Union Pacific Railroad</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Plains in the Civil War</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cheyenne War</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Sioux War</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Peace Commission and the Open Way</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_284">284</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Black Kettle's Last Raid</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The First of the Railways</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The New Indian Policy</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_340">340</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">ix</a></span></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Last Stand: Chief Joseph and Sitting Bull</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_358">358</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Letting in the Population</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_372">372</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Bibliographical Note</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_387">387</a></td></tr>

-</table></div>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">xi</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS">LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</a></h2>

-

-<div class="center">

-<table summary="List of Illustrations">

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Prairie Schooner</span></td>

-    <td class="tdr" colspan="2"><a href="#i_frontis"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>

-  <tr class="small">

-    <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr">PAGE</td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: Indian Country and Agricultural Frontier, 1840&ndash;1841</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_22">22</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Chief Keokuk</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_30">30</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Iowa Sod Plow.</span> (From a Cut belonging to the Historical Department of Iowa.)</td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_46">46</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: Overland Trails</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_56">57</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Fort Laramie, 1842</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_78">78</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The West in 1849</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_120">120</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The West in 1854</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_140">140</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl">"<span class="smcap">Ho for the Yellow Stone</span>"</td>

-    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_144">144</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Mining Camp</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">"</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_158">158</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Fort Snelling</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">"</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_204">204</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Red Cloud and Professor Marsh</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">"</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_274">274</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The West in 1863</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_300">300</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Position of Reno on the Little Big Horn</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_360">360</a></td></tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The Pacific Railroads, 1884</span></td>

-    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>

-    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_379">380</a></td></tr>

-</table></div>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>

-

-<h2><a name="THE_LAST_AMERICAN_FRONTIER" id="THE_LAST_AMERICAN_FRONTIER">THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER</a></h2>

-

-<hr />

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT</span></h2>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>The line of the frontier was generally parallel to

-the coast in 1700. By 1800 it had assumed the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>

-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&ndash;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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>

-East. A new state for every year was the western

-accompaniment.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>

-the valleys farther west than to strike out across

-country for lands nearer home but lacking the convenience

-of the natural route.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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&ndash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>

-lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,

-threatened to become a constant quantity.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE INDIAN FRONTIER</span></h2>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>

-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,&mdash;and too

-often they were real,&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;"domestic dependent nations," Justice

-Marshall later called them&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>

-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,&mdash;to the further limits of the

-Louisiana Purchase, which lay beyond the line of

-the western frontier.</p>

-

-<p>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 <span class="locked">Osage<a name="FNanchor_1" id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">1</a></span> 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.</p>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="fnanchor">1</a> My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed upon

-by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American Ethnology, and

-printed in C.&nbsp;J. Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, 57th

-Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452, Serial 4253, p. 1021.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span></p></div>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>

-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.</p>

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span></p>

-

-<div id="ip_22" class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-036.jpg" width="353" height="600" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Indian Country and Agricultural Frontier, 1840&ndash;1841</span></p></div>

-  <div class="captionl">

-<p>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.</p>

-</div></div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>

-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."</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>While the north flank of the Indian frontier was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_30" class="figcenter" style="width: 356px;">

-  <img src="images/i-045.jpg" width="356" height="542" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Chief Keokuk</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionl"><p>From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C.&nbsp;F. Davis. Reproduced

-by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span>

-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."</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST</span></h2>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>

-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."</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">bon mot</i>; and wields the pen or the Bowie<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>

-choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it

-could for a community still suffering from the results

-of the panic.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_46" class="figcenter" style="width: 360px;"><img class="nobdr" src="images/i-062.jpg" width="360" height="153" alt="" /><div class="caption"><span class="smcap">Iowa Sod Plow</span></div></div>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>

-sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest

-bidder,&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>

-its neighbors had been, while its first period was over

-before any railroad played an immediate part in its

-development.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>

-and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever

-or cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL</span></h2>

-

-<p>England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible

-as the interior provinces of Spain, which

-stretched up into the country between the Rio

-Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred

-miles above Vera Cruz. Before the English

-seaboard had received its earliest colonists, the

-hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters

-of the Rio Grande, where her outposts had been

-planted around the little adobe village of Santa Fé.

-For more than two hundred years this life had gone

-on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened

-by contact with the world or admixture of

-foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility characteristic

-of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions

-and restrictions of the law, communication with

-these villages of Chihuahua and New Mexico had

-been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills

-by the pack-trains of the king.</p>

-

-<p>It was no stately procession that wound up into

-the hills yearly to supply the Mexican frontier.

-From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through Mexico

-City, and thence north along the highlands through

-San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>

-thence to Chihuahua, and up the valley of the

-Rio Grande to Santa Fé climbed the long pack-trains

-and the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the

-provinces their whole supply from outside. The

-civilization of the provincial life might fairly be

-measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of

-this transportation route. Nearly two thousand

-miles, as the road meandered, of river, mountain

-gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the

-mule-drivers of the caravans. What their pack-animals

-could not carry, could not go. What had

-large bulk in proportion to its value must stay

-behind. The ancient commerce of the Orient,

-carried on camels across the Arabian desert, could

-afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and

-precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree,

-the world's contribution to these remote towns was

-confined largely to textiles, drugs, and trinkets of

-adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population

-of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for

-more than two centuries without an effort to improve

-upon them. Their resignation gives some credit to

-the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which

-restricted their importation to the defined route and

-the single port. It is due as much, however, to the

-hard geographic fact which made Vera Cruz and

-Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors,

-until in the nineteenth century another civilization

-came within hailing distance, at its frontier in the

-bend of the Missouri.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>

-The Spanish provincials were at once willing to

-endure the rigors of the commercial system and to

-smuggle when they had a chance. So long as it

-was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan

-than to develop other sources of supply the caravans

-flourished without competition. It was not until

-after the expulsion of Spain and the independence of

-Mexico that a rival supply became important, but

-there are enough isolated events before this time to

-show what had to occur just so soon as the United

-States frontier came within range.</p>

-

-<p>The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish

-captivity did something to reveal the existence of a

-possible market in Santa Fé. He had been engaged

-in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana

-purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the

-Rio Grande while searching for the head waters of

-the Red River. Here he was arrested, in 1807, by

-Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.

-After a short detention he was escorted to

-the limits of the United States, where he was released.

-He carried home the news of high prices and profitable

-markets existing among the Mexicans.</p>

-

-<p>In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify

-the statements of Pike. Rumor had come to the

-States of an insurrection in upper Mexico, which

-might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the

-revolt had been suppressed before the dozen or so of

-reckless Americans who crossed the plains had arrived

-at their destination. The Spanish authorities,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>

-restored to power and renewed vigor, received them

-with open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua,

-some for ten years, while the traffic which they

-had hoped to inaugurate remained still in the future.

-Their release came only with the independence of

-Mexico, which quickly broke down the barrier against

-importation and the foreigner.</p>

-

-<p>The Santa Fé trade commenced when the news of

-the Mexican revolution reached the border. Late

-in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell, chancing

-a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took

-a small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in

-what proved to be a profitable speculation. He

-returned to the States in time to lead out a large

-party in the following summer. So long as the

-United States frontier lay east of the Missouri River

-there could have been no western traffic, but now

-that settlement had reached the Indian Country,

-and river steamers had made easy freighting from

-Pittsburg to Franklin or Independence, Santa Fé

-was nearer to the United States seaboard markets

-than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the

-American desert and the Indian frontier made by

-this earliest of the overland trails.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_56" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-073.jpg" width="600" height="446" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Overland Trails</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California appeared

-about 1845; the Santa Fé trail had been used since 1821. The overland

-mail of 1858 followed the southern route.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the

-Santa Fé trade, but it saw the first wagons taken

-across the plains. The freight capacity of the mule-train

-placed a narrow limit upon the profits and

-extent of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled

-over the rough trails was a matter of considerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>

-doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper attempted

-it in this year. The experiment was so successful

-that within two years the pack-train was generally

-abandoned for the wagons by the Santa Fé traders.

-The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton

-goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics,

-calicoes, domestic, shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom

-shirtings, and cotton hose," were in high

-demand. There were also "a few woollen goods,

-consisting of super blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths,

-and shawls, crapes, bombazettes, some light articles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>

-of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses." Backward

-bound their freights were lighter. Many of the

-wagons, indeed, were sold as part of the cargo. The

-returning merchants brought some beaver skins and

-mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and

-silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.</p>

-

-<p>Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings,

-could not escape the public eye. The patron of the

-West came early to its aid. Senator Thomas Hart

-Benton had taken his seat from the new state of

-Missouri just in time to notice and report upon the

-traffic. No public man was more confirmed in his

-friendship for the frontier trade than Senator

-Benton. The fur companies found him always on

-hand to get them favors or to "turn aside the whip of

-calamity." Because of his influence his son-in-law,

-Frémont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness.

-Now, in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement.

-A large policy in the building of public

-roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.

-In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided

-$30,000 to mark and build a wagon road

-from Missouri to the United States border on the

-Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road

-reported some annoyance from the Indians, whose

-hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around

-their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and

-Kansa treaties of 1825 these tribes agreed to let the

-traders traverse the country in peace.</p>

-

-<p>Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>

-Santa Fé trade. The long journey from the fringe

-of settlement to the Spanish towns eight hundred

-miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican

-soil, crossing the international boundary on the

-Arkansas near the hundredth meridian. The Indians

-of the route knew no national lines, and found

-a convenient refuge against pursuers from either

-nation in crossing the border. There was no military

-protection to the frontier at the American end of the

-trail until in 1827 the war department erected a new

-post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it

-Fort Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were

-stationed to guard the border and protect the traders.

-The post was due as much to the new Indian concentration

-policy as to the Santa Fé trade. Its

-significance was double. Yet no one seems to have

-foreseen that the development of the trade through

-the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment

-of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.</p>

-

-<p>From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of

-regulars convoyed the caravans to the Southwest.

-In 1829 four companies of the sixth infantry, under

-Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan

-at the usual place of organization, Council Grove,

-a few days west of the Missouri line, and marched

-with it to the confines of the United States. Along

-the march there had been some worry from the Indians.

-After the caravan and escort had separated

-at the Arkansas the former, going on alone into

-Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard before<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>

-it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose

-promptly to the occasion. He immediately crossed

-the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the consequences

-of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the

-Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican

-authorities furnished an escort of troops which

-marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who

-had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all

-summer, met them. He entertained the Mexican

-officers with drill while they responded with a parade,

-chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report

-declares, and then he brought the traders back to the

-States by the beginning of November.</p>

-

-<p>There was some criticism in the United States of

-this costly use of troops to protect a private trade.

-Hezekiah Niles, who was always pleading for high

-protection to manufactures and receiving less than

-he wanted, complained that the use of four companies

-during a whole season was extravagant protection

-for a trade whose annual profits were not

-over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely

-repeated after 1829. Fort Leavenworth and the

-troops gave moral rather than direct support. Colonel

-Dodge, with his dragoons,&mdash;for infantry were

-soon seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,&mdash;made

-long expeditions and demonstrations in the

-thirties, reaching even to the slopes of the Rockies.

-And the Santa Fé caravans continued until the forties

-in relative safety.</p>

-

-<p>Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>

-event of great consequence in the history of the

-Santa Fé trail. Josiah Gregg, impelled by ill health

-to seek a change of climate, made his first trip to

-Santa Fé in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg

-would call for no more comment than would any one

-who crossed the plains eight times in a single decade.

-But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was

-watching and thinking during his entire career,

-examining into the details of Mexican life and history

-and tabulating the figures of the traffic. When he

-finally retired from the plains life which he had come

-to love so well, he produced, in two small volumes,

-the great classic of the trade: "The Commerce of

-the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé Trader."

-It is still possible to check up details and add small

-bits of fact to supplement the history and description

-of this commerce given by Gregg, but his book

-remains, and is likely to remain, the fullest and best

-source of information. Gregg had power of scientific

-observation and historical imagination, which,

-added to unusual literary ability, produced a masterpiece.</p>

-

-<p>The Santa Fé trade, begun in 1822, continued with

-moderate growth until 1843. This was its period of

-pioneer development. After the Mexican War the

-commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its

-greatest volume in the sixties, just before the construction

-of the Pacific railways. But in its later

-years it was a matter of greater routine and less

-general interest than in those years of commencement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>

-during which it was educating the United States

-to a more complete knowledge of the southern portion

-of the American desert. Gregg gives a table

-in which he shows the approximate value of the trade

-for its first twenty-two years. To-day it seems

-strange that so trifling a commerce should have been

-national in its character and influence. In only one

-year, 1843, does he find that the eastern value of the

-goods sent to Santa Fé was above a quarter of a

-million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,

-but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter

-million mark. In nine years it was under $100,000.

-The men involved were a mere handful. At the

-start nearly every one of the seventy men in the

-caravan was himself a proprietor. The total number

-increased more rapidly than the number of independent

-owners. Three hundred and fifty were the

-most employed in any one year. The twenty-six

-wagons of 1824 became two hundred and thirty

-in 1843, but only four times in the interval were

-there so many as a hundred.</p>

-

-<p>Yet the Santa Fé trade was national in its importance.

-Its romance contained a constant appeal

-to a public that was reading the Indian tales of James

-Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship

-and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country

-with quaint people and strange habitations. The

-American desert, not much more than a chartless

-sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must

-have confirmation of the truth that frontier causes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>

-have produced results far beyond their normal

-measure, such confirmation may be found here.</p>

-

-<p>The traders to Santa Fé commonly travelled together

-in a single caravan for safety. In the earlier

-years they started overland from some Missouri

-town&mdash;Franklin most often&mdash;to a rendezvous at

-Council Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth

-and an increasing navigation of the Missouri River

-made possible a starting-point further west than

-Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the

-Missouri in 1828 its place was taken by the new settlement

-of Independence, further up the river and only

-twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at

-Independence was done most of the general outfitting

-in the thirties. For the greater part of the year

-the town was dead, but for a few weeks in the spring

-it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the frontier.

-Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for

-mules and oxen, building and repairing wagons and

-ox-yokes, and in the evening drinking and gambling

-among the hard men soon to leave port for the

-Southwest,&mdash;all these gave to Independence its name

-and place. From Independence to Council Grove,

-some one hundred and fifty miles, across the border,

-the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove

-they halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a

-general company for self-defence. Here in ordinary

-years the assembled traders elected a captain whose

-responsibility was complete, and whose authority

-was as great as he could make it by his own force.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span>

-Under him were lieutenants, and under the command

-of these the whole company was organized in guards

-and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company

-was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal

-vigilance was the price of safety.</p>

-

-<p>The unit of the caravan was the wagon,&mdash;the

-same Pittsburg or Conestoga wagon that moved

-frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to

-travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve

-mules or oxen, and carried from three to five thousand

-pounds of cargo. Over the wagon were large

-arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn

-water and protect the contents. The careful freighter

-used two thicknesses of sheetings, while the canny

-one slipped in between them a pair of blankets,

-which might thus increase his comfort outward

-bound, and be in an inconspicuous place to elude

-the vigilance of the customs officials at Santa Fé.

-Arms, mounts, and general equipment were innumerable

-in variation, but the prairie schooner, as

-its white canopy soon named it, survived through

-its own superiority.</p>

-

-<p>At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey

-now became one across a treeless prairie, with

-water all too rare, and habitations entirely lacking.

-The first stage of the trail crossed the country, nearly

-west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two

-hundred and seventy miles from Independence. Up

-the Arkansas it ran on, past Chouteau's Island, to

-Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>

-traders had established a post. Water was most

-scarce. Whether the caravan crossed the river at

-the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's Fort to

-follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader

-and on stock. His oxen often reached Santa Fé

-with scarcely enough strength left to stand alone.

-But with reasonable success and skilful guidance the

-caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties

-and at last enter Santa Fé, seven hundred and eighty

-miles away, in from six to seven weeks from Independence.</p>

-

-<p>When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri

-frontier was familiar with all of the long trail to Santa

-Fé. Even in the East there had come to be some real

-interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert

-and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the

-strategy of the war was the organization of an Army

-of the West at Fort Leavenworth, with orders to

-march overland against Mexico and Upper California.</p>

-

-<p>Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command

-of the invading army, which he recruited largely

-from the frontier and into which he incorporated a

-battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the

-summer of 1846, near Council Bluffs, on their way to

-the Rocky Mountains and the country beyond.

-Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken

-him in 1845 all the way to the mountains and back

-in the interest of policing the trails. By the end of

-June he was ready to begin the march towards

-Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>

-to be a common rendezvous. To this point the

-army marched in separate columns, far enough apart

-to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder

-from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was

-little more than a pleasure jaunt. The trail was well

-known, and Indians, never likely to run heedlessly

-into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's

-Fort the advance assumed more of a military aspect,

-for the enemy's country had been entered and

-resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the

-mountain passes north of Santa Fé. But the resistance

-came to naught, while the army, footsore and

-hot, marched easily into Santa Fé on August 18, 1846.

-In the palace of the governor the conquering officers

-were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the

-provinces would permit. "We were too thirsty to

-judge of its merits," wrote one of them of the native

-wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything

-liquid and cool was palatable." With little more

-than the formality of taking possession New Mexico

-thus fell into the hands of the United States, while

-the war of conquest advanced further to the West.

-In the end of September Kearny started out from

-Santa Fé for California, where he arrived early in

-the following January.</p>

-

-<p>The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary

-of the United States to the Gila and the Pacific,

-broadening the area of the desert within the United

-States and raising new problems of long-distance

-government in connection with the populations of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>

-New Mexico and California. The Santa Fé trail,

-with its continuance west of the Rio Grande, became

-the attenuated bond between the East and the West.

-From the Missouri frontier to California the way was

-through the desert and the Indian Country, with

-regular settlements in only one region along the route.

-The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit

-trade disappeared with the conquest, so that the

-traffic with the Southwest and California boomed

-during the fifties.</p>

-

-<p>The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions

-which had never been dreamed of before the conquest.

-Kearny's baggage-trains started a new era in plains

-freighting. The armies had continuously to be

-supplied. Regular communication had to be maintained

-for the new Southwest. But the freighting

-was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the

-Santa Fé traders. It became a matter of business,

-running smoothly along familiar channels. It ceased

-to have to do with the extension of geographic knowledge

-and came to have significance chiefly in connection

-with the organization of overland commerce.

-Between the Mexican and Civil wars was its new

-period of life. Finally, in the seventies, it gradually

-receded into history as the tentacles of the continental

-railway system advanced into the desert.</p>

-

-<p>The Santa Fé trail was the first beaten path thrust

-in advance of the western frontier. Even to-day its

-course may be followed by the wheel ruts for much of

-the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>

-Fé. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind

-it at the start, not touching it again until the end

-was reached. For nearly fifty years after the trade

-began, this character of the desert remained substantially

-unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which

-had rushed west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped

-at the bend, and though the trail continued, settlement

-would not follow it. The Indian country and

-the American desert remained intact, while the Santa

-Fé trail, in advance of settlement, pointed the way of

-manifest destiny, as no one of the eastern trails had

-ever done. When the new states grew up on the Pacific,

-the desert became as an ocean traversed only

-by the prairie schooners in their beaten paths.

-Islands of settlement served but to accentuate the

-unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain

-West.</p>

-

-<p>The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the

-statesmen of the twenties as the limit of American

-advance. It might have continued thus had there

-really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of

-the trade to Santa Fé created a new interest and a

-connecting road. In nearly the same years the call

-of the fur trade led to the tracing of another path in

-the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and

-the fur trade had stirred up so much interest beyond

-the Rockies that before Kearny marched his army

-into Santa Fé another trail of importance equal to

-his had been run to Oregon.</p>

-

-<p>The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span>

-upon the ability of the United States to keep whites

-out of the Indian Country. But with Oregon and

-Santa Fé beyond, this could never be. The trails

-had already shown the fallacy of the frontier policy

-before it had become a fact in 1840.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE OREGON TRAIL</span></h2>

-

-<p>The Santa Fé trade had just been started upon

-its long career when trappers discovered in the Rocky

-Mountains, not far from where the forty-second

-parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy

-crossing by which access might be had from the waters

-of the upper Platte to those of the Pacific Slope.

-South Pass, as this passage through the hills soon

-came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon. As

-yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested

-soil upon the Pacific, but in years to come a whole

-civilization was to pour over the upper trail to people

-the valley of the Columbia and claim it for new states.

-The Santa Fé trail was chiefly the route of commerce.

-The Oregon trail became the pathway of a people

-westward bound.</p>

-

-<p>In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the

-fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed

-an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill

-and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before

-the surveyor and his transit brought them within

-the circle of recorded facts. The historian of the

-fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden, has

-tracked out many of them with the same laborious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span>

-industry that carried them after the beaver and the

-other marketable furs. When they first appeared is

-lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in

-the period between the journey of Lewis and Clark,

-in 1805, and the rise of Independence as an outfitting

-post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That they discovered

-every important geographic fact of the West

-is quite as certain as it is that their discoveries were

-often barren, were generally unrecorded in a formal

-way, and exercised little influence upon subsequent

-settlement and discovery. Their place in history is

-similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains

-of the thirteenth century who knew and charted the

-shore of the Mediterranean at a time when scientific

-geographers were yet living on a flat earth and shaping

-cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although

-the fur-traders, with their great companies

-behind them, did less to direct the future than their

-knowledge of geography might have warranted, they

-managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast

-early in the century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a

-pawn in the game between the British and American

-organizations, whose control over Oregon was so

-confusing that Great Britain and the United States,

-in 1818, gave up the task of drawing a boundary

-when they reached the Rockies, and allowed the country

-beyond to remain under joint occupation.</p>

-

-<p>In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to

-the profits of the fur trade as an inducement to visit

-Oregon. By 1832 the trading prospects had incited<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span>

-migration outside the regular companies. Nathaniel

-J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He

-repeated the journey with a second party in 1834.

-The Methodist church sent a body of missionaries

-to convert the western Indians in this latter year.

-The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out

-the redoubtable Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before

-the thirties were over Oregon had become a household

-word through the combined reports of traders

-and missionaries. Its fertility and climate were

-common themes in the lyceums and on the lecture

-platform; while the fact that this garden might

-through prompt migration be wrested from the

-British gave an added inducement. Joint occupation

-was yet the rule, but the time was approaching

-when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time

-when Oregon ought to become the admitted property

-of the United States. The thirties ended with no

-large migration begun. But the financial crisis of

-1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great

-Lakes, provided an impoverished and restless population

-ready to try the chance in the farthest West.</p>

-

-<p>A growing public interest in Oregon roused the

-United States government to action in the early

-forties. The Indians of the Northwest were in need

-of an agent and sound advice. The exact location

-of the trail, though the trail itself was fairly well

-known, had not been ascertained. Into the hands

-of the senators from Missouri fell the task of inspiring

-the action and directing the result. Senator<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>

-Linn was the father of bills and resolutions looking

-towards a territory west of the mountains; while

-Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new

-son-in-law, John C. Frémont, a detail in command

-of an exploring party to the South Pass.</p>

-

-<p>The career of Frémont, the Pathfinder, covers

-twenty years of great publicity, beginning with his

-first command in 1842. On June 10, of this year,

-with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed

-from Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten

-miles above its mouth. He shortly left the Kansas,

-crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte, and

-followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's

-Fort in northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty

-days. From St. Vrain's he skirted the foothills north

-to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the Sweetwater,

-he reached his destination at South Pass on

-August 8, just one day previous to the signing of the

-great English treaty at Washington. At South Pass

-his journey of observation was substantially over.

-He continued, however, for a few days along the

-Wind River Range, climbing a mountain peak and

-naming it for himself. By October he was back in

-St. Louis with his party.</p>

-

-<p>In the spring of 1843, Frémont started upon a

-second and more extended governmental exploration

-to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail along

-the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St.

-Vrain's, whence he made a detour south to Boiling

-Spring and Bent's trading-post on the Arkansas River.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>

-Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon

-for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided

-his company, sending part of it over his course of

-1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while he led his

-own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the

-Medicine Bow Range, and across North Park, where

-rises the North Platte. Before reaching Fort Hall,

-where he was to reunite his party, he made another

-detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like

-Balboa as he looked upon the inland sea. From Fort

-Hall, which he reached on September 18, he followed

-the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the

-Dalles of the Columbia.</p>

-

-<p>Whether the ocean could be reached by any river

-between the Columbia and Colorado was a matter of

-much interest to persons concerned with the control

-of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the

-trappers, had not yet received scientific record when

-Frémont started south from the Dalles in November,

-1843, to ascertain them. His march across the Nevada

-desert was made in the dead of winter under

-difficulties that would have brought a less resolute

-explorer to a stop. It ended in March, 1844, at

-Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento Valley, with half

-his horses left upon the road. His homeward march

-carried him into southern California and around the

-sources of the Colorado, proving by recorded observation

-the difficult character of the country between

-the mountains and the Pacific.</p>

-

-<p>In following years the Pathfinder revisited the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>

-scenes of these two expeditions upon which his reputation

-is chiefly based. A man of resolution and moderate

-ability, the glory attendant upon his work turned

-his head. His later failures in the face of military

-problems far beyond his comprehension tended to

-belittle the significance of his earlier career, but history

-may well agree with the eminent English traveller,

-Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground

-passed over by Colonel Frémont was perfectly well

-known to the old trappers and traders, as the interior

-of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese pombeiros.

-But this fact takes nothing away from the

-honors of the man who first surveyed and scientifically

-observed the country." Through these two

-journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition

-above the American intellectual horizon. "The

-American Eagle," quoth the <i>Platte (Missouri) Eagle</i>

-in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser [<i xml:lang="la" lang="la">sic</i>]

-of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the

-Pacific. Destiny has willed it."</p>

-

-<p>The year in which Frémont made his first expedition

-to the mountains was also the year of the first

-formal, conducted emigration to Oregon. Missionaries

-beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress

-the appointment of an American representative and

-magistrate for the country, with such effect that

-Dr. Elijah White, who had some acquaintance with

-Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the

-spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration

-of homeseekers that peopled Oregon during<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>

-the next ten years. His emigration was not large,

-perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons;

-but it seems to have been larger than he expected,

-and large enough to raise doubt as to the

-practicability of taking so many persons across the

-plains at once. In the decade following, every May,

-when pasturage was fresh and green, saw pioneers

-gathering, with or without premeditation, at the

-bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence

-and its neighbor villages continued to be the

-posts of outfit. How many in the aggregate crossed

-the plains can never be determined, in spite of the

-efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record

-their names. The distinguishing feature of the

-emigration was its spontaneous individualistic character.

-Small parties, too late for the caravan, frequently

-set forth alone. Single families tried it

-often enough to have their wanderings recorded in

-the border papers. In the spring following the crossing

-of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds

-at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand

-in all is probably not too high. In 1844 the

-tide subsided a little, but in 1845 it established a

-new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and in

-1847 ran between four and five thousand. These

-were the highest figures, yet throughout the decade

-the current flowed unceasingly.</p>

-

-<p>The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years,

-may be taken as typical of the Oregon movement.

-Early in the year faces turned toward the Missouri<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>

-rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and

-young, with wagons and cattle, household equipment,

-primitive sawmills, and all the impedimenta of civilization

-were to be found in the hopeful crowd. For

-some days after departure the unwieldy party, a

-thousand strong, with twice as many cattle and

-beasts of burden, held together under Burnett, their

-chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control

-soon split the company. In addition to the general

-fear that the number was dangerously high, the poorer

-emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some of the latter

-had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,

-and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian

-thieves during his long night watches he felt the

-injustice which compelled him to protect the property

-of another. Hence the party broke early in

-June. A "cow column" was formed of those who

-had many cattle and heavy belongings; the lighter

-body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting

-distance; and under two captains the procession

-moved on. The way was tedious rather than difficult,

-but habit soon developed in the trains a life

-that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the

-migrants of 1842 had written, was a "great country

-for unmarried gals." Courtship and marriage began

-almost before the States were out of sight.

-Death and burial, crime and punishment, filled out

-the round of human experience, while Dr. Whitman

-was more than once called upon in his professional

-capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span></p>

-

-<div id="ip_78" class="figcenter" style="width: 519px;">

-  <img src="images/i-095.jpg" width="519" height="288" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Fort Laramie in 1842</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>From a sketch made to illustrate Frémont's report.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed

-in the United States. It started from the

-Missouri River anywhere between Independence and

-Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence

-was the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural

-frontier advanced through Iowa in the forties numerous

-new crossings and ferries were made further

-up the stream. From the various ferries the start

-began, as did the Santa Fé trade, sometime in May.

-By many roads the wagons moved westward towards

-the point from which the single trail extended to the

-mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte

-River reaches its most southerly point, these routes

-from the border were nearly as numerous as the caravans,

-but here began the single highway along the

-river valley, on its southern side. At this point,

-in the years immediately after the Mexican War, the

-United States founded a military post to protect

-the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W.

-Kearny, commander of the Army of the West. From

-Fort Kearney (custom soon changed the spelling

-of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie

-Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork.

-Fort Laramie itself was bought from the fur company

-and converted into a military post which became

-a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.

-Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the

-trail to South Pass, where, through a gap twenty

-miles in width, the main commerce between the

-Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span>

-Beyond South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the

-next post of importance on the road. From Fort

-Hall to Fort Boisé the trail continued down the

-Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to

-meet the Columbia near Walla Walla.</p>

-

-<p>The journey to Oregon took about five months.

-Its deliberate, domesticated progress was as different

-as might be from the commercial rush to Santa

-Fé. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily

-get caught in the early mountain winter, but with

-a prompt start and a wise guide, or pilot, winter

-always found the homeseeker in his promised land.

-"This is the right manner to settle the Oregon

-question," wrote Niles, after he had counted over

-the emigrants of 1844.</p>

-

-<p>Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon

-the pioneers already there had taken the law to

-themselves and organized a provisional government

-in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under

-the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was

-one of considerable uncertainty. National interests

-prompted settlers to hope and work for future control

-by one country or the other, while advantage

-seemed to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the

-generous factor of the British fur companies. But

-the aggressive Americans of the early migrations were

-restive under British leadership. They were fearful

-also lest future American emigration might carry

-political control out of their hands into the management

-of newcomers. Death and inheritance among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>

-their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions.

-In May, 1843, with all the ease invariably

-shown by men of Anglo-Saxon blood when isolated

-together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary

-association for government and adopted a code of

-laws.</p>

-

-<p>Self-confidence, the common asset of the West,

-was not absent in this newest American community.

-"A few months since," wrote Elijah White, "at our

-Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the

-colony of Wallamette held out the most flattering

-encouragement to immigrants of any colony on the

-globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of

-Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the

-course of events. "During my up-country excursion,

-the whites of the colony convened, and formed a code

-of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves

-during the absence of law from our mother country,

-adopting in almost all respects the Iowa code. In this

-I was consulted, and encouraged the measure, as it

-was so manifestly necessary for the collection of

-debts, securing rights in claims, and the regulation of

-general intercourse among the whites."</p>

-

-<p>A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress

-for the extension of United States laws and jurisdiction

-over the territory. His journey was six

-months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,

-who went to Boston to save the missions of the

-American Board from abandonment, and might with

-better justice than Whitman's be called the ride to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>

-save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being

-lost, however dilatory Congress might be. The little

-illegitimate government settled down to work, its

-legislative committee enacted whatever laws were

-needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law

-and order prevailed.</p>

-

-<p>Sometimes the action of the Americans must have

-been meddlesome and annoying to the English and

-Canadian trappers. In the free manners of the first

-half of the nineteenth century the use of strong

-drink was common throughout the country and universal

-along the frontier. "A family could get along

-very well without butter, wheat bread, sugar, or tea,

-but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping

-as corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses.

-It was always present at the house raising, harvesting,

-road working, shooting matches, corn husking,

-weddings, and dances. It was never out of order

-'where two or three were gathered together.'" Yet

-along with this frequent intemperance, a violent

-abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of

-the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new

-Northwest, full of the new crusade and ready to

-support it. Despite the lack of legal right, though

-with every moral justification, attempts were made to

-crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells

-of a mass meeting authorizing him to take action on

-his own responsibility; of his enlisting a band of

-coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the distillery in

-a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>

-<span class="smcap smaller">P.M.</span> The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and

-all the apparatus well accorded. Two hogsheads and

-eight barrels of slush or beer were standing ready for

-distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses. No

-liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled.

-Having resolved on my course, I left no time

-for reflection, but at once upset the nearest cask,

-when my noble volunteers immediately seconded

-my measures, making a river of beer in a moment;

-nor did we stop till the kettle was raised, and elevated

-in triumph at the prow of our boat, and every

-cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to

-pieces and utterly destroyed. We then returned,

-in high cheer, to the town, where our presence and

-report gave general joy."</p>

-

-<p>The provisional government lasted for several

-years, with a fair degree of respect shown to it by its

-citizens. Like other provisional governments, it

-was weakest when revenue was in question, but its

-courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the

-settlers. It was long after regular settlement began

-before Congress acquired sure title to the country

-and could pass laws for it.</p>

-

-<p>The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties,

-thus broke out loudly in the forties. Emigrants then

-rushed west in the great migrations with deliberate

-purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded,

-with absolute confidence, that Congress

-protect them in their new homes. The stories of the

-election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>

-erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all

-belong to an intimate study of the Oregon trail.</p>

-

-<p>In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important

-question in practical politics. Well-informed

-historians no longer believe that the annexation of

-Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of

-slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states

-and more southern senators. All along the frontier,

-whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, or in Arkansas,

-Alabama, and Mississippi, population was

-restive under hard times and its own congenital instinct

-to move west to cheaper lands. Speculation

-of the thirties had loaded up the eastern states with

-debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape

-with honor, but from under which their individual

-citizens could emigrate. Wherever farm

-lands were known, there went the home-seekers, and

-it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the

-presence, in the platform, of a party that appealed to

-the great plain people, of planks for the reannexation

-of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With a Democratic

-party strongest in the South, the former extension

-was closer to the heart, but the whole West

-could subscribe to both.</p>

-

-<p>Oregon included the whole domain west of the

-Rockies, between Spanish Mexico at 42° and Russian

-America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´. Its

-northern and southern boundaries were clearly established

-in British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern

-limit by the old treaty of 1818 was the continental<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>

-divide, since the United States and Great

-Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it.

-Title which should justify a claim to it was so equally

-divided between the contesting countries that it would

-be difficult to make out a positive claim for either,

-while in fact a compromise based upon equal division

-was entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon

-with an eagerness that saw no flaw in the United

-States title. That the democratic party was sincere

-in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with

-respect to the rank and file of the organization than

-with the leaders of the party. Certain it is that just

-so soon as the execution of the Texas pledge provoked

-a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a

-westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his

-words and agree with his British adversary quickly.</p>

-

-<p>Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to

-serve a year's notice on Great Britain and bring joint

-occupation to an end. But more pacific advices

-prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary

-of State, so that the United States agreed to accept

-an equitable division instead of the whole or none.

-The Senate, consulted in advance upon the change of

-policy, gave its approval both before and after to the

-treaty which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the

-boundary line of 49° from the Rockies to the Pacific.

-The settled half of Oregon and the greater part of

-the Columbia River thus became American territory,

-subject to such legislation as Congress should

-prescribe.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>

-A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result

-of the establishment of the first clear American

-title on the Pacific. All that the United States had

-secured in the division was given the popular name.

-Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,

-popular agricultural conquest, had established the

-first detached American colony, with the desert

-separating it from the mother country. The trail

-was already well known to thousands, and so clearly

-defined by wheel ruts and débris along the sides

-that even the blind could scarce wander from the

-beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient

-for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at

-once paved the way for the legitimate territory and

-revealed the high degree of law and morality prevailing

-in the population. Already the older settlers

-were prosperous, and the first chapter in the history

-of Oregon was over. A second great trail had still

-further weakened the hold of the American desert

-over the American mind, endangering, too, the

-Indian policy that was dependent upon the desert

-for its continuance.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS</span></h2>

-

-<p>The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon

-is but a small portion of the whole history of the

-Oregon trail. The trail was not only the road to

-Oregon, but it was the chief road across the continent.

-Santa Fé dominated a southern route that was important

-in commerce and conquest, and that could

-be extended west to the Pacific. But the deep ravine

-of the Colorado River splits the United States

-into sections with little chance of intercourse below

-the fortieth parallel. To-day, in only two places

-south of Colorado do railroads bridge it; only

-one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The

-southern trail could not be compared in its traffic or

-significance with the great middle highway by South

-Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri

-River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to

-California and Great Salt Lake.</p>

-

-<p>Of the waves of influence that drew population

-along the trail, the Oregon fever came first; but while

-it was still raging, there came the Mormon trek that

-is without any parallel in American history. Throughout

-the lifetime of the trails the American desert

-extended almost unbroken from the bend of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>

-Missouri to California and Oregon. The Mormon

-settlement in Utah became at once the most considerable

-colony within this area, and by its own

-fertility emphasized the barren nature of the rest.</p>

-

-<p>Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet,

-but it would be fair to ascribe the parentage of the

-sect to that emotional upheaval of the twenties and

-thirties which broke down barriers of caste and

-politics, ruptured many of the ordinary Christian

-churches, and produced new revelations and new

-prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely

-one of these, more astute perhaps than the others,

-having much of the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed

-had had before him, and able to direct and

-hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet

-might have been able to arouse. History teaches

-that it is easy to provoke religious enthusiasm,

-however improbable or fraudulent the guides or

-revelations may be; but that the founding of a

-church upon it is a task for greatest statesmanship.</p>

-

-<p>The discovery of the golden plates and the magic

-spectacles, and the building upon them of a militant

-church has little part in the conquest of the

-frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for

-the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other

-than as a joke, and its perpetrator as a successful

-charlatan. Mormon apologists and their enemies

-have gone over the details of its production without

-establishing much sure evidence on either side. The

-theological teaching of the church seems to put less<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>

-stress upon it than its supposed miraculous origin

-would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain, with his

-light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome

-to read, but there is nothing vicious in its

-teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable&mdash;it

-is 'smouched' from the New Testament and no

-credit given." Converts came slowly to the new

-prophet at the start, for he was but one of many

-teachers crying in the wilderness, and those who had

-known him best in his youth were least ready to see

-in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring

-of 1830 it was possible to organize, in western New

-York, the body which Rigdon was later to christen

-the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

-By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to

-Kirtland, Ohio, where proselyting had proved to be

-successful in both religion and finance.</p>

-

-<p>Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new

-sect. Revelations came in upon the prophet rapidly,

-pointing out the details of organization and administration,

-the duty of missionary activity among the

-Indians and gentiles, and the future home further

-to the west. Scouts were sent to the Indian Country

-at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland the

-leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts

-who, by 1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in

-hopeful numbers. The frontier of this decade was

-equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,

-banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates

-possessed the germ of leadership to take advantage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>

-of every chance. Until the panic of 1837 they flourished,

-apparently not always beyond reproach in

-financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had

-the right to throw the stone. Antagonism, already

-appearing against the church, was due partly to an

-essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors

-and partly to the whole-souled union between church

-and life which distinguished the Mormons from the

-other sects. Their political complexion was identical

-with their religion,&mdash;a combination which

-always has aroused resentment in America.</p>

-

-<p>For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract

-in Missouri, not far from Independence, close to

-the Indians whose conversion was a part of the Mormon

-duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa

-Fé were by-words along the Missouri, the Mormons

-were getting a precarious foothold near the commencement

-of the trails. The population around Independence

-was distinctly inhospitable, with the result

-that petty violence appeared, in which it is hard to

-place the blame. There was a calm assurance among

-the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit

-the earth. Their neighbors maintained that poultry

-and stock were unsafe in their vicinity because of

-this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges

-of well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all

-the bickerings the sources of information are partisan

-and cloudy with prejudice, so that it is easier to see

-the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit. From

-the south side of the Missouri around Independence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>

-the Saints were finally driven across the river by

-armed mobs; a transaction in which the Missourians

-spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the peace.

-North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached

-in a few miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell

-County, they settled down at last, to build their

-tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of

-1838 their corner-stone was laid.</p>

-

-<p>Far West remained their goal in belief longer than

-in fact. Before 1838 ended they had been forced to

-agree to leave Missouri; yet they returned in secret

-to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and continued

-to dream of this as their future home. Up to

-the time of their expulsion from Missouri in 1838

-they are not proved to have been guilty of any crime

-that could extenuate the gross intolerance which

-turned them out. As individuals they could live

-among Gentiles in peace. It seems to have been the

-collective soul of the church that was unbearable to

-the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had

-facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled

-it from Missouri, in a few more years drove them

-again on their migrations. The cohesion of the

-church in politics, economics, and religion explains

-the opposition which it cannot well excuse.</p>

-

-<p>In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old

-Fort Madison ferry which led into the half-breed

-country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered a village

-of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement

-from which the business genius of Smith<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>

-now purchased it on easy terms. It was occupied in

-1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a new tabernacle

-was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken

-young clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet

-had now developed into a successful man of affairs,

-with ambitions that reached even to the presidency

-at Washington. With a strong sect behind him,

-money at his disposal, and supernatural powers in

-which all faithful saints believed, Joseph could go

-far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen

-thousand by the end of 1840.</p>

-

-<p>Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely

-contested presidential election, at a time when the

-state feared to lose its population in an emigration

-to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to

-be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the

-Mormons insured for themselves a hearty welcome

-from both Democrats and Whigs. A complaisant

-legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of

-privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so

-that the ideal of the Mormons of a state within the

-state was fully realized. The town council was

-emancipated from state control, its courts were independent,

-and its militia was substantially at the beck

-of Smith. Proselyting and good management built

-up the town rapidly. To an importunate creditor

-Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but

-to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of

-milk and honey. Here it began to be noticed that

-desertions from the church were not uncommon; that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>

-conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks.

-It was noised about that the wealthy convert had

-the warmest reception, but was led on to let his

-religious passion work his impoverishment for the

-good of the cause.</p>

-

-<p>Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the

-church took the decisive step that carried Mormonism

-beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable, religious

-sects. Rumors of immorality circulated

-among the Gentile neighbors. It was bad enough,

-they thought, to have the Mormons chronic petty

-thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail

-among the leaders was more than could be endured

-by a community that did not count this form of iniquity

-among its own excesses. The Mormons were

-in general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen

-until they took to this. At the time, all immorality

-was denounced and denied by the prophet

-and his friends, but in later years the church made

-public a revelation concerning celestial or plural

-marriage, with the admission that Joseph Smith had

-received it in the summer of 1843. Never does

-Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent

-as its enemies have charged. But no church countenancing

-the practice could hope to be endured by

-an American community. The odium of practising it

-was increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It

-was only a matter of time until the Mormons should

-resume their march.</p>

-

-<p>The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>

-by the murder of Joseph Smith, and Hyrum

-his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the summer

-of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an

-attack upon the Saints similar to that in Missouri.

-Under promise of protection the Smiths had surrendered

-themselves. Their martyrdom at once

-disgraced the state in which it could be possible, and

-gave to Mormonism in a murdered prophet a mighty

-bond of union. The reins of government fell into

-hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young

-succeeded Joseph Smith.</p>

-

-<p>Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a

-formal way president of the church, but his authority

-was complete in fact after the death of Joseph.

-A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain

-knew him, and has left an estimate of him which

-must be close to truth. He was "a man of great

-ability. Apparently deficient in education and

-refinement, he was fair and honest in his dealings,

-and seemed extremely liberal in conversation upon

-religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so

-Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates,

-"as anything but a religious fanatic or even enthusiast;

-but he knew how to make use of the fanaticism

-of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly

-after the murder of Joseph it became clear that

-Nauvoo must be abandoned, and Brigham began to

-consider an exodus across the plains so familiar

-by hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky

-Mountains beyond the limits of the United States.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>

-Persecution, for the persecuted can never see two

-sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened

-eviction came in the autumn of 1845. In 1846 the

-last great trek began.</p>

-

-<p>The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at

-Nauvoo as early as February, 1846. By the hundred,

-in the spring of the year, the wagons of the persecuted

-sect were ferried across the river. Five

-hundred and thirty-nine teams within a single

-week in May is the report of one observer. Property

-which could be commuted into the outfit for the

-march was carefully preserved and used. The

-rest, the tidy houses, the simple furniture, the careful

-farms (for the backbone of the church was its well-to-do

-middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced

-sale to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full

-of real estate vultures hoping to thrive upon the

-Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more

-abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple

-within the year.</p>

-

-<p>Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as

-Brigham Young liked to call his headquarters,

-advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer allowed.

-To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy

-railway follows the Mormon road for many miles, but

-in 1846 the western half of Iowa territory was Indian

-Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and

-Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over,

-but who were in possession at this time. Along the

-line of march camps were built by advance parties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>

-to be used in succession by the following thousands.

-The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri

-River, near Council Bluffs, where as yet no city stood,

-to plant a crop of grain, since manna could not be

-relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of

-the population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter

-quarters not far above the present site of Omaha,

-preserving the orderly life of the society, and enduring

-hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate

-by gaiety and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi

-country of Iowa, opposite their winter

-quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all

-the way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the

-Platte Mormon detachments were scattered along the

-roads. The destination was yet in doubt. Westward

-it surely was, but it is improbable that even

-Brigham knew just where.</p>

-

-<p>The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted

-and driven westward like themselves, kindly at

-first, but discontent came as the winter residence

-was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha,

-west of the Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit

-Mormon settlement, but east, in the abandoned

-Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain

-Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several

-years. A permanent residence here was not desired

-even by the Mormons themselves. Spring in 1847

-found them preparing to resume the march.</p>

-

-<p>In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance

-of no less a person than Brigham Young started out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>

-the Platte trail in search of Zion. One hundred and

-forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred

-and seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they

-took along, if the figures of one of their historians

-may be accepted. Under strict military order,

-the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is

-one of the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no

-sooner selected their abode beyond the line of the

-United States in their flight from persecution than

-conquest from Mexico extended the United States

-beyond them to the Pacific. They themselves aided

-in this defeat of their plan, since from among them

-Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army

-of invasion.</p>

-

-<p>Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and

-beyond, the prospectors followed the well-beaten

-trail. Oregon homeseekers had been cutting it deep

-in the prairie sod for five years. West of South

-Pass they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on

-the 24th of July, 1847, Brigham gazed upon the

-waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious

-premeditation, so far as is known, and against the

-advice of one of the most experienced of mountain

-guides, this valley by a later-day Dead Sea was chosen

-for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground

-was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were

-commenced at once, and within a month the town site

-was baptized the City of the Great Salt Lake.</p>

-

-<p>Behind the advance guard the main body remained

-in winter quarters, making ready for their difficult<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>

-search for the promised land; moving at last in the

-late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere

-would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph

-relied but little upon supernatural aid in keeping his

-flock under control. Commonly he depended upon

-human wisdom and executive direction. But upon

-the eve of his own departure from winter quarters

-he had made public, for the direction of the main

-body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will of

-the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their

-Journeyings to the West." Such revelations as this,

-had they been repeated, might well have created

-or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration

-of the leader. The order given was such as a wise

-source of inspiration might have formed after constant

-intercourse with emigrants and traders upon

-the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers

-of the way.</p>

-

-<p>"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of

-Latter-day Saints, and those who journey with them,"

-read the revelation, "be organized into companies,

-with a covenant and a promise to keep all the

-commandments and statutes of the Lord our God.

-Let the companies be organized with captains of

-hundreds, and captains of fifties, and captains of tens,

-with a president and counsellor at their head, under

-direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be

-our covenant, that we will walk in all the ordinances

-of the Lord.</p>

-

-<p>"Let each company provide itself with all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>

-teams, wagons, provisions, and all other necessaries

-for the journey that they can. When the companies

-are organized, let them go with all their might, to

-prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company,

-with their captains and presidents, decide

-how many can go next spring; then choose out a sufficient

-number of able-bodied and expert men to take

-teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers

-to prepare for putting in the spring crops. Let each

-company bear an equal proportion, according to the

-dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the

-widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those

-who have gone with the army, that the cries of the

-widow and the fatherless come not up into the ears

-of the Lord against his people.</p>

-

-<p>"Let each company prepare houses and fields

-for raising grain for those who are to remain behind

-this season; and this is the will of the Lord concerning

-this people.</p>

-

-<p>"Let every man use all his influence and property

-to remove this people to the place where the Lord

-shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do this with

-a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed

-in your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields,

-and in your houses, and in your families...."</p>

-

-<p>The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk

-Horn River, whence the head of the procession

-moved late in June and early in July. In careful organization,

-with camps under guard and wagons

-always in corral at night, detachments moved on in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>

-quick succession. Kanesville and a large body

-remained behind for another year or longer, but

-before Brigham had laid out his city and started

-east the emigration of 1847 was well upon its way.

-The foremost began to come into the city by September.

-By October the new city in the desert had

-nearly four thousand inhabitants. The march had

-been made with little suffering and slight mortality.

-No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the

-trail.</p>

-

-<p>The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to

-become an oasis in the American desert, supporting

-the only agricultural community existing therein during

-nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the

-Mormons at the start. In Illinois and Missouri

-they were used to wood and water; here they found

-neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to

-carry their water to their crops in a way in which

-their leader had more confidence than themselves.

-The urgency of Brigham in setting his first detachment

-to work on fields and crops was not unwise,

-since for two years there was a real question of food

-to keep the colony alive. Inexperience in irrigating

-agriculture and plagues of crickets kept down the

-early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its

-maintenance does still more credit to its skilful

-leadership. Its people, apart from foreign converts

-who came in later years, were of the stuff that had

-colonized the middle West and won a foothold in

-Oregon; but nowhere did an emigration so nearly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>

-create a land which it enjoyed as here. A paternal

-government dictated every effort, outlined the

-streets and farms, detailed parties to explore the

-vicinity and start new centres of life. Little was

-left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical

-success and a high state of general welfare rewarded

-the Saints for their implicit obedience to authority.</p>

-

-<p>Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became

-as common as that to Oregon in the years following

-1847, but, except in the disastrous hand-cart episode

-of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial

-increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living

-in the West, who, walking all the way, with their own

-hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled carts from

-the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad

-management in handling proselytes the hand-cart

-catastrophe was chiefly due. From the beginning

-missionary activity had been pressed throughout

-the United States and even in Europe. In England

-and Scandinavia the lower classes took kindly to the

-promises, too often impracticable, it must be believed,

-of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon

-success abroad. The convert with property could

-pay his way to the Missouri border and join the ordinary

-annual procession. But the poor, whose wealth

-was not equal to the moderately costly emigration,

-were a problem until the emigration society

-determined to cut expenses by reducing equipment

-and substituting pushcarts and human power for the

-prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span>

-In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants

-left Liverpool, at contract rates, for Iowa City,

-where the parties were to be organized and ample

-equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised

-to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found

-that slovenly management had not built enough of

-the carts. Delayed by the necessary construction

-of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the

-trail until late in the summer,&mdash;too late for a successful

-trip, as a few of their more cautious advisers

-had said. The earliest company got through to

-Salt Lake City in September with considerable success.

-It was hard and toilsome to push the carts;

-women and children suffered badly, but the task

-was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains

-broke down the last company. A friendly historian

-speaks of a loss of sixty-seven out of a party of four

-hundred and twenty. Throughout the United States

-the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling

-against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom,

-with clothing going and food quite gone, increased

-the conviction that the Mormon hierarchy

-was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.</p>

-

-<p>That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of

-the whole United States came to be believed as well.

-In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement three years old,

-Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending

-from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°,

-and the President had made Brigham Young its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>

-governor. The close association of the Mormon

-church and politics had prevented peaceful relations

-from existing between its people and the federal

-officers of the territory, while Washington prejudiced

-a situation already difficult by sending to Utah

-officers and judges, some of whom could not have

-commanded respect even where the sway of United

-States authority was complete. The vicious influence

-of politics in territorial appointments, which the

-territories always resented, was specially dangerous

-in the case of a territory already feeling itself persecuted

-for conscience' sake. Yet it was not impossible

-for a tactful and respectable federal officer to do

-business in Utah. For several years relations increased

-in bad temper, both sides appealing constantly

-to President and Congress, until it appeared,

-as was the fact, that the United States authority

-had become as nothing in Utah and with the church.

-Among the earliest of President Buchanan's acts

-was the preparation of an army which should reëstablish

-United States prestige among the Mormons.

-Large wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth

-in the summer of 1857, with an army under

-Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and

-again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.</p>

-

-<p>The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base,

-and operating in a desert against plainsmen of remarkable

-skill, the army was helpless. At will, the

-Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply

-trains, confining their attacks to property rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>

-than to armed forces. When the army reached

-Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his

-people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned.

-With difficulty could the army of invasion have

-lived through the winter without aid. In the spring

-of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons,

-being invulnerable, were forgiven. The army

-marched down the trail again.</p>

-

-<p>The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island

-settlements in the heart of the desert. The very

-isolation of Utah gave it prominence. What religious

-enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization,

-shrewd leadership and resulting prosperity supplied.

-The first impulse moving population across the plains

-had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as the result.

-Religion was the next, producing Utah. The

-lust for gold followed close upon the second, calling

-into life California, and then in a later decade sprinkling

-little camps over all the mountain West. The

-Mormons would have fared much worse had their

-leader not located his stake of Zion near the point

-where the trail to the Southwest deviated from the

-Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay

-tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through

-his oasis on their way to California.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS</span></h2>

-

-<p>On his second exploring trip, John C. Frémont

-had worked his way south over the Nevada desert

-until at last he crossed the mountains and found

-himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in

-1844 a small group of Americans had already been

-established for several years. Mexican California

-was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient

-central government that the province had

-almost fallen away of its own weight. John A.

-Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was the

-magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed

-a liberal hospitality to the Pathfinder's

-party.</p>

-

-<p>In 1845, Frémont started on his third trip, this

-time entering California by a southern route and

-finding himself at Sutter's early in 1846. In some

-respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance

-of a filibustering party from the start.

-When it crossed the Rockies, it began to trespass

-upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with whom

-the United States was yet at peace. Whether the

-explorer was actually instructed to detach California<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>

-from Mexico, or whether he only imagined that such

-action would be approved at home, is likely never

-to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were

-already under orders in the event of war to seize

-California at once; and Polk was from the start ambitious

-to round out the American territory on the

-Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were

-at variance with their Mexican neighbors, who resented

-the steady influx of foreign blood. Between

-1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased.

-And in June, 1846, certain of them, professing to

-believe that they were to be attacked, seized the

-Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors

-of what they called their Bear Flag Republic.

-Frémont, near at hand, countenanced and supported

-their act, if he did not suggest it.</p>

-

-<p>The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly

-after the American population in California had begun

-its little revolution. Frémont was in his glory

-for a time as the responsible head of American

-power in the province. Naval commanders under

-their own orders coöperated along the coast so

-effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,

-learned that the conquest was substantially complete,

-soon after he left Santa Fé, and was able to

-send most of his own force back. California fell

-into American hands almost without a struggle,

-leaving the invaders in possession early in 1847.

-In January of that year the little village of Yerba

-Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>

-American occupants began the sale of lots along the

-water front and the construction of a great seaport.</p>

-

-<p>The relations of Oregon and California to the

-occupation of the West were much the same in 1847.

-Both had been coveted by the United States. Both

-had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come

-first because it was most easily reached by the great

-trail, and because it had no considerable body of

-foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It was, under

-the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field

-for colonization. But California had been the

-territory of Mexico and was occupied by a strange

-population. In the early forties there were from

-4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province,

-living the easy agricultural life of the Spanish

-colonist. The missions and the Indians had decayed

-during the past generation. The population

-was light hearted and generous. It quarrelled

-loudly, but had the Latin-American knack for

-bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized

-by long association with those trappers who had

-visited it since the twenties, and the settlers who had

-begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied

-foreign territory it had not invited American colonization

-as Oregon had done. Hence the Oregon

-movement had been going on three or four years before

-any considerable bodies of emigrants broke

-away from the trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out

-homes in California. If war had not come, American

-immigration into California would have progressed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>

-after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities

-would have allowed. As it was, the actual conquest

-removed the barrier, so that California migration

-in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon

-under the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement.

-The settlement of the Mormons at Salt

-Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at

-the head of the most perilous section of the California

-trail. Both Mormons and Californians profited

-by its traffic.</p>

-

-<p>With respect to California, the treaty which closed

-the Mexican War merely recognized an accomplished

-fact. By right of conquest California had changed

-hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid

-the penalty under that organic law of politics which

-forbids a nation to sit still when others are moving.

-In no conceivable way could the occupation of California

-have been prevented, and if the war over

-Texas had not come in 1846, a war over California

-must shortly have occurred. By the treaty of

-Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory

-which she had never been able to develop, and made

-way for the erection of the new America on the Pacific.</p>

-

-<p>Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in

-California was John A. Sutter, whose establishment

-on the Sacramento had been a centre of the new

-life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government

-he had erected his adobe buildings in the usual

-semi-fortified style that distinguished the isolated

-ranch. He was ready for trade, or agriculture, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>

-war if need be, possessing within his own domain

-equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and

-supplies. As his ranch prospered, and as Americans

-increased in San Francisco and on the Sacramento,

-the prospects of Sutter steadily improved.

-In 1847 he made ready to reap an additional share

-of profit from the boom by building a sawmill on his

-estate. Among his men there had been for some

-months a shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W.

-Marshall, who had been chiefly carpenter while in

-Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall

-was sent out to find a place where timber and water-power

-should be near enough together to make a

-profitable mill site. He found his spot on the south

-bank of the American, which is a tributary of the

-Sacramento, some forty-five miles northeast of

-Sacramento.</p>

-

-<p>In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall

-came to their agreement by which the former was to

-furnish all supplies and the latter was to build the

-mill and operate it on shares. Construction was

-begun before the year ended, and was substantially

-completed in January, 1848. Experience showed

-the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too

-shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of

-turning the river into it by night to wash out earth

-and deepen the channel. Here it was that after one

-of these flushings, toward the end of January, he

-picked up glittering flakes which looked to him like

-gold.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span>

-With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter,

-at the ranch. Together they tested the flakes in

-the apothecary's shop, proving the reality of the

-discovery before returning to the mill to prospect

-more fully.</p>

-

-<p>For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None

-could tell how large the field might be, but he saw

-clearly that once the news of the find got abroad, the

-whole population would rush madly to the diggings.

-His ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under

-way, all needed labor. But none would work for

-hire with free gold to be had for the taking. The

-discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks,

-but the news leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands

-in a few days, and reached even to San Francisco in

-the form of rumor before February was over. A

-new force had appeared to change the balance of

-the West and to excite the whole United States.</p>

-

-<p>The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two

-parts: the earlier including the population of California,

-near enough to hear of the find and get to

-the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the

-world, but could not start until the news had percolated

-by devious and tedious courses to centres

-of population thousands of miles away. The movement

-within California started in March and April.</p>

-

-<p>Further prospecting showed that over large areas

-around the American and Sacramento rivers free

-gold could be obtained by the simple processes of

-placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span>

-or eight men was the most profitable tool, but a

-tin dishpan would do in an emergency. San Francisco

-was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and

-was not excited even by the first of April, but as

-nuggets and bags of dust appeared in quantity, the

-doubters turned to enthusiasts. Farms were abandoned,

-town houses were deserted, stores were closed,

-while every able-bodied man tramped off to the

-north to try his luck. The city which had flourished

-and expanded since the beginning of 1847 became

-an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper

-is mute witness of the desertion, lapsing into

-silence for a month after May 29th because its hands

-had disappeared. Farther south in California the

-news spread as spring advanced, turning by June

-nearly every face toward Sacramento.</p>

-

-<p>The public authorities took cognizance of the find

-during the summer. It was forced upon them by

-the wholesale desertions of troops who could not

-stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor

-Mason, who represented the sovereignty of

-the United States, visited the scenes in person and

-described the situation in their official letters home.

-The former got his news off to the Secretary of State

-by the 1st of June; the latter wrote on August 17;

-together they became the authoritative messengers

-that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk

-published some of their documents in his message to

-Congress in December, 1848. The rumors had

-reached the East as early as September, but now,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>

-writes Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."</p>

-

-<p>How to get to California became a great popular

-question in the winter of 1848&ndash;1849. The public

-mind was well prepared for long migrations through

-the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the

-journals for at least six years. Route, time, method,

-and cost were all to be considered. Migration, of

-a sort, began at once.</p>

-

-<p>Land and water offered a choice of ways to California.

-The former route was now closed for the

-winter and could not be used until spring should

-produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the

-impetuous and the well-to-do could start immediately

-by sea. All along the seaboard enterprising

-ship-owners announced sailings for California, by

-the Horn or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired

-hulks were called again into commission for

-the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many

-were willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery,

-Congress had arranged for a postal service, <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">via</i>

-Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company

-had been organized to work the contracts. The

-<i>California</i> had left New York in the fall of 1848

-to run on the western end of the route. It had

-sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news

-of gold on the South American coast, had begun to

-load up at Latin ports. When it reached Panama,

-a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many times beyond

-its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>

-over its accommodations. On February 28, 1849,

-it reached San Francisco at last, starting the influx

-from the world at large.</p>

-

-<p>The water route was too costly for most of the

-gold-seekers, who were forced to wait for spring,

-when the trails would be open. Various routes then

-guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most

-of all they crowded once more the great Platte trail.

-Oregon migration and the Mormon flight had

-familiarized this route to all the world. For its first

-stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any

-turnpike in our country."</p>

-

-<p>The usual crowd, which every May for several

-years had brought to the Missouri River crossings

-around Fort Leavenworth, was reënforced in 1849

-and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle

-regiment of regulars was there, bound for Forts

-Laramie and Hall to erect new frontier posts. Lieutenant

-Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying

-party which was to prospect for a railway route to

-Salt Lake. By thousands and tens of thousands

-others came, tempted by the call of gold. This

-was the cheap and popular route. Every western

-farmer was ready to start, with his own wagons and

-his own stock. The townsman could easily buy the

-simple equipment of the plains. The poor could

-work their way, driving cattle for the better-off.

-Through inexperience and congestion the journey

-was likely to be hard, but any one might undertake

-it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>

-wagons had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and

-1500 more at the other ferries.</p>

-

-<p>Familiarity had done much to divest the overland

-journey of its terrors. We hear in this, and even in

-earlier years, of a sort of plains travel de luxe, of

-wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from the weather

-and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the

-world as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury,

-hurrying out in June and overtaking the trains,

-was impressed with the picturesque character of the

-emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in

-company with multitudes of emigrants the whole

-day," he wrote on June 12. "The road has been lined

-to a long extent with their wagons, whose white

-covers, glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a

-distance, ships upon the ocean.... We passed

-also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon,

-drawn by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household

-furniture. Behind followed a covered cart

-containing the wife, driving herself, and a host of

-babies&mdash;the whole bound to the land of promise,

-of the distance to which, however, they seemed to

-have not the most remote idea. To the tail of the

-cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls;

-two milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare,

-upon the back of which was perched a little, brown-faced,

-barefooted girl, not more than seven years old,

-while a small sucking colt brought up the rear."

-Travellers eastward bound, meeting the procession,

-reported the hundreds and thousands whom they met.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>

-The organization of the trains was not unlike that

-of the Oregonians and the Mormons, though generally

-less formal than either of these. The wagons

-were commonly grouped in companies for protection,

-little needed, since the Indians were at peace during

-most of 1849. At nightfall the long columns came

-to rest and worked their wagons into the corral which

-was the typical plains encampment. To form this

-the wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with

-its tongue overlapping the vehicle ahead, and each

-fastened to the next with the brake or yoke chains.

-An opening at one end allowed for driving in the

-stock, which could here be protected from stampede

-or Indian theft. In emergency the circle of wagons

-formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside ordinary

-Indian attacks. When the companies had been

-on the road for a few weeks the forming of the corral

-became an easy military man&oelig;uvre. The itinerant

-circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of

-prairie schooners.</p>

-

-<p>The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by

-worse sufferings than the trail had yet known. Cholera

-broke out among the trains at the start. It

-stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five

-thousand graves, until they reached the hills beyond

-Fort Laramie. The price of inexperience, too, had

-to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock died.

-The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this.

-On July 27, Stansbury observed: "To-day we find

-additional and melancholy evidence of the difficulties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>

-encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before

-halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had

-been broken up, the spokes of the wheels taken to

-make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or otherwise

-destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with

-articles that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and

-steel, large blacksmiths' anvils and bellows, crowbars,

-drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels, axes, lead,

-trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,

-cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels,

-harness, clothing, bacon, and beans, were found along

-the road in pretty much the order in which they have

-been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen,

-lying in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained

-a part of the trouble." In twenty-four miles

-he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and twenty-seven

-dead oxen.</p>

-

-<p>Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done,

-came the worst perils. In the dust and heat of the

-Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away, so that

-thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake,

-or were forced on foot to struggle with thirst and

-starvation.</p>

-

-<p>The number of the overland emigrants can never

-be told with accuracy. Perhaps the truest estimate

-is that of the great California historian who counts

-it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and

-reached the gold fields.</p>

-

-<p>It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California

-after July, 1849, when the overland folk began<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>

-to arrive. All countries and all stations in society

-had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000 or

-more whites who were there in the end of the year.

-The farmer, the amateur prospector, and the professional

-gambler mingled in the crowd. Loose

-women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who

-had come by sea contained an over-share of the undesirable

-element that proposed to live upon the recklessness

-and vices of the miners. The overland emigrants

-were largely of farmer stock; whether they

-had possessed frontier experience or not before the

-start, the 3000-mile journey toughened and seasoned

-all who reached California. Nearly all possessed

-the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.</p>

-

-<p>The experience of Oregon might point to the future

-of California when its strenuous population

-arrived upon the unprepared community. The

-Mexican government had been ejected by war. A

-military government erected by the United States

-still held its temporary sway, but felt out of place as

-the controlling power over a civilian American population.

-The new inhabitants were much in need of

-law, and had the American dislike for military authority.

-Immediately Congress was petitioned to

-form a territorial government for the new El Dorado.

-But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of

-slavery and freedom in the Southwest during its

-session of 1848&ndash;1849. It adjourned with nothing

-done for California. The mining population was irritated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>

-but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It

-had already organized its miners' courts and begun

-to execute summary justice in emergencies. It was

-quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion of

-its administrative officers and erect its state government

-without the consent of Congress. The military

-governor called the popular convention; the

-constitution framed during September, 1849, was ratified

-by popular vote on November 13; a few days

-later Governor Riley surrendered his authority into

-the hands of the elected governor, Burnett, and the

-officials of the new state. All this was done spontaneously

-and easily. There was no sanction in law

-for California until Congress admitted it in September,

-1850, receiving as one of its first senators, John

-C. Frémont.</p>

-

-<p>The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon

-slavery in the Southwest, a compromise made necessary

-by the appearance on the Pacific of a new America.

-The "call of the West and the lust for gold"

-had done their work in creating a new centre of life

-beyond the quondam desert.</p>

-

-<p>The census of 1850 revealed something of the

-nature of this population. Probably 125,000 whites,

-though it was difficult to count them and impossible

-to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon

-and California. Nine-tenths of these were in the

-latter colony. More than 11,000 were found in the

-settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many

-more than 3000 Americans were scattered among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>

-the Mexican population along the Rio Grande.

-The great trails had seen most of these home-seekers

-marching westward over the desert and across the

-Indian frontier which in the blindness of statecraft

-had been completed for all time in 1840.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER</span></h2>

-

-<p>The long line separating the Indian and agricultural

-frontiers was in 1850 but little farther west

-than the point which it had reached by 1820. Then

-it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it

-remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung

-out during this generation, including Arkansas on the

-south and Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin on the

-north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War

-the line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri

-at its bend. West of this spot it had been kept

-from going by the tradition of the desert and the

-pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind

-had filled up with population, Oregon and California

-had appeared across the desert, but the barrier had

-not been pushed away.</p>

-

-<p>Through the great trails which penetrated the

-desert accurate knowledge of the Far West had begun

-to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike and Long

-had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and

-covetous eyes had been cast upon the Indian

-lands across the border,&mdash;lands from which the

-tribes were never to be removed without their consent,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>

-and which were never to be included in any

-organized territory or state. Most of the traffic

-over the trails and through this country had been in

-defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes

-had granted rights of transit, but such privileges as

-were needed and used by the Oregon, and California,

-and Utah hordes were far in excess of these. Most

-of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon

-Indian lands as well as violators of treaty provisions.

-Trouble with the Indians had begun early in the migrations.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_120" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-138.jpg" width="600" height="441" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The West in 1849</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The Southwest

-acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the

-Indian office had foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>

-have occurred during the spring of the last

-and present year [1845] from the passing of emigrants

-for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country.

-Large companies have frequently rendezvoused on

-the Indian lands for months previous to the period

-of their starting. The emigrants have two advantages

-in crossing into the Indian Country at an early

-period of the spring; one, the facility of grazing their

-stock on the rushes with which the lands abound;

-and the other, that they cross the Missouri River at

-their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be

-forced by the military to put back. This passing

-of the emigrants through the Indian Country without

-their permission must, I fear, result in an unpleasant

-collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the

-whites have no right to be in their country without

-their consent; and the upper tribes, who subsist on

-game, complain that the buffalo are wantonly killed

-and scared off, which renders their only means of

-subsistence every year more precarious." Frémont

-had seen, in 1842, that this invasion of the Indian

-Country could not be kept up safely without a show

-of military force, and had recommended a post at the

-point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.</p>

-

-<p>The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated

-the relations with the tribes, while the Indian

-agents continually called upon Congress to redress

-or stop the wrongs being done as often by panic-stricken

-emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate

-persuasion and force," wrote the Commissioner in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>

-1854, "some of these tribes have been removed, step

-by step, from mountain to valley, and from river to

-plain, until they have been pushed halfway across

-the continent. They can go no further; on the

-ground they now occupy the crisis must be met, and

-their future determined.... [There] they are, and

-as they are, with outstanding obligations in their

-behalf of the most solemn and imperative character,

-voluntarily assumed by the government." But a

-relentless westward movement that had no regard

-for rights of Mexico in either Texas or California

-could not be expected to notice the rights of savages

-even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens

-rights not inferior to those conceded by the government

-"to wandering nations of savages." A shrewd

-and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who had

-the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in

-1853. "But one course remains," he wrote, "which

-promises any permanent relief to them, or any lasting

-benefit to the country in which they dwell. That

-is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse

-laws' as will invite the residence of traders

-amongst them, and <i>open the whole Indian territory

-to settlement</i>. In this manner will be introduced

-amongst them those who will set the example of

-developing the resources of the soil, of which the

-Indians have not now the most distant idea; who

-will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial

-to their nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly,

-to those modes of life which can alone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>

-secure them from the miseries of penury. Trade is

-the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor

-of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of

-all hereafter.... The present 'intercourse laws'

-too, so far as they are calculated to protect the

-Indians from the evils of civilized life&mdash;from the

-sale of ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals&mdash;are

-nothing more than a dead letter; while, so far

-as they contribute to exclude the benefits of civilization

-from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly

-enforced."</p>

-

-<p>In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress

-from the War Department to the Interior, with

-the idea that the Indians would be better off under

-civilian than military control, and shortly after this

-negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements

-with the tribes. The Sioux were persuaded

-in the summer of 1851 to make way for increasing

-population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the

-same year the tribes of the western plains were induced

-to make concessions.</p>

-

-<p>The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte

-agency at Fort Laramie in 1851 were in the interest

-of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had spent

-the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne

-and Arapaho to the conference. Shoshoni

-were brought in from the West. From the north of

-the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara,

-Grosventres, and Crows. The treaties here concluded

-were never ratified in full, but for fifteen years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>

-Congress paid various annuities provided by them,

-and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right

-of the United States to make roads across the plains

-and to fortify them with military posts was fully

-agreed to, while the Indians pledged themselves to

-commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two

-years later, at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a

-conference with the plains Indians of the south,

-Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of

-faith, which the Indians did not have in the Government,

-nor the Government in them."</p>

-

-<p>Overland traffic was made more safe for several

-years by these treaties. Such friction and fighting

-as occurred in the fifties were due chiefly to the excesses

-and the fears of the emigrants themselves.

-But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern

-tribes along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were

-in constant danger of dispossession by the advance of

-the frontier itself.</p>

-

-<p>The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in

-the early fifties, was the impending danger threatening

-the peace of the border. There was not as yet

-any special need to extend colonization across the

-Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota

-were but sparsely inhabited. Settlers for

-years might be accommodated farther to the east.

-But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and

-aroused passions in both North and South. Motives

-were so thoroughly mixed that participants

-were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>

-themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge,

-political ambition, all mingled with pure philanthropy

-and a reasonable fear of outside interference with

-domestic institutions. The compromise had settled

-the future of the new lands, but between Missouri

-and the mountains lay the residue of the Louisiana

-purchase, divided truly by the Missouri compromise

-line of 36° 30', but not yet settled. Ambition to

-possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for

-freedom was stimulated by the debate and the fears

-of outside interference. The nearest part of the

-unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence

-it was that Kansas came within the public vision first.</p>

-

-<p>It is possible to trace a movement for territorial

-organization in the Indian Country back to 1850 or

-even earlier. Certain of the more intelligent of the

-Indian colonists had been able to read the signs of

-the times, with the result that organized effort for a

-territory of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot

-country and had besieged Congress between

-1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment

-were the Indians and the laws. Experience

-had long demonstrated the unwisdom of permitting

-Indians and emigrants to live in the same districts.

-The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties

-based upon them, had guaranteed in particular that

-no territory or state should ever be organized in this

-country. Good faith and the physical presence of

-the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory

-could appear.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>

-The guarantee of permanency was based upon

-treaty, and in the eye of Congress was not so sacred

-that it could not be modified by treaty. As it became

-clear that the demand for the opening of these

-lands would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared

-for the inevitable by ordering, in March, 1853,

-a series of negotiations with the tribes west of Missouri

-with a view to the cession of more country.

-The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W.

-Manypenny, who later wrote a book on "Our Indian

-Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to

-the Indians the hard news that they were expected

-once more to vacate. He found the tribes uneasy

-and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering over

-their lands, had set them thinking. There had been

-no actual white settlement up to October, 1853, so

-Manypenny declared, but the chiefs feared that he

-was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The

-Indian mind had some difficulty in comprehending

-the difference between ceding their land by treaty

-and losing it by force.</p>

-

-<p>At a long series of council fires the Commissioner

-soothed away some of the apprehensions, but found

-a stubborn resistance when he came to talk of ceding

-all the reserves and moving to new homes. The

-tribes, under pressure, were ready to part with some

-of their lands, but wanted to retain enough to live

-on. When he talked to them of the Great Father

-in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony

-of the situation; the guarantee of permanency had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span>

-been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged for a

-series of treaties in the following year.</p>

-

-<p>In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with

-most of the tribes fronting on Missouri between 37°

-and 42° 40'. Some of these had been persuaded to

-move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of

-the thirties. Others, always resident there, had

-accepted curtailed reserves. The Omaha faced the

-Missouri, north of the Platte. South of the Platte

-were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes

-of Missouri, the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The

-Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas, and around

-Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization

-of a high order. The Shawnee, immediately

-south of the Kansas, were also well advanced in agriculture

-in the permanent home they had accepted.

-The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea

-and Piankashaw, and the Miami were further south.

-From those tribes more than thirteen million acres of

-land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered

-and reduced reserves the Indians retained for

-themselves about one-tenth of what they ceded.

-Generally, when the final signing came, under the

-persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the

-strange surroundings of Washington, the chiefs

-surrendered the lands outright and with no condition.</p>

-

-<p>Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to

-give title at once and held out for conditions of sale.

-The Iowa, the confederated minor tribes, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>

-notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust

-to the United States, with the treaty pledge that the

-lands so yielded should be sold at public auction to

-the highest bidder, the remainders should then be

-offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre,

-and the final remnants should be disposed of by the

-United States, the accruing funds being held in trust

-by the United States for the Indians. By the end

-of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In

-July, 1854, Congress provided a land office for the

-territory of Kansas.</p>

-

-<p>While the Indian negotiations were in progress,

-Senator Douglas was forcing his Kansas-Nebraska

-bill at Washington. The bill had failed in 1853,

-partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of

-the Indian agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the

-Democratic party carried it along relentlessly. With

-words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as Rhodes

-has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed

-by the westward movement, subversive of the national

-pledge, and, blind as he was, destructive as

-well of his party and his own political future. The

-support of President Pierce and the coöperation of

-Jefferson Davis were his in the struggle. It was not

-his intent, he declared, to legislate slavery into or

-out of the territories; he proposed to leave that to

-the people themselves. To this principle he gave the

-name of "popular sovereignty," "and the name was

-a far greater invention than the doctrine." With

-rising opposition all about him, he repealed the Missouri<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>

-compromise which in 1820 had divided the

-Indian Country by the line of 36° 30' into free and

-slave areas, and created within these limits the new

-territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was

-signed by the President on May 30, 1854. In later

-years this day has been observed as a memorial to

-those who lost their lives in fighting the battle which

-he provoked.</p>

-

-<p>With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri

-compromise repealed, eager partisans prepared in

-the spring of 1854 to colonize the new territories

-in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the

-slavery side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was

-to be reckoned as one of the leaders. Young men

-of the South were urged to move, with their slaves

-and their possessions, into the new territories,

-and thus secure these for their cherished institution.

-If votes should fail them in the future, the

-Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization

-of voters might be counted upon. Missouri,

-directly adjacent to Kansas, and a slave state,

-naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing

-the erection of a free state on her western boundary.

-The northern states had been stirred by the act as

-deeply as the South. In New England the bill was

-not yet passed when leaders of the abolition movement

-prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer,

-of Worcester, urged during the spring that friends of

-freedom could do no better work than aid in the

-colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>

-state, in April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant

-Aid Society, through which he proposed to aid

-suitable men to move into the debatable land.

-Churches and schools were to be provided for them.

-A stern New England abolition spirit was to be fostered

-by them. And they were not to be left without

-the usual border means of defence. Amos A. Lawrence,

-of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made

-Thayer's scheme financially possible. Dr. Charles

-Robinson was their choice for leader of emigration

-and local representative in Kansas.</p>

-

-<p>The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated

-little by the ordinary westward impulse but greatly

-by political ambition and sectional rivalry. As

-late as October, 1853, there had been almost no

-whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they

-began to come in, in increasing numbers. The

-Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at once, before

-the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before

-land offices had been opened. The approach was

-by the Missouri River steamers to Kansas City and

-Westport, near the bend of the river, where was the

-gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north

-of the Kansas River, was not yet open to legal occupation,

-but the Shawnee lands had been ceded completely

-and would soon be ready. So the New England

-companies worked their way on foot, or in hired

-wagons, up the right bank of the Kansas, hunting

-for eligible sites. About thirty miles west of the

-Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>

-picked their spot late in July. The town of Lawrence

-grew out of their cluster of tents and cabins.</p>

-

-<p>It was more than two months after the arrival of

-the squatters at Lawrence before the first governor

-of the new territory, Andrew H. Reeder, made his

-appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established

-civil government in Kansas. One of his first experiences

-was with the attempt of United States officers

-at the post to secure for themselves pieces of the Delaware

-lands which surrounded it. "While lying at

-the fort," wrote a surveyor who left early in September

-to run the Nebraska boundary line, "we

-heard a great deal about those d&mdash;d squatters who

-were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None

-of the Delaware lands were open to settlement, since

-the United States had pledged itself to sell them all

-at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But

-certain speculators, including officers of the regular

-army, organized a town company to preëmpt a site

-near the fort, where they thought they foresaw the

-great city of the West. They relied on the immunity

-which usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands,

-and seem even to have used United States soldiers

-to build their shanties. They had begun to dispose

-of their building lots "in this discreditable business"

-four weeks before the first of the Delaware trust

-lands were put on sale.</p>

-

-<p>However bitter toward each other, the settlers

-were agreed in their attitude toward the Indians, and

-squatted regardless of Indian rights or United States<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>

-laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his legislature,

-first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort

-Riley ejected it; then at the Shawnee mission, close

-to Kansas City, where his presence and its were

-equally without authority of law. He established

-election precincts in unceded lands, and voting places

-at spots where no white man could go without violating

-the law. The legal snarl into which the

-settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the

-Indian policy. It is even intimated that Governor

-Reeder was interested in a land scheme at Pawnee

-similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.</p>

-

-<p>The fight for Kansas began immediately after the

-arrival of Governor Reeder and the earliest immigrants.

-The settlers actually in residence at the

-commencement of 1855 seem to have been about

-8500. Propinquity gave Missouri an advantage at

-the start, when the North was not yet fully aroused.

-At an election for territorial legislature held on

-March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was

-revealed in all its fulness when more than 6000

-votes were counted among a population which

-had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men

-had ridden over in organized bands to colonize

-the precincts and carry the election. The whole

-area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride

-of the Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that

-Governor Reeder disavowed certain of the results,

-yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July, 1855,

-was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>

-while the rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri

-code of law, thus laying the foundations for a slave

-state.</p>

-

-<p>The political struggle over Kansas became more

-intense on the border and more absorbing in the

-nation in the next four years. The free-state men,

-as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known,

-disavowed the first legislature on the ground of its

-fraudulent election, while President Pierce steadily

-supported it from Washington. Governor Reeder

-was removed during its session, seemingly because

-he had thrown doubts upon its validity. Protesting

-against it, the northerners held a series of meetings

-in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some

-twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and

-crystallized their opposition under Dr. Robinson.

-Their efforts culminated at Topeka in October in a

-spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary, convention

-which framed a free-state constitution for

-Kansas and provided for erecting a rival administration.

-Dr. Robinson became its governor.</p>

-

-<p>Before the first legislature under the Topeka

-constitution assembled, Kansas had still further

-trouble. Private violence and mob attacks began

-during the fall of 1855. What is known as the

-Wakarusa War occurred in November, when Sheriff

-Jones of Douglas County tried to arrest some free-state

-men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance

-reënforced with Sharpe rifles from New

-England. Governor Wilson Shannon, who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>

-succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility

-continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly

-the centre of northern settlement and the

-object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri mob

-visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving

-presence, it is said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel

-and printing shop, and burned the residence of Dr.

-Robinson.</p>

-

-<p>In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river

-and attacked Lecompton, but within a week of the

-sacking of Lawrence retribution was visited upon the

-pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were

-murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by

-a group of fanatical free-state men. Just what

-provocation John Brown and his family had received

-which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In

-many instances individual anti-slavery men retaliated

-lawlessly upon their enemies. But the leaders

-of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring

-Brown and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts.

-It is certain that in this struggle the free-state party,

-in general, wanted peaceful settlement of the country,

-and were staking their fortunes and families upon it.

-They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression

-was no part of their platform.</p>

-

-<p>The course of Governor Shannon reached its end

-in the summer of 1856. He was disliked by the free-state

-faction, while his personal habits gave no respectability

-to the pro-slave cause. At the end of

-his régime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>

-constitution was prevented by federal troops

-from convening in session at Topeka. A few weeks

-later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and

-established his seat of government in Lecompton,

-by this time a village of some twenty houses. It

-took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only

-six weeks to fall out with the pro-slave element and

-the federal land officers. He resigned in March, 1857.</p>

-

-<p>Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed

-Geary, the first official attempt at a constitution was

-entered upon. The legislature had already summoned

-a convention which sat at Lecompton during

-September and October. Its constitution, which

-was essentially pro-slavery, however it was read, was

-ratified before the end of the year and submitted to

-Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which

-called the convention had fallen into free-state hands,

-disavowed the constitution, and summoned another

-convention. At Leavenworth this convention

-framed a free-state constitution in March, which was

-ratified by popular vote in May, 1858. Governor

-Walker had already resigned in December, 1857.

-Through holding an honest election and purging the

-returns of slave-state frauds he had enabled the free-state

-party to secure the legislature. Southerner

-though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty

-of the administration in Kansas. He had yielded

-to the evidence of his eyes, that the population of

-Kansas possessed a large free-state majority. But

-so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span>

-Even Senator Douglas, the patron of the popular

-sovereignty doctrine, had now broken with President

-Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to

-form their own institutions. No attention was ever

-paid by Congress to this Leavenworth constitution,

-but when the Lecompton constitution was finally

-submitted to the people by Congress, in August,

-1858, it was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a

-total of 13,000. Kansas was henceforth in the hands

-of the actual settlers. A year later, at Wyandotte,

-it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last

-entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the

-Wyandotte Convention," says one of the local historians,

-"there were a few Democrats and one or

-two cranks, and probably both were of some use in

-their way."</p>

-

-<p>There had been no white population in Kansas in

-1853, and no special desire to create one. But the

-political struggle had advertised the territory on a

-large scale, while the whole West was under the influence

-of the agricultural boom that was extending

-settlement into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.

-Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found that about

-8500 had come in since the erection of the territory.

-The rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles

-and the stories of Lawrence and Potawatomi,

-instead of frightening settlers away, drew them there

-in increasing thousands. Some few came from the

-South, but the northern majority was overwhelming

-before the panic of 1857 laid its heavy hand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>

-upon expansion. There was a white population of

-106,390 in 1860.</p>

-

-<p>The westward movement, under its normal influences,

-had extended the range of prosperous agricultural

-settlement into the Northwest in this past

-decade. It had coöperated in the extension into that

-part of the old desert now known as Kansas. But

-chiefly politics, and secondly the call of the West,

-is the order of causes which must explain the first

-westward advance of the agricultural frontier since

-1820. Even in 1860 the population of Kansas was

-almost exclusively within a three days' journey of

-the Missouri bend.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 title="CHAPTER IX PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST" class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"<a name="FNanchor_2" id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">2</a></span></h2>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="fnanchor">2</a> This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The Territory

-of Colorado" which was published in <i>The American Historical

-Review</i> in October, 1906.</p></div>

-

-<p class="p2">The territory of Kansas completed the political

-organization of the prairies. Before 1854 there had

-been a great stretch of land beyond Missouri and

-the Indian frontier without any semblance of organization

-or law. Indeed within the area whites had

-been forbidden to enter, since here was the final

-abode of the Indians. But with the Kansas-Nebraska

-act all this was changed. In five years a

-series of amorphous territories had been provided for

-by law.</p>

-

-<p>Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct

-divisions. From the Canadian border to the

-fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended. Kansas lay

-between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the

-old Indian Country, now much reduced by partition,

-embraced the rest. The whole plains country,

-east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial

-projects. Indian Territory was without the

-government which its name implied, but popular

-parlance regarded it as the others and refused to

-see any difference among them.</p>

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span></p>

-<p>Beyond the mountain wall which formed the

-western boundary of Kansas and Nebraska lay four

-other territories equally without particular reason

-for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in

-1846, had been divided in 1853 by a line starting

-at the mouth of the Columbia and running east to the

-Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its

-northern side. The Utah territory which figured in

-the compromise of 1850, and which Mormon migration

-had made necessary, extended between California

-and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42° to New

-Mexico at 37°. New Mexico, also of the compromise

-year, reached from Texas to California, south

-of 37°, and possessed at its northeast corner a panhandle

-which carried it north to 38° in order to leave

-in it certain old Mexican settlements.</p>

-

-<p>These divisions of the West embraced in 1854

-the whole of the country between California and the

-states. As yet their boundaries were arbitrary and

-temporary, but they presaged movements of population

-which during the next quarter century should

-break them up still further and provide real colonies

-in place of the desert and the Indian Country.

-Congress had no formative part in the work. Population

-broke down barriers and showed the way,

-while laws followed and legalized what had been

-done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the

-mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains

-no prophecy of the four states which were shortly to

-appear.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span></p>

-

-<div id="ip_140" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-158.jpg" width="600" height="448" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The West in 1854</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky

-Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>For several decades the area of Kansas territory,

-and the southern part of Nebraska, had been well

-known as the range of the plains Indians,&mdash;Pawnee

-and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche

-and Apache. Through this range the caravans

-had gone. Here had been constant military

-expeditions as well. It was a common summer's

-campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort

-Leavenworth to the mountains by either the Arkansas

-or Platte route, to skirt the eastern slopes along

-the southern fork of the Platte, and return home

-by the other trail. Those military demonstrations,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>

-which were believed to be needed to impress the

-tribes, had made this march a regular performance.

-Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner

-and Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous

-others in between. A well-known trail had

-been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on the

-north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte

-at Cherry Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and

-on to Bent's Fort and the New Mexican towns.

-Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end.

-Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling

-over slavery, but they had scarcely scratched the

-soil for one-fourth of the length of the territory.</p>

-

-<p>The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme

-west of Kansas, lay between the great trails, so that

-it was off the course of the chief migrations, and

-none visited it for its own sake. The deviating

-trails, which commenced at the Missouri bend, were

-some 250 miles apart at the one hundred and third

-meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized

-in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose

-the hills around Pike's Peak, which rumor came in

-three years more to tip with gold.</p>

-

-<p>The discovery of gold in California prepared the

-public for similar finds in other parts of the West.

-With many of the emigrants prospecting had become

-a habit that sent small bands into the mountain

-valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories

-of success in various regions arose repeatedly during

-the fifties and are so reasonable that it is not possible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>

-to determine with certainty the first finds in many

-localities. Any mountain stream in the whole

-system might be expected to contain some gold, but

-deposits large enough to justify a boom were slow

-in coming.</p>

-

-<p>In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to

-Omaha from the mountains, confirmed the rumors

-of a new discovery that had been persistent for several

-months. The previous summer had seen organized

-attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region

-the deposits whose existence had been believed in,

-more or less, since 1850. Parties from the gold

-fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton

-are known to have been in the field and to have

-started various mushroom settlements. El Paso,

-near the present site of Colorado Springs, appeared,

-as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the

-South Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry

-Creek,&mdash;Montana, Auraria, Highland, and St.

-Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the

-States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by

-trifling finds, remained to occupy their flimsy cabins

-or to jump the claims of the absentees. In the

-sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold

-the finders and to start a small migration thither

-in the autumn. In the early winter the groups on

-Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the name of

-Denver City.</p>

-

-<p>The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri

-Valley at the strategic moment when the newness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>

-Kansas had worn off, and the depression of 1857 had

-brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier. The

-adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to

-move, had been reënforced by individuals down on

-their luck and reduced to any sort of extremity.

-The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration

-to the new diggings which started in the fall of 1858

-and assumed great volume in the spring of 1859.</p>

-

-<p>The edge of the border for these emigrants was not

-much farther west than it had been for emigrants of

-the preceding decade. A few miles from the Missouri

-River all traces of Kansas or Nebraska disappeared,

-whether one advanced by the Platte or the Arkansas,

-or by the intermediate routes of the Smoky Hill and

-Republican. The destination was less than half as

-far away as California had been. No mountains and

-no terrible deserts were to be crossed. The costs and

-hardships of the journey were less than any that had

-heretofore separated the frontier from a western goal.

-There is a glimpse of the bustling life around the head

-of the trails in a letter which General W.&nbsp;T. Sherman

-wrote to his brother John from Leavenworth City,

-on April 30, 1859: "At this moment we are in

-the midst of a rush to Pike's Peak. Steamboats

-arrive in twos and threes each day, loaded with

-people for the new gold region. The streets are full

-of people buying flour, bacon, and groceries, with

-wagons and outfits, and all around the town are

-little camps preparing to go west. A daily stage

-goes west to Fort Riley, 135 miles, and every morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>

-two spring wagons, drawn by four mules and capable

-of carrying six passengers, start for the Peak, distance

-six hundred miles, the journey to be made in

-twelve days. As yet the stages all go out and don't

-return, according to the plan for distributing the

-carriages; but as soon as they are distributed, there

-will be two going and two returning, making a good

-line of stages to Pike's Peak. Strange to say, even

-yet, although probably 25,000 people have actually

-gone, we are without authentic advices of gold. Accounts

-are generally favorable as to words and descriptions,

-but no positive physical evidence comes

-in the shape of gold, and I will be incredulous until I

-know some considerable quantity comes in in way

-of trade."</p>

-

-<div id="ip_144" class="figcenter" style="width: 438px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-163.jpg" width="438" height="600" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p>"<span class="smcap">Ho for the Yellow Stone</span>"</p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>Reproduced by permission of the Montana Historical Society, from the original handbill in

-its possession.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>Throughout the United States newspapers gave full

-notice to the new boom, while a "Pike's Peak Guide,"

-based on a journal kept by one of the early parties,

-found a ready sale. No single movement had ever

-carried so heavy a migration upon the plains as this,

-which in one year must have taken nearly 100,000

-pioneers to the mountains. "Pike's Peak or Bust!"

-was a common motto blazoned on their wagon

-covers. The sawmill, the press, and the stage-coach

-were all early on the field. Byers, long a great

-editor in Denver, arrived in April to distribute an

-edition of his <i>Rocky Mountain News</i>, which he had

-printed on one side before leaving Omaha. Thenceforth

-the diggings were consistently advertised by a

-resident enthusiast. Early in May the first coach of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>

-the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company

-brought Henry Villard into Denver. In June came

-no less a personage than Horace Greeley to see for

-himself the new wonder. "Mine eyes have never yet

-been blessed with the sight of any floor whatever

-in either Denver or Auraria," he could write of the

-village of huts which he inspected. The seal of

-approval which his letters set upon the enterprise

-did much to encourage it.</p>

-

-<p>With the rush of prospectors to the hills, numerous

-new camps quickly appeared. Thirty

-miles north along the foothills and mesas Boulder

-marked the exit of a mountain creek upon the

-plains. Behind Denver, in Clear Creek Valley,

-were Golden, at the mouth, and Black Hawk and

-Central City upon the north fork of the stream.

-Idaho Springs and Georgetown were on its south

-fork. Here in the Gregory district was the active

-life of the diggings. The great extent of the gold

-belt to the southwest was not yet fully known.

-Farther south was Pueblo, on the Arkansas, and a

-line of little settlements working up the valley, by

-Canyon City to Oro, where Leadville now stands.</p>

-

-<p>Reaction followed close upon the heels of the

-boom, beginning its work before the last of the outward

-bound had reached the diggings. Gold was

-to be found in trifling quantities in many places,

-but the mob of inexperienced miners had little

-chance for fortune. The great deposits, which were

-some months in being discovered, were in refractory<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span>

-quartz lodes, calling for heavy stamp mills, chemical

-processes, and, above all, great capital for their

-working. Even for laborers there was no demand

-commensurate with the number of the fifty-niners.

-Hence, more than half of these found their way

-back to the border before the year was over, bitter,

-disgusted, and poor, scrawling on deserted wagons, in

-answer to the outward motto, "Busted! By Gosh!"</p>

-

-<p>The problem of government was born when the

-first squatters ran the lines of Denver City. Here

-was a new settlement far away from the seat of territorial

-government, while the government itself was

-impotent. Kansas had no legislature competent to

-administer law at home&mdash;far less in outlying colonies.

-But spontaneous self-government came easily to the

-new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers

-in his diary, "that within two weeks of the

-arrival of a few dozen Americans in a wilderness, they

-set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States

-Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory!

-But we are of a fast race and in a fast age and must

-prod along." An early snow in November, 1858,

-had confined the miners to their cabins and started

-politics. The result had been the election of two

-delegates, one to Congress and one to Kansas legislature,

-both to ask for governmental direction. Kansas

-responded in a few weeks, creating five new

-counties west of 104°, and chartering a city of St.

-Charles, long after St. Charles had been merged into

-Denver. Congress did nothing.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span>

-The prospective immigration of 1859 inspired

-further and more comprehensive attempts at local

-government. It was well understood that the news

-of gold would send in upon Denver a wave of population

-and perhaps a reign of lawlessness. The

-adjournment of Congress without action in their

-behalf made it certain that there could be no aid from

-this quarter for at least a year, and became the

-occasion for a caucus in Denver over which William

-Larimer presided on April 11, 1859. As a result of

-this caucus, a call was issued for a convention of

-representatives of the neighboring mining camps to

-meet in the same place four days later. On April

-15, six camps met through their delegates, "being

-fully impressed with the belief, from early and recent

-precedents, of the power and benefits and duty of

-self-government," and feeling an imperative necessity

-"for an immediate and adequate government,

-for the large population now here and soon to be

-among us ... and also believing that a territorial

-government is not such as our large and peculiarly

-situated population demands."</p>

-

-<p>The deliberations thus informally started ended in

-a formal call for a constitutional convention to meet

-in Denver on the first Monday in June, for the purpose,

-as an address to the people stated, of framing a

-constitution for a new "state of Jefferson." "Shall

-it be," the address demanded, "the government of

-the knife and the revolver, or shall we unite in forming

-here in our golden country, among the ravines and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>

-gulches of the Rocky Mountains, and the fertile

-valleys of the Arkansas and the Platte, a new

-and independent State?" The boundaries of the

-prospective state were named in the call as the one

-hundred and second and one hundred and tenth

-meridians of longitude, and the thirty-seventh

-and forty-third parallels of north latitude&mdash;including

-with true frontier amplitude large portions of

-Utah and Nebraska and nearly half of Wyoming,

-in addition to the present state of Colorado.</p>

-

-<p>When the statehood convention met in Denver on

-June 6, the time was inopportune for concluding

-the movement, since the reaction had set in. The

-height of the gold boom was over, and the return

-migration left it somewhat doubtful whether any

-permanent population would remain in the country

-to need a state. So the convention met on the 6th,

-appointed some eight drafting committees, and adjourned,

-to await developments, until August 1.

-By this later date, the line had been drawn between

-the confident and the discouraged elements in the

-population, and for six days the convention worked

-upon the question of statehood. As to permanency

-there was now no doubt; but the body divided into

-two nearly equal groups, one advocating immediate

-statehood, the other shrinking from the heavy taxation

-incident to a state establishment and so preferring

-a territorial government with a federal treasury

-behind it. The body, too badly split to reach a conclusion

-itself, compromised by preparing the way<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>

-for either development and leaving the choice to a

-public vote. A state constitution was drawn up

-on one hand; on the other, was prepared a memorial

-to Congress praying for a territorial government, and

-both documents were submitted to a vote on September

-5. Pursuant to the memorial, which was

-adopted, another election was held on October 3,

-at which the local agent of the new Leavenworth

-and Pike's Peak Express Company, Beverly D.

-Williams, was chosen as delegate to Congress.</p>

-

-<p>The adoption of the territorial memorial failed to

-meet the need for immediate government or to

-prevent the advocates of such government from

-working out a provisional arrangement pending the

-action of Congress. On the day that Williams was

-elected, these advocates chose delegates for a preliminary

-territorial constitutional convention which

-met a week later. "Here we go," commented

-Byers, "a regular triple-headed government machine;

-south of 40 deg. we hang on to the skirts of Kansas;

-north of 40 deg. to those of Nebraska; straddling the

-line, we have just elected a Delegate to the United

-States Congress from the 'Territory of Jefferson,'

-and ere long we will have in full blast a provisional

-government of Rocky Mountain growth and manufacture."

-In this convention of October 10, 1859,

-the name of Jefferson was retained for the new

-territory; the boundaries of April 15 were retained,

-and a government similar to the highest type of

-territorial establishment was provided for. If the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>

-convention had met on the authority of an enabling

-act, its career could not have been more dignified.

-Its constitution was readily adopted, while officers

-under it were chosen in an orderly election on October

-24. Robert W. Steele, of Ohio, became its governor.

-On November 7 he met his legislature and delivered

-his first inaugural address.</p>

-

-<p>The territory of Jefferson which thus came into

-existence in the Pike's Peak region illustrates well

-the spirit of the American frontier. The fundamental

-principle of American government which Byers expressed

-in connection with it is applicable at all

-times in similar situations. "We claim," he wrote

-in his <i>Rocky Mountain News</i>, "that any body, or

-community of American citizens, which from any

-cause or under any circumstance is cut off from, or

-from isolation is so situated as not to be under, any

-active and protecting branch of the central government,

-have a right, if on American soil, to frame a

-government, and enact such laws and regulations as

-may be necessary for their own safety, protection,

-and happiness, always with the condition precedent,

-that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central

-government shall extend an <i>effective</i> organization

-and laws over them, give it their unqualified support

-and obedience." The life of the spontaneous commonwealth

-thus called into existence is a creditable

-witness to the American instinct for orderly government.</p>

-

-<p>When Congress met in December, 1859, the provisional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>

-territory of Jefferson was in operation, while

-its delegates in Washington were urging the need for

-governmental action. To their influence, President

-Buchanan added, on February 20, 1860, a message

-transmitting the petition from the Pike's Peak country.

-The Senate, upon April 3, received a report

-from the Committee on Territories introducing Senate

-Bill No. 366, for the erection of Colorado territory,

-while Grow of Pennsylvania reported to the

-House on May 10 a bill to erect in the same region a

-territory of Idaho. The name of Jefferson disappeared

-from the project in the spring of 1860, its

-place being taken by sundry other names for the same

-mountain area. Several weeks were given, in part,

-to debate over this Colorado-Idaho scheme, though

-as usual the debate turned less upon the need for

-this territorial government than upon the attitude

-which the bill should take toward the slavery issue.

-The slavery controversy prevented territorial legislation

-in this session, but the reasonableness of the

-Colorado demand was well established.</p>

-

-<p>The territory of Jefferson, as organized in November,

-1859, had been from the first recognized as

-merely a temporary expedient. The movement

-for it had gained weight in the summer of that year

-from the probability that it need not be maintained

-for many months. When Congress, however, failed

-in the ensuing session of 1859&ndash;1860 to grant the

-relief for which the pioneers had prayed, the wisdom

-of continuing for a second year the life of a government<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span>

-admitted to be illegal came into question.

-The first session of its legislature had lasted from

-November 7, 1859, to January 25, 1860. It

-had passed comprehensive laws for the regulation of

-titles in lands, water, and mines, and had adopted

-civil and criminal codes. Its courts had been established

-and had operated with some show of

-authority. But the service and obedience to the

-government had been voluntary, no funds being on

-hand for the payment of salaries and expenses. One

-of the pioneers from Vermont wrote home, "There is

-no hopes [<i xml:lang="la" lang="la">sic</i>] of perfect quiet in our governmental

-matters until we are securely under the wing of our

-National Eagle." In his proclamation calling the

-second election Governor Steele announced that

-"all persons who expect to be elected to any of the

-above offices should bear in mind that there will be

-no salaries or per diem allowed from this territory,

-but that the General Government will be memorialized

-to aid us in our adversity."</p>

-

-<p>Upon this question of revenue the territory of

-Jefferson was wrecked. Taxes could not be collected,

-since citizens had only to plead grave doubts

-as to the legality in order to evade payment. "We

-have tried a Provisional Government, and how has

-it worked," asked William Larimer in announcing

-his candidacy for the office of territorial delegate.

-"It did well enough until an attempt was made to

-tax the people to support it." More than this, the

-real need for the government became less apparent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>

-as 1860 advanced, for the scattered communities

-learned how to obtain a reasonable peace without

-it. American mining camps are peculiarly free from

-the need for superimposed government. The new

-camp at once organizes itself on a democratic basis,

-and in mass meeting registers claims, hears and

-decides suits, and administers summary justice.

-Since the Pike's Peak country was only a group of

-mining camps, there proved to be little immediate

-need for a central government, for in the local mining-district

-organizations all of the most pressing

-needs of the communities could be satisfied. So

-loyalty to the territory of Jefferson, in the districts

-outside of Denver, waned during 1860, and in the

-summer of that year had virtually disappeared. Its

-administration, however, held together. Governor

-Steele made efforts to rehabilitate its authority,

-was himself reëlected, and met another legislature

-in November.</p>

-

-<p>When the thirty-sixth Congress met for its second

-session in December, 1860, the Jefferson organization

-was in the second year of its life, yet in Congress

-there was no better prospect of quick action than

-there had been since 1857. Indeed the election of

-Lincoln brought out the eloquence of the slavery

-question with a renewed vigor that monopolized the

-time and strength of Congress until the end of January.

-Had not the departure of the southern members

-to their states cleared the way for action, it

-is highly improbable that even this session would

-have produced results of importance.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span>

-Grow had announced in the beginning of the session

-a territorial platform similar to that which had

-been under debate for three years. Until the close

-of January the southern valedictories held the floor,

-but at last the admission of Kansas, on January 29,

-1861, revealed the fact that pro-slavery opposition

-had departed and that the long-deferred territorial

-scheme could have a fair chance. On the very day

-that Kansas was admitted, with its western boundary

-at the twenty-fifth meridian from Washington, the

-Senate revived its bill No. 366 of the last session

-and took up its deliberation upon a territory for

-Pike's Peak. Only by chance did the name Colorado

-remain attached to the bill. Idaho was at one

-time adopted, but was amended out in favor of the

-original name when the bill at last passed the Senate.

-The boundaries were cut down from those which the

-territory had provided for itself. Two degrees were

-taken from the north of the territory, and three

-from the west. In this shape, between 37° and

-41° north latitude, and 25° and 32° of longitude

-west of Washington, the bill received the signature

-of President Buchanan on February 28. The

-absence of serious debate in the passage of this

-Colorado act is excellent evidence of the merit of

-the scheme and the reasons for its being so long

-deferred.</p>

-

-<p>President Buchanan, content with approving the

-bill, left the appointment of the first officials for

-Colorado to his successor. In the multitude of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span>

-greater problems facing President Lincoln, this was

-neglected for several weeks, but he finally commissioned

-General William Gilpin as the first

-governor of the territory. Gilpin had long known

-the mountain frontier; he had commanded a detachment

-on the Santa Fé trail in the forties, and he had

-written prophetic books upon the future of the

-country to which he was now sent. His loyalty

-was unquestioned and his readiness to assume responsibility

-went so far as perhaps to cease to be a

-virtue. He arrived in Denver on May 29, 1861,

-and within a few days was ready to take charge of

-the government and to receive from the hands of

-Governor Steele such authority as remained in the

-provisional territory of Jefferson.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA</span></h2>

-

-<p>The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of

-mining episodes which, within fifteen years of the

-discoveries in California, let in the light of exploration

-and settlement upon hundreds of valleys

-scattered over the whole of the Rocky Mountain

-West. The men who exploited California had

-generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by

-bitter experience; but the next decade developed a

-professional class, mobile as quicksilver, restless

-and adventurous as all the West, which permeated

-into the most remote recesses of the mountains and

-produced before the Civil War was over, as the direct

-result of their search for gold, not only Colorado,

-but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana.

-Activity was constant during these years all along

-the continental divide. New camps were being

-born overnight, old ones were abandoned by magic.

-Here and there cities rose and remained to mark

-success in the search. Abandoned huts and half-worked

-diggings were scars covering a fourth of the

-continent.</p>

-

-<p>Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the

-largest of migrations, but while Denver was being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>

-settled there began, farther west, a boom which for

-the present outdid it in significance. The old

-California trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada

-desert and entered California by various passes

-through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts

-had been planted along this trail by Mormons and

-others during the fifties, until in 1854 the legislature

-of Utah had created a Carson County in the west

-end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements

-along the river of the same name. Small discoveries

-of gold were enough to draw to this district a floating

-population which founded a Carson City as early as

-1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement

-until after the finding of a marvellously

-rich vein of silver near Gold Hill in the spring of 1859.

-Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a few

-miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the

-famous Comstock lode, upon which it was possible

-within five years to build a state.</p>

-

-<p>The California population, already rushing about

-from one boom to another in perpetual prospecting,

-seized eagerly upon this new district in western

-Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and

-Placerville was crowded beyond capacity, while

-hundreds marched over the mountains on foot.

-"There was no difficulty in reaching the newly

-discovered region of boundless wealth," asserted a

-journalistic visitor. "It lay on the public highway

-to California, on the borders of the state. From

-Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>

-Peak and Salt Lake, the tide of emigration poured

-in. Transportation from San Francisco was easy.

-I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead

-of winter, when the mountains were covered with

-snow." Carson City had existed before the great

-discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade

-southerner, nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed

-it, while the typical population of the mining camps

-piled in around the two.</p>

-

-<p>In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The

-new pony express ran through the heart of the

-fields and aided in advertising them east and west.

-Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye.

-Both camps obtained their territorial acts within the

-same week, that of Nevada receiving Buchanan's

-signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west

-of the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became

-the new territory which, through the need of

-the union for loyal votes, gained its admission as

-a state in three more years.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_158" class="figcenter" style="width: 541px;">

-  <img src="images/i-179.jpg" width="541" height="353" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The Mining Camp</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the Montana Historical Society.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>The rush to Carson valley drew attention away

-from another mining enterprise further south. In

-the western half of New Mexico, between the Rio

-Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful

-mining ever since the acquisition of the territory.

-The southwest boundary of the United States after

-the Mexican War was defined in words that could not

-possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This

-fact, together with knowledge that an easy railway

-grade ran south of the Gila River, had led in 1853<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>

-to the purchase of additional land from Mexico

-and the definition of a better boundary in the

-Gadsden treaty. In these lands of the Gadsden

-purchase old mines came to light in the years immediately

-following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles

-D. Poston were most active in promoting the mining

-companies which revived abandoned claims and developed

-new ones near the old Spanish towns of

-Tubac and Tucson. The region was too remote

-and life too hard for the individual miner to have

-much chance. Organized mining companies here

-took the place of the detached prospector of Colorado

-and Nevada. Disappointed miners from California

-came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee

-of San Francisco did more to populate the

-new Territory than the silver mines. Tucson became

-the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and

-crime.... It was literally a paradise of devils."

-Excessive dryness, long distances, and Apache depredation

-discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys

-of the early fifties and the passage of the overland

-mail through the camps in 1858 advertised the

-Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.</p>

-

-<p>The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the

-time the Mowry mines and others in the Santa Cruz

-Valley, holding them in check till a second mineral

-area in western New Mexico should be found.

-United States army posts were abandoned, confederate

-agents moved in, and Indians became bold.

-The federal authority was not reëstablished until<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>

-Colonel J.&nbsp;H. Carleton led his California column

-across the Colorado and through New Mexico to

-Tucson early in 1862. During the next two years

-he maintained his headquarters at Santa Fé, carried

-on punitive campaigns against the Navaho and the

-Apache, and encouraged mining.</p>

-

-<p>The Indian campaigns of Carleton and his aides

-in New Mexico have aroused much controversy.

-There were no treaty rights by which the United

-States had privileges of colonization and development.

-It was forcible entry and retention, maintained

-in the face of bitter opposition. Carleton,

-with Kit Carson's assistance, waged a war of scarcely

-concealed extermination. They understood, he reported

-to Washington, "the direct application of

-force as a law. If its application be removed, that

-moment they become lawless. This has been tried

-over and over and over again, and at great expense.

-The purpose now is never to relax the application

-of force with a people that can no more be trusted

-than you can trust the wolves that run through

-their mountains; to gather them together little by

-little, on to a reservation, away from the haunts,

-and hills, and hiding-places of their country, and

-then to be kind to them; there teach their children

-how to read and write, teach them the arts of peace;

-teach them the truths of Christianity. Soon they

-will acquire new habits, new ideas, new modes of

-life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them

-all the latent longings for murdering and robbing;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>

-the young ones will take their places without these

-longings; and thus, little by little, they will become

-a happy and contented people."</p>

-

-<p>Mowry's mines had been seized by Carleton at

-the start, as tainted with treason. The whole

-Tucson district was believed to be so thoroughly in

-sympathy with the confederacy that the commanding

-officer was much relieved when rumors came of a

-new placer gold field along the left bank of the Colorado

-River, around Bill Williams Creek. Thither

-the population of the territory moved as fast as it

-could. Teamsters and other army employees deserted

-freely. Carleton deliberately encouraged

-surveying and prospecting, and wrote personally

-to General Halleck and Postmaster-general Blair,

-congratulating them because his California column

-had found the gold with which to suppress the confederacy.

-"One of the richest gold countries in

-the world," he described it to be, destined to be the

-centre of a new territorial life, and to throw into the

-shade "the insignificant village of Tucson."</p>

-

-<p>The population of the silver camp had begun

-to urge Congress to provide a territory independent

-of New Mexico, immediately after the development

-of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had

-been sent to Washington in the usual style. But

-congressional indifference to new territories had

-blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened

-the case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian

-wards and their rights, the Superintendent of Indian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>

-Affairs had told of the sad peril of the "unprotected

-miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear

-title. They would offer to the "numerous and

-warlike tribes" an irresistible opportunity. The

-territorial act was finally passed on February 24,

-1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart

-of the new gold field, at Fort Whipple, near which

-the city of Prescott soon appeared.</p>

-

-<p>The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by

-the erection of a territorial government. There never

-came in a population large enough to intimidate

-the tribes, while bad management from the start

-provoked needless wars. Most serious were the

-Apache troubles which began in 1861 and ceased

-only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies.

-In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp

-Grant in 1871, when citizens of Tucson, with careful

-premeditation, murdered in cold blood more

-than eighty Apache, men, women, and children.

-The degree of provocation is uncertain, but the

-disposition of Tucson, as Mowry has phrased it,

-was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice of

-the attack: "There is only one way to wage war

-against the Apache. A steady, persistent campaign

-must be made, following them to their haunts&mdash;hunting

-them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.'

-They must be surrounded, starved into coming in,

-surprised or inveigled&mdash;by white flags, or any other

-method, human or divine&mdash;and then put to death.

-If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>

-who thinks himself a philanthropist, I can only say

-that I pity without respecting his mistaken sympathy.

-A man might as well have sympathy for

-a rattlesnake or a tiger."</p>

-

-<p>The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by

-climate and inaccessibility, brought life into the

-extreme Southwest. Those of Nevada worked the

-partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old

-Oregon country gave out its gold in these same

-years as miners opened up the valleys of the Snake

-and the head waters of the Missouri River. Right

-on the crest of the continental divide appeared the

-northern group of mining camps.</p>

-

-<p>The territory of Washington had been cut away

-from Oregon at its own request and with Oregon's

-consent in 1853. It had no great population and

-was the subject of no agricultural boom as Oregon

-had been, but the small settlements on Puget Sound

-and around Olympia were too far from the Willamette

-country for convenient government. When

-Oregon was admitted in 1859, Washington was

-made to include all the Oregon country outside the

-state, embracing the present Washington and Idaho,

-portions of Montana and Wyoming, and extending

-to the continental divide. Through it ran the overland

-trail from Fort Hall almost to Walla Walla.

-Because of its urging Congress built a new wagon

-road that was passable by 1860 from Fort Benton,

-on the upper Missouri, to the junction of the Columbia

-and Snake. Farther east the active business<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span>

-of the American Fur Company had by 1859 established

-steamboat communication from St. Louis

-to Fort Benton, so that an overland route to rival

-the old Platte trail was now available.</p>

-

-<p>In eastern Washington the most important of the

-Indians were the Nez Percés, whose peaceful habits

-and friendly disposition had been noted since the

-days of Lewis and Clark, and who had permitted

-their valley of the Snake to become a main route to

-Oregon. Treaties with these had been made in 1855

-by Governor Stevens, in accordance with which

-most of the tribe were in 1860 living on their reserve

-at the junction of the Clearwater and Snake, and

-were fairly prosperous. Here as elsewhere was the

-specific agreement that no whites save government

-employees should be allowed in the Indian Country;

-but in the summer of 1861 the news that gold had

-been found along the Clearwater brought the agreement

-to naught. Gold had actually been discovered

-the summer before. In the spring of 1861 pack

-trains from Walla Walla brought a horde of miners

-east over the range, while steamboats soon found

-their way up the Snake. In the fork between the

-Clearwater and Snake was a good landing where, in

-the autumn of 1861, sprang up the new Lewiston,

-named in honor of the great explorer, acting as

-centre of life for five thousand miners in the district,

-and showing by its very existence on the Indian reserve

-the futility of treaty restrictions in the face

-of the gold fever. The troubles of the Indian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>

-department were great. "To attempt to restrain

-miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to

-restrain the whirlwind," reported Superintendent

-Kendall. "The history of California, Australia,

-Frazer river, and even of the country of which I am

-now writing, furnishes abundant evidence of the

-attractive power of even only reported gold discoveries.</p>

-

-<p>"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed

-fact, and are equalled in richness by few recorded

-discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility of preventing

-miners from going to the mines, I have refrained

-from taking any steps which, by certain

-want of success, would tend to weaken the force of

-the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided

-giving any consent to unauthorized statements,

-and verbally instructed the agent in charge that,

-while he might not be able to enforce the laws for

-want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt

-to lay out a town at the juncture of the Snake

-and Clearwater rivers, as he had expressed a desire

-of doing."</p>

-

-<p>Continued developments proved that Lewiston

-was in the centre of a region of unusual mineral

-wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed closely

-by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary

-of the Snake, a little farther south. The Boisé

-mines came on the heels of this boom, being followed

-by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of the great

-bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>

-the usual flood of miners from the whole West. Before

-1862 was over eastern Washington had outgrown

-the bounds of the territorial government on Puget

-Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the

-placers of the Colorado Valley, and the Carson and

-Virginia City camps, these called for and received

-a new territorial establishment.</p>

-

-<p>In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska

-had met along a common boundary at the

-top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington

-was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape

-under the pressure of a small but active population

-north of its seat of government. The centres of

-population in Nebraska north of the Platte River

-represented chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota.

-Emigrating from these states farmers had by

-1860 opened the country on the left bank of the Missouri,

-in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri

-traffic had developed both shores of the river

-past Fort Pierre and Fort Union to Fort Benton, by

-1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people

-here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along

-the line of the Missouri and the forty-third parallel.

-Dakota had been created out of the country thus cut

-loose and in two years more shared in the fate

-of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in

-1863 to provide home rule for the miners of the

-new mineral region. It included a great rectangle,

-on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah

-and Nebraska, west to its present western boundary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>

-at Oregon and 117°, east to 104°, the present

-eastern line of Montana and Wyoming. Dakota

-and Washington were cut down for its sake.</p>

-

-<p>It seemed, in 1862 and 1863, as though every little

-rivulet in the whole mountain country possessed its

-treasures to be given up to the first prospector with

-the hardihood to tickle its soil. Four important

-districts along the upper course of the Snake, not to

-mention hundreds of minor ones, lent substance to

-this appearance. Almost before Idaho could be organized

-its area of settlement had broadened enough

-to make its own division in the near future a certainty.

-East of the Bitter Root Mountains, in the

-head waters of the Missouri tributaries, came a long

-series of new booms.</p>

-

-<p>When the American Fur Company pushed its

-little steamer <i>Chippewa</i> up to the vicinity of Fort

-Benton in 1859, none realized that a new era for

-the upper Missouri had nearly arrived. For half

-a century the fur trade had been followed in this

-region and had dotted the country with tiny forts

-and palisades, but there had been no immigration,

-and no reason for any. The Mullan road, which

-Congress had authorized in 1855, was in course of

-construction from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, but

-as yet there were few immigrants to follow the new

-route. Considerably before the territory of Idaho

-was created, however, the active prospectors of the

-Snake Valley had crossed the range and inspected

-most of the Blackfoot country in the direction of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>

-Fort Benton. They had organized for themselves

-a Missoula County, Washington territory, in July,

-1862, an act which may be taken as the beginning

-of an entirely new movement.</p>

-

-<p>Two brothers, James and Granville Stuart, were

-the leaders in developing new mineral areas east of

-the main range. After experience in California and

-several years of life along the trails, they settled

-down in the Deer Lodge Valley, and began to open

-up their mines in 1861. They accomplished little

-this year since the steamboat to Fort Benton, carrying

-supplies, was burned, and their trip to Walla

-Walla for shovels and picks took up the rest of the

-season. But early in 1862 they were hard and successfully

-at work. Reënforcements, destined for the

-Salmon River mines farther west, came to them in

-June; one party from Fort Benton, the other from

-the Colorado diggings, and both were easily persuaded

-to stay and join in organizing Missoula

-County. Bannack City became the centre of their

-operations.</p>

-

-<p>Alder Gulch and Virginia City were, in 1863, a

-second focus for the mines of eastern Idaho. Their

-deposits had been found by accident by a prospecting

-party which was returning to Bannack City after

-an unsuccessful trip. The party, which had been

-investigating the Big Horn Mountains, discovered

-Alder Gulch between the Beaver Head and Madison

-rivers, early in June. With an accurate knowledge

-of the mining population, the discoverers organized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span>

-the mining district and registered their own

-claims before revealing the location of the new diggings.

-Then came a stampede from Bannack City

-which gave to Virginia City a population of 10,000

-by 1864.</p>

-

-<p>Another mining district, in Last Chance Gulch,

-gave rise in 1864 to Helena, the last of the great boom

-towns of this period. Its situation as well as its

-resources aided in the growth of Helena, which lay a

-little west of the Madison fork of the Missouri, and

-in the direct line from Bannack and Virginia City to

-Fort Benton. Only 142 miles of easy staging above

-the head of Missouri River navigation, it was a

-natural post on the main line of travel to the northwest

-fields.</p>

-

-<p>The excitement over Bannack and Virginia and

-Helena overlapped in years the period of similar

-boom in Idaho. It had begun even before Idaho

-had been created. When this was once organized,

-the same inconveniences which had justified it,

-justified as well its division to provide home rule for

-the miners east of the Bitter Root range. An act of

-1864 created Montana territory with the boundaries

-which the state possesses to-day, while that part of

-Idaho south of Montana, now Wyoming, was temporarily

-reattached to Dakota. Idaho assumed its

-present form. The simultaneous development in all

-portions of the great West of rich mining camps did

-much to attract public attention as well as population.</p>

-

-<p>In 1863 nearly all of the camps were flourishing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>

-The mountains were occupied for the whole distance

-from Mexico to Canada, while the trails were

-crowded with emigrants hunting for fortune. The

-old trails bore much of the burden of migration as

-usual, but new spurs were opened to meet new needs.

-In the north, the Mullan road had made easy travel

-from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, and had been completed

-since 1862. Congress authorized in 1864 a new

-road from eastern Nebraska, which should run north

-of the Platte trail, and the war department had sent

-out personally conducted parties of emigrants from

-the vicinity of St. Paul. The Idaho and Montana

-mines were accessible from Fort Hall, the former by

-the old emigrant road, the latter by a new northeast

-road to Virginia City. The Carson mines were on

-the main line of the California road. The Arizona

-fields were commonly reached from California, by

-way of Fort Yuma.</p>

-

-<p>The shifting population which inhabited the new

-territories invites and at the same time defies description.

-It was made up chiefly of young men.

-Respectable women were not unknown, but were so

-few in number as to have little measurable influence

-upon social life. In many towns they were in the

-minority, even among their sex, since the easily won

-wealth of the camps attracted dissolute women who

-cannot be numbered but who must be imagined.

-The social tone of the various camps was determined

-by the preponderance of men, the absence of regular

-labor, and the speculative fever which was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>

-justification of their existence. The political tone

-was determined by the nature of the population, the

-character of the industry, and the remoteness from

-a seat of government. Combined, these factors produced

-a type of life the like of which America had

-never known, and whose picturesque qualities have

-blinded the thoughtless into believing that it was romantic.

-It was at best a hard bitter struggle with

-the dark places only accentuated by the tinsel of

-gambling and adventure.</p>

-

-<p>A single street meandering along a valley, with one-story

-huts flanking it in irregular rows, was the typical

-mining camp. The saloon and the general store,

-sometimes combined, were its representative institutions.

-Deep ruts along the street bore witness to

-the heavy wheels of the freighters, while horses

-loosely tied to all available posts at once revealed the

-regular means of locomotion, and by the careless

-way they were left about showed that this sort of

-property was not likely to be stolen. The mining

-population centring here lived a life of contrasts.

-The desolation and loneliness of prospecting and

-working claims alternated with the excitement of

-coming to town. Few decent beings habitually

-lived in the towns. The resident population expected

-to live off the miners, either in way of trade,

-or worse. The bar, the gambling-house, the dance-hall

-have been made too common in description to

-need further account. In the reaction against loneliness,

-the extremes of drunkenness, debauchery, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span>

-murder were only too frequent in these places of

-amusement.</p>

-

-<p>That the camps did not destroy themselves in their

-own frenzy is a tribute to the solid qualities which

-underlay the recklessness and shiftlessness of much

-of the population. In most of the camps there came

-a time when decency finally asserted itself in the

-only possible way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity

-with which these camps had drawn their hundreds

-and their thousands into the fastnesses of the

-territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary

-law and regular institutions. Law and the

-politician followed fast enough, but there was generally

-an interval after the discovery during which such

-peace prevailed as the community itself demanded.

-In absence of sheriff and constable, and jail in which

-to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance committee was

-the only protection of the new camp. Such summary

-justice as these committees commonly executed is

-evidence of innate tendency toward law and order,

-not of their defiance. The typical camp passed

-through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start,

-then came an era of invasion by hordes of miners

-and disreputable hangers-on, with accompanying violence

-and crime. Following this, the vigilance committee,

-in its stern repression of a few of the crudest

-sins, marks the beginning of a reign of law.</p>

-

-<p>The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized

-the United States with the whole area of the

-nation, and dispelled most of the remaining tradition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span>

-of desert which hung over the mountain West.

-They attracted a large floating population, they

-secured the completion of the political map through

-the erection of new territories, and they emphasized

-loudly the need for national transportation on a

-larger scale than the trail and the stage coach could

-permit. But they did not directly secure the presence

-of permanent population in the new territories.

-Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants

-as soon as the first flush of discovery was over.

-Montana, Idaho, and Colorado declined rapidly to a

-fraction of their largest size. None of them was successful

-in securing a large permanent population until

-agriculture had gained firm foothold. Many indeed

-who came to mine remained to plough, but the permanent

-populating of the Far West was the work of

-railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the

-mining camps had served their purpose in revealing

-the nature of the whole of the national domain.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE OVERLAND MAIL</span></h2>

-

-<p>Close upon the heels of the overland migrations

-came an organized traffic to supply their needs.

-Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all the later gold

-fields, drew population away from the old Missouri

-border, scattered it in little groups over the face of

-the desert, and left it there crying for sustenance.

-Many of the new colonies were not self-supporting

-for a decade or more; few of them were independent

-within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand

-for necessities and luxuries which must be

-hauled from the states to the new market by the

-routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled.

-Greater than their need for material supplies was that

-for intellectual stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and

-the regular carriage of the mails were constantly demanded

-of the express companies and the post-office

-department. To meet this pressure there was organized

-in the fifties a great system of wagon traffic.

-In the years from 1858 to 1869 it reached its mighty

-culmination; while its possibilities of speed, order,

-and convenience had only just come to be realized

-when the continental railways brought this agency

-of transportation to an end.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>

-The individual emigrant who had gathered together

-his family, his flocks, and his household

-goods, who had cut away from the life at home and

-staked everything on his new venture, was the unit

-in the great migrations. There was no regular provision

-for going unless one could form his own self-contained

-and self-supporting party. Various bands

-grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence,

-but the characteristic feature of the emigration was

-private initiative. The home-seekers had no power

-in themselves to maintain communication with

-the old country, yet they had no disposition to be

-forgotten or to forget. Professional freighting companies

-and carriers of mails appeared just as soon as

-the traffic promised a profit.</p>

-

-<p>A water mail to California had been arranged even

-before the gold discovery lent a new interest to the

-Pacific Coast. From New York to the Isthmus,

-and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be

-carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company,

-which sent the nucleus of its fleet around

-Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The arrival

-of the first mail in San Francisco in February,

-1849, commenced the regular public communication

-between the United States and the new colonies.

-For the places lying away from the coast, mails were

-hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon,

-Utah, New Mexico, and California were given a

-measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.</p>

-

-<p>There is little interest in the earlier phases of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span>

-overland mail service save in that they foreshadowed

-greater things. A stage line was started from Independence

-to Santa Fé in the summer of 1849;

-another contract was let to a man named Woodson

-for a monthly carriage to Salt Lake City. Neither

-of the carriers made a serious attempt to stock his

-route or open stations. Their stages advanced under

-the same conditions, and with little more rapidity

-than the ordinary emigrant or freighter. Mormon

-interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying

-Company at about this time. For four or five years

-both government and private industry were experimenting

-with the problems of long-distance wagon

-traffic,&mdash;the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the stations,

-the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort

-made in 1856, by the War Department, to acclimate

-the Saharan camel on the American desert as a beast

-of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for

-the experiment, in execution of which Secretary

-Davis sent Lieutenant H.&nbsp;C. Wayne to the Levant to

-purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels

-were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio.

-There is a long congressional document filled

-with the correspondence of this attempt and embellished

-with cuts of types of camels and equipment.</p>

-

-<p>While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas

-plains, Congress made a more definite movement

-towards supplying the Pacific Slope with adequate

-service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>

-1857 to call for bids for an overland mail which, in

-a single organization, should join the Missouri to

-Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run

-at a high scheduled speed. The service which the

-Postmaster-general invited in his advertisement

-was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or semi-monthly at

-his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years;

-it was to carry through the mails in four-horse

-wagons in not more than twenty-five days. A long

-list of bidders, including most of the firms engaged in

-plains freighting, responded with their bids and

-itineraries; from them the department selected the

-offer of a company headed by one John Butterfield,

-and explained to the public in 1857 the reasons for its

-choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract

-was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made

-a junction near the western border of Arkansas,

-and proceeded thence through Preston, Texas, El

-Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails

-the company was to receive $600,000 a year. The

-choice of the most southern of routes required considerable

-explanation, since the best-known road ran

-by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this

-latter route the Postmaster-general pointed out the

-cold and snow of winter, and claimed that the experience

-of the department during seven years proved

-the impossibility of maintaining a regular service

-here. A second available road had been revealed

-by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across northern

-Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>

-this was likewise too long and too severe. The best

-route, in his mind&mdash;the one open all the year,

-through a temperate climate, suitable for migration

-as well as traffic&mdash;was this southern route, via El

-Paso. It is well to remember that the administration

-which made this choice was democratic and of

-strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific

-railway was expected to follow the course of the

-overland mail.</p>

-

-<p>The first overland coaches left the opposite ends

-of the line on September 15, 1858. The east-bound

-stage carried an agent of the Post-office Department,

-whose report states that the through trip to Tipton,

-Missouri, and thence by rail to St. Louis, was made

-in 20 days, 18 hours, 26 minutes, actual time. "I

-cordially congratulate you upon the result," wired

-President Buchanan to Butterfield. "It is a glorious

-triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements

-will soon follow the course of the road, and

-the East and West will be bound together by a chain

-of living Americans which can never be broken."

-The route was 2795 miles long. For nearly all the

-way there was no settlement upon which the stages

-could rely. The company built such stations as it

-needed.</p>

-

-<p>The vehicle of the overland mail, the most interesting

-vehicle of the plains, was the coach manufactured

-by the Abbott-Downing Company of Concord,

-New Hampshire. No better wagon for the purpose

-has been devised. Its heavy wheels, with wide, thick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>

-tires, were set far apart to prevent capsizing. Its

-body, braced with iron bands, and built of stout white

-oak, was slung on leather thoroughbraces which took

-the strain better and were more nearly unbreakable

-than any other springs. Inside were generally three

-seats, for three passengers each, though at times

-as many as fourteen besides the driver and messenger

-were carried. Adjustable curtains kept out

-part of the rain and cold. High up in front sat the

-driver, with a passenger or two on the box and a large

-assortment of packages tucked away beneath his

-seat. Behind the body was the triangular "boot"

-in which were stowed the passengers' boxes and the

-mail sacks. The overflow of mail went inside under

-the seats. Mr. Clemens tells of filling the whole

-body three feet deep with mail, and of the passengers

-being forced to sprawl out on the irregular bed thus

-made for them. Complaining letter-writers tell of

-sacks carried between the axles and the body, under

-the coach, and of the disasters to letters and contents

-resulting from fording streams. Drawn by four galloping

-mules and painted a gaudy red or green, the

-coach was a visible emblem of spectacular western

-advance. Horace Greeley's coach, bright red, was

-once charged by a herd of enraged buffaloes and

-overturned, to the discomfort and injury of the venerable

-editor.</p>

-

-<p>It was no comfortable or luxurious trip that the

-overland passenger had, with all the sumptuous

-equipment of the new route. The time limit was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span>

-twenty-five days, reduced in practice to twenty-two

-or twenty-three, at the price of constant travel day

-and night, regardless of weather or convenience.

-One passenger who declined to follow this route has

-left his reason why. The "Southern, known as the

-Butterfield or American Express, offered to start me

-in an ambulance from St. Louis, and to pass me

-through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on the Gila

-River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate

-portion of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and

-nights&mdash;twenty-five being schedule time&mdash;must be

-spent in that ambulance; passengers becoming crazy

-by whiskey, mixed with want of sleep, are often

-obliged to be strapped to their seats; their meals,

-despatched during the ten-minute halts, are simply

-abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate

-malarious; lamps may not be used at night for fear of

-non-existent Indians: briefly there is no end to this

-Via Mala's miseries." But the alternative which

-confronted this traveller in 1860 was scarcely more

-pleasant. "You may start by stage to the gold regions

-about Denver City or Pike's Peak, and thence,

-if not accidentally or purposely shot, you may proceed

-by an uncertain ox train to Great Salt Lake City,

-which latter part cannot take less than thirty-five

-days."</p>

-

-<p>Once upon the road, the passenger might nearly as

-well have been at sea. There was no turning back.

-His discomforts and dangers became inevitable.

-The stations erected along the trail were chiefly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>

-for the benefit of the live stock. Horses and mules

-must be kept in good shape, whatever happened to

-passengers. Some of the depots, "home stations,"

-had a family in residence, a dwelling of logs, adobe,

-or sod, and offered bacon, potatoes, bread, and coffee

-of a sort, to those who were not too squeamish. The

-others, or "swing" stations, had little but a corral

-and a haystack, with a few stock tenders. The

-drivers were often drunk and commonly profane.

-The overseers and division superintendents differed

-from them only in being a little more resolute and

-dangerous. Freighting and coaching were not child's

-play for either passengers or employees.</p>

-

-<p>The Butterfield Overland Express began to work

-its six year contract in September, 1858. Other

-coach and mail services increased the number of

-continental routes to three by 1860. From New

-Orleans, by way of San Antonio and El Paso, a

-weekly service had been organized, but its importance

-was far less than that of the great route, and

-not equal to that by way of the Great Salt Lake.</p>

-

-<p>Staging over the Platte trail began on a large scale

-with the discovery of gold near Pike's Peak in 1858.

-The Mormon mails, interrupted by the Mormon

-War, had been revived; but a new concern had sprung

-up under the name of the Leavenworth and Pike's

-Peak Express Company. The firm of Jones and

-Russell, soon to give way to Russell, Majors, and

-Waddell, had seen the possibilities of the new boom

-camps, and had inaugurated regular stage service in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>

-May, 1859. Henry Villard rode out in the first

-coach. Horace Greeley followed in June. After

-some experimenting in routes, the line accepted

-a considerable part of the Platte trail, leaving the

-road at the forks of the river. Here Julesburg

-came into existence as the most picturesque home

-station on the plains. It was at this station that

-Jack Slade, whom Mark Twain found to be a mild,

-hospitable, coffee-sharing man, cut off the ears of

-old Jules, after the latter had emptied two barrels of

-bird-shot into him. It was "celebrated for its desperadoes,"

-wrote General Dodge. "No twenty-four

-hours passed without its contribution to Boots Hill

-(the cemetery whose every occupant was buried in

-his boots), and homicide was performed in the most

-genial and whole-souled way."</p>

-

-<p>Before the Denver coach had been running for a

-year another enterprise had brought the central

-route into greater prominence. Butterfield had given

-California news in less than twenty-five days from

-the Missouri, but California wanted more even than

-this, until the electric telegraph should come. Senator

-Gwin urged upon the great freight concern the

-starting of a faster service for light mails only. It

-was William H. Russell who, to meet this supposed

-demand, organized a pony express, which he announced

-to a startled public in the end of March.

-Across the continent from Placerville to St. Joseph

-he built his stations from nine to fifteen miles apart,

-nearly two hundred in all. He supplied these with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span>

-tenders and riders, stocked them with fodder and

-fleet American horses, and started his first riders at

-both ends on the 3d of April, 1860.</p>

-

-<p>Only letters of great commercial importance could

-be carried by the new express. They were written

-on tissue paper, packed into a small, light saddlebag,

-and passed from rider to rider along the route.

-The time announced in the schedule was ten days,&mdash;two

-weeks better than Butterfield's best. To make

-it called for constant motion at top speed, with

-horses trained to the work and changed every few

-miles. The carriers were slight men of 135 pounds

-or under, whose nerve and endurance could stand

-the strain. Often mere boys were employed in the

-dangerous service. Rain or snow or death made

-no difference to the express. Dangers of falling at

-night, of missing precipitous mountain roads where

-advance at a walk was perilous, had to be faced.

-When Indians were hostile, this new risk had to be

-run. But for eighteen months the service was continued

-as announced. It ceased only when the overland

-telegraph, in October, 1861, declared its readiness

-to handle through business.</p>

-

-<p>In the pony express was the spectacular perfection

-of overland service. Its best record was some

-hours under eight days. It was conducted along

-the well-known trail from St. Joseph to Forts Kearney,

-Laramie, and Bridger; thence to Great Salt

-Lake City, and by way of Carson City to Placerville

-and Sacramento. It carried the news in a time when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span>

-every day brought new rumors of war and disunion,

-in the pregnant campaign of 1860 and through the

-opening of the Civil War. The records of its riders

-at times approached the marvellous. One lad,

-William F. Cody, who has since lived to become the

-personal embodiment of the Far West as Buffalo

-Bill, rode more than 320 consecutive miles on a single

-tour. The literature of the plains is full of instances

-of courage and endurance shown in carrying through

-the despatches.</p>

-

-<p>The Butterfield mail was transferred to the central

-route of the pony express in the summer of 1861.

-For two and a half years it had run steadily along

-its southern route, proving the entire practicability

-of carrying on such a service. But its expense had

-been out of all proportion to its revenue. In 1859

-the Postmaster-general reported that its total receipts

-from mails had been $27,229.94, as against a

-cost of $600,000. It is not unlikely that the fast

-service would have been dropped had not the new

-military necessity of 1861 forbidden any act which

-might loosen the bonds between the Pacific and the

-Atlantic states. Congress contemplated the approach

-of war and authorized early in 1861 the abandonment

-of the southern route through the confederate

-territory, and the transfer of the service to

-the line of the pony express. To secure additional

-safety the mails were sent by way of Davenport,

-Iowa, and Omaha, to Fort Kearney a few times, but

-Atchison became the starting-point at last, while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>

-military force was used to keep the route free from

-interference. The transfer worked a shortening of

-from five to seven days over the southern route.</p>

-

-<p>In the autumn of 1861, when the overland mail

-and the pony express were both running at top speed

-along the Platte trail, the overland service reached

-its highest point. In October the telegraph brought

-an end to the express. "The Pacific to the Atlantic

-sends greeting," ran the first message over the new

-wire, "and may both oceans be dry before a foot of all

-the land that lies between them shall belong to any

-other than one united country." Probably the pony

-express had done its share in keeping touch between

-California and the Union. Certainly only its national

-purpose justified its existence, since it was run

-at a loss that brought ruin to Russell, its backer, and

-to Majors and Waddell, his partners.</p>

-

-<p>Russell, Majors, and Waddell, with the biggest

-freighting business of the plains, had gone heavily

-into passenger and express service in 1859&ndash;1860.

-Russell had forced through the pony express against

-the wishes of his partners, carried away from practical

-considerations by the magnitude of the idea.

-The transfer of the southern overland to their route

-increased their business and responsibility. The

-future of the route steadily looked larger. "Every

-day," wrote the Postmaster-general, "brings intelligence

-of the discovery of new mines of gold and

-silver in the region traversed by this mail route,

-which gives assurance that it will not be many years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>

-before it will be protected and supported throughout

-the greater part of the route by a civilized population."

-Under the name of the Central Overland,

-California, and Pike's Peak Express the firm tried to

-keep up a struggle too great for them. "Clean out

-of Cash and Poor Pay" is said to have been an irreverent

-nickname coined by one of their drivers. As

-their embarrassments steadily increased, their notes

-were given to a rival contractor who was already beginning

-local routes to reach the mining camps of

-eastern Washington. Ben Holladay had been the

-power behind the company for several months before

-the courts gave him control of their overland stage

-line in 1862. The greatest names in this overland

-business are first Butterfield, then Russell, Majors,

-and Waddell, and then Ben Holladay, whose power

-lasted until he sold out to Wells, Fargo, and Company

-in 1866. Ben Holladay was the magnate of the

-plains during the early sixties. A hostile critic,

-Henry Villard, has written that he was "a genuine

-specimen of the successful Western pioneer of former

-days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful, false, and

-cunning." In later days he carried his speculation

-into railways and navigation, but already his was the

-name most often heard in the West. Mark Twain,

-who has left in "Roughing It" the best picture of

-life in the Far West in this decade, speaks lightly of

-him when he tells of a youth travelling in the Holy

-Land with a reverend preceptor who was impressing

-upon him the greatness of Moses, "'the great guide,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span>

-soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack,

-from this spot where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a

-fearful desert three hundred miles in extent&mdash;and

-across that desert that wonderful man brought the

-children of Israel!&mdash;guiding them with unfailing

-sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation

-and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and

-landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of

-this very spot. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing

-to do, Jack. Think of it!"</p>

-

-<p>"'Forty years? Only three hundred miles?'"

-replied Jack. "'Humph! Ben Holladay would have

-fetched them through in thirty-six hours!'"</p>

-

-<p>Under Holladay's control the passenger and express

-service were developed into what was probably

-the greatest one-man institution in America. He

-directed not only the central overland, but spur lines

-with government contracts to upper California,

-Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. He travelled up and

-down the line constantly himself, attending in person

-to business in Washington and on the Pacific. The

-greatest difficulties in his service were the Indians

-and progress as stated in the railway. Man and

-nature could be fought off and overcome, but the life

-of the stage-coach was limited before it was begun.</p>

-

-<p>The Indian danger along the trails had steadily

-increased since the commencement of the migrations.

-For many years it had not been large, since there

-was room for all and the emigrants held well to the

-beaten track. But the gold camps had introduced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span>

-settlers into new sections, and had sent prospectors

-into all the Indian Country. The opening of new

-roads to the Pacific increased the pressure, until the

-Indians began to believe that the end was at hand

-unless they should bestir themselves. The last years

-of the overland service, between 1862 and 1868,

-were hence filled with Indian attacks. Often for

-weeks no coach could go through. Once, by premeditation,

-every station for nearly two hundred

-miles was destroyed overnight, Julesburg, the greatest

-of them all, being in the list. The presence of

-troops to defend seemed only to increase the zeal of

-the red men to destroy.</p>

-

-<p>Besides these losses, which lessened his profits and

-threatened ruin, Holladay had to meet competition

-in his own trade, and detraction as well. Captain

-James L. Fiske, who had broken a new road through

-from Minnesota to Montana, came east in 1863, "by

-the 'overland stage,' travelling over the saline plains

-of Laramie and Colorado Territory and the sand

-deserts of Nebraska and Kansas. The country was

-strewed with the skeletons and carcases of cattle,

-and the graves of the early Mormon and California

-pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst emigrant

-route that I have ever travelled; much of the

-road is through deep sand, feed is very scanty, a

-great deal of the water is alkaline, and the snows in

-winter render it impassable for trains. The stage

-line is wretchedly managed. The company undertake

-to furnish travellers with meals, (at a dollar a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>

-meal,) but very frequently on arriving at a station

-there was nothing to eat, the supplies had not been

-sent on. On one occasion we fasted for thirty-six

-hours. The stages were sometimes in a miserable

-condition. We were put into a coach one night with

-only two boards left in the bottom. On remonstrating

-with the driver, we were told to hold on by the

-sides."</p>

-

-<p>At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay

-controlled a monopoly in stage service between the

-Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The express

-companies and railways met him at the ends of his

-link, but had to accept his terms for intermediate

-traffic. In the summer of 1865 a competing firm

-started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on

-the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that

-Indian dangers here were greater than along the

-Platte, and it learned how near it was to bankruptcy

-when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had

-sent his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand

-a more detailed statement of resources and conditions

-than the Overland Despatch itself possessed.

-He purchased easily at his own price and so ended

-this danger of competition.</p>

-

-<p>Such was the character of the overland traffic that

-any day might bring a successful rival, or loss by

-accident. Holladay seems to have realized that the

-advantages secured by priority were over, and that

-the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866

-he sold out his lines to the greatest of his competitors,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>

-Wells, Fargo, and Company. He sold out wisely.

-The new concern lost on its purchase through the

-rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the

-Pacific railway had advanced so far that the end of

-the mail route was moved to Fort Kearney in November.

-By May, 1869, some years earlier than

-Wells, Fargo had estimated, the road was done. And

-on the completion of the Union and Central Pacific

-railways the great period of the overland mail was

-ended.</p>

-

-<p>Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland

-freight that lacked the seeming romance of the

-former, but possessed quite as much of real significance.

-No one has numbered the trains of wagons

-that supplied the Far West. Santa Fé wagons they

-were now; Pennsylvania or Pittsburg wagons they

-had been called in the early days of the Santa Fé

-trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the

-remoter time of the trans-Alleghany migrations.

-But whatever their name, they retained the characteristics

-of the wagons and caravans of the earlier

-period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons,

-organized in trains of twenty-six, from the Butterfield

-Overland Despatch in 1866. Six thousand

-were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in

-1865. One of the drivers on the overland mail,

-Frank Root, relates that Russell, Majors, and Waddell

-owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height

-of their business. The long trains, crawling along

-half hidden in their clouds of dust, with the noises<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>

-of the animals and the profanity of the drivers, were

-the physical bond between the sections. The mail

-and express served politics and intellect; the freighters

-provided the comforts and decencies of life.</p>

-

-<p>The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the

-first migrations. Its growth during the fifties and

-its triumphant period in the sixties were great arguments

-in favor of the construction of railways to

-take its place. It came to an end when the first

-continental railroad was completed in 1869. For

-decades after this time the stages still found useful

-service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional

-exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the

-railways were following them closely, for a new period

-of American history had begun.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER</span></h2>

-

-<p>In a national way, the South struggling against

-the North prevented the early location of a Pacific

-railway. Locally, every village on the Mississippi

-from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus

-and had advocates throughout its section of

-the country. The list of claimants is a catalogue

-of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans, Vicksburg,

-Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and

-Duluth were all entered in the competition. By

-1860 the idea had received general acceptance; no

-one in the future need urge its adoption, but the

-greatest part of the work remained to be done.</p>

-

-<p>Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway

-was of uncertain origin and parentage. Just

-so soon as there was a railroad anywhere, it was

-inevitable that some enterprising visionary should

-project one in imagination to the extremity of the

-continent. The railway speculation, with which the

-East was seething during the administrations of

-Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West,

-so that the group of men advocating a railway to

-connect the oceans were but the product of their

-time.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span>

-Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney,

-a New York merchant interested in the China

-trade and eager to win the commerce of the Orient

-for the United States. Others had declared such a

-road to be possible before he presented his memorial

-to Congress in 1845, but none had staked so much

-upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted

-a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and

-was at last convinced that "the time is not far distant

-when Oregon will become ... a separate

-nation" unless communication should "unite them

-to us." He petitioned Congress in January, 1845,

-for a franchise and a grant of land, that the national

-road might be accomplished; and for many years he

-agitated persistently for his project.</p>

-

-<p>The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest,

-coming in the years immediately after the commencement

-of Whitney's advocacy, gave new point to

-arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional

-element. So long as Oregon constituted the

-whole American frontage on the Pacific it was idle

-to debate railway routes south of South Pass. This

-was the only known, practicable route, and it was

-the course recommended by all the projectors, down

-to Whitney. But with California won, the other

-trails by El Paso and Santa Fé came into consideration

-and at once tempted the South to make the

-railway tributary to its own interests.</p>

-

-<p>Chief among the politicians who fell in with the

-growing railway movement was Senator Benton, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>

-tried to place himself at its head. "The man is

-alive, full grown, and is listening to what I say

-(without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October,

-1844, "who will yet see the Asiatic commerce

-traversing the North Pacific Ocean&mdash;entering the

-Oregon River&mdash;climbing the western slopes of the

-Rocky Mountains&mdash;issuing from its gorges&mdash;and

-spreading its fertilizing streams over our wide-extended

-Union!" After this date there was no subject

-closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy

-was constant. His last word in the Senate was

-concerning it. In 1849 he carried off its feet the

-St. Louis railroad convention with his eloquent

-appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron

-road, and make it from sea to sea&mdash;States and

-individuals making it east of the Mississippi, the

-nation making it west. Let us ... rise above

-everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ...

-build the great road ... which shall be adorned

-with ... the colossal statue of the great Columbus&mdash;whose

-design it accomplishes, hewn from a

-granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains,

-overlooking the road ... pointing with outstretched

-arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying

-passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"</p>

-

-<p>By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad

-could be built along the Platte route, and it was

-believed that the mountains could be penetrated in

-several other places, but the process of surveying with

-reference to a particular railway had not yet been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span>

-begun. It is possible and perhaps instructive to make

-a rough grouping, in two classes divided by the year

-1842, of the explorations before 1853. So late as

-Frémont's day it was not generally known whether a

-great river entered the Pacific between the Columbia

-and the Colorado. Prior to 1842 the explorations

-are to be regarded as "incidents" and "adventures"

-in more or less unknown countries. The narratives

-were popular rather than scientific, representing the

-experiences of parties surveying boundary lines or

-locating wagon roads, of troops marching to remote

-posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and casual

-explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed

-a large mass of detailed but unorganized information

-concerning the country where the continental railway

-must run. But Lieutenant Frémont, in 1842,

-commenced the effort by the United States to acquire

-accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the West.

-In 1842, 1843, and 1845 Frémont conducted the three

-Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him

-for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by

-Charles Preuss for his second expedition, confined

-itself in strict scientific fashion to the facts actually

-observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the

-best map made before 1853. The individual expeditions

-which in the later forties filled in the details

-of portions of the Frémont map are too numerous

-for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before

-1853, all serving to extend both general and particular

-knowledge of the West. To these was added a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>

-great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants

-and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific

-knowledge of nearly all the West, and accurate

-information concerning some portions of it. The

-railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction

-in which the roads must run, but no road could well

-be located without a more comprehensive survey

-than had yet been made.</p>

-

-<p>The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was

-founded almost exclusively upon general and inaccurate

-knowledge of the West. The exact location

-of the line was naturally left for the professional

-civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself

-with general principles. Frequently these were

-sufficient, yet, as in the case of Benton, misinformation

-led to the waste of strength upon routes unquestionably

-bad. But there was slight danger of

-the United States being led into an unwise route,

-since in the diversity of routes suggested there was

-deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as the idea

-was received with unanimity, the routes were fought

-with increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved

-in 1852 when the choice of routes had become more

-important than the method of construction.</p>

-

-<p>In 1852&ndash;1853 Congress worked upon one of the

-many bills to construct the much-desired railway to

-the Pacific. It was discovered that an absolute

-majority in favor of the work existed, but the enemies

-of the measure, virulent in proportion as they were

-in the minority, were able to sow well-fertilized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span>

-dissent. They admitted and gloried in the intrigue

-which enabled them to command through the time-honored

-method of division. They defeated the road

-in this Congress. But when the army appropriation

-bill came along in February, 1853, Senator

-Gwin asked for an amendment for a survey. He

-doubted the wisdom of a survey, since, "if any route

-is reported to this body as the best, those that may

-be rejected will always go against the one selected."

-But he admitted himself to be as a drowning man

-who "will catch at straws," and begged that $150,000

-be allowed to the President for a survey of the best

-routes from the Mississippi to the Pacific, the survey

-to be conducted by the Corps of Topographical Engineers

-of the regular army. To a non-committal

-measure like this the opposition could make slight

-resistance. The Senate, by a vote of 31 to 16, added

-this amendment to the army appropriation bill,

-while the House concurred in nearly the same proportion.

-The first positive official act towards the

-construction of the road was here taken.</p>

-

-<p>Under the orders of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of

-War, well-organized exploring parties took to the

-field in the spring of 1853. Farthest north, Isaac

-I. Stevens, bound for his post as first governor of

-Washington territory, conducted a line of survey to

-the Pacific between the parallels of 47° and 49°,

-north latitude. South of the Stevens survey, four

-other lines were worked out. Near the parallels of

-41° and 42°, the old South Pass route was again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>

-examined. Frémont's favorite line, between 38°

-and 39°, received consideration. A thirty-fifth parallel

-route was examined in great detail, while on this

-and another along the thirty-second parallel the

-most friendly attentions of the War Department

-were lavished. The second and third routes had

-few important friends. Governor Stevens, because

-he was a first-rate fighter, secured full space for the

-survey in his charge. But the thirty-second and

-thirty-fifth parallel routes were those which were

-expected to make good.</p>

-

-<p>Governor Stevens left Washington on May 9,

-1853, for St. Louis, where he made arrangements with

-the American Fur Company to transport a large part

-of his supplies by river to Fort Union. From St.

-Louis he ascended the Mississippi by steamer to

-St. Paul, near which city Camp Pierce, his first

-organized camp, had been established. Here he

-issued his instructions and worked into shape his

-party,&mdash;to say nothing of his 172 half-broken mules.

-"Not a single full team of broken animals could be

-selected, and well broken riding animals were essential,

-for most of the gentlemen of the scientific corps

-were unaccustomed to riding." One of the engineers

-dislocated a shoulder before he conquered his steed.</p>

-

-<p>The party assigned to Governor Stevens's command

-was recruited with reference to the varied demands

-of a general exploring and scientific reconnaissance.

-Besides enlisted men and laborers, it included engineers,

-a topographer, an artist, a surgeon and naturalist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>

-an astronomer, a meteorologist, and a geologist.

-Its two large volumes of report include elaborate

-illustrations and appendices on botany and seven

-different varieties of zoölogy in addition to the geographical

-details required for the railway.</p>

-

-<p>The expedition, in its various branches, attacked

-the northernmost route simultaneously in several

-places. Governor Stevens led the eastern division

-from St. Paul. A small body of his men, with much

-of the supplies, were sent up the Missouri in the

-American Fur Company's boat to Fort Union, there

-to make local observations and await the arrival of

-the governor. United there the party continued

-overland to Fort Benton and the mountains. Six

-years later than this it would have been possible to

-ascend by boat all the way to Fort Benton, but as

-yet no steamer had gone much above Fort Union.

-From the Pacific end the second main division operated.

-Governor Stevens secured the recall of Captain

-George B. McClellan from duty in Texas, and

-his detail in command of a corps which was to proceed

-to the mouth of the Columbia River and start

-an eastward survey. In advance of McClellan,

-Lieutenant Saxton was to hurry on to erect a

-supply depot in the Bitter Root Valley, and then

-to cross the divide and make a junction with the

-main party.</p>

-

-<p>From Governor Stevens's reports it would seem

-that his survey was a triumphal progress. To his

-threefold capacities as commander, governor, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>

-Indian superintendent, nature had added a magnifying

-eye and an unrestrained enthusiasm. No

-formal expedition had traversed his route since the

-day of Lewis and Clark. The Indians could still be

-impressed by the physical appearance of the whites.

-His vanity led him at each success or escape from

-accident to congratulate himself on the antecedent

-wisdom which had warded off the danger. But

-withal, his report was thorough and his party was

-loyal. The <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">voyageurs</i> whom he had engaged received

-his special praise. "They are thorough woodsmen

-and just the men for prairie life also, going into the

-water as pleasantly as a spaniel, and remaining

-there as long as needed."</p>

-

-<p>Across the undulating fertile plains the party

-advanced from St. Paul with little difficulty. Its

-draught animals steadily improved in health and

-strength. The Indians were friendly and honest.

-"My father," said Old Crane of the Assiniboin,

-"our hearts are good; we are poor and have not

-much.... Our good father has told us about this

-road. I do not see how it will benefit us, and I fear

-my people will be driven from these plains before

-the white men." In fifty-five days Fort Union was

-reached. Here the American Fur Company maintained

-an extensive post in a stockade 250 feet square,

-and carried on a large trade with "the Assiniboines,

-the Gros Ventres, the Crows, and other migratory

-bands of Indians." At Fort Union, Alexander

-Culbertson, the agent, became the guide of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span>

-party, which proceeded west on August 10. From

-Fort Union it was nearly 400 miles to Fort Benton,

-which then stood on the left bank of the Missouri,

-some eighteen miles below the falls. The country,

-though less friendly than that east of the Missouri,

-offered little difficulty to the party, which covered the

-distance in three weeks. A week later, September 8,

-a party sent on from Fort Benton met Lieutenant

-Saxton coming east.</p>

-

-<p>The chief problems of the Stevens survey lay west

-of Fort Benton, in the passes of the continental divide.

-Lieutenant Saxton had left Vancouver early

-in July, crossed the Cascades with difficulty, and

-started up the Columbia from the Dalles on July 18.

-He reached Fort Walla Walla on the 27th, and proceeded

-thence with a half-breed guide through the

-country of the Spokan and the C&oelig;ur d'Alene.

-Crossing the Snake, he broke his only mercurial

-barometer and was forced thereafter to rely on his

-aneroid. Deviating to the north, he crossed Lake

-Pend d'Oreille on August 10, and reached St. Mary's

-village, in the Bitter Root Valley, on August 28. St.

-Mary's village, among the Flatheads, had been established

-by the Jesuit fathers, and had advanced

-considerably, as Indian civilization went. Here

-Saxton erected his supply depot, from which he advanced

-with a smaller escort to join the main party.

-Always, even in the heart of the mountains, the country

-exceeded his expectations. "Nature seemed to

-have intended it for the great highway across the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>

-continent, and it appeared to offer but little obstruction

-to the passage of a railroad."</p>

-

-<p>Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced

-his party at Fort Benton, stored much of his

-government property there, and started west with a

-pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved

-on September 22, anxious lest snow should catch

-him in the mountains. At Fort Benton he left a

-detachment to make meteorological observations

-during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left

-another under Lieutenant Mullan. On October 7

-he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley for

-Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's

-party, which had been spending a difficult season in

-the passes of the Cascade range. Because of overcautious

-advice which McClellan here gave him,

-and since his animals were tired out with the summer's

-hardships, he practically ended his survey for

-1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia

-to Olympia and his new territory.</p>

-

-<p>The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to

-make one of the first of the Pacific railway reports.

-His was the only survey from the Mississippi to the

-ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30,

-1854, it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled

-reports. In 1859 he submitted his "narrative

-and final report" which the Senate ordered Secretary

-of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February

-of that year. This document is printed as supplement

-to Volume I, but really consists of two large<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>

-volumes which are commonly bound together as

-Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes

-of the reports, his are filled with lithographs and engravings

-of fauna, flora, and topography.</p>

-

-<p>The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by

-Lieutenant E.&nbsp;G. Beckwith, of the third artillery, in

-the summer of 1854. East of Fort Bridger, the War

-Department felt it unnecessary to make a special

-survey, since Frémont had traversed and described

-the country several times and Stansbury had surveyed

-it carefully as recently as 1849&ndash;1850. At

-the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt

-Lake. During April he visited the Green River

-Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by his surveys the

-entire practicability of railway construction here.

-In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake

-and passed along the Humboldt to the Sacramento

-Valley. He had no important adventures and was

-impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians,

-whose grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups"

-were frequently seen. As his band approached the

-Indians would fearfully cache their belongings in

-the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed

-a novel and ludicrous sight of wretchedness to see

-them approach their bush and attempt, slyly (for

-they still tried to conceal from me what they were

-about), to repossess themselves of their treasures,

-one bringing out a piece of old buckskin, a couple of

-feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn; another a

-half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>

-sewed together, which he would swing over his

-shoulders by a string&mdash;his only blanket or clothing;

-while a third brought out a blue string, which he

-girded about him and walked away in full dress&mdash;one

-of the lords of the soil." It needed no special

-emphasis in Beckwith's report to prove that a railway

-could follow this middle route, since thousands

-of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_204" class="figcenter" style="width: 541px;">

-  <img src="images/i-227.jpg" width="541" height="355" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Fort Snelling</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>From an old photograph, loaned by Horace B. Hudson, of Minneapolis.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>Beckwith, who started his forty-second parallel

-survey from Salt Lake City, had reached that point

-as one of the officers in Gunnison's unfortunate

-party. Captain J.&nbsp;W. Gunnison had followed

-Governor Stevens into St. Louis in 1853. His field

-of exploration, the route of 38°-39°, was by no means

-new to him since he had been to Utah with Stansbury

-in 1849 and 1850, and had already written one of

-the best books upon the Mormon settlement. He

-carried his party up the Missouri to a fitting-out

-camp just below the mouth of the Kansas River,

-five miles from Westport. Like other commanders

-he spent much time at the start in "breaking in wild

-mules," with which he advanced in rain and mud

-on June 23. For more than two weeks his party

-moved in parallel columns along the Santa Fé road

-and the Smoky Hill fork of the Kansas. Near

-Walnut creek on the Santa Fé road they united, and

-soon were following the Arkansas River towards the

-mountains. At Fort Atkinson they found a horde

-of the plains Indians waiting for Major Fitzpatrick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span>

-to make a treaty with them. Always their observations

-were taken with regularity. One day Captain

-Gunnison spent in vain efforts to secure specimens

-of the elusive prairie dog. On August 1, when they

-were ready to leave the Arkansas and plunge southwest

-into the Sangre de Cristo range, they were

-gratified "by a clear and beautiful view of the Spanish

-Peaks."</p>

-

-<p>This thirty-ninth parallel route, which had been a

-favorite with Frémont, crossed the divide near the

-head of the Rio Grande. Its grades, which were

-difficult and steep at best, followed the Huerfano

-Valley and Cochetopa Pass. Across the pass,

-Gunnison began his descent of the arid alkali valley

-of the Uncompahgre,&mdash;a valley to-day about to

-blossom as the rose because of the irrigation canal

-and tunnel bringing to it the waters of the neighboring

-Gunnison River. With heavy labor, intense heat,

-and weakening teams, Gunnison struggled on through

-September and October towards Salt Lake in Utah

-territory. Near Sevier Lake he lost his life. Before

-daybreak, on October 26, he and a small detachment

-of men were surprised by a band of young Paiute.

-When the rest of his party hurried up to the

-rescue, they found his body "pierced with fifteen

-arrows," and seven of his men lying dead around

-him. Beckwith, who succeeded to the command,

-led the remainder of the party to Salt Lake City,

-where public opinion was ready to charge the Mormons

-with the murder. Beckwith believed this to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>

-entirely false, and made use of the friendly assistance

-of Brigham Young, who persuaded the chiefs of the

-tribe to return the instruments and records which

-had been stolen from the party.</p>

-

-<p>The route surveyed by Captain Gunnison passed

-around the northern end of the ravine of the Colorado

-River, which almost completely separates the Southwest

-from the United States. Farther south, within

-the United States, were only two available points

-at which railways could cross the cańon, at Fort

-Yuma and near the Mojave River. Towards these

-crossings the thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallel

-surveys were directed.</p>

-

-<p>Second only to Governor Stevens's in its extent

-was the exploration conducted by Lieutenant A.&nbsp;W.

-Whipple from Fort Smith on the Arkansas to Los

-Angeles along the thirty-fifth parallel. Like that

-of Governor Stevens this route was not the channel

-of any regular traffic, although later it was to have

-some share in the organized overland commerce.

-Here also was found a line that contained only two

-or three serious obstacles to be overcome. Whipple's

-instructions planned for him to begin his observations

-at the Mississippi, but he believed that the

-navigable Arkansas River and the railways already

-projected in that state made it needless to commence

-farther east than Fort Smith, on the edge of the

-Indian Country. He began his survey on July

-14, 1853. His westward march was for two months

-up the right bank of the Canadian River, as it traversed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>

-the Choctaw and Chickasaw reserves, to the

-hundredth meridian, where it emerged from the panhandle

-of Texas, and across the panhandle into New

-Mexico. After crossing the upper waters of the

-Rio Pecos he reached the Rio Grande at Albuquerque,

-where his party tarried for a month or more, working

-over their observations, making local explorations,

-and sending back to Washington an account of their

-proceedings thus far. Towards the middle of November

-they started on toward the Colorado Chiquita

-and the Bill Williams Fork, through "a region over

-which no white man is supposed to have passed."

-The severest difficulties of the trip were found near

-the valley of the Colorado River, which was entered

-at the junction of the Bill Williams Fork and followed

-north for several days. A crossing here was made

-near the supposed mouth of the Mojave River at a

-place where porphyritic and trap dykes, outcropping,

-gave rise to the name of the Needles. The river

-was crossed February 27, 1854, three weeks before

-the party reached Los Angeles.</p>

-

-<p>South of the route of Lieutenant Whipple, the

-thirty-second parallel survey was run to the Fort

-Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. No attempt

-was made in this case at a comprehensive survey

-under a single leader. Instead, the section from the

-Rio Grande at El Paso to the Red River at Preston,

-Texas, was run by John Pope, brevet captain in the

-topographical engineers, in the spring of 1854.

-Lieutenant J.&nbsp;G. Parke carried the line at the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span>

-time from the Pimas villages on the Gila to the Rio

-Grande. West of the Pimas villages to the Colorado,

-a reconnoissance made by Lieutenant-colonel Emory

-in 1847 was drawn upon. The lines in California

-were surveyed by yet a different party. Here again

-an easy route was discovered to exist. Within the

-states of California and Oregon various connecting

-lines were surveyed by parties under Lieutenant

-R.&nbsp;S. Williamson in 1855.</p>

-

-<p>The evidence accumulated by the Pacific railway

-surveys began to pour in upon the War Department

-in the spring of 1854. Partial reports at first, elaborate

-and minute scientific articles following later, made

-up a series which by the close of the decade filled the

-twelve enormous volumes of the published papers.

-Rarely have efforts so great accomplished so little

-in the way of actual contribution to knowledge. The

-chief importance of the surveys was in proving by

-scientific observation what was already a commonplace

-among laymen&mdash;that the continent was

-traversable in many places, and that the incidental

-problems of railway construction were in finance

-rather than in engineering. The engineers stood

-ready to build the road any time and almost anywhere.</p>

-

-<p>The Secretary of War submitted to Congress the

-first instalment of his report under the resolution

-of March 3, 1853, on February 27, 1855. As yet the

-labors of compilation and examination of the field

-manuscripts were by no means completed, but he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span>

-was able to make general statements about the

-probability of success. At five points the continental

-divide had been crossed; over four of these railways

-were entirely practicable, although the shortest

-of the routes to San Francisco ran by the one pass,

-Cochetopa, where it would be unreasonable to construct

-a road.</p>

-

-<p>From the routes surveyed, Secretary Davis recommended

-one as "the most practicable and economical

-route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the

-Pacific Ocean." In all cases cost, speed of construction,

-and ease in operation needed to be ascertained

-and compared. The estimates guessed at by

-the parties in the field, and revised by the War Department,

-pointed to the southernmost as the most

-desirable route. To reach this conclusion it was

-necessary to accuse Governor Stevens of underestimating

-the cost of labor along his northern line;

-but the figures as taken were conclusive. On this

-thirty-second parallel route, declared the Secretary

-of War, "the progress of the work will be regulated

-chiefly by the speed with which cross-ties and rails

-can be delivered and laid.... The few difficult

-points ... would delay the work but an inconsiderable

-period.... The climate on this route is such

-as to cause less interruption to the work than on any

-other route. Not only is this the shortest and least

-costly route to the Pacific, but it is the shortest and

-cheapest route to San Francisco, the greatest commercial

-city on our western coast; while the aggregate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span>

-length of railroad lines connecting it at its eastern

-terminus with the Atlantic and Gulf seaports is less

-than the aggregate connection with any other route."</p>

-

-<p>The Pacific railway surveys had been ordered as

-the only step which Congress in its situation of deadlock

-could take. Senator Gwin had long ago told

-his fears that the advocates of the disappointed routes

-would unite to hinder the fortunate one. To the

-South, as to Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, the

-thirty-second parallel route was satisfactory; but

-there was as little chance of building a railway as

-there had been in 1850. In days to come, discussion

-of railways might be founded upon facts rather than

-hopes and fears, but either unanimity or compromise

-was in a fairly remote future. The overland traffic,

-which was assuming great volume as the surveys

-progressed, had yet nearly fifteen years before the

-railway should drive it out of existence. And no

-railway could even be started before war had

-removed one of the contesting sections from the floor

-of Congress.</p>

-

-<p>Yet in the years since Asa Whitney had begun his

-agitation the railways of the East had constantly

-expanded. The first bridge to cross the Mississippi

-was under construction when Davis reported in 1855.

-The Illinois Central was opened in 1856. When the

-Civil War began, the railway frontier had become

-coterminous with the agricultural frontier, and both

-were ready to span the gap which separated them

-from the Pacific.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD</span></h2>

-

-<p>It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of

-the Union Pacific Railroad that the period of agitation

-was approaching probable success when the latter

-was deferred because of the rivalry of sections and

-localities into which the scheme was thrown. From

-about 1850 until 1853 it indeed seemed likely that

-the road would be built just so soon as the terminus

-could be agreed upon. To be sure, there was keen

-rivalry over this; yet the rivalry did not go beyond

-local jealousies and might readily be compromised.

-After the reports of the surveys were completed and

-presented to Congress the problem took on a new aspect

-which promised postponement until a far greater

-question could be solved. Slavery and the Pacific

-railroad are concrete illustrations of the two horns

-of the national dilemma.</p>

-

-<p>As a national project, the railway raised the problem

-of its construction under national auspices.

-Was the United States, or should it become, a nation

-competent to undertake the work? With no hesitation,

-many of the advocates of the measure answered

-yes. Yet even among the friends of the

-road the query frequently evoked the other answer.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>

-Slavery had already taken its place as an institution

-peculiar to a single section. Its defence and perpetuation

-depended largely upon proving the contrary

-of the proposition that the Pacific railroad

-demanded. For the purposes of slavery defence the

-United States must remain a mere federation, limited

-in powers and lacking in the attributes of sovereignty

-and nationality. Looking back upon this struggle,

-with half a century gone by, it becomes clear that the

-final answer upon both questions, slavery and railway,

-had to be postponed until the more fundamental

-question of federal character had been worked out.

-The antitheses were clear, even as Lincoln saw them

-in 1858. Slavery and localism on the one hand,

-railway and nationalism on the other, were engaged

-in a vital struggle for recognition. Together they

-were incompatible. One or the other must survive

-alone. Lincoln saw a portion of the problem,

-and he sketched the answer: "I do not expect the

-Union to be dissolved,&mdash;I do not expect the house

-to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided."</p>

-

-<p>The stages of the Pacific railroad movement are

-clearly marked through all these squabbles. Agitation

-came first, until conviction and acceptance

-were general. This was the era of Asa Whitney.

-Reconnoissance and survey followed, in a decade

-covering approximately 1847&ndash;1857. Organization

-came last, beginning in tentative schemes which

-counted for little, passing through a long series of

-intricate debates in Congress, and being merged in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>

-the larger question of nationality, but culminating

-finally in the first Pacific railroad bills of 1862 and

-1864.</p>

-

-<p>When Congress began its session of 1853&ndash;1854,

-most of the surveying parties contemplated by the

-act of the previous March were still in the field. The

-reports ordered were not yet available, and Congress

-recognized the inexpediency of proceeding farther

-without the facts. It is notable, however, that both

-houses at this time created select committees to

-consider propositions for a railway. Both of these

-committees reported bills, but neither received

-sanction even in the house of its friends. The next

-session, 1854&ndash;1855, saw the great struggle between

-Douglas and Benton.</p>

-

-<p>Stephen A. Douglas, who had triumphantly carried

-through his Kansas-Nebraska bill in the preceding

-May, started a railway bill in the Senate in 1855.

-As finally considered and passed by the Senate, his

-bill provided for three railroads: a Northern Pacific,

-from the western border of Wisconsin to Puget Sound;

-a Southern Pacific, from the western border of Texas

-to the Pacific; and a Central Pacific, from Missouri

-or Iowa to San Francisco. They were to be constructed

-by private parties under contracts to be let

-jointly by the Secretaries of War and Interior and

-the Postmaster-general. Ultimately they were to

-become the property of the United States and the

-states through which they passed. The House of

-Representatives, led by Benton in the interests of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>

-central road, declined to pass the Douglas measure.

-Before its final rejection, it was amended to please

-Benton and his allies by the restriction to a single

-trunk line from San Francisco, with eastern branches

-diverging to Lake Superior, Missouri or Iowa, and

-Memphis.</p>

-

-<p>During the two years following the rejection of the

-Douglas scheme by the allied malcontents, the select

-committees on the Pacific railways had few propositions

-to consider, while Congress paid little attention

-to the general matter. Absorbing interest in politics,

-the new Republican party, and the campaign of 1856

-were responsible for part of the neglect. The conviction

-of the dominant Democrats that the nation

-had no power to perform the task was responsible

-for more. The transition from a question of

-selfish localism to one of national policy which

-should require the whole strength of the nation for

-its solution was under way. The northern friends of

-the railway were disheartened by the southern tendencies

-of the Democratic administration which

-lasted till 1861. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of

-War, was followed by Floyd, of Virginia, who believed

-with his predecessor that the southern was the most

-eligible route. At the same time, Aaron V. Brown,

-of Tennessee, Postmaster-general, was awarding the

-postal contract for an overland mail to Butterfield's

-southern route in spite of the fact that Congress

-had probably intended the central route to be

-employed.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>

-Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress

-show the difficulties under which the railroad labored.

-Many bills were started, but few could get

-through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed

-a bill. In 1860 the House passed one which the

-Senate amended to death. In the session of 1860&ndash;1861

-its serious consideration was crowded out by

-the incipiency of war.</p>

-

-<p>Through the long years of debate over the organization

-of the road, the nature of its management

-and the nature of its governmental aid were much

-in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the

-United States had undertaken no such scheme,

-while the Cumberland road, vastly less in magnitude

-than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties

-to last a generation. That there must be some

-connection between the road and the public lands

-had been seen even before Whitney commenced

-his advocacy. The nature of that connection was

-worked out incidentally to other movements while

-the Whitney scheme was under fire.</p>

-

-<p>The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements

-in transportation had been hinted at as far back as

-the admission of Ohio, but it had not received its full

-development until the railroad period began. To

-some extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands

-had been allotted to the states to aid in canal

-building, but when the railroad promoters started

-their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the

-history of the public domain was commenced. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>

-definitive fight over the issue of land grants for railways

-took place in connection with the Illinois

-Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years

-from 1847 to 1850.</p>

-

-<p>The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made

-its appearance before the panic of 1837. The northwest

-states were now building their own railroads,

-and this enterprise was designed to connect the

-Galena lead country with the junction of the Ohio

-and Mississippi by a road running parallel to the

-Mississippi through the whole length of the state of

-Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran

-naturally from east to west, seeking termini on the

-Mississippi and at the Alleghany crossings. This

-one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making

-useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a

-country where yet the prairie hen held uncontested

-sway. There was little population or freight to justify

-it, and hence the project, though it guised itself in at

-least three different corporate garments before 1845,

-failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse

-railways, on whose junctions it had counted,

-crossed its right-of-way before 1850. La Salle,

-Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its

-line worth marking on a large-scale map, while

-Chicago was yet under forty thousand in population.</p>

-

-<p>Men who in the following decade led the Pacific

-railway agitation promoted the Illinois Central idea

-in the years immediately preceding 1850. Both

-Breese and Douglas of Illinois claimed the parentage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span>

-of the bill which eventually passed Congress in 1850,

-and by opening the way to public aid for railway

-transportation commenced the period of the land-grant

-railroads. Already in some of the canal grants

-the method of aid had been outlined, alternate sections

-of land along the line of the canal being conveyed

-to the company to aid it in its work. The

-theory underlying the granting of alternate sections

-in the familiar checker-board fashion was that the

-public lands, while inaccessible, had slight value, but

-once reached by communication the alternate sections

-reserved by the United States would bring a

-higher price than the whole would have done without

-the canal, while the construction company would be

-aided without expense to any one. The application

-of this principle to railroads came rather slowly in a

-Congress somewhat disturbed by a doubt as to its

-power to devote the public resources to internal improvements.

-The sectional character of the Illinois

-Central railway was against it until its promoters enlarged

-the scheme into a Lake-to-Gulf railway by

-including plans for a continuation to Mobile from

-the Ohio. With southern aid thus enticed to its

-support, the bill became a law in 1850. By its terms,

-the alternate sections of land in a strip ten miles

-wide were given to the interested states to be used

-for the construction of the Illinois Central and the

-Mobile and Ohio. The grants were made directly

-to the states because of constitutional objections to

-construction within a state without its consent and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span>

-approval. It was twelve years before Congress was

-ready to give the lands directly to the railroad company.</p>

-

-<p>The decade following the Illinois Central grant

-was crowded with applications from other states for

-grants upon the same terms. In this period of speculative

-construction before the panic of 1857, every

-western state wanted all the aid it could get. In a

-single session seven states asked for nearly fourteen

-million acres of land, while before 1857 some five

-thousand miles of railway had been aided by land

-grants.</p>

-

-<p>When Asa Whitney began his agitation for the

-Pacific railway, he asked for a huge land grant, but

-the machinery and methods of the grants had not

-yet become familiar to Congress. During the subsequent

-fifteen years of agitation and survey the

-method was worked out, so that when political conditions

-made it possible to build the road, there had

-ceased to be great difficulty in connection with its

-subsidy.</p>

-

-<p>The sectional problem, which had reached its full

-development in Congress by 1857, prevented any

-action in the interest of a Pacific railway so long as it

-should remain unchanged. As the bickerings widened

-into war, the railway still remained a practical

-impossibility. But after war had removed from

-Congress the representatives of the southern states

-the way was cleared for action. When Congress

-met in its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">219</a></span>

-favor of southern routes was silenced by disunion.

-It remained only to choose among the routes lying

-north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize

-the construction along one of them of the railway

-which all admitted to be possible of construction,

-and to which military need in preservation of the

-union had now added an imperative quality.</p>

-

-<p>The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a

-Pacific railway, and handed them over to the regular

-session of 1861&ndash;1862 as unfinished business. In the

-lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah,

-a young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave

-powerful aid to the final settlement of route and

-means. Judah had come east in the autumn in

-company with one of the newly elected California

-representatives. During the long sea voyage he

-had drilled into his companion, who happily was later

-appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of

-the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem

-which he had acquired in his advocacy of the railway

-on the Pacific Coast. California had begun the construction

-of local railways several years before the

-war broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant

-need and prayer. Her own corporations were

-planned with reference to the time when tracks from

-the East should cross her border and find her local

-creations waiting for connections with them.</p>

-

-<p>When the advent of war promised an early maturity

-for the scheme, a few Californians organized

-the most significant of the California railways, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>

-Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company

-was incorporated, having for its leading spirits Judah,

-its chief engineer, and Collis Potter Huntington,

-Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford,

-soon to be governor of the state. Its founders

-were all men of moderate means, but they had the best

-of that foresight and initiative in which the frontier

-was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861

-Judah prospected for routes across the mountains

-into Utah territory, where the new silver fields

-around Carson indicated the probable course of a

-route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on

-to Washington in the fall to aid in the quick settlement

-of the long-debated question.</p>

-

-<p>Judah's interest in a special California road coincided

-well with the needs and desires of Congress.

-Already various bills were in the hands of the select

-committees of both houses. The southern interest

-was gone. The only remaining rivalries were

-among St. Louis, Chicago, and the new Minnesota;

-while the first of these was tainted by the doubtful

-loyalty of Missouri, and the last was embarrassed

-by the newness of its territory and its lack of population.

-The Sioux were yet in control of much

-of the country beyond St. Paul. Out of this rivalry

-Chicago and a central route could emerge triumphant.</p>

-

-<p>The spring of 1862 witnessed a long debate over a

-Union Pacific railroad to meet the new military needs

-of the United States as well as to satisfy the old economic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>

-necessities. Why it was called "Union" is

-somewhat in doubt. Bancroft thinks its name was

-descriptive of the various local roads which were

-bound together in the single continental scheme.

-Davis, on the contrary, is inclined to believe that the

-name was in contrast to the "Disunion" route of the

-thirty-second parallel, since the route chosen was

-to run entirely through loyal territory. Whatever

-the reason, however, the Union Pacific Railroad Company

-was incorporated on the 1st of July, 1862.</p>

-

-<p>Under the act of incorporation a continental railway

-was to be constructed by several companies.

-Within the limits of California, the Central Pacific

-of California, already organized and well managed,

-was to have the privilege. Between the boundary

-line of California and Nevada and the hundredth

-meridian, the new Union Pacific was to be the constructing

-company. On the hundredth meridian, at

-some point between the Republican River in Kansas

-and the Platte River in Nebraska, radiating lines

-were to advance to various eastern frontier points,

-somewhat after the fashion of Benton's bill of 1855.

-Thus the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western of

-Kansas was authorized to connect this point with

-the Missouri River, south of the mouth of the Kansas,

-with a branch to Atchison and St. Joseph in connection

-with the Hannibal and St. Joseph of Missouri.

-The Union Pacific itself was required to build two

-more connections; one to run from the hundredth

-meridian to some point on the west boundary of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>

-Iowa, to be fixed by the President of the United

-States, and another to Sioux City, Iowa, whenever

-a line from the east should reach that place.</p>

-

-<p>The aid offered for the construction of these lines

-was more generous than any previously provided by

-Congress. In the first place, the roads were entitled

-to a right-of-way four hundred feet wide, with permission

-to take material for construction from adjacent

-parts of the public domain. Secondly, the

-roads were to receive ten sections of land for each mile

-of track on the familiar alternate section principle.

-Finally, the United States was to lend to the roads

-bonds to the amount of $16,000 per mile, on the

-level, $32,000 in the foothills, and $48,000 in

-the mountains, to facilitate construction. If not

-completed and open by 1876, the whole line was to be

-forfeited to the United States. If completed, the

-loan of bonds was to be repaid out of subsequent

-earnings.</p>

-

-<p>The Central Pacific of California was prompt in its

-acceptance of the terms of the act of July 1, 1862.

-It proceeded with its organization, broke ground at

-Sacramento on February 22, 1863, and had a few

-miles of track in operation before the next year closed.

-But the Union Pacific was slow. "While fighting

-to retain eleven refractory states," wrote one irritated

-critic of the act, "the nation permitted itself

-to be cozened out of territory sufficient to form

-twelve new republics." Yet great as were the offered

-grants, eastern capital was reluctant to put life<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>

-into the new route across the plains. That it could

-ever pay, was seriously doubted. Chances for more

-certain and profitable investment in the East were

-frequent in the years of war-time prosperity.

-Although the railroad organized according to the

-terms of the law, subscribers to the stock of the Union

-Pacific were hard to find, and the road lay dormant

-for two more years until Congress revised its offer

-and increased its terms.</p>

-

-<p>In the session of 1863&ndash;1864 the general subject

-was again approached. Writes Davis, "The opinion

-was almost universal that additional legislation

-was needed to make the Act of 1862 effective, but the

-point where the limit of aid to patriotic capitalists

-should be set was difficult to determine." It was,

-and remained, the belief of the opponents of the bill

-now passed that "lobbyists, male and female, ...

-shysters and adventurers" had much to do with the

-success of the measure. In its most essential parts,

-the new bill of 1864 increased the degree of government

-aid to the companies. The land grant was

-doubled from ten sections per mile of track to

-twenty, and the road was allowed to borrow of the

-general public, on first mortgage bonds, money to the

-amount of the United States loan, which was reduced

-by a self-denying ordinance to the status of a

-second mortgage. With these added inducements,

-the Union Pacific was finally begun.</p>

-

-<p>The project at last under way in 1864&ndash;1865, as

-Davis graphically pictures it, "was thoroughly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span>

-saturated and fairly dripping with the elements of

-adventure and romance." But he overstates his

-case when he goes on to remark that, "Before the

-building of the Pacific railway most of the wide

-expanse of territory west of the Missouri was <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">terra

-incognita</i> to the mass of Americans." For twenty

-years the railway had been under agitation; during

-the whole period population had crossed the great

-desert in increasing thousands; new states had

-banked up around its circumference, east, west, and

-south, while Kansas had been thrust into its middle;

-new camps had dotted its interior. The great West

-was by no means unknown, but with the construction

-of the railway the American frontier entered upon

-its final phase.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR</span></h2>

-

-<p>That the fate of the outlying colonies of the

-United States should have aroused grave concerns

-at the beginning of the Civil War is not surprising.

-California and Oregon, Carson City, Denver, and

-the other mining camps were indeed on the same continent

-with the contending factions, but the degree

-of their isolation was so great that they might as well

-have been separated by an ocean. Their inhabitants

-were more mixed than those of any portion of

-the older states, while in several of the communities

-the parties were so evenly divided as to raise doubts

-of the loyalty of the whole. "The malignant secession

-element of this Territory," wrote Governor Gilpin

-of Colorado, in October, 1861, "has numbered

-7,500. It has been ably and secretly organized from

-November last, and requires extreme and extraordinary

-measures to meet and control its onslaught."

-At best, the western population was scanty and scattered

-over a frontier that still possessed its virgin

-character in most respects, though hovering at the

-edge of a period of transition. An English observer,

-hopeful for the worst, announced in the middle of the

-war that "When that 'late lamented institution,'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">226</a></span>

-the once United States, shall have passed away, and

-when, after this detestable and fratricidal war&mdash;the

-most disgraceful to human nature that civilization

-ever witnessed&mdash;the New World shall be restored

-to order and tranquility, our shikaris will not

-forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel

-suffices to transport them from fallow deer and

-pheasant shooting to the haunts of the bison and the

-grizzly bear. There is little chance of these animals

-being 'improved off' the Prairies, or even of their

-becoming rare during the lifetime of the present

-generation." The factors of most consequence in

-shaping the course of the great plains during the Civil

-War were those of mixed population, of ever present

-Indian danger, and of isolation. Though the plains

-had no effect upon the outcome of the war, the war

-furthered the work already under way of making

-known the West, clearing off the Indians, and preparing

-for future settlement.</p>

-

-<p>Like the rest of the United States the West was

-organized into military divisions for whose good order

-commanding officers were made responsible. At

-times the burden of military control fell chiefly

-upon the shoulders of territorial governors; again,

-special divisions were organized to meet particular

-needs, and generals of experience were detached from

-the main armies to direct movements in the West.</p>

-

-<p>Among the earliest of the episodes which drew

-attention to the western departments was the resignation

-of Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span>

-Department of the Pacific, and his rather spectacular

-flight across New Mexico, to join the confederate

-forces. From various directions, federal troops were

-sent to head him off, but he succeeded in evading all

-these and reaching safety at the Rio Grande by

-August 1. Here he could take an overland stage

-for the rest of his journey. The department which

-he abandoned included the whole West beyond

-the Rockies except Utah and present New Mexico.

-The country between the mountains and Missouri

-constituted the Department of the West. As the

-war advanced, new departments were created and

-boundaries were shifted at convenience. The Department

-of the Pacific remained an almost constant

-quantity throughout. A Department of the Northwest,

-covering the territory of the Sioux Indians,

-was created in September, 1862, for the better defence

-of Minnesota and Wisconsin. To this command

-Pope was assigned after his removal from the

-command of the Army of Virginia. Until the close

-of the war, when the great leaders were distributed

-and Sheridan received the Department of the Southwest,

-no detail of equal importance was made to a

-western department.</p>

-

-<p>The fighting on the plains was rarely important

-enough to receive the dignified name of battle.

-There were plenty of marching and reconnoitring,

-much police duty along the trails, occasional skirmishes

-with organized troops or guerrillas, aggressive

-campaigns against the Indians, and campaigns in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span>

-defence of the agricultural frontier. But the armies

-so occupied were small and inexperienced. Commonly

-regiments of local volunteers were used in

-these movements, or returned captives who were on

-parole to serve no more against the confederacy.

-Disciplined veterans were rarely to be found. As a

-consequence of the spasmodic character of the plains

-warfare and the inferior quality of the troops available,

-western movements were often hampered and

-occasionally made useless.</p>

-

-<p>The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important

-as any of the military operations on the plains. At

-the beginning of the war the confederate forces

-seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear

-the way for Johnston as he hurried east. The

-Tucson country was occupied about the same time,

-so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts

-were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the

-Rio Grande, with New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado

-threatened. In December General Henry Hopkins

-Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops

-in the upper Rio Grande, while Colonel E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S.

-Canby, from Fort Craig, organized the resistance

-against further extension of the confederate power.</p>

-

-<p>Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio

-Grande country, around Santa Fé and Albuquerque,

-aroused federal apprehensions in the winter of 1862.

-Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened

-at the danger within his own territory, and scarcely

-needed the order which came from Fort Leavenworth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span>

-through General Hunter to reënforce Canby and

-look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility

-easily, drew upon the federal treasury for funds

-which had not been allowed him, and shortly had

-the first Colorado, and a part of the second Colorado

-volunteers marching south to join the defensive

-columns. It is difficult to define this march in terms

-applicable to movements of war. At least one soldier

-in the second Colorado took with him two children

-and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the

-regiment and praising the chivalry of the soldiers,

-apparently oblivious of the fact that it is not a

-soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's

-family. But with wife and children, and the degree

-of individualism and insubordination which these

-imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched south

-to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was

-sure.</p>

-

-<p>As Sibley pushed up the river, passing Fort Craig

-and brushing aside a small force at Valverde, the

-Colorado forces reached Fort Union. Between

-Fort Union and Albuquerque, which Sibley entered

-easily, was the turning-point in the campaign. On

-March 26, 1862, Major J.&nbsp;M. Chivington had a successful

-skirmish at Johnson's ranch in Apache Cańon,

-about twenty miles southeast of Santa Fé. Two

-days later, at Pigeon's ranch, a more decisive check

-was given to the confederates, but Colonel John P.

-Slough, senior volunteer in command, fell back upon

-Fort Union after the engagement, while the confederates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span>

-were left free to occupy Santa Fé. A few days

-later Slough was deposed in the Colorado regiment,

-Chivington made colonel, and the advance on Santa

-Fé begun again. Sibley, now caught between Canby

-advancing from Fort Craig and Chivington coming

-through Apache Cańon from Fort Union, evacuated

-Santa Fé on April 7, falling back to Albuquerque.

-The union troops, taking Santa Fé on April 12, hurried

-down the Rio Grande after Sibley in his final

-retreat. New Mexico was saved, and its security

-brought tranquillity to Colorado. The Colorado

-volunteers were back in Denver for the winter of

-1862&ndash;1863, but Gilpin, whose vigorous and independent

-support had made possible their campaign, had

-been dismissed from his post as governor.</p>

-

-<p>Along the frontier of struggle campaigns of this

-sort occurred from time to time, receiving little attention

-from the authorities who were directing

-weightier movements at the centre. Less formal

-than these, and more provocative of bitter feeling,

-were the attacks of guerrillas along the central frontier,&mdash;chiefly

-the Missouri border and eastern

-Kansas. Here the passions of the struggle for Kansas

-had not entirely cooled down, southern sympathizers

-were easily found, and communities divided

-among themselves were the more intense in their

-animosities.</p>

-

-<p>The Department of Kansas, where the most aggravated

-of these guerrilla conflicts occurred, was

-organized in November, 1861, under Major-general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span>

-Hunter. From his headquarters at Leavenworth

-the commanding officer directed the affairs of Kansas,

-Nebraska, Dakota, Colorado, and "the Indian Territory

-west of Arkansas." The department was often

-shifted and reshaped to meet the needs of the frontier.

-A year later the Department of the Northwest

-was cut away from it, after the Sioux outbreak, its

-own name was changed to Missouri, and the states

-of Missouri and Arkansas were added to it. Still

-later it was modified again. But here throughout

-the war continued the troubles produced by the

-mixture of frontier and farm-lands, partisan whites

-and Indians.</p>

-

-<p>Bushwhacking, a composite of private murder

-and public attack, troubled the Kansas frontier from

-an early period of the war. It was easily aroused

-because of public animosities, and difficult to suppress

-because its participating parties retired quickly

-into the body of peace-professing citizens. In it,

-asserted General Order No. 13, of June 26, 1862,

-"rebel fiends lay in wait for their prey to assassinate

-Union soldiers and citizens; it is therefore ... especially

-directed that whenever any of this class of

-offenders shall be captured, they shall not be treated

-as prisoners of war but be summarily tried by drumhead

-court-martial, and if proved guilty, be executed

-... on the spot."</p>

-

-<p>In August, 1863, occurred Quantrill's notable raid

-into Kansas to terrify the border which was already

-harassed enough. The old border hatred between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span>

-Kansas and Missouri had been intensified by the

-"murders, robberies, and arson" which had characterized

-the irregular warfare carried on by both

-sides. In western Missouri, loyal unionists were

-not safe outside the federal lines; here the guerrillas

-came and went at pleasure; and here, about August

-18, Quantrill assembled a band of some three hundred

-men for a foray into Kansas. On the 20th he

-entered Kansas, heading at once for Lawrence,

-which he surprised on the 21st. Although the city

-arsenal contained plenty of arms and the town

-could have mustered 500 men on "half an hour's

-notice," the guerrilla band met no resistance. It

-"robbed most of the stores and banks, and burned

-one hundred and eighty-five buildings, including one-fourth

-of the private residences and nearly all of the

-business houses of the town, and, with circumstances

-of the most fiendish atrocity, murdered 140 unarmed

-men." The retreat of Quantrill was followed by a

-vigorous federal pursuit and a partial devastation of

-the adjacent Missouri counties. Kansas, indignant,

-was in arms at once, protesting directly to President

-Lincoln of the "imbecility and incapacity" of Major-general

-John M. Schofield, commanding the Department

-of the Missouri, "whose policy has opened

-Kansas to invasion and butchery." Instead of carrying

-out an unimpeded pursuit of the guerrillas,

-Schofield had to devote his strength to keeping the

-state of Kansas from declaring war against and

-wreaking indiscriminate vengeance upon the state<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span>

-of Missouri. A year after Quantrill's raid came

-Price's Missouri expedition, with its pitched battles

-near Kansas City and Westport, and its pursuit

-through southern Missouri, where confederate sympathizers

-and the partisan politics of this presidential

-year made punitive campaigns anything but

-easy.</p>

-

-<p>Carleton's march into New Mexico has already

-been described in connection with the mining boom

-of Arizona. The silver mines of the Santa Cruz

-Valley had drawn American population to Tubac and

-Tucson several years before the war; while the confederate

-successes in the upper Rio Grande in the

-summer of 1861 had compelled federal evacuation of

-the district. Colonel E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S. Canby devoted the

-small force at his command to regaining the country

-around Albuquerque and Santa Fé, while the relief

-of the forts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado

-was intrusted to Carleton's California Column.

-After May, 1862, Carleton was firmly established in

-Tucson, and later he was given command of the whole

-Department of New Mexico. Of fighting with the

-confederates there was almost none. He prosecuted,

-instead, Apache and Navaho wars, and exploited the

-new gold fields which were now found. In much of

-the West, as in his New Mexico, occasional ebullitions

-of confederate sympathizers occurred, but the

-military task of the commanders was easy.</p>

-

-<p>The military problem of the plains was one of

-police, with the extinction of guerrilla warfare and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span>

-the pacification of Indians as its chief elements.

-The careers of Canby, Carleton, and Gilpin indicate

-the nature of the western strategic warfare, Schofield's

-illustrates that of guerrilla fighting, the Minnesota

-outbreak that of the Indian relations.</p>

-

-<p>In the Northwest, where the agricultural expansion

-of the fifties had worked so great changes, the

-pressure on the tribes had steadily increased. In

-1851 the Sioux bands had ceded most of their territory

-in Minnesota, and had agreed upon a reduced

-reserve in the St. Peter's, or Minnesota, Valley. But

-the terms of this treaty had been delayed in enforcement,

-while bad management on the part of the

-United States and the habitual frontier disregard of

-Indian rights created tense feelings, which might

-break loose at any time. No single grievance of the

-Indians caused more trouble than that over traders'

-claims. The improvident savages bought largely

-of the traders, on credit, at extortionate prices. The

-traders could afford the risk because when treaties

-of cession were made, their influence was generally

-able to get inserted in the treaty a clause for satisfying

-claims against individuals out of the tribal funds

-before these were handed over to the savages. The

-memory of the savage was short, and when he found

-that his allowance, the price for his lands, had gone

-into the traders' pockets, he could not realize that it

-had gone to pay his debts, but felt, somehow, defrauded.

-The answer would have been to prevent

-trade with the Indians on credit. But the traders'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">235</a></span>

-influence at Washington was great. It would be an

-interesting study to investigate the connection between

-traders' bills and agitation for new cessions,

-since the latter generally meant satisfaction of the

-former.</p>

-

-<p>Among the Sioux there were factional feelings that

-had aroused the apprehensions of their agents before

-the war broke out. The "blanket" Indians continually

-mocked at the "farmers" who took kindly

-to the efforts of the United States for their agricultural

-civilization. There was civil strife among the

-progressives and irreconcilables which made it

-difficult to say what was the disposition of the whole

-nation. The condition was so unstable that an accidental

-row, culminating in the murder of five whites

-at Acton, in Meeker County, brought down the most

-serious Indian massacre the frontier had yet seen.</p>

-

-<p>There was no more occasion for a general uprising

-in 1862 than there had been for several years. The

-wiser Indians realized the futility of such a course.

-Yet Little Crow, inclined though he was to peace,

-fell in with the radicals as the tribe discussed their

-policy; and he determined that since a massacre

-had been commenced they had best make it as thorough

-as possible. Retribution was certain whether

-they continued war or not, and the farmer Indians

-were unlikely to be distinguished from the blankets

-by angry frontiersmen. The attack fell first upon the

-stores at the lower agency, twenty miles above Fort

-Ridgely, whence refugee whites fled to Fort Ridgely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>

-with news of the outbreak. All day, on the 18th of

-August, massacres occurred along the St. Peter's,

-from near New Ulm to the Yellow Medicine River.

-The incidents of Indian war were all there, in surprise,

-slaughter of women and children, mutilation

-and torture.</p>

-

-<p>The next day, Tuesday the 19th, the increasing

-bands fell upon the rambling village of New Ulm,

-twenty-eight miles above Mankato, where fugitives

-had gathered and where Judge Charles E. Flandrau

-hastily organized a garrison for defence. He had

-been at St. Peter's when the news arrived, and had

-led a relief band through the drenching rain, reaching

-New Ulm in the evening. On Wednesday afternoon

-Little Crow, his band still growing&mdash;the Sioux

-could muster some 1300 warriors&mdash;surprised Fort

-Ridgely, though with no success. On Thursday he

-renewed the attack with a force now dwindling because

-of individual plundering expeditions which drew

-his men to various parts of the neighboring country.

-On Friday he attacked once more.</p>

-

-<p>On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the

-river again to renew his fight upon New Ulm, which,

-unmolested since Tuesday, had been increasing its

-defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites

-in a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen,

-cool and determined, of unerring aim;

-but most were German settlers, recently arrived, and

-often terrified by their new experiences. During

-the week of horrors the depredations covered the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span>

-Minnesota frontier and lapped over into Iowa and

-Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated,

-or led captive into the wilderness, were common.

-Stories of those who survived these dangers form a

-large part of the local literature of this section of the

-Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become

-so desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the

-town and led its whole remaining population to safety

-at Mankato.</p>

-

-<p>Long before the week of suffering was over, aid

-had been started to the harassed frontier. Governor

-Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to Mendota, and there

-organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota

-Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from

-him of Rio Grande fame, commanded the column

-and reached St. Peter's with his advance on Friday.

-By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the

-panic and restore peace and repopulate the deserted

-country. He was now joined by Ignatius Donnelly,

-Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater speed.

-The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th,

-they had reached Fort Ridgely, passing through country

-"abandoned by the inhabitants; the houses, in

-many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture

-undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors

-or through the cultivated fields." The country had

-been settled up to the very edge of the Fort Ridgely

-reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only partially

-devastated. Donnelly commented in his report

-upon the prayer-books and old German trunks of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">238</a></span>

-"Johann Schwartz," strewn upon the ground in one

-place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored,

-and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent,

-Thomas J. Galbraith, who was at Fort Ridgely during

-the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737 whites

-were known to have been massacred.</p>

-

-<p>Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at

-first to reconnoitre and bury the dead, then to follow

-the Indians and rescue the captives. More than once

-the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off

-prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify

-or prevent punishment for the original outbreak.

-Early in September there were pitched battles at

-Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake.

-At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was

-able not only to defeat the tribes and take nearly

-2000 prisoners, but to release 227 women and children,

-who had been the "prime object," from whose

-"pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The

-Indians were handed over under arrest to Agent

-Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower Agency,

-and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.</p>

-

-<p>The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's

-massacre at Spirit Lake was still remembered

-and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in

-battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders

-escaped. In 1863, Pope, who had been called to

-command a new department in the Northwest, organized

-a general campaign against the tribes, sending

-Sibley up the Minnesota River to drive them west,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span>

-and Sully up the Missouri to head them off, planning

-to catch and crush them between the two columns.

-The man&oelig;uvre was badly timed and failed, while

-punishment drifted gradually into a prolonged war.</p>

-

-<p>Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with

-judicial irony, on the farmer Sioux who had been

-drawn reluctantly into the struggle. At the Lower

-Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while

-more than four hundred of their men were singled

-out for trial for murder. Nothing is more significant

-of the anomalous nature of the Indian relation than

-this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The United

-States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt

-free to punish individuals as though they were citizens

-of the United States. The military commission

-sat at Redwood for several weeks with the missionary

-and linguist, Rev. S.&nbsp;R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand

-Jury of the court." Three hundred and three were

-condemned to death by the court for murder, rape,

-and arson, their condemnation starting a wave of

-protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner,

-W.&nbsp;P. Dole. To the indignation of the

-frontier, naturally revengeful and never impartial,

-President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the case

-of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of

-them were hanged on a single scaffold at Mankato

-on December 26, 1862. The innocent and uncondemned

-were punished also, when Congress confiscated

-all their Minnesota reserve in 1863, and

-transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span>

-Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found

-for them.</p>

-

-<p>All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota

-to the Rio Grande, were problems that drew the West

-into the movement of the Civil War. The situation

-was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere

-did the Indians suffer between the millstones as they

-did in the Indian Territory, where the Cherokee and

-Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and Seminole,

-had been colonized in the years of creation of the

-Indian frontier. For a generation these nations

-had resided in comparative peace and advancing

-civilization, but they were undone by causes which

-they could not control.</p>

-

-<p>The confederacy was no sooner organized than its

-commissioners demanded of the tribes colonized west

-of Arkansas their allegiance and support, professing

-to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the

-United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized

-and better, this demand raised difficulties which

-would have been a strain on any diplomacy. If

-they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate

-forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and

-already coveting their lands, would cut them to pieces.

-If they adhered to the confederacy and the latter

-lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the

-United States. Yet they were too weak to stand

-alone and were forced to go one way or other. The

-resulting policy was temporizing and brought to

-them a large measure of punishment from both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span>

-sides, and the heavy subsequent wrath of the

-United States.</p>

-

-<p>John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation,

-tried to maintain his neutrality at the commencement

-of the conflict, but the fiction of Indian nationality

-was too slight for his effort to be successful. During

-the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against

-the confederate control to which he succumbed by

-August, when confederate troops had overrun most

-of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents had

-surrendered United States property to the enemy.

-The war which followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts

-of Kansas, with the addition of the Indian element.</p>

-

-<p>By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate

-control. When the Indian Territory forts&mdash;Gibson,

-Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb&mdash;fell

-into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their

-homes and sought protection within the United

-States lines. Almost the only way to fight a war in

-which a population is generally divided, is by means

-of depopulation and concentration. Along the

-Verdigris River, in southeast Kansas, these Indian

-refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number of

-6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as

-best he could, and organized them to fight when that

-was possible. With the return of federal success in

-the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas

-during the next two years, the natives began to

-return to their homes. But the relation of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span>

-tribes to the United States was tainted. The compulsory

-cession of their western lands which came at

-the close of the conflict belongs to a later chapter and

-the beginnings of Oklahoma. Here, as elsewhere,

-the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.</p>

-

-<p>The great plains and the Far West were only the

-outskirts of the Civil War. At no time did they shape

-its course, for the Civil War was, from their point of

-view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East,

-and merely an episode in the grander development

-of the United States. The way is opening ever

-wider for the historian who shall see in this material

-development and progress of civilization the central

-thread of American history, and in accordance with

-it, retail the story. But during the years of sectional

-strife the West was occasionally connected with the

-struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly

-into a period in which it came to be the admitted

-centre of interest. The last stand of the Indians

-against the onrush of settlement is a warfare with an

-identity of its own.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CHEYENNE WAR</span></h2>

-

-<p>It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous

-restlessness of the Indians during and after the

-Civil War to the evil machinations of the Confederacy.

-It has been plausible to charge that agents of the

-South passed among the tribes, inciting them to

-outbreak by pointing out the preoccupation of the

-United States and the defencelessness of the frontier.

-Popular narratives often repeat this charge when

-dealing with the wars and depredations, whether

-among the Sioux of Minnesota, or the Northwest

-tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians

-of the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus

-to harass the enemy it is not improbable that it

-would have done it. It is not impossible that it

-actually did it. But at least the charge has not been

-proved. No one has produced direct evidence to

-show the existence of agents or their connection with

-the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general

-belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs

-have admitted, regretfully, their inability to add

-incitement of Indians to the charges against the

-South. If such a cause were needed to explain the

-increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span>

-while to search further in the hope of establishing it,

-but nothing occurred in these wars which cannot be

-accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and

-well authenticated.</p>

-

-<p>Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly

-on friendly terms with the United States.

-Occasional wars broke this friendship, and frequent

-massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another,

-for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the

-frontiersman was reckless and inconsiderate. But

-the outbreaks were exceptional, they were easily

-put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By

-1865 this condition had changed over most of the

-West. Warfare had become systematic and widely

-spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks

-in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or

-at least similar reactions from similar provocations.

-From 1865, for nearly five years, these wars continued

-with only intervals of truce, or professed peace;

-while during a long period after 1870, when most of

-the tribes were suppressed and well policed, upheavals

-occurred which were clearly to be connected with

-the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from

-peace to war has caused many to charge it to the

-South. It is, however, connected with the culmination

-of the westward movement, which more than explains

-it.</p>

-

-<p>For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement

-of the events before 1861 is needed. By 1840 the

-agricultural frontier of the United States had reached<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span>

-the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes,

-with plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains.

-In the generation following appeared the heavy

-traffic along the overland trails, the advance of the

-frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific

-railway surveys. Each of these served to compress

-the Indians and restrict their range. Accompanying

-these came curtailing of reserves, shifting of residences

-to less desirable grounds, and individual

-maltreatment to a degree which makes marvellous

-the incapacity, weakness, and patience of the Indians.

-Occasionally they struggled, but always they

-lost. The scalped and mutilated pioneer, with

-his haystacks burning and his stock run off, is a

-vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic

-than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable,

-and moving to let the white man in.</p>

-

-<p>The necessary results of white encroachment were

-destruction of game and education of the Indian to

-the luxuries and vices of the white man. At a time

-when starvation was threatening because of the

-disappearance of the buffalo and other food animals,

-he became aware of the superior diet of the whites

-and the ease with which robbery could be accomplished.

-In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier

-than ever. The railway surveys reached nearly

-every corner of the Indian Country. In the next

-few years came the prospectors who started hundreds

-of mining camps beyond the line of settlements,

-while the engineers began to stick the advancing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span>

-heads of railways out from the Missouri frontier and

-into the buffalo range.</p>

-

-<p>Even the Indian could see the approaching end.

-It needed no confederate envoy to assure him that

-the United States could be attacked. His own

-hunger and the white peril were persuading him to

-defend his hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the

-widespread Indian wars of the later sixties, uniformity

-of action came without much previous

-coöperation. A general Indian league against the

-whites was never raised. The general war, upon

-dissection and analysis, breaks up into a multitude

-of little wars, each having its own particular causes,

-which, in many instances, if the word of the most

-expert frontiersmen is to be believed, ran back into

-cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.</p>

-

-<p>The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of

-the general wars, with causes rising from the treaties

-of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux in 1851. The

-plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly

-stated in this year. "We are constrained to say,"

-wrote the men who made these treaties, "that in our

-opinion <i>the time has come</i> when the extinguishment

-of the Indian title to this region should no longer be

-delayed, if government would not have the mortification,

-on the one hand, of confessing its inability to

-protect the Indian from encroachment; or be subject

-to the painful necessity, upon the other, of

-ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a

-land which they desire to make their homes, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">247</a></span>

-which, without their occupancy and labor, will be

-comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties

-concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie

-were equally the fountains of discontent which

-boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at

-last to one of the most horrible incidents of the

-plains war.</p>

-

-<p>In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt

-to partition the plains among the tribes was made.

-The lines agreed upon recognized existing conditions

-to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in consideration

-of which the savages agreed to stay at

-peace, to allow free migration along the trails, and

-to keep within their boundaries. The Sioux here

-agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The

-Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as

-lying between the Platte and the Arkansas, the mountains

-and, roughly, the hundred and first meridian.

-For ten years after these treaties the last-named

-tribes kept the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon

-settlers or emigrants. They even allowed the Senate

-in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the term of

-the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.</p>

-

-<p>In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians

-lay off the beaten tracks and apart from contact with

-the whites. Their home was in the triangle between

-the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them

-that offered almost insuperable obstacles to those

-who would cross the continent through their domain.

-The Gunnison railroad survey, which was run along<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">248</a></span>

-the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa

-Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range

-at this point. Accordingly, a decade which built up

-Oregon and California made little impression on this

-section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry

-Creek. Then came the deluge.</p>

-

-<p>Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on

-crossed the plains to the Pike's Peak country in

-1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst of the

-Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than

-the right of transit over these lands," admitted the

-Peace Commissioners in 1868. Yet they "took

-possession of them for the purpose of mining, and,

-against the protest of the Indians, founded cities,

-established farms, and opened roads. Before 1861

-the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven from

-the mountain regions down upon the waters of

-the Arkansas, and were becoming sullen and discontented

-because of this violation of their rights."

-The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in

-their possession, pledging the United States to prevent

-depredations by the whites, but here, as in most

-similar cases, the guarantees had no weight in the

-face of a population under way. The Indians were

-brushed aside, the United States agents made no

-real attempts to enforce the treaty, and within a few

-months the settlers were demanding protection

-against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw

-their former homes and hunting grounds overrun by a

-greedy population, thirsting for gold," continued the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span>

-Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east

-to the plains, and soon found themselves the objects

-of jealousy and hatred. They too must go. The

-presence of the injured is too often painful to the

-wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of

-guilt. It now became apparent that what had been

-taken by force must be retained by the ravisher,

-and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a

-treaty consecrating the act."</p>

-

-<p>Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho

-and Cheyenne strove to defend their lands and to

-drive out the intruders, a war in which the United

-States ought to have coöperated with the Indians,

-a treaty of cession followed. On February 18, 1861,

-at Fort Wise, which was the new name for Bent's

-old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed

-by which these tribes gave up much of the great range

-reserved for them in 1851, and accepted in its place,

-with what were believed to be greater guarantees, a

-triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by

-Sand Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by

-the Arkansas and Purgatory rivers; and extending

-west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand

-Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the

-Ute on the other side of the range, not long after

-this, are another part of the same story of mining

-aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed

-to remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from

-under the feet of the restless prospectors. For years

-they had kept the peace in the face of great provocation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span>

-For three years more they put up with white

-encroachment before their war began.</p>

-

-<p>The Colorado miners, like those of the other boom

-camps, had been loud in their demand for transportation.

-To satisfy this, overland traffic had been

-organized on a large scale, while during 1862 the

-stage and freight service of the plains fell under the

-control of Ben Holladay. Early in August, 1864,

-Holladay was nearly driven out of business. About

-the 10th of the month, simultaneous attacks were

-made along his mail line from the Little Blue River

-to within eighty miles of Denver. In the forays,

-stations were sacked and burned, isolated farms were

-wiped out, small parties on the trails were destroyed.

-At Ewbank Station, a family of ten "was massacred

-and scalped, and one of the females, besides having

-suffered the latter inhuman barbarity, was pinned to

-the earth by a stake thrust through her person, in a

-most revolting manner; ... at Plum Creek ...

-nine persons were murdered, their train, consisting

-of ten wagons, burnt, and two women and two children

-captured.... The old Indian traders ...

-and the settlers ... abandoned their habitations."

-For a distance of 370 miles, Holladay's general superintendent

-declared, every ranch but one was "deserted

-and the property abandoned to the Indians."</p>

-

-<p>Fifteen years after the destruction of his stations,

-Holladay was still claiming damages from the United

-States and presenting affidavits from his men which

-revealed the character of the attacks. George H.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span>

-Carlyle told how his stage was chased by Indians for

-twenty miles, how he had helped to bury the mutilated

-bodies of the Plum Creek victims, and how

-within a week the route had to be abandoned, and

-every ranch from Fort Kearney to Julesburg was

-deserted. The division agent told how property

-had been lost in the hurried flight. To save some of

-the stock, fodder and supplies had to be sacrificed,&mdash;hundreds

-of sacks of corn, scores of tons of hay,

-besides the buildings and their equipment. Nowhere

-were the Indians overbold in their attacks. In small

-bands they waited their time to take the stations by

-surprise. Well-armed coaches might expect to get

-through with little more than a few random shots,

-but along the hilltops they could often see the savages

-waiting in safety for them to pass. Indian warfare

-was not one of organized bodies and formal man&oelig;uvres.

-Only when cornered did the Indian

-stand to fight. But in wild, unexpected descents

-the tribes fell upon the lines of communication,

-reducing the frontier to an abject terror overnight.</p>

-

-<p>The destruction of the stage route was not the first,

-though it was the most general hostility which

-marked the commencement of a new Indian war.

-Since the spring of 1864 events had occurred which

-in the absence of a more rigorous control than the

-Indian Department possessed, were likely to lead to

-trouble. The Cheyenne had been dissatisfied with

-the Fort Wise treaty ever since its conclusion. The

-Sioux were carrying on a prolonged war. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">252</a></span>

-Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were ready to be

-started on the war-path. It was the old story of

-too much compression and isolated attacks going

-unpunished. Whatever the merits of an original

-controversy, the only way to keep the savages under

-control was to make fair retribution follow close upon

-the commission of an outrage. But the punishment

-needed to be fair.</p>

-

-<p>In April, 1864, a ranchman named Ripley came

-into one of the camps on the South Platte and declared

-that some Indians had stolen his stock. Perhaps

-his statement was true; but it must be remembered

-that the ranchman whose stock strayed away

-was prone to charge theft against the Indians, and

-that there is only Ripley's own word that he ever

-had any stock. Captain Sanborn, commanding, sent

-out a troop of cavalry to recover the animals. They

-came upon some Indians with horses which Ripley

-claimed as his, and in an attempt to disarm them, a

-fight occurred in which the troop was driven off.

-Their lieutenant thought the Indians were Cheyenne.</p>

-

-<p>A few weeks after this, Major Jacob Downing,

-who had been in Camp Sanborn inspecting troops,

-came into Denver and got from Colonel Chivington

-about forty men, with whom "to go against the

-Indians." Downing later swore that he found the

-Cheyenne village at Cedar Bluffs. "We commenced

-shooting; I ordered the men to commence killing

-them.... They lost ... some twenty-six killed

-and thirty wounded.... I burnt up their lodges and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span>

-everything I could get hold of.... We captured

-about one hundred head of stock, which was distributed

-among the boys."</p>

-

-<p>On the 12th of June, a family living on Box Elder

-Creek, twenty miles east of Denver, was murdered

-by the Indians. Hungate, his wife, and two children

-were killed, the house burned, and fifty or sixty head

-of stock run off. When the "scalped and horribly

-mangled bodies" were brought into Denver, the

-population, already uneasy, was thrown into panic by

-this appearance of danger so close to the city. Governor

-Evans began at once to organize the militia for

-home defence and to appeal to Washington for help.</p>

-

-<p>By the time of the attack upon the stage line it

-was clear that an Indian war existed, involving in

-varying degrees parts of the Arapaho, Cheyenne,

-Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the

-causes which provoked it were considerably in doubt.

-On the frontier there was no hesitation in charging

-it all to the innate savagery of the tribes. Governor

-Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the

-Indians might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a

-general peace on the plains, until after a severe

-chastisement of the Indians for these depredations."</p>

-

-<p>In restoring tranquillity the frontier had to rely

-largely upon its own resources. Its own Second

-Colorado was away doing duty in the Missouri campaign,

-while the eastern military situation presented

-no probability of troops being available to help out

-the West. Colonel Chivington and Governor John<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span>

-Evans, with the long-distance aid of General Curtis,

-were forced to make their own plans and execute

-them.</p>

-

-<p>As early as June, Governor Evans began his corrective

-measures, appealing first to Washington for

-permission to raise extra troops, and then endeavoring

-to separate the friendly and warlike Indians in

-order that the former "should not fall victims to the

-impossibility of soldiers discriminating between them

-and the hostile, upon whom they must, to do any

-good, inflict the most severe chastisement." To

-this end, and with the consent of the Indian Department,

-he sent out a proclamation, addressed to "the

-friendly Indians of the Plains," directing them to

-keep away from those who were at war, and as evidence

-of friendship to congregate around the agencies

-for safety. Forts Lyons, Laramie, Larned, and

-Camp Collins were designated as concentration

-points for the several tribes. "None but those who

-intend to be friendly with the whites must come to

-these places. The families of those who have gone

-to war with the whites must be kept away from

-among the friendly Indians. The war on hostile

-Indians will be continued until they are all effectually

-subdued." The Indians, frankly at war, paid no

-attention to this invitation. Two small bands only

-sought the cover of the agencies, and with their

-exception, so Governor Evans reported on October

-15, the proclamation "met no response from any of

-the Indians of the plains."</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">255</a></span>

-The war parties became larger and more general

-as the summer advanced, driving whites off the plains

-between the two trails for several hundred miles. But

-as fall approached, the tribes as usual sought peace.

-The Indians' time for war was summer. Without

-supplies, they were unable to fight through the winter,

-so that autumn brought them into a mood well

-disposed to peace, reservations, and government

-rations. Major Colley, the agent on the Sand Creek

-reserve at Fort Lyon, received an overture early in

-September. In a letter written for them on August

-29, by a trader, Black Kettle, of the Cheyenne, and

-other chiefs declared their readiness to make a peace

-if all the tribes were included in it. As an olive

-branch, they offered to give up seven white prisoners.

-They admitted that five war parties, three Cheyenne

-and two Arapaho, were yet in the field.</p>

-

-<p>Upon receipt of Black Kettle's letter, Major E.

-W. Wynkoop, military commander at Fort Lyon,

-marched with 130 men to the Cheyenne camp at

-Bend of Timbers, some eighty miles northeast of

-Fort Lyons. Here he found "from six to eight

-hundred Indian warriors drawn up in line of battle

-and prepared to fight." He avoided fighting, demanded

-and received the prisoners, and held a council

-with the chiefs. Here he told them that he had

-no authority to conclude a peace, but offered to conduct

-a group of chiefs to Denver, for a conference

-with Governor Evans.</p>

-

-<p>On September 28, Governor Evans held a council<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span>

-with the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs brought in

-by Major Wynkoop; Black Kettle and White Antelope

-being the most important. Black Kettle

-opened the conference with an appeal to the governor

-in which he alluded to his delivery of the prisoners

-and Wynkoop's invitation to visit Denver. "We

-have come with our eyes shut, following his handful

-of men, like coming through the fire," Black Kettle

-went on. "All we ask is that we may have peace

-with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand.

-You are our father. We have been travelling

-through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since

-the war began. These braves who are with me are

-all willing to do what I say. We want to take good

-tidings home to our people, that they may sleep in

-peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers

-here to understand that we are for peace, and

-that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken

-by them for enemies." To him Governor

-Evans responded that this submission was a long time

-coming, and that the nation had gone to war, refusing

-to listen to overtures of peace. This Black Kettle

-admitted.</p>

-

-<p>"So far as making a treaty now is concerned,"

-continued Governor Evans, "we are in no condition

-to do it.... You, so far, have had the advantage; but

-the time is near at hand when the plains will swarm

-with United States soldiers. I have learned that

-you understand that as the whites are at war among

-themselves, you think you can now drive the whites<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span>

-from this country; but this reliance is false. The

-Great Father at Washington has men enough to drive

-all the Indians off the plains, and whip the rebels

-at the same time. Now the war with the whites is

-nearly through, and the Great Father will not

-know what to do with all his soldiers, except to send

-them after the Indians on the plains. My proposition

-to the friendly Indians has gone out; [I] shall be

-glad to have them all come in under it. I have no

-new proposition to make. Another reason that I am

-not in a condition to make a treaty is that war is

-begun, and the power to make a treaty of peace has

-passed to the great war chief." He further counselled

-them to make terms with the military authorities

-before they could hope to talk of peace. No prospect

-of an immediate treaty was given to the chiefs.

-Evans disclaimed further powers, and Colonel Chivington

-closed the council, saying: "I am not a big

-war chief, but all the soldiers in this country are at my

-command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians

-is to fight them until they lay down their arms

-and submit." The same evening came a despatch

-from Major-general Curtis, at Fort Leavenworth,

-confirming the non-committal attitude of Evans and

-Chivington: "I want no peace till the Indians

-suffer more.... I fear Agent of the Interior Department

-will be ready to make presents too soon....

-No peace must be made without my directions."</p>

-

-<p>The chiefs were escorted home without their peace

-or any promise of it, Governor Evans believing that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span>

-the great body of the tribes was still hostile, and that

-a decisive winter campaign was needed to destroy

-their lingering notion that the whites might be driven

-from the plains. Black Kettle had been advised at

-the council to surrender to the soldiers, Major Wynkoop

-at Fort Lyon being mentioned as most available.

-Many of his tribe acted on the suggestion, so

-that on October 20 Agent Colley, their constant

-friend, reported that "nearly all the Arapahoes are

-now encamped near this place and desire to remain

-friendly, and make reparation for the damages

-committed by them."</p>

-

-<p>The Indians unquestionably were ready to make

-peace after their fashion and according to their

-ability. There is no evidence that they were reconciled

-to their defeat, but long experience had accustomed

-them to fighting in the summer and drawing

-rations as peaceful in the winter. The young

-men, in part, were still upon the war-path, but the

-tribes and the head chiefs were anxious to go upon a

-winter basis. Their interpreter who had attended

-the conference swore that they left Denver, "perfectly

-contented, deeming that the matter was settled,"

-that upon their return to Fort Lyon, Major

-Wynkoop gave them permission to bring their families

-in under the fort where he could watch them

-better; and that "accordingly the chiefs went after

-their families and villages and brought them in,

-... satisfied that they were in perfect security and

-safety."</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">259</a></span>

-While the Indians gathered around the fort,

-Major Wynkoop sent to General Curtis for advice

-and orders respecting them. Before the orders arrived,

-however, he was relieved from command and

-Major Scott J. Anthony, of the First Colorado Cavalry,

-was detailed in his place. After holding a conference

-with the Indians and Anthony, in which

-the latter renewed the permission for the bands to

-camp near the fort, he left Fort Lyons on November

-26. Anthony meanwhile had become convinced that

-he was exceeding his authority. First he disarmed

-the savages, receiving only a few old and worn-out

-weapons. Then he returned these and ordered the

-Indians away from Fort Lyons. They moved forty

-miles away and encamped on Sand Creek.</p>

-

-<p>The Colorado authorities had no idea of calling it

-a peace. Governor Evans had scolded Wynkoop

-for bringing the chiefs in to Denver. He had received

-special permission and had raised a hundred-day

-regiment for an Indian campaign. If he should

-now make peace, Washington would think he had

-misrepresented the situation and put the government

-to needless expense. "What shall I do with

-the third regiment, if I make peace?" he demanded

-of Wynkoop. They were "raised to kill Indians,

-and they must kill Indians."</p>

-

-<p>Acting on the supposition that the war was still on,

-Colonel Chivington led the Third Colorado, and a

-part of the First Colorado Cavalry, from 900 to 1000

-strong, to Fort Lyons in November, arriving two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span>

-days after Wynkoop departed. He picketed the

-fort, to prevent the news of his arrival from getting

-out, and conferred on the situation with Major

-Anthony, who, swore Major Downing, wished he

-would attack the Sand Creek camp and would have

-done so himself had he possessed troops enough.

-Three days before, Anthony had given a present to

-Black Kettle out of his own pocket. As the result of

-the council of war, Chivington started from Fort

-Lyon at nine o'clock, on the night of the 28th.</p>

-

-<p>About daybreak on November 29 Chivington's

-force reached the Cheyenne village on Sand Creek,

-where Black Kettle, White Antelope, and some

-500 of their band, mostly women and children,

-were encamped in the belief that they had made

-their peace. They had received no pledge of this,

-but past practice explained their confidence. The

-village was surrounded by troops who began to fire

-as soon as it was light. "We killed as many as we

-could; the village was destroyed and burned," declared

-Downing, who further professed, "I think

-and earnestly believe the Indians to be an obstacle to

-civilization, and should be exterminated." White

-Antelope was killed at the first attack, refusing to

-leave the field, stating that it was the fault of Black

-Kettle, others, and himself that occasioned the massacre,

-and that he would die. Black Kettle, refusing

-to leave the field, was carried off by his young men.

-The latter had raised an American flag and a white

-flag in his effort to stop the fight.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span>

-The firing began, swore interpreter Smith, on

-the northeast side of Sand Creek, near Black Kettle's

-lodge. Driven thence, the disorderly horde of

-savages retreated to War Bonnet's lodge at the upper

-end of the village, some few of them armed but most

-making no resistance. Up the dry bottom of Sand

-Creek they ran, with the troops in wild charge close

-behind. In the hollows of the banks they sought

-refuge, but the soldiers dragged them out, killing

-seventy or eighty with the worst barbarities Smith

-had seen: "All manner of depredations were inflicted

-on their persons; they were scalped, their

-brains knocked out; the men used their knives,

-ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked

-them in the head with their guns, beat their brains

-out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the

-word." The affidavits of soldiers engaged in the

-attack are printed in the government documents.

-They are too disgusting to be more than referred to

-elsewhere.</p>

-

-<p>Here at last was the culmination of the plains war

-of 1864 in the "Chivington massacre," which has been

-the centre of bitter controversy ever since its heroes

-marched into Denver with their bloody trophies. It

-was without question Indian fighting at its worst, yet

-it was successful in that the Indian hostilities stopped

-and a new treaty was easily obtained by the whites

-in 1865. The East denounced Chivington, and the

-Indian Commissioner described the event in 1865 as

-a butchery "in cold blood by troops in the service of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">262</a></span>

-the United States." "Comment cannot magnify

-the horror," said the <i>Nation</i>. The heart of the question

-had to do with the matter of good faith. At no

-time did the military or Colorado authorities admit

-or even appear to admit that the war was over.

-They regarded the campaign as punitive and necessary

-for the foundation of a secure peace. The Indians,

-on the other hand, believed that they had surrendered

-and were anxious to be let alone. Too often

-their wish in similar cases had been gratified, to the

-prolongation of destructive wars. What here occurred

-was horrible from any standard of civilized

-criticism. But even among civilized nations war is

-an unpleasant thing, and war with savages is most

-merciful, in the long run, when it speaks the savages'

-own tongue with no uncertain accent. That such

-extreme measures could occur was the result of the

-impossible situation on the plains. "My opinion,"

-said Agent Colley, "is that white men and wild

-Indians cannot live in the same country in peace."

-With several different and diverging authorities over

-them, with a white population wanting their reserves

-and anxious for a provocation that might justify retaliation

-upon them, little difficulties were certain to

-lead to big results. It was true that the tribes were

-being dispossessed of lands which they believed to belong

-to them. It was equally true that an Indian war

-could terrify a whole frontier and that stern repression

-was its best cure. The blame which was accorded

-to Chivington left out of account the terror in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span>

-Colorado, which was no less real because the whites

-were the aggressors. The slaughter and mutilation

-of Indian women and children did much to embitter

-Eastern critics, who did not realize that the only way

-to crush an Indian war is to destroy the base of supplies,&mdash;the

-camp where the women are busy helping

-to keep the men in the field; and who overlooked

-also the fact that in the męlée the squaws were quite

-as dangerous as the bucks. Indiscriminate blame

-and equally indiscriminate praise have been accorded

-because of the Sand Creek affair. The terrible

-event was the result of the orderly working of causes

-over which individuals had little control.</p>

-

-<p>In October, 1865, a peace conference was held on

-the Little Arkansas at which terms were agreed

-upon with Apache, Kiowa and Comanche, Arapaho

-and Cheyenne, while the last named surrendered

-their reserve at Sand Creek. For four years after

-this, owing to delays in the Senate and ambiguity

-in the agreements, they had no fixed abode. Later

-they were given room in the Indian Territory in lands

-taken from the civilized tribes.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">264</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE SIOUX WAR</span></h2>

-

-<p>The struggle for the possession of the plains worked

-the displacement of the Indian tribes. At the beginning,

-the invasion of Kansas had undone the work

-accomplished in erecting the Indian frontier. The

-occupation of Minnesota led surely to the downfall

-and transportation of the Sioux of the Mississippi.

-Gold in Colorado attracted multitudes who made

-peace impossible for the Indians of the southern

-plains. The Sioux of the northern plains came within

-the influence of the overland march in the same years

-with similar results.</p>

-

-<p>The northern Sioux, commonly known as the Sioux

-of the plains, and distinguished from their relatives

-the Sioux of the Mississippi, had participated in the

-treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, had granted rights

-of transit to the whites, and had been recognized

-themselves as nomadic bands occupying the plains

-north of the Platte River. Heretofore they had had

-no treaty relations with the United States, being far

-beyond the frontier. Their people, 16,000 perhaps,

-were grouped roughly in various bands: Brulé,

-Yankton, Yanktonai, Blackfoot, Hunkpapa, Sans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span>

-Arcs, and Miniconjou. Their dependence on the

-chase made them more dependent on the annuities

-provided them at Laramie. As the game diminished

-the annuity increased in relative importance, and

-scarcely made a fair equivalent for what they lost.

-Yet on the whole, they imitated their neighbors, the

-Cheyenne and Arapaho, and kept the peace.</p>

-

-<p>Almost the only time that the pledge was broken

-was in the autumn of 1854. Continual trains of

-immigrants passing through the Sioux country made

-it nearly impossible to prevent friction between the

-races in which the blame was quite likely to fall upon

-the timorous homeseekers. On August 17, 1854, a

-cow strayed away from a band of Mormons encamped

-a few miles from Fort Laramie. Some have it that

-the cow was lame, and therefore abandoned; but

-whatever the cause, the cow was found, killed, and

-eaten by a small band of hungry Miniconjou Sioux.

-The charge of theft was brought into camp at Laramie,

-not by the Mormons, but by The Bear, chief of

-the Brulé, and Lieutenant Grattan with an escort of

-twenty-nine men, a twelve-pounder and a mountain

-howitzer, was sent out the next day to arrest the

-Indian who had slaughtered the animal. At the

-Indian village the culprit was not forthcoming,

-Grattan's drunken interpreter roughened a diplomacy

-which at best was none too tactful, and at last

-the troops fired into the lodge which was said to contain

-the offender. No one of the troops got away

-from the enraged Sioux, who, after their anger had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span>

-led them to retaliate, followed it up by plundering the

-near-by post of the fur company. Commissioner

-Manypenny believed that this action by the troops

-was illegal and unnecessary from the start, since the

-Mormons could legally have been reimbursed from

-the Indian funds by the agent.</p>

-

-<p>No general war followed this outbreak. A few

-braves went on the war-path and rumors of great

-things reached the East, but General Harney, sent

-out with three regiments to end the Sioux war in

-1855, found little opposition and fought only one

-important battle. On the Little Blue Water, in

-September, 1855, he fell upon Little Thunder's

-band of Brulé Sioux and killed or wounded nearly

-a hundred of them. There is some doubt whether

-this band had anything to do with the Grattan episode,

-or whether it was even at war, but the defeat

-was, as Agent Twiss described it, "a thunderclap

-to them." For the first time they learned the

-mighty power of the United States, and General

-Harney made good use of this object lesson in the

-peace council which he held with them in March,

-1856. The treaty here agreed upon was never

-legalized, and remained only a sort of <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">modus vivendi</i>

-for the following years. The Sioux tribes were so

-loosely organized that the authority of the chiefs

-had little weight; young braves did as they pleased

-regardless of engagements supposed to bind the

-tribes. But the lesson of the defeat lasted long in

-the memory of the plains tribes, so that they gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span>

-little trouble until the wars of 1864 broke out.

-Meanwhile Chouteau's old Fort Pierre on the Missouri

-was bought by the United States and made

-a military post for the control of these upper tribes.</p>

-

-<p>Before the plains Sioux broke out again, the Minnesota

-uprising had led the Mississippi Sioux to their

-defeat. Some were executed in the fall of 1862,

-others were transported to the Missouri Valley; still

-others got away to the Northwest, there to continue

-a profitless war that kept up fighting for several

-years. Meanwhile came the plains war of 1864 in

-which the tribes south of the Platte were chiefly

-concerned, and in which men at the centre of the

-line thought there were evidences of an alliance between

-northern and southern tribes. Thus Governor

-Evans wrote of "information furnished me,

-through various sources, of an alliance of the Cheyenne

-and a part of the Arapahoe tribes with the

-Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians of the south,

-and the great family of the Sioux Indians of the north

-upon the plains," and the Indian Commissioner accepted

-the notion. But, like the question of intrigue,

-this was a matter of belief rather than of

-proof; while local causes to account for the disorder

-are easily found. Yet it is true that during 1864

-and 1865 the northern Sioux became uneasy.</p>

-

-<p>During 1865, though the causes likely to lead to

-hostilities were in no wise changed, efforts were made

-to reach agreements with the plains tribes. The

-Cheyenne, humbled at Sand Creek, were readily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">268</a></span>

-handled at the Little Arkansas treaty in October.

-They there surrendered to the United States all their

-reserve in Colorado and accepted a new one, which

-they never actually received, south of the Arkansas,

-and bound themselves not to camp within ten miles

-of the route to Santa Fé. On the other side, "to

-heal the wounds caused by the Chivington affair,"

-special appropriations were made by the United

-States to the widows and orphans of those who had

-been killed. The Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche

-joined in similar treaties. During the same week, in

-1865, a special commission made treaties of peace with

-nine of the Sioux tribes, including the remnants of

-the Mississippi bands. "These treaties were made,"

-commented the Commissioner, "and the Indians, in

-spite of the great suffering from cold and want of

-food endured during the very severe winter of 1865&ndash;66,

-and consequent temptation to plunder to procure

-the absolute necessaries of life, faithfully kept

-the peace."</p>

-

-<p>In September, 1865, the steamer <i>Calypso</i> struggled

-up the shallow Missouri River, carrying a party of

-commissioners to Fort Sully, there to make these

-treaties with the Sioux. Congress had provided

-$20,000 for a special negotiation before adjourning

-in March, 1865, and General Sully, who was yet conducting

-the prolonged Sioux War, had pointed out

-the place most suitable for the conference. The first

-council was held on October 6.</p>

-

-<p>The military authorities were far from eager to hold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">269</a></span>

-this council. Already the breach between the military

-power responsible for policing the plains and

-the civilian department which managed the tribes

-was wide. Thus General Pope, commanding the

-Department of the Missouri, grumbled to Grant in

-June that whenever Indian hostilities occurred, the

-Indian Department, which was really responsible,

-blamed the soldiers for causing them. He complained

-of the divided jurisdiction and of the policy

-of buying treaties from the tribes by presents made

-at the councils. In reference to this special treaty

-he had "only to say that the Sioux Indians have

-been attacking everybody in their region of country;

-and only lately ... attacked in heavy force Fort

-Rice, on the upper Missouri, well fortified and garrisoned

-by four companies of infantry with artillery.

-If these things show any desire for peace, I confess

-I am not able to perceive it."</p>

-

-<p>In future years this breach was to become wider

-yet. At Sand Creek the military authorities had

-justified the attack against the criticism of the local

-Indian agents and Eastern philanthropists. There

-was indeed plenty of evidence of misconduct on both

-sides. If the troops were guilty on the charge of being

-over-ready to fight&mdash;and here the words of Governor

-Evans were prophetic, "Now the war ... is

-nearly through, and the Great Father will not know

-what to do with all his soldiers, except to send them

-after the Indians on the plains,"&mdash;the Indian agents

-often succumbed to the opportunity for petty thieving.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span>

-The case of one of the agents of the Yankton

-Sioux illustrates this. It was his custom each

-year to have the chiefs of his tribe sign general receipts

-for everything sent to the agency. Thus at

-the end of the year he could turn in Indians' vouchers

-and report nothing on hand. But the receipt did not

-mean that the Indian had got the goods; although

-signed for, these were left in the hands of the agent

-to be given out as needed. The inference is strong

-that many of the supplies intended for and signed

-for by the Indians went into the pocket of the agent.

-During the third quarter of 1863 this agent claimed

-to have issued to his charges: "One pair of bay horses,

-7 years old; ... 1 dozen 17-inch mill files; ... 6

-dozen Seidlitz powders; 6 pounds compound syrup

-of squills; 6 dozen Ayer's pills; ... 3 bottles of

-rose water; ... 1 pound of wax; ... 1 ream of

-vouchers; ... ˝ M 6434 8˝-inch official envelopes;

-... 4 bottles 8-ounce mucilage." So great was

-this particular agent's power that it was nearly impossible

-to get evidence against him. "If I do, he

-will fix it so I'll never get anything in the world and

-he will drive me out of the country," was typical of

-the attitude of his neighbors.</p>

-

-<p>With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for

-it quarrelling, it is no wonder that the charges suffered.

-But the ill results came more from the impossible

-situation than from abuse on either side. It

-needs often to be reiterated that the heart of the

-Indian question was in the infiltration of greedy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span>

-timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who could

-not be restrained by any process known to American

-government. In the conflict between two civilizations,

-the lower must succumb. Neither the

-War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible

-for most of the troubles; yet of the two, the

-former, through readiness to fight and to hold the

-savage to a standard of warfare which he could not

-understand, was the greater offender. It was not

-so great an offender, however, as the selfish interests

-of those engaged in trading with the Indians would

-make it out to be.</p>

-

-<p>The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty

-signed on October 10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory.

-Many of the western Sioux did not

-come at all. Even the eastern were only partially

-represented. And among tribes in which the central

-authority of the chiefs was weak, full representation

-was necessary to secure a binding peace. The commissioners,

-after most pacific efforts, were "unable

-to ascertain the existence of any really amicable

-feeling among these people towards the government."

-The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the

-treaty which resulted did little more than repeat

-the terms of the treaty of 1851, binding the Indians

-to permit roads to be opened through their country

-and to keep away from the trails.</p>

-

-<p>It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were

-bound by the treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie

-treaty of 1851 had never had full force of law because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span>

-the Senate had added amendments to it, which

-all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although

-Congress had appropriated the annuities

-specified in the treaty the binding force of the document

-was not great on savages. The Fort Sully

-treaty was deficient in that it did not represent all of

-the interested tribes. In making Indian treaties at

-all, the United States acted upon a convenient fiction

-that the Indians had authorities with power to bind;

-whereas the leaders had little control over their followers

-and after nearly every treaty there were

-many bands that could claim to have been left out

-altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed,

-and the United States proceeded in 1865

-and 1866 to use its specified rights in opening roads

-through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.</p>

-

-<p>The mines of Montana and Idaho, which had attracted

-notice and emigration in the early sixties,

-were still the objective points of a large traffic. They

-were somewhat off the beaten routes, being accessible

-by the Missouri River and Fort Benton, or by

-the Platte trail and a northern branch from near

-Fort Hall to Virginia City. To bring them into

-more direct connection with the East an available

-route from Fort Laramie was undertaken in 1865.

-The new trail left the main road near Fort Laramie,

-crossed to the north side of the Platte, and ran off

-to the northwest. Shortly after leaving the Platte

-the road got into the charming foothill country

-where the slopes "are all covered with a fine growth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span>

-of grass, and in every valley there is either a rushing

-stream or some quiet babbling brook of pure, clear

-snow-water filled with trout, the banks lined with

-trees&mdash;wild cherry, quaking asp, some birch,

-willow, and cottonwood." To the left, and not far

-distant, were the Big Horn Mountains. To the

-right could sometimes be seen in the distance the

-shadowy billows of the Black Hills. Running to

-the north and draining the valley were the Powder

-and Tongue rivers, both tributaries of the Yellowstone.

-Here were water, timber, and forage, coal

-and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the

-Indians, "the very heart of their hunting-grounds."

-In a single day's ride were seen "bear, buffalo, elk,

-deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens." With

-little exaggeration it was described as a "natural

-source of recuperation and supply to moving, hunting,

-and roving bands of all tribes, and their lodge

-trails cross it in great numbers from north to south."

-Through this land, keeping east of the Big Horn

-Mountains and running around their northern end

-into the Yellowstone Valley, was to run the new Powder

-River road to Montana. The Sioux treaties

-were to have their severest testing in the selection

-of choice hunting-grounds for an emigrant road, for

-it was one of the certainties in the opening of new

-roads that game vanished in the face of emigration.</p>

-

-<p>While the commissioners were negotiating their

-treaty at Fort Sully, the first Powder River expedition,

-in its attempt to open this new road by the short<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span>

-and direct route from Fort Laramie to Bozeman and

-the Montana mines, was undoing their work. In the

-summer of 1865 General Patrick E. Connor, with a

-miscellaneous force of 1600, including a detachment

-of ex-Confederate troops who had enlisted in the

-United States army to fight Indians, started from

-Fort Laramie for the mouth of the Rosebuds on the

-Yellowstone, by way of the Powder River. Old Jim

-Bridger, the incarnation of this country, led them,

-swearing mightily at "these damn paper-collar

-soldiers," who knew so little of the Indians. There

-was plenty of fighting as Connor pushed into the

-Yellowstone, but he was relieved from command in

-September and the troops were drawn back, so that

-there were no definitive results of the expedition of

-1865.</p>

-

-<p>In 1866, in spite of the fact that the Sioux of this

-region, through their leader Red Cloud, had refused

-to yield the ground or even to treat concerning it,

-Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered by General

-Pope to command the Mountain District, Department

-of the Platte, and to erect and garrison posts

-for the control of the Powder River road. On December

-21 of this year, Captain W.&nbsp;J. Fetterman,

-of his command, and seventy-eight officers and men

-were killed near Fort Philip Kearney in a fight whose

-merits aroused nearly as much acrimonious discussion

-as the Sand Creek massacre.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_274" class="figcenter" style="width: 356px;">

-  <img src="images/i-299.jpg" width="356" height="542" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Red Cloud and Professor Marsh</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>From a cut lent by Professor Warren K. Moorehead, of Andover, Mass.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>The events leading up to the catastrophe at Fort

-Philip Kearney, a catastrophe so complete that none<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span>

-of its white participants escaped to tell what happened,

-were connected with Carrington's work in

-building forts. He had been detailed for the work

-in the spring, and after a conference at Fort Kearney,

-Nebraska, with General Sherman, had marched his

-men in nineteen days to Fort Laramie. He reached

-Fort Reno, which became his headquarters, on June

-28. On the march, if his orders were obeyed, his

-soldiers were scrupulous in their regard for the Indians.

-His orders issued for the control of emigrants

-passing along the Powder River route were equally

-careful. Thirty men were to constitute the minimum

-single party; these were to travel with a military

-pass, which was to be scrutinized by the commanding

-officer of each post. The trains were

-ordered to hold together and were warned that

-"nearly all danger from Indians lies in the recklessness

-of travellers. A small party, when separated,

-either sell whiskey to or fire upon scattering Indians,

-or get into disputes with them, and somebody is hurt.

-An insult to an Indian is resented by the Indians

-against the first white men they meet, and innocent

-travellers suffer."</p>

-

-<p>Carrington's orders were to garrison Fort Reno

-and build new forts on the Powder, Big Horn, and

-Yellowstone rivers, and cover the road. The last-named

-fort was later cut away because of his insufficient

-force, but Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C.&nbsp;F.

-Smith were located during July and August. The

-former stood on a little plateau formed between the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span>

-two Pineys as they emerge from the Big Horn Mountains.

-Its site was surveyed and occupied on July 15.

-Already Carrington was complaining that he had too

-few men for his work. With eight companies of

-eighty men each, and most of these new recruits, he

-had to garrison his long line, all the while building

-and protecting his stockades and fortifications. "I

-am my own engineer, draughtsman, and visit my

-pickets and guards nightly, with scarcely a day or

-night without attempts to steal stock." Worse than

-this, his military equipment was inadequate. Only

-his band, specially armed for the expedition, had

-Spencer carbines and enough ammunition. His

-main force, still armed with Springfield rifles, had

-under fifty rounds to the man.</p>

-

-<p>The Indians, Cheyenne and Sioux, were, all through

-the summer, showing no sign of accepting the invasion

-of the hunting-grounds without a fight. Yet

-Carrington reported on August 29 that he was holding

-them off; that Fort C.&nbsp;F. Smith on the Big Horn

-had been occupied; that parties of fifty well-armed

-men could get through safely if they were careful.

-The Indians, he said, "are bent on robbery; they only

-fight when assured of personal security and remunerative

-stealings; they are divided among themselves."</p>

-

-<p>With the sites for forts C.&nbsp;F. Smith and Philip

-Kearney selected, the work of construction proceeded

-during the autumn. A sawmill, sent out from the

-states, was kept hard at work. Wood was cut on

-the adjacent hills and speedily converted into cabins<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span>

-and palisades which approached completion before

-winter set in. It was construction during a state of

-siege, however. Instead of pacifying the valley the

-construction of the forts aggravated the Sioux hostility

-so that constant watchfulness was needed.

-That the trains sent out to gather wood were not

-seriously injured was due to rigorous discipline. The

-wagons moved twenty or more at a time, with guards,

-and in two parallel columns. At first sight of Indians

-they drove into corral and signalled back to

-the lookouts at the fort for help. Occasionally men

-were indeed cut out by the Indians, who in turn

-suffered considerable loss; but Carrington reduced

-his own losses to a minimum. Friendly Indians were

-rarely seen. They were allowed to come to the fort,

-by the main road and with a white flag, but few

-availed themselves of the privilege. The Sioux

-were up in arms, and in large numbers hung about the

-Tongue and Powder river valleys waiting for their

-chance.</p>

-

-<p>Early in December occurred an incident revealing

-the danger of annihilation which threatened Carrington's

-command. At one o'clock on the afternoon of

-the sixth a messenger reported to the garrison at

-Fort Philip Kearney that the wood train was attacked

-by Indians four miles away. Carrington immediately

-had every horse at the post mounted. For

-the main relief he sent out a column under Brevet

-Lieutenant-colonel Fetterman, who had just arrived

-at the fort, while he led in person a flanking party to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span>

-cut off the Indians' retreat. The mercury was below

-zero. Carrington was thrown into the water of

-Peno Creek when his horse stumbled through breaking

-ice. Fetterman's party found the wood train

-in corral and standing off the attack with success.

-The savages retreated as the relief approached and

-were pursued for five miles, when they turned and

-offered battle. Just as the fighting began, most of

-the cavalry broke away from Fetterman, leaving

-him and some fourteen others surrounded by Indians

-and attacked on three sides. He held them off,

-however, until Carrington came in sight and the Indians

-fled. Why Lieutenant Bingham retreated with

-his cavalry and left Fetterman in such danger was

-never explained, for the Indians killed him and one

-of his non-commissioned officers, while several other

-privates were wounded. The Indians, once the

-fight was over, disappeared among the hills, and

-Carrington had no force with which to follow them.

-In reporting the battle that night he renewed his

-requests for men and officers. He had but six officers

-for the six companies at Fort Philip Kearney. He

-was totally unable to take the aggressive because

-of the defences which had constantly to be maintained.</p>

-

-<p>In this fashion the fall advanced in the Powder

-River Valley. The forts were finished. The Indian

-hostilities increased. The little, overworked force

-of Carrington, chopping, building, guarding, and

-fighting, struggled to fulfil its orders. If one should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">279</a></span>

-criticise Carrington, the attack would be chiefly that

-he looked to defensive measures in the Indian war.

-He did indeed ask for troops, officers, and equipment,

-but his despatches and his own vindication show little

-evidence that he realized the need for large reënforcements

-for the specific purpose of a punitive

-campaign. More skilful Indian fighters knew that

-the Indians could and would keep up indefinitely

-this sort of filibustering against the forts, and that a

-vigorous move against their own villages was the

-surest means to secure peace. In Indian warfare,

-even more perhaps than in civilized, it is advantageous

-to destroy the enemy's base of supplies.</p>

-

-<p>The wood train was again attacked on December

-21. About eleven o'clock that morning the pickets

-reported the train "corralled and threatened by

-Indians on Sullivant Hills, a mile and a half from the

-fort." The usual relief party was at once organized

-and sent out under Fetterman, who claimed the right

-to command it by seniority, and who was not highest

-in the confidence of Colonel Carrington. He had

-but recently joined the command, was full of enthusiasm

-and desire to hunt Indians, and needed the

-admonition with which he left the fort: that he

-was "fighting brave and desperate enemies who

-sought to make up by cunning and deceit all the

-advantage which the white man gains by intelligence

-and better arms." He was ordered to support and

-bring in the wood train, this being all Carrington

-believed himself strong enough to do and keep on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">280</a></span>

-doing. Any one could have had a fight at any time,

-and Carrington was wise to issue the "peremptory

-and explicit" orders to avoid pursuit beyond the

-summit of Lodge Trail Ridge, as needless and unduly

-dangerous. Three times this order was given to

-Fetterman; and after that, "fearing still that the

-spirit of ambition might override prudence," says

-Carrington, "I crossed the parade and from a sentry

-platform halted the cavalry and again repeated my

-precise orders."</p>

-

-<p>With these admonitions, Fetterman started for

-the relief, leading a party of eighty-one officers and

-men, picked and all well armed. He crossed the

-Lodge Trail Ridge as soon as he was out of sight of

-the fort and disappeared. No one of his command

-came back alive. The wood train, before twelve

-o'clock, broke corral and moved on in safety, while

-shots were heard beyond the ridge. For half an

-hour there was a constant volleying; then all was

-still. Meanwhile Carrington, nervous at the lack of

-news from Fetterman, had sent a second column, and

-two wagons to relieve him, under Captain Ten Eyck.

-The latter, moving along cautiously, with large bands

-of Sioux retreating before him, came finally upon

-forty-nine bodies, including that of Fetterman. The

-evidence of arrows, spears, and the position of bodies

-was that they had been surrounded, surprised, and

-overwhelmed in their defeat. The next day the rest

-of the bodies were reached and brought back. Naked,

-dismembered, slashed, visited with indescribable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span>

-indignities, they were buried in two great graves;

-seventy-nine soldiers and two civilians.</p>

-

-<p>The Fetterman massacre raised a storm in the East

-similar in volume to that following Sand Creek, two

-years before. Who was at fault, and why, were the

-questions indignantly asked. Judicious persons were

-well aware, wrote the <i>Nation</i>, that "our whole Indian

-policy is a system of mismanagement, and in many

-parts one of gigantic abuse." The military authorities

-tried to place the blame on Carrington, as plausible,

-energetic, and industrious, but unable to maintain

-discipline or inspire his officers with confidence.

-Unquestionably a part of this was true, yet the letter

-which made the charge admitted that often the Indians

-were better armed than the troops, and the

-critic himself, General Cooke, had ordered Carrington:

-"You can only defend yourself and trains,

-and emigrants, the best you can." The Indian Commissioner

-charged it on the bad disposition of the

-troops, always anxious to fight.</p>

-

-<p>The issue broke over the number of Indians involved.

-Current reports from Fort Philip Kearney

-indicated from 3000 to 5000 hostile warriors, chiefly

-Sioux and led by Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe.

-The Commissioner pointed out that such a force

-must imply from 21,000 to 35,000 Indians in all&mdash;a

-number that could not possibly have been in the

-Powder River country. It is reasonable to believe

-that Fetterman was not overwhelmed by any multitude

-like this, but that his own rash disobedience led<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">282</a></span>

-to ambush and defeat by a force well below 3000.

-Upon him fell the immediate responsibility; above

-him, the War Department was negligent in detailing

-so few men for so large a task; and ultimately

-there was the impossibility of expecting savage Sioux

-to give up their best hunting-grounds as a result of

-a treaty signed by others than themselves.</p>

-

-<p>The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of

-transition in Indian warfare. Even here the Indians

-were mostly armed with bows and arrows, and were

-relying upon their superior numbers for victory.

-Yet a change in Indian armament was under way,

-which in a few years was to convert the Indian from

-a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in

-the world." He was being armed with rifles. As

-the game diminished the tribes found that the old

-methods of hunting were inadequate and began the

-pressure upon the Indian Department for better

-weapons. The department justified itself in issuing

-rifles and ammunition, on the ground that the laws

-of the United States expected the Indians to live

-chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure

-by the older means. Hence came the anomalous

-situation in which one department of the

-United States armed and equipped the tribes for

-warfare against another. If arms were cut down,

-the tribes were in danger of extinction; if they

-were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the

-Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that

-the hostile Sioux were merely hungry, because the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">283</a></span>

-War Department had caused the issuing of guns to

-be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with

-bad temper and suspicion on both sides.</p>

-

-<p>A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud

-tried again to wreck a wood train near Fort Philip

-Kearney. But this time the escort erected a barricade

-with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety

-of army wagon, and though deserted by most of

-his men, Major James Powell, with one other officer,

-twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind

-their fortification and repelled charge after charge

-from some 800 Sioux and Cheyenne. With little

-loss to himself he inflicted upon the savages a lesson

-that lasted many years.</p>

-

-<p>The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the

-chain of Indian outbreaks that stretched across the

-path of the westward movement, the overland traffic

-and the continental railways. The Pacific railways

-had been chartered just as the overland telegraph

-had been opened to the Pacific coast. With this last,

-perhaps from reverence for the nearly supernatural,

-the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway

-advanced, increasing compression and repression

-stirred the tribes to a series of hostilities. The first

-treaties which granted transit&mdash;meaning chiefly

-wagon transit&mdash;broke down. A new series of conferences

-and a new policy were the direct result of

-these wars.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">284</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY</span></h2>

-

-<p>The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great

-plains may fairly be said to have been reached about

-the time of the slaughter of Fetterman and his men

-at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous fifteen

-years the causes had been shaping through the development

-of the use of the trails, the opening of the

-mining territories, and the agitation for a continental

-railway. Now the railway was not only authorized

-and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon

-its completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted

-the Union Pacific to build west and the

-Central Pacific to build east until the two lines should

-meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the

-roads were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis

-of the Indian problem was speedily reached. In the

-fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of the overland

-freighting and sold out. In November the

-terminus of the overland mail route was moved west

-to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither the Union Pacific

-had now arrived in its course of construction. No

-wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke

-out in protest.</p>

-

-<p>As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">285</a></span>

-among those who must handle the tribes became

-apparent. The question of the management by the

-War Department or the Interior was in the air, and

-was raised again and again in Congress. More

-fundamental was the question of policy, upon which

-the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as any.

-"I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William,

-in 1867, "that Indian wars will not cease until all the

-Indian tribes are absorbed in our population, and

-can be controlled by constables instead of soldiers."

-Upon another phase of management Francis A.

-Walker wrote a little later: "There can be no question

-of national dignity involved in the treatment of

-savages by a civilized power. The proudest Anglo-Saxon

-will climb a tree with a bear behind him....

-With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question

-whether to fight, coax, or run is a question merely

-of what is safest or easiest in the situation given."

-That responsibility for some decided action lay

-heavily upon the whites may be implied from the

-admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the

-frontier well&mdash;"that, during more than a third of a

-century passed on the plains and in the mountains, he

-has never known of a war with the hostile tribes that

-was not caused by broken faith on the part of the

-United States or its agents." A professional Indian

-fighter, like Kit Carson, declared on oath that "as

-a general thing, the difficulties arise from aggressions

-on the part of the whites."</p>

-

-<p>In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">286</a></span>

-problem found spokesmen. The War and Interior

-departments had ample representation; the Western

-members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of

-the frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian

-sentiment that saw much good in the Indian

-and much evil in his treatment. But withal, when it

-came to special action upon any situation, Congress

-felt its lack of information. The departments best

-informed were partisan and antagonistic. Even

-to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship to

-determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and

-responsibility in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak,

-and the Chivington or the Fetterman massacre.

-To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness in the midst

-of interested parties Congress raised a committee

-of seven, three of the Senate and four of the House,

-in March, 1865, to investigate and report on the

-condition of the Indian tribes. The joint committee

-was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed

-debate on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne

-war ended and the Sioux broke out; the committee

-reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its investigation

-it divided itself into three groups to visit the

-Pacific Slope, the southern plains, and the northern

-plains. Its report, with the accompanying testimony,

-fills over five hundred pages. In all the storm centres

-of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and

-questioned.</p>

-

-<p>The <i>Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes</i>

-gave a doleful view of the future from the Indians'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">287</a></span>

-standpoint. General Pope was quoted to the effect

-that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars,

-cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration,

-"and by steady and resistless encroachments

-of the white emigration towards the west, which

-is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits,

-and driving off or killing the game, their only means

-of subsistence." To this catalogue of causes General

-Carleton, who must have believed his war of Apache

-and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of

-providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty

-originates, when in their appointed time He wills

-that one race of man&mdash;as in races of lower animals&mdash;shall

-disappear off the face of the earth and give place

-to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced

-out by Himself, which may be seen, but has reasons

-too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of mammoths

-and mastodons, and the great sloths, came

-and passed away; the red man of America is passing

-away!"</p>

-

-<p>The committee believed that the wars with their

-incidents of slaughter and extermination by both sides,

-as occasion offered, were generally the result of white

-encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing

-opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed

-over to the War Department, but recommended instead

-a system of visiting boards, each including a

-civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner,

-for the regular inspection of the tribes. The

-recommendation of the committee came to naught<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">288</a></span>

-in Congress, but the information it gathered, supplementing

-the annual reports of the Commissioner

-of Indian Affairs and the special investigations of

-single wars, gave much additional weight to the

-belief that a crisis was at hand.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne

-and Sioux wars dragged on. The Powder River

-country continued to be a field of battle, with

-Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867.

-In the spring of 1867 General Hancock destroyed

-a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern

-opinion came to demand more forcefully that this

-fighting should stop. Western opinion was equally

-insistent that the Indian must go, while General

-Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand

-was due to a desire for "the profit resulting

-from military occupation." Certain it was that war

-had lasted for several years with no definite results,

-save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of

-the Indians, and the philanthropy of the East. The

-army had had its chance. Now the time had come

-for general, real attempts at peace.</p>

-

-<p>The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March

-4, 1867, actually began its session at that time. Ordinarily

-it would have waited until December, but

-the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his

-reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early

-as the law allowed. Among the most significant of its

-measures in this extra session was "Mr. Henderson's

-bill for establishing peace with certain Indian tribes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">289</a></span>

-now at war with the United States," which, in the view

-of the <i>Nation</i>, was a "practical measure for the security

-of travel through the territories and for the selection

-of a new area sufficient to contain all the unsettled

-tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator

-Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect

-of this law, and the General had replied: "The fact

-is, this contact of the two races has caused universal

-hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered

-bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and

-hitting little parties who are off their guard. I have

-a much heavier force on the plains, but they are so

-large that it is impossible to guard at all points, and

-the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented

-our being able to collect a large force to go into the

-country where we believe the Indians have hid their

-families; viz. up on the Yellowstone and down on the

-Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than

-in treating at this time, yet he went on the commission

-erected by the act of July 20, 1867. By this law

-four civilians, including the Indian Commissioner, and

-three generals of the army, were appointed to collect

-and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects

-in view: to remove the existing causes of complaint,

-to secure the safety of the various continental

-railways and the overland routes, and to work out

-some means for promoting Indian civilization without

-impeding the advance of the United States. To

-this last end they were to hunt for permanent homes

-for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">290</a></span>

-the railways then chartered,&mdash;the Union Pacific,

-the Northern Pacific, and the Atlantic and Pacific.</p>

-

-<p>The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for

-fifteen months. When it rose at last, it had opened

-the way for the railways, so far as treaties could avail.

-It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and more

-remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations

-the breach between military and civil control had

-widened, so that the Commission was at the end

-divided against itself.</p>

-

-<p>On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at

-St. Louis and discussed plans for getting into touch

-with the tribes with whom it had to treat. "The

-first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview

-with the chiefs and leading warriors of these

-hostile tribes. They were roaming over an immense

-country, thousands of miles in extent, and much of it

-unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white

-race. Small war parties constantly emerging from

-this vast extent of unexplored country would suddenly

-strike the border settlements, killing the men

-and carrying off into captivity the women and children.

-Companies of workmen on the railroads, at

-points hundreds of miles from each other, would be

-attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour.

-Overland mail coaches could not be run without

-military escort, and railroad and mail stations unguarded

-by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All

-safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without

-soldiers was hazardous in the extreme; to go with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">291</a></span>

-them forbade reasonable hope of securing peaceful

-interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace

-Commission contained within itself the most useful

-of assistants. General Sherman and Commissioner

-Taylor sent out word to the Indians through the

-military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the

-tribes that the Commissioners desired to confer with

-them near Fort Laramie in September and Fort

-Larned in October.</p>

-

-<p>The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during

-the summer of 1867. After inspecting conditions on

-the upper Missouri the Commissioners proceeded to

-Omaha in September and thence to North Platte

-station on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they

-met Swift Bear of the Brulé Sioux and learned

-that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them

-until November. The Powder River War was still

-being fought by chiefs who could not be reached

-easily and whose delegations must be delayed.

-When the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie

-in November, they found matters little better. Red

-Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the Oglala

-and Brulé Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne,

-refused even to see the envoys, and sent them word:

-"that his war against the whites was to save the valley

-of the Powder River, the only hunting ground left

-to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us

-that whenever the military garrisons at Fort Philip

-Kearney and Fort C.&nbsp;F. Smith were withdrawn, the

-war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">292</a></span>

-Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no

-savages except a few non-hostile Crows, and having

-summoned Red Cloud to meet them during the following

-summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of

-hostilities until the council could be held."</p>

-

-<p>The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine

-Lodge Creek some eighty miles south of the Arkansas

-River. Before the Commissioners arrived here

-General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his

-place being taken by General C.&nbsp;C. Augur, whose

-name makes the eighth signature to the published

-report. For some time after the Commissioners

-arrived the Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained

-in their camp forty miles away from Medicine

-Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and

-Apache came to an agreement, while the others

-held off. On the 21st of October these ceded all

-their rights to occupy their great claims in the

-Southwest, the whole of the two panhandles of

-Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to confine themselves

-to a new reserve in the southwestern part of

-Indian Territory, between the Red River and the

-Washita, on lands taken from the Choctaw and

-Chickasaw in 1866.</p>

-

-<p>The Commissioners could not greatly blame the

-Arapaho and Cheyenne for their reluctance to

-treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular

-Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been

-massacred by Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly

-or not, they believed themselves betrayed, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">293</a></span>

-Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand

-Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in

-Kansas and Indian Territory, which was amended

-to nothingness when the Senate added to the treaty

-the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within

-the state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve;

-the new one had not been given them; yet

-for two years after 1865 they had generally kept the

-peace. Sherman travelled through this country in

-the autumn of 1866 and "met no trouble whatever,"

-although he heard rumors of Indian wars. In 1867,

-General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages

-on the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation,

-the Indians believed. After this there had

-been admitted war. The Indians had been on the

-war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and

-dodging the military parties, and were unable for

-some weeks to realize that the Peace Commissioners

-offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded

-to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October

-28, a treaty at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve

-was a bit of barren land nearly destitute of

-wood and water, and containing many streams that

-were either brackish or dry during most of the year.

-It was in the Cherokee Outlet, between the Arkansas

-and Cimarron rivers.</p>

-

-<p>The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of

-the summer's negotiations. The Peace Commission

-returned to Fort Laramie in the following spring to

-meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">294</a></span>

-Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were

-allied with them, made peace after the Commissioners

-had assented to the terms laid down by Red Cloud in

-1867. They had convinced themselves that the

-occupation of the Powder River Valley was both

-illegal and unjust, and accordingly the garrisons had

-been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger

-of Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic

-pusillanimity," wrote one of the pioneers, years

-later, denouncing the act, "the government ordered

-all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel."

-In the new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868,

-it was specifically agreed that the country east of the

-Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as unceded

-Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves

-to occupy as their permanent home the lands west of

-the Missouri, between the parallels of 43° and 46°, and

-east of the 104th meridian&mdash;an area coinciding to-day

-with the western end of South Dakota. Thus

-was begun the actual compression of the Sioux of

-the plains.</p>

-

-<p>The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners

-were the most important, but were not the only

-treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the relinquishment

-by the Indians of lands along the railroad's

-right of way. It had been found that rights

-of transit through the Indian Country, such as those

-secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient. The

-Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of

-travel, for peace and his own good.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">295</a></span>

-Most important of the other tribes shoved away

-from the route were the Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock,

-whose country lay across the great trail just

-west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their

-name to the territory of Utah, were to be found

-south of the trail, between it and the lower waters

-of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest

-in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most

-important being on the Uintah River in northeast

-Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute began to treat

-in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until 1868,

-when the southwestern third of Colorado was set

-apart for them. Active life in Colorado territory

-was at the start confined to the mountains in the

-vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were

-pushed down the slopes of the range on both sides.

-But as the eastern Sand Creek reserve soon had to be

-abolished, so Colorado began to growl at the western

-Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages

-were given better treatment than white citizens.

-The Shoshoni and Bannock ranged from Fort Hall

-to the north and were visited by General Augur

-at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results

-of his gifts and diplomacy the former were

-pushed up to the Wind River reserve in Wyoming

-territory, while the latter were granted a home

-around Fort Hall.</p>

-

-<p>The friction with the Indians was heaviest near

-the line of the old Indian frontier and tended to be

-lighter towards the west. It was natural enough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">296</a></span>

-that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the

-tribes had been colonized and where Indian population

-was most dense, the difficulties should be

-greatest. Indeed the only wars which were sufficiently

-important to count as resistance to the westward

-movement were those of the plains tribes and

-were fought east of the continental divide. The

-mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated

-from the main movements. Yet these great plains

-that now had to be abandoned had been set aside

-as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of

-Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners

-all agreed that the time had come to

-change it.</p>

-

-<p>The influence of the humanitarians dominated

-the report of the Commissioners, which was signed in

-January, 1868. Wherever possible, the side of the

-Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was

-an "indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled

-in the "records of the Indian barbarity"; General

-Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the Cheyenne

-at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to

-the existence of a war: Fetterman had been killed

-because "the civil and military departments of our

-government cannot, or will not, understand each

-other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility,

-and the "revolting" history of the removal policy

-was described. It had been the result of this policy

-to promote barbarism rather than civilization.

-"But one thing then remains to be done with honor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">297</a></span>

-to the nation, and that is to select a district, or districts

-of country, as indicated by Congress, on which

-all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be

-gathered. For each district let a territorial government

-be established, with powers adapted to the

-ends designed. The governor should be a man of

-unquestioned integrity and purity of character;

-he should be paid such salary as to place him

-above temptation." He should be given adequate

-powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of

-progressive civilization. The belief that under

-American conditions the Indian problem was insoluble

-was confirmed by this report of the Peace

-Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as

-they were. After their condemnation of an existing

-removal policy, the only remedy which they could

-offer was another policy of concentration and

-removal.</p>

-

-<p>The Commissioners recommended that the Indians

-should be colonized on two reserves, north and

-south of the railway lines respectively. The southern

-reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized

-tribes, known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners

-thought a total of 86,000 could be settled

-within a few years. A northern district might be

-located north of Nebraska, within the area which

-they later allotted to the Sioux; 54,000 could be

-colonized here. Individual savages might be allowed

-to own land and be incorporated among the citizens

-of the Western states, but most of the tribes ought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">298</a></span>

-to be settled in the two Indian territories, while this

-removal policy should be the last.</p>

-

-<p>Upon the vexed question of civilian or military

-control the Commissioners were divided. They

-believed that both War and Interior departments

-were too busy to give proper attention to the wards,

-and recommended an independent department for

-the Indians. In October, 1868, they reversed this

-report and, under military influence, spoke strongly

-for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the War

-Department. "We have now selected and provided

-reservations for all, off the great roads," wrote

-General Sherman to his brother in September, 1868.

-"All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are

-hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will

-have a sort of predatory war for years, every now

-and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder

-of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large,

-and the advantage of the Indians so great, that

-we cannot make a single war and end it. From

-the nature of things we must take chances and clean

-out Indians as we encounter them." Although it

-was the tendency of military control to provoke Indian

-wars, the army was near the truth in its notion

-that Indians and whites could not live together.</p>

-

-<p>The way across the continent was opened by these

-treaties of 1867 and 1868, and the Union Pacific

-hurried to take advantage of it. The other Pacific

-railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific,

-were so slow in using their charters that hope in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">299</a></span>

-construction was nearly abandoned, but the chief

-enterprise neared completion before the inauguration

-of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming,

-rather than the statue of Columbus which Benton

-had foreseen, was perched upon the summit of the

-Rockies as its monument.</p>

-

-<p>Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping

-pace with western development during the decade

-of the Civil War. The United States itself had made

-no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and

-allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered

-through a thousand volumes of government documents.

-Even Indian agents and army officers were

-often as ignorant of the facts as was the general

-public. "All Americans have some knowledge of

-the country west of the Mississippi," lamented the

-<i>Nation</i> in 1868, but "there is no book of travel relating

-to those regions which does more than add to a

-mass of very desultory information. Few men have

-more than the most unconnected and unmethodical

-knowledge of the vast expanse of territory which

-lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth

-must have ceased to be in the West; probably,

-as we write, Denver has become an Eastern city,

-and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the

-marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life....

-A man talks to us of the country west of the Rocky

-Mountains, and while he is talking, the Territory

-of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor

-his auditors have before heard."</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">300</a></span></p>

-

-<div id="ip_300" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-326.jpg" width="600" height="448" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The West in 1863</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the Southwest.

-In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming followed in 1868.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>In that division of the plains which was sketched

-out in the fifties, the great amorphous eastern territories

-of Kansas and Nebraska met on the summit

-of the Rockies the great western territories of

-Washington, Utah, and New Mexico. The gold

-booms had broken up all of these. Arizona, Nevada,

-Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found

-their excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada

-entered the Union, with Nebraska following

-in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first

-parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">301</a></span>

-To the north, in the region of the great river valleys,&mdash;Green,

-Big Horn, Powder, Platte, and Sweetwater,&mdash;the

-precious metals were not found in

-quantities which justified exploitation earlier than

-1867. But in that year moderate discoveries on

-the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal

-camps of the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a

-scheme for a new territory.</p>

-

-<p>The Sweetwater mines, without causing any

-great excitement, brought a few hundred men to the

-vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was

-established, a county was organized, a newspaper

-was brought into life at Fort Bridger. If the railway

-had not appeared at the same time, the foundation

-for a territory would probably have been too slight.

-But the Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg

-early in 1867, extended its terminus to a new town,

-Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in

-the spring of 1868.</p>

-

-<p>Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the

-Union Pacific advanced to its site. It had a better

-prospect of life than had most of the mushroom

-cities that accompanied the westward course of the

-railroad, because it was the natural junction point

-for Denver trade. Colorado had been much disappointed

-at its own failure to induce the Union Pacific

-managers to put Denver City on the main line of

-the road, and felt injured when compelled to do its

-business through Cheyenne. But just because of

-this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">302</a></span>

-rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an

-orderly or reputable population that it had during

-the first months of its existence, but, to its good

-fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off

-the worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868.

-Cheyenne was left with an overlarge town site,

-but with some real excuse for existence. Most of

-the terminal towns vanished completely when the

-railroad moved on.</p>

-

-<p>A new territory for the country north of Colorado

-had been talked about as early as 1861. Since the creation

-of Montana territory in 1864, this area had been

-attached, obviously only temporarily, to Dakota.

-Now, with the mining and railway influences at work,

-the population made appeal to the Dakota legislature

-and to Congress for independence. "Without opposition

-or prolonged discussion," as Bancroft puts it,

-the new territory was created by Congress in July,

-1868. It was called Wyoming, just escaping the

-names of Lincoln and Cheyenne, and received as

-bounds the parallels of 41° and 45°, and the meridians

-of 27° and 34°, west of Washington.</p>

-

-<p>For several years after the Sioux treaties of 1868

-and the erection of Wyoming territory, the Indians

-of the northern plains kept the peace. The routes of

-travel had been opened, the white claim to the

-Powder River Valley had been surrendered, and a

-great northern reserve had been created in the

-Black Hills country of southern Dakota. All

-these, by lessening contact, removed the danger of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">303</a></span>

-Indian friction. But the southern tribes were

-still uneasy,&mdash;treacherous or ill-treated, according

-as the sources vary,&mdash;and one more war was needed

-before they could be compelled to settle down.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">304</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID</span></h2>

-

-<p>Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations

-determined the condition of the frontier, none

-admitted that it desired to provoke Indian wars.

-The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish

-to be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian

-agents lost their authority and many of their perquisites

-during war time. The army and the frontiersmen

-denied that they were belligerent. "I assert,"

-wrote Custer, "and all candid persons familiar

-with the subject will sustain the assertion, that of all

-classes of our population the army and the people

-living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of

-an Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest

-sacrifices to avoid its horrors." To fix the responsibility

-for the wars which repeatedly occurred, despite

-the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls for

-the examination of individual episodes in large number.

-It is easier to acquit the first two classes than

-the last two. There are enough instances in which

-the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep the

-peace to establish the belief that a policy combining

-benevolence, equity, and relentless firmness in punishing

-wrong-doers, white or red, could have maintained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">305</a></span>

-friendly relations with ease. The Indian

-agents were hampered most by their inability to

-enforce the laws intrusted to them for execution,

-and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying agreements

-and of Congress in voting supplies. The

-frontiersmen, with their isolated homesteads lying

-open to surprise and destruction, would seem to be

-sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly they

-thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted

-Indian title, while their personal relations

-with the red men were commonly marked by fear

-and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and

-better administration than the Indian Bureau,

-overdid its work, being unable to think of the Indians

-as anything but public enemies and treating

-them with an arbitrary curtness that would have

-been dangerous even among intelligent whites. The

-history of the southwest Indians, after the Sand

-Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially

-ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances

-which led to their destruction.</p>

-

-<p>After the battle at Sand Creek, the southwest

-tribes agreed to a series of treaties in 1865 by which

-new reserves were promised them on the borderland

-of Kansas and Indian Territory. These treaties

-were so amended by the Senate that for a time

-the tribes had no admitted homes or rights save the

-guaranteed hunting privileges on the plains south of

-the Platte. They seem generally to have been peaceful

-during 1866, in spite of the rather shabby treatment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">306</a></span>

-which the neglect of Congress procured for

-them. In 1867 uneasiness became apparent. Agent

-E.&nbsp;W. Wynkoop, of Sand Creek fame, was now in

-charge of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache tribes

-in the vicinity of Fort Larned, on the Santa Fé trail

-in Kansas. In 1866 they had "complained of the

-government not having fulfilled its promises to them,

-and of numerous impositions practised upon them

-by the whites." Some of their younger braves had

-gone on the war-path. But Wynkoop claimed to

-have quieted them, and by March, 1867, thought

-that they were "well satisfied and quiet, and anxious

-to retain the peaceful relations now existing."</p>

-

-<p>The military authorities at Fort Dodge, farther

-up the Arkansas and near the old Santa Fé crossing,

-were less certain than Wynkoop that the Indians

-meant well. Little Raven, of the Arapaho, and

-Satanta, "principal chief" of the Kiowa, were reported

-as sending in insulting messages to the troops,

-ordering them to cut no more wood, to leave the

-country, to keep wagons off the Santa Fé trail.

-Occasional thefts of stock and forays were reported

-along the trail. Custer thought that there was

-"positive evidence from the agents themselves"

-that the Indians were guilty, the trouble only being

-that Wynkoop charged the guilt on the Kiowa

-and Comanche, while J.&nbsp;H. Leavenworth, agent

-for these tribes, asserted their innocence and accused

-the wards of Wynkoop.</p>

-

-<p>The Department of the Missouri, in which these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">307</a></span>

-tribes resided, was under the command of Major-general

-Winfield Scott Hancock in the spring of 1867.

-With a desire to promote the tranquillity of his command,

-Hancock prepared for an expedition on the

-plains as early as the roads would permit. He wrote

-of this intention to both of the agents, asking them

-to accompany him, "to show that the officers of the

-government are acting in harmony." His object

-was not necessarily war, but to impress upon the

-Indians his ability "to chastise any tribes who may

-molest people who are travelling across the plains."

-In each of the letters he listed the complaints against

-the respective tribes&mdash;failure to deliver murderers,

-outrages on the Smoky Hill route in 1866, alliances

-with the Sioux, hostile incursions into Texas, and

-the specially barbarous Box murder. In this last

-affair one James Box had been murdered by the

-Kiowas, and his wife and five daughters carried off.

-The youngest of these, a baby, died in a few days, the

-mother stated, and they "took her from me and

-threw her into a ravine." Ultimately the mother

-and three of the children were ransomed from the

-Kiowas after Mrs. Box and her eldest daughter,

-Margaret, had been passed around from chief to chief

-for more than two months. Custer wrote up this

-outrage with much exaggeration, but the facts were

-bad enough.</p>

-

-<p>With both agents present, Hancock advanced to

-Fort Larned. "It is uncertain whether war will

-be the result of the expedition or not," he declared<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">308</a></span>

-in general orders of March 26, 1867, thus admitting

-that a state of war did not at that time exist. "It

-will depend upon the temper and behavior of the

-Indians with whom we may come in contact. We go

-prepared for war and will make it if a proper occasion

-presents." The tribes which he proposed to visit

-were roaming indiscriminately over the country

-traversed by the Santa Fé trail, in accordance with

-the treaties of 1865, which permitted them, until they

-should be settled upon their reserves, to hunt at

-will over the plains south of the Platte, subject only

-to the restriction that they must not camp within ten

-miles of the main roads and trails. It was Hancock's

-intention to enforce this last provision, and more,

-to insist "upon their keeping off the main lines of

-travel, where their presence is calculated to bring

-about collisions with the whites."</p>

-

-<p>The first conference with the Indians was held at

-Fort Larned, where the "principal chiefs of the Dog

-Soldiers of the Cheyennes" had been assembled by

-Agent Wynkoop. Leavenworth thought that the

-chiefs here had been very friendly, but Wynkoop

-criticised the council as being held after sunset,

-which was contrary to Indian custom and calculated

-"to make them feel suspicious." At this council

-General Hancock reprimanded the chiefs and told

-them that he would visit their village, occupied by

-themselves and an almost equal number of Sioux;

-which village, said Wynkoop, "was 35 miles from

-any travelled road." "Why don't he confine the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">309</a></span>

-troops to the great line of travel?" demanded Leavenworth,

-whose wards had the same privilege of hunting

-south of the Arkansas that those of Wynkoop

-had between the Arkansas and the Platte. So long

-as they camped ten miles from the roads, this was

-their right.</p>

-

-<p>Contrary to Wynkoop's urgings, Hancock led his

-command from Fort Larned on April 13, 1867,

-moving for the main Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux

-village on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles west of the

-post. With cavalry, infantry, artillery, and a pontoon

-train, it was hard for him to assume any

-other appearance than that of war. Even the

-General's particular assurance, as Custer puts it,

-"that he was not there to make war, but to promote

-peace," failed to convince the chiefs who had attended

-the night council. It was not a pleasant

-march. The snow was nearly a foot deep, fodder was

-scarce, and the Indian disposition was uncertain.

-Only a few had come in to the Fort Larned conference,

-and none appeared at camp after the first day's

-march. After this refusal to meet him, Hancock

-marched on to the village, in front of which he

-found some three hundred Indians drawn up in

-battle array. Fighting seemed imminent, but at

-last Roman Nose, Bull Bear, and other chiefs met

-Hancock between the lines and agreed upon an evening

-conference. It developed that the men alone

-were left at the Indian camp. Women and children,

-with all the movables they could handle, had fled out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">310</a></span>

-upon the snowy plains at the approach of the troops.

-Fear of another Sand Creek had caused it, said

-Wynkoop. But Hancock chose to regard this as

-evidence of a treacherous disposition, demanded that

-the fugitives return at once, and insisted upon encamping

-near the village against the protest of the

-chiefs. Instead of bringing back their people, the

-men themselves abandoned the village that evening,

-while Hancock, learning of the flight, surrounded

-and took possession of it. The next morning,

-April 15, Custer was sent with cavalry in pursuit

-of the flying bands. Depredations occurring to the

-north of Pawnee Fork within a day or two, Hancock

-burned the village in retaliation and proceeded to

-Fort Dodge. Wynkoop insisted that the Cheyenne

-and Arapaho had been entirely innocent and that

-these injuries had been committed by the Sioux. "I

-have no doubt," he wrote, "but that they think that

-war has been forced upon them."</p>

-

-<p>When Hancock started upon the plains, there was

-no war, but there was no doubt about its existence

-as the spring advanced. When the Peace Commissioners

-of this year came with their protestations

-of benevolence for the Great Father, it was small

-wonder that the Cheyenne and Arapaho had to be

-coaxed into the camp on the Medicine Lodge Creek.

-And when the treaties there made failed of prompt

-execution by the United States, the war naturally

-dragged on in a desultory way during 1868 and 1869.</p>

-

-<p>In the spring of 1868 General Sheridan, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">311</a></span>

-had succeeded Hancock in command of the Department

-of the Missouri, visited the posts at Fort Larned

-and Fort Dodge. Here on Pawnee and Walnut

-creeks most of the southwest Indians were congregated.

-Wynkoop, in February and April, reported

-them as happy and quiet. They were destitute,

-to be sure, and complained that the Commissioners

-at Medicine Lodge had promised them arms and

-ammunition which had not been delivered. Indeed,

-the treaty framed there had not yet been ratified.

-But he believed it possible to keep them contented

-and wean them from their old habits. To Sheridan

-the situation seemed less happy. He declined to

-hold a council with the complaining chiefs on the

-ground that the whole matter was yet in the hands

-of the Peace Commission, but he saw that the young

-men were chafing and turbulent and that frontier

-hostilities would accompany the summer buffalo hunt.</p>

-

-<p>There is little doubt of the destitution which prevailed

-among the plains tribes at this time. The

-rapid diminution of game was everywhere observable.

-The annuities at best afforded only partial

-relief, while Congress was irregular in providing

-funds. Three times during the spring the Commissioner

-prodded the Secretary of the Interior, who

-in turn prodded Congress, with the result that

-instead of the $1,000,000 asked for $500,000 were,

-in July, 1868, granted to be spent not by the Indian

-Office, but by the War Department. Three weeks

-later General Sherman created an organization for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">312</a></span>

-distributing this charity, placing the district south

-of Kansas in command of General Hazen. Meanwhile,

-the time for making the spring issues of

-annuity goods had come. It was ordered in June

-that no arms or ammunition should be given to the

-Cheyenne and Arapaho because of their recent

-bad conduct; but in July the Commissioner, influenced

-by the great dissatisfaction on the part of the

-tribes, and fearing "that these Indians, by reason of

-such non-delivery of arms, ammunition, and goods,

-will commence hostilities against the whites in their

-vicinity, modified the order and telegraphed Agent

-Wynkoop that he might use his own discretion in the

-matter: "If you are satisfied that the issue of the

-arms and ammunition is necessary to preserve the

-peace, and that no evil will result from their delivery,

-let the Indians have them." A few days previously

-on July 20, Wynkoop had issued the ordinary supplies

-to his Arapaho and Apache, his Cheyenne

-refusing to take anything until they could have the

-guns as well. "They felt much disappointed, but

-gave no evidence of being angry ... and would

-wait with patience for the Great Father to take pity

-upon them." The permission from the Commissioner

-was welcomed by the agent, and approved

-by Thomas Murphy, his superintendent. Murphy

-had been ordered to Fort Larned to reënforce Wynkoop's

-judgment. He held a council on August 1

-with Little Raven and the Arapaho and Apache,

-and issued them their arms. "Raven and the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">313</a></span>

-chiefs then promised that these arms should never

-be used against the whites, and Agent Wynkoop

-then delivered to the Arapahoes 160 pistols, 80

-Lancaster rifles, 12 kegs of powder, 1˝ keg of lead,

-and 15,000 caps; and to the Apaches he gave 40

-pistols, 20 Lancaster rifles, 3 kegs of powder,

-˝ keg of lead, and 5000 caps." The Cheyenne

-came in a few days later for their share, which

-Wynkoop handed over on the 9th. "They were

-delighted at receiving the goods," he reported,

-"particularly the arms and ammunition, and

-never before have I known them to be better

-satisfied and express themselves as being so well

-contented." The fact that within three days murders

-were committed by the Cheyenne on the Solomon

-and Saline forks throws doubt upon the sincerity

-of their protestations.</p>

-

-<p>The war party which commenced the active hostilities

-of 1868 at a time so well calculated to throw

-discredit upon the wisdom of the Indian Office,

-had left the Cheyenne village early in August,

-"smarting under their <i>supposed</i> wrongs," as Wynkoop

-puts it. They were mostly Cheyenne, with

-a small number of Arapaho and a few visiting

-Sioux, about 200 in all. Little Raven's son and

-a brother of White Antelope, who died at Sand

-Creek, were with them; Black Kettle is said to have

-been their leader. On August 7 some of them

-spent the evening at Fort Hays, where they held a

-powwow at the post. "Black Kettle loves his white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">314</a></span>

-soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he

-meets them and shakes their hands in friendship,"

-is the way the post-trader, Hill P. Wilson, reported

-his speech. "The white soldiers ought to be glad

-all the time, because their ponies are so big and so

-strong, and because they have so many guns and

-so much to eat.... All other Indians may take

-the war trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep

-friendship with his white brothers." Three nights

-later they began to kill on Saline River, and on the

-11th they crossed to the Solomon. Some fifteen

-settlers were killed, and five women were carried off.

-Here this particular raid stopped, for the news

-had got abroad, and the frontier was instantly in

-arms. Various isolated forays occurred, so that

-Sheridan was sure he had a general war upon his

-hands. He believed nearly all the young men of

-the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche to

-be in the war parties, the old women, men, and

-children remaining around the posts and professing

-solicitous friendship. There were 6000 potential

-warriors in all, and that he might better devote

-himself to suppressing them, Sheridan followed the

-Kansas Pacific to its terminus at Fort Hays and there

-established his headquarters in the field.</p>

-

-<p>The war of 1868 ranged over the whole frontier

-south of the Platte trail. It influenced the Peace

-Commission, at its final meeting in October, 1868,

-to repudiate many of the pacific theories of January

-and recommend that the Indians be handed over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">315</a></span>

-to the War Department. Sheridan, who had led

-the Commission to this conclusion, was in the field

-directing the movement. His policy embraced a

-concentration of the peaceful bands south of the

-Arkansas, and a relentless war against the rest. It

-is fairly clear that the war need not have come, had

-it not been for the cross-purposes ever apparent between

-the Indian Office and the War Department,

-and even within the War Department itself.</p>

-

-<p>At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared for war. He had,

-at the start, about 2600 men, nearly equally divided

-among cavalry and infantry. Believing his force

-too small to cover the whole plains between Fort

-Hays and Denver, he called for reënforcements,

-receiving a part of the Fifth Cavalry and a regiment

-of Kansas volunteers. With enthusiasm this last

-addition was raised among the frontiersmen, where

-Indian fighting was popular; the governor of the

-state resigned his office to become its colonel.

-September and October were occupied in getting the

-troops together, keeping the trails open for traffic,

-and establishing, about a hundred miles south of

-Fort Dodge, a rendezvous which was known as

-Camp Supply. It was the intention to protect

-the frontier during the autumn, and to follow up

-the Indian villages after winter had fallen, catching

-the tribes when they would be concentrated and at a

-disadvantage.</p>

-

-<p>On October 15, 1868, Sherman, just from the

-Chicago meeting of the Peace Commissioners<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">316</a></span>

-and angry because he had there been told that the

-army wanted war, gave Sheridan a free hand for the

-winter campaign. "As to 'extermination,' it is

-for the Indians themselves to determine. We don't

-want to exterminate or even to fight them....

-The present war ... was begun and carried on by

-the Indians in spite of our entreaties and in spite

-of our warnings, and the only question to us is,

-whether we shall allow the progress of our western

-settlements to be checked, and leave the Indians

-free to pursue their bloody career, or accept their

-war and fight them.... We ... accept the war

-... and hereby resolve to make its end final....

-I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our

-troops from doing what they deem proper on the

-spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges

-of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but

-will use all the powers confided to me to the end

-that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our

-civilization, shall not again be able to begin and

-carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext

-that they may choose to allege."</p>

-

-<p>The plan of campaign provided that the main

-column, Custer in immediate command, should

-march from Fort Hays directly against the Indians,

-by way of Camp Supply; two smaller columns

-were to supplement this, one marching in on Indian

-Territory from New Mexico, and the other from

-Fort Lyon on the old Sand Creek reserve. Detachments

-of the chief column began to move in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">317</a></span>

-middle of November, Custer reaching the depot at

-Camp Supply ahead of the rest, while the Kansas

-volunteers lost themselves in heavy snow-storms.

-On November 23 Custer was ordered out of Camp

-Supply, on the north fork of the Canadian, to follow

-a fresh trail which led southwest towards the Washita

-River, near the eastern line of Texas. He pushed on

-as rapidly as twelve inches of snow would allow,

-discovering in the early morning of November 27 a

-large camp in the valley of the Washita.</p>

-

-<p>It was Black Kettle's camp of Cheyenne and

-Arapaho that they had found in a strip of heavy

-timber along the river. After reconnoitring Custer

-divided his force into four columns for simultaneous

-attacks upon the sleeping village. At daybreak

-"my men charged the village and reached the lodges

-before the Indians were aware of our presence. The

-moment the charge was ordered the band struck

-up 'Garry Owen,' and with cheers that strongly

-reminded me of scenes during the war, every trooper,

-led by his officer, rushed towards the village." For

-several hours a promiscuous fight raged up and down

-the ravine, with Indians everywhere taking to cover,

-only to be prodded out again. Fifty-one lodges in all

-fell into Custer's hands; 103 dead Indians, including

-Black Kettle himself, were found later. "We

-captured in good condition 875 horses, ponies, and

-mules; 241 saddles, some of very fine and costly

-workmanship; 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins

-for lodges, 160 untanned robes, 210 axes, 140<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">318</a></span>

-hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535 pounds of

-powder, 1050 pounds of lead, 4000 arrows and arrowheads,

-75 spears, 90 bullet moulds, 35 bows and

-quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds of bullets, 775

-lariats, 940 buckskin saddle-bags, 470 blankets,

-93 coats, 700 pounds of tobacco."</p>

-

-<p>As the day advanced, Custer's triumph seemed

-likely to turn into defeat. The Cheyenne village

-proved to be only the last of a long string of villages

-that extended down the Washita for fifteen miles or

-more, and whose braves rode up by hundreds to see

-the fight. A general engagement was avoided, however,

-and with better luck and more discretion than

-he was one day to have, Custer marched back to

-Camp Supply on December 3, his band playing

-gayly the tune of battle, "Garry Owen." The

-commander in his triumphal procession was followed

-by his scouts and trailers, and the captives of his

-prowess&mdash;a long train of Indian widows and orphans.</p>

-

-<p>The decisive blow which broke the power of the

-southwest tribes had been struck, and Black Kettle

-had carried on his last raid,&mdash;if indeed he had carried

-on this one at all&mdash;but as the reports came in it

-became evident that the merits of the triumph were

-in doubt. The Eastern humanitarians were shocked

-at the cold-blooded attack upon a camp of sleeping

-men, women, and children, forgetting that if Indians

-were to be fought this was the most successful way to

-do it, and was no shock to the Indians' own ideals

-of warfare and attack. The deeper question was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">319</a></span>

-whether this camp was actually hostile, whether the

-tribes had not abandoned the war-path in good faith,

-whether it was fair to crush a tribe that with apparent

-earnestness begged peace because it could not control

-the excesses of some of its own braves. It became

-certain, at least, that the War Department itself

-had fallen victim to that vice with which it had so

-often reproached the Indian Office&mdash;failure to

-produce a harmony of action among several branches

-of the service.</p>

-

-<p>The Indian Office had no responsibility for the

-battle of the Washita. It had indeed issued arms

-to the Cheyenne in August, but only with the approval

-of the military officer commanding Forts

-Larned and Dodge, General Alfred Sully, "an

-officer of long experience in Indian affairs." In the

-early summer all the tribes had been near these forts

-and along the Santa Fé trail. After Congress had

-voted its half million to feed the hungry, Sherman

-had ordered that the peaceful hungry among the

-southern tribes should be moved from this locality

-to the vicinity of old Fort Cobb, in the west end of

-Indian Territory on the Washita River.</p>

-

-<p>During September, while Sheridan was gathering

-his armament at Fort Hays, Sherman was ordering

-the agents to take their peaceful charges to Fort

-Cobb. With the major portion of the tribes at war

-it would be impossible for the troops to make any

-discrimination unless there should be an absolute

-separation between the well-disposed and the warlike.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">320</a></span>

-He proposed to allow the former a reasonable

-time to get to their new abode and then beg the

-President for an order "declaring all Indians who

-remain outside of their lawful reservations" to be

-outlaws. He believed that by going to war these

-tribes had violated their hunting rights. Superintendent

-Murphy thought he saw another Sand

-Creek in these preparations. Here were the tribes

-ordered to Fort Cobb; their fall annuity goods were

-on the way thither for distribution; and now the

-military column was marching in the same direction.</p>

-

-<p>In the meantime General W.&nbsp;B. Hazen had arrived

-at Fort Cobb on November 7 and had immediately

-voiced his fear that "General Sheridan, acting under

-the impression of hostiles, may attack bands of Comanche

-and Kiowa before they reach this point."

-He found, however, most of these tribes, who had not

-gone to war this season, encamped within reach on

-the Canadian and Washita rivers,&mdash;5000 of the Comanche

-and 1500 of the Kiowa. Within a few days

-Cheyenne and Arapaho began to join the settlements

-in the district, Black Kettle bringing in his

-band to the Washita, forty miles east of Antelope

-Hills, and coming in person to Fort Cobb for an

-interview with General Hazen on November 20.</p>

-

-<p>"I have always done my best," he protested, "to

-keep my young men quiet, but some will not listen,

-and since the fighting began I have not been able to

-keep them all at home. But we all want peace."

-To which added Big Mouth, of the Arapaho: "I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">321</a></span>

-came to you because I wish to do right.... I do not

-want war, and my people do not, but although we

-have come back south of the Arkansas, the soldiers

-follow us and continue fighting, and we want you to

-send out and stop these soldiers from coming against

-us."</p>

-

-<p>To these, General Hazen, fearful as he was of an

-unjust attack, responded with caution. Sherman

-had spoken of Fort Cobb in his orders to Sheridan, as

-"aimed to hold out the olive branch with one hand

-and the sword in the other. But it is not thereby

-intended that any hostile Indians shall make use

-of that establishment as a refuge from just punishment

-for acts already done. Your military control

-over that reservation is as perfect as over Kansas, and

-if hostile Indians retreat within that reservation, ...

-they may be followed even to Fort Cobb, captured,

-and punished." It is difficult to see what could

-constitute the fact of peaceful intent if coming in

-to Fort Cobb did not. But Hazen gave to Black

-Kettle cold comfort: "I am sent here as a peace

-chief; all here is to be peace; but north of the

-Arkansas is General Sheridan, the great war chief, and

-I do not control him; and he has all the soldiers who

-are fighting the Arapahoes and Cheyennes.... If

-the soldiers come to fight, you must remember they

-are not from me, but from that great war chief, and

-with him you must make peace.... I cannot stop

-the war.... You must not come in again unless I

-send for you, and you must keep well out beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">322</a></span>

-the friendly Kiowas and Comanches." So he sent

-the suitors away and wrote, on November 22, to

-Sherman for more specific instructions covering these

-cases. He believed that Black Kettle and Big Mouth

-were themselves sincere, but doubted their control

-over their bands. These were the bands which

-Custer destroyed before the week was out, and it is

-probable that during the fight they were reënforced

-by braves from the friendly lodges of Satanta's

-Kiowa and Little Raven's Arapaho.</p>

-

-<p>Whatever might have been a wise policy in treating

-semi-hostile Indian tribes, this one was certainly unsatisfactory.

-It is doubtful whether the war was ever

-so great as Sherman imagined it. The injured tribes

-were unquestionably drawn to Fort Cobb by a desire

-for safety; the army was in the position of seeming

-to use the olive branch to assemble the Indians in order

-that the sword might the better disperse them.

-There is reasonable doubt whether Black Kettle

-had anything to do with the forays. Murphy believed

-in him and cited many evidences of his friendly

-disposition, while Wynkoop asserted positively that

-he had been encamped on Pawnee Fork all through

-the time when he was alleged to have been committing

-depredations on the Saline. The army alone had

-been no more successful in producing obvious justice

-than the army and Indian Office together had been.

-Yet whatever the merits of the case, the power of the

-Cheyenne and their neighbors was permanently gone.</p>

-

-<p>During the winter of 1868&ndash;1869 Sheridan's army<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">323</a></span>

-remained in the vicinity of Fort Cobb, gathering the

-remnants of the shattered tribes in upon their reservation.

-The Kiowa and Comanche were placed at

-last on the lands awarded them at the Medicine Lodge

-treaties, while the Arapaho and Cheyenne once

-more had their abiding-place changed in August, 1869,

-and were settled down along the upper waters of the

-Washita, around the valley of their late defeat.</p>

-

-<p>The long controversy between the War and Interior

-departments over the management of the tribes entered

-upon a new stage with the inauguration of

-Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his

-administration was a bill erecting a board of civilian

-Indian commissioners to advise the Indian Department

-and promote the civilization of the tribes.

-A generous grant of two millions accompanied the

-act. More care was used in the appointment of

-agents than had hitherto been taken, and the immediate

-results seemed good when the Commissioner

-wrote his annual report in December, 1869. But the

-worst of the troubles with the Indians of the plains

-was over, so that without special effort peace could

-now have been the result.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">324</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS</span></h2>

-

-<p>Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains

-made their last stand in front of the invading white

-man overland travel had begun; ten years before,

-Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic

-Whitney and the leadership of more practical men,

-had provided for a survey of railroad routes along

-the trails; on the eve of the struggle the earliest continental

-railway had received its charter; and the

-struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in

-1867, sent out its Peace Commission to prepare an

-open way. That the tribes must yield was as inevitable

-as it was that their yielding must be ungracious

-and destructive to them. Too weak to compel their

-enemy to respect their rights, and uncertain what their

-rights were, they were too low in intelligence to realize

-that the more they struggled, the worse would be their

-suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in

-which the iron band was put across the continent.

-Its completion and their subjection came in 1869.</p>

-

-<p>After years of tedious debate the earliest of the

-Pacific railways was chartered in 1862. The withdrawal

-of southern claims had made possible an

-agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">325</a></span>

-engendered by the Civil War gave to the project its

-final impetus. Under the management of the Central

-Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and two

-or three border railways, provision was made for a

-road from the Iowa border to California. Land grants

-and bond subsidies were for two years dangled

-before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt

-to entice them to construct it. Only after these

-were increased in 1864 did active organization begin,

-while at the end of 1865 but forty miles of the Union

-Pacific had been built.</p>

-

-<p>Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the

-Pacific Ocean was easily the greatest engineering feat

-that America had undertaken. In their day the

-Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania

-Portage Railway had ranked among the

-American wonders, but none of these had been accompanied

-by the difficult problems that bristled

-along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must

-be laid across plain and desert, through hostile Indian

-country and over mountains. Worse yet, the road

-could hope for little aid from the country through

-which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson,

-Salt Lake, and Denver, the last of which it missed by

-a hundred miles, its course lay through unsettled

-wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the

-trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected

-themselves across the continent, relying, up to the

-moment of joining, upon the firm anchorage of the

-termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">326</a></span>

-Equally trying, though different in variety, were the

-difficulties attendant upon construction at either end.</p>

-

-<p>The impetus which Judah had given to the Central

-Pacific had started the western end of the system

-two years ahead of the eastern, but had not produced

-great results at first. It was hard work building east

-into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging,

-tunnelling, filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade

-down and the curvature out. Twenty miles a year

-only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865, thirty

-in 1866, and forty-six in 1867&mdash;one hundred and

-thirty-six miles during the first five years of work.

-Nature had done her best to impede the progress of

-the road by thrusting mountains and valleys across

-its route. But she had covered the mountains with

-timber and filled them with stone, so that materials of

-construction were easily accessible along all of the

-costliest part of the line. Bridges and trestles could

-be built anywhere with local material. The labor

-problem vexed the Central Pacific managers at the

-start. It was a scanty and inefficient supply of

-workmen that existed in California when construction

-began. Like all new countries, California possessed

-more work than workmen. Economic independence

-was to be had almost for the asking. Free land and

-fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work for

-hire. The slight results of the first five years were

-due as much to lack of labor as to refractory roadway

-or political opposition. But by 1865 the employment

-of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">327</a></span>

-the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker,

-who was the most active constructor, brought

-a new rapidity into construction. "I used to go

-up and down that road in my car like a mad

-bull," Crocker dictated to Bancroft's stenographer,

-"stopping along wherever there was anything amiss,

-and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up

-to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles

-began. California could manufacture no iron. Rolling

-stock and rails had to be imported from Europe

-or the East, and came to San Francisco after the

-costly sea voyage, <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">via</i> Panama or the Horn. But

-the men directing the Central Pacific&mdash;Stanford,

-Crocker, Huntington, and the rest&mdash;rose to the difficulties,

-and once they had passed the mountains, fairly

-romped across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.</p>

-

-<p>The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies

-than did the California terminus, yet until 1867 no

-railroad from the East reached Council Bluffs, where

-the President had determined that the Union Pacific

-should begin. There had been railway connection

-to the Missouri River at St. Joseph since 1859, and

-various lines were hurrying across Iowa in the sixties,

-but for more than two years of construction the Union

-Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the

-Missouri steamers or the laborious prairie schooners.

-Until its railway connection was established its

-difficulty in this respect was only less great than that

-of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">328</a></span>

-Union Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following

-the old Platte trail, flat and smooth as the

-best highways, its construction gangs could do the light

-grading as rapidly as the finished single track could

-deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful

-culverts and trestles there was little material at

-hand. The willows and Cottonwood lining the river

-would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its

-wood as it needed it, often within sight of its track.

-The Union Pacific had to haul much of its wood and

-stone, like its iron, from its eastern terminus.</p>

-

-<p>The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately

-connected with the solution of its Indian

-problem. The Central Pacific had almost no trouble

-with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but

-the Union Pacific was built during the very years

-when the great plains were most disturbed and hostile

-forays were most frequent. Its employees contained

-large elements of the newly arrived Irish and

-of the recently discharged veterans of the Civil War.

-General Dodge, who was its chief engineer, has described

-not only the military guards who "stacked

-their arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's

-warning to fall in and fight," but the military capacity

-of the construction gangs themselves. The "track

-train could arm a thousand men at a word," and

-from chief constructor down to chief spiker "could

-be commanded by experienced officers of every rank,

-from general to a captain. They had served five

-years at the front, and over half of the men had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">329</a></span>

-shouldered a musket in many battles. An illustration

-of this came to me after our track had passed

-Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River.

-The Indians had captured a freight train and were

-in possession of it and its crews." Dodge came to

-the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal," with

-twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to

-him; yet "when I called upon them to fall in, to go

-forward and retake the train, every man on the train

-went into line, and by his position showed that he

-was a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as

-skirmishers, and at the command they went forward

-as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the

-old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."</p>

-

-<p>By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much

-to accelerate the construction of the road. Heretofore

-the junction point had been in the Nevada Desert,

-a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line.

-It was now provided that each road might build until

-it met the other. Since the mountain section, with

-the highest accompanying subsidies, was at hand,

-each of the companies was spurred on by its desire

-to get as much land and as many bonds as possible.

-The race which began in the autumn of 1866 ended

-only with the completion of the track in 1869. A

-mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start;

-seven or eight a day were laid before the end.</p>

-

-<p>The English traveller, Bell, who published his

-<i>New Tracks in North America</i> in 1869, found somewhere

-an enthusiastic quotation admirably descriptive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">330</a></span>

-of the process. "Track-laying on the Union

-Pacific is a science," it read, "and we pundits of the

-Far East stood upon that embankment, only about

-a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed

-westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives

-with mingled feelings of amusement, curiosity,

-and profound respect. On they came. A light car,

-drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with

-its load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and

-start forward, the rest of the gang taking hold by twos

-until it is clear of the car. They come forward at a

-run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in

-its place, right side up, with care, while the same

-process goes on at the other side of the car. Less

-than thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four

-rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say,

-but the fellows on the U.&nbsp;P. are tremendously in

-earnest. The moment the car is empty it is tipped

-over on the side of the track to let the next loaded car

-pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a

-sight to see it go flying back for another load, propelled

-by a horse at full gallop at the end of 60

-or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu, who

-drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come

-the gaugers, spikers, and bolters, and a lively time

-they make of it. It is a grand Anvil Chorus that

-these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.

-It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike.

-There are ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to

-a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">331</a></span>

-That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one

-million times are those sledges to be swung&mdash;twenty-one

-million times are they to come down

-with their sharp punctuation, before the great work

-of modern America is complete!"</p>

-

-<p>Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of

-laborers who built the road was no mean problem.

-Ten years earlier the builders of the Illinois Central

-had complained because their road from Galena and

-Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited

-country upon which they could not live as

-they went along. Much more the continental railways,

-building rapidly away from the settlements,

-were forced to carry their dwellings with them.

-Their commissariat was as important as their general

-offices.</p>

-

-<p>An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where

-Cheyenne now is and seeing a long freight train

-arrive "laden with frame houses, boards, furniture,

-palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom

-city. "The guard jumped off his van, and seeing

-some friends on the platform, called out with a

-flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head

-of the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder

-than the horn that was blown around the walls of

-Jericho," was the terminal town; its tongue was the

-stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the

-head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head

-followed, leaving across the plains a series of scars,

-marking the spots where it had rested for a time.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">332</a></span>

-Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight

-train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end

-of the track. Its vagrant population followed it. It

-was at Julesburg early in 1867; at Cheyenne in the

-end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring.

-Always it was the most disreputably picturesque

-spot on the anatomy of the railroad.</p>

-

-<p>In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel

-Bowles, editor of the <i>Springfield Republican</i>, appropriately

-designated the terminal town, was at Benton,

-Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles

-from Omaha and near the military reservation

-at Fort Steele. In the very midst of the gray desert,

-with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the town

-stood dusty white&mdash;"a new arrival with black

-clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach

-struggling through a flour barrel." A less promising

-location could hardly have been found, yet within

-two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand

-people with ordinances and government suited

-to its size, and facilities for vice ample for all. The

-needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the

-road was operating for passengers and freight; to

-the west it was yet constructing track. Here was

-the end of rail travel and the beginning of the stage

-routes to the coast and the mines. Two years

-earlier the similar point had been at Fort Kearney,

-Nebraska.</p>

-

-<p>The city of tents and shacks contained, according

-to the count of John H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">333</a></span>

-twenty-three saloons and five dance houses. It

-had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling

-and rowdyism were the order of day and night.

-Its great institution was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes,

-with equal truth but less politeness, called

-the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred

-feet long by forty wide, well floored, and given over

-to drinking, dancing, and gambling. The sumptuous

-bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry

-alkali country; all the games known to the professional

-gambler were in full blast; women, often fair

-and well-dressed, were there to gather in what the

-bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came

-these people, and how they learned their trade, was

-a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would appear to have

-been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they

-must have naturally returned after graduating here,

-fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service."</p>

-

-<p>Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments,

-like beads, were strung along the cord of

-rails. In advance of the construction gangs land

-companies would commonly survey town sites in

-preparation for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner

-lots was a form of gambling in which real money was

-often lost and honest hopes were regularly shattered.

-Each town had its advocates who believed it was to

-be the great emporium of the West. Yet generally,

-as the railroad moved on, the town relapsed into a

-condition of deserted prairie, with only the street<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">334</a></span>

-lines and débris to remind it of its past. Omaha,

-though Beadle thought in 1868 that no other "place

-in America had been so well lied about," and Council

-Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of their

-strategic position at the commencement of the main

-line. Tied together in 1872 by the great iron bridge

-of the Union Pacific, their relations were as harmonious

-as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they

-quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real

-terminus. But the future of both was assured when

-the eastern roads began to run in to get connections

-with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city

-of some consequence because the Denver Pacific

-branched off at this point to serve the Pike's Peak

-region. But the names of most of the other one-time

-terminal towns were writ in sand.</p>

-

-<p>The progress of construction of the road after

-1866 was rapid enough. At the end of 1865, though

-the Central Pacific had started two years before the

-Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of

-track, to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central

-Pacific built thirty laborious miles over the mountains,

-and in 1867, forty-six miles, while in the same

-two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In

-1868, the western road, now past its worst troubles,

-added more than 360 to its mileage; the Union

-Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide, making

-a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line

-was done, 1776 miles from Omaha to Sacramento.

-For the last sixteen months of the continental race<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">335</a></span>

-the two roads together had built more than two and

-a half miles for every working day. Never before

-had construction been systematized so highly or the

-rewards for speed been so great.</p>

-

-<p>Whether regarded as an economic achievement or

-a national work, the building of the road deserved

-the attention it received; yet it was scarcely finished

-before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had

-written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary

-notices" of the men who had made possible the feat,

-but before he went to press their reputations were

-blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention no

-names." "Never praise a man," he declared in

-disgust, "or name your children after him, till he

-is dead." Before the end of Grant's first administration

-the <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">Crédit Mobilier</i> scandal proved that men,

-high in the national government, had speculated in

-the project whose success depended on their votes.

-That many of them had been guilty of indiscretion,

-was perfectly clear, but they had done only what

-many of their greatest predecessors had done. Their

-real fault was made more prominent by their misfortune

-in being caught by an aroused national conscience

-which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it

-had ever disregarded in the past.</p>

-

-<p>The junction point for the Union Pacific and

-Central Pacific had been variously fixed by the

-acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open to

-fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened

-in 1869 it might never have existed. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">336</a></span>

-their rush for the land grants the two rivals hurried

-on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake,

-where their advancing ends began to overlap, and

-continued parallel for scores of miles. Congress,

-noticing their indisposition to agree upon a junction,

-intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to

-bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a

-few miles northwest of Ogden on the shore of the

-lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was celebrated

-in due form.</p>

-

-<p>Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton

-from Buffalo to the Atlantic in 1825, it has been the

-custom to make the completion of a new road an

-occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of

-May, 1869, the whole United States stood still to

-signalize the junction of the tracks. The date had

-been agreed upon by the railways on short notice,

-and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford

-for the Central Pacific and President Dillon for the

-Union Pacific, had come to the scene of activities.

-The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last Spike"

-for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling

-how General Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying

-his final section, and how at noon on the appointed

-day the last two rails were spiked to a tie of California

-laurel. The immediate audience was small, including

-few beyond the railway officials, but within hearing

-of the telegraphic taps that told of the last blows

-of the sledge-hammer was much of the United States.

-President Dillon told the story as it was given in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">337</a></span>

-leading paragraph of the <i>Nation</i> of the Thursday

-after. "So far as we have seen them," wrote Godkin's

-censor of American morals, "the speeches,

-prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke

-down under the weight of the occasion, and it is a

-relief to turn from them to the telegrams which passed

-between the various operators, and to get their

-flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the

-Omaha man says, when the operators all over the

-Union begin to pester him with questions. 'When

-the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we

-will say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word,

-'Hats off! Prayer is being offered.' Then at the

-end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with a

-sense of having at last come to business: 'We have

-got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.' ...

-Before sunset the event was celebrated, not

-very noisily but very heartily, throughout the

-country. Chicago made a procession seven miles

-long; New York hung out bunting, fired a hundred

-guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity;

-Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo

-sang the 'Star-spangled Banner'; and many towns

-burnt powder in honor of the consummation of a

-work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a

-road to the Indies, a means of making the United

-States a halfway house between the East and West,

-and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the perpetuity

-of the Union as it is."</p>

-

-<p>No single event in the struggle for the last frontier<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">338</a></span>

-had a greater significance for the immediate audience,

-or for posterity, than this act of completion. Bret

-Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question that

-all were <span class="locked">framing:&mdash;</span></p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="iq">"What was it the Engines said,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Pilots touching, head to head<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Facing on the single track,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Half a world behind each back?"<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="in0">But he was able to answer only a part of it. His

-western engine retorted to the <span class="locked">eastern:&mdash;</span></p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="iq">"'You brag of the East! <i>You</i> do?<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Why, <i>I</i> bring the East to <i>you</i>!<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">All the Orient, all Cathay,<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Find through me the shortest way;<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">And the sun you follow here<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Rises in my hemisphere.<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Really,&mdash;if one must be rude,&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-

-<p>The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet

-dazzled the eyes of the men who built the road, blinding

-them to the prosaic millions lying beneath their

-feet. The East and West were indeed united; but,

-more important, the intervening frontier was ceasing

-to divide. When the road was undertaken, men

-thought naturally of the East and the Pacific Coast,

-unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains

-and the desert and the Indian Country. The mining

-flurries of the early sixties raised a hope that this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">339</a></span>

-intervening land might not all be waste. As the

-railway had advanced, settlement had marched with

-it, the two treading upon the heels of the Peace

-Commissioners sent out to lure away the Indians.

-With the opening of the road the new period of

-national assimilation of the continent had begun.

-In fifteen years more, as other roads followed, there

-had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap between the

-East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">340</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE NEW INDIAN POLICY</span></h2>

-

-<p>Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners

-of 1867 and 1868, and the opening of the

-Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the plains

-had been cleanly split into two main groups which

-had their centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest

-Dakota and the old Indian Territory. The advance

-of a new wave of population had followed along the

-road thus opened, pushing settlements into central

-Nebraska and Kansas. Through the latter state the

-Union Pacific, Eastern Division, better known as the

-Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver,

-where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this

-advance of civilized life upon the plains it became

-clear that the old Indian policy was gone for good,

-and that the idea of a permanent country, where the

-tribes, free from white contact, could continue their

-nomadic existence, had broken down. The old Indian

-policy had been based upon the permanence

-of this condition, but with the white advance troops

-for police had been added, while the loud bickerings

-between the military authorities, thus superimposed,

-and the Indian Office, which regarded itself as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">341</a></span>

-rightful custodian of the problem, proved to be the

-overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first

-annual message in 1869: "No matter what ought to

-be the relations between such [civilized] settlements

-and the aborigines, the fact is they do not harmonize

-well, and one or the other has to give way in the end.

-A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is

-too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing

-upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering

-in the citizen a disregard for human life

-and the rights of others, dangerous to society.

-I see no substitute for such a system, except in placing

-all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly

-as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection

-there."</p>

-

-<p>The vexed question of civilian or military control

-had reached the bitterest stage of its discussion when

-Grant became President. For five years there had

-been general wars in which both departments seemed

-to be badly involved and for which responsibility

-was hard to place. There were many things to be

-said in favor of either method of control. Beginning

-with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian

-Affairs in 1832, the office had been run by the War

-Department for seventeen years. In this period

-the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been

-carried out; the frontier had been established in an

-unbroken line of reserves from Texas to Green Bay;

-and the migration across the plains had begun.

-But with the creation of the Interior Department<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">342</a></span>

-in 1849 the Indian Bureau had been transferred

-to civilian hands. As yet the Indian war was so

-exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments

-in favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly

-too, though the results make this conviction

-hard to hold, to treat the Indian well, to keep the

-peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they

-would permit it. However the government failed

-in practice and in controlling the men of the frontier,

-there is no doubt about the sincerity of its general

-intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California,

-no mines and no railways, and no mixture of slavery

-and politics, the hope might not have failed of realization.

-Even as it was, the civilian bureau had little

-trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years

-after its organization. In general the military

-power was called upon when disorder passed beyond

-the control of the agent; short of that time the agent

-remained in authority.</p>

-

-<p>As a means of introducing civilization among the

-tribes the agents were more effective than army

-officers could be. They were, indeed, underpaid, appointed

-for political reasons, and often too weak to

-resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty;

-but they were civilians. Their ideals were those of

-industry and peace. Their terms of service were

-often too short for them to learn the business, but

-they were not subject to the rapid shifting and

-transfer which made up a large part of army life.

-Army officers were better picked and trained than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">343</a></span>

-the agents, but their ambitions were military, and

-they were frequently unable to understand why

-breaches of formal discipline were not always matters

-of importance.</p>

-

-<p>The strong arguments in favor of military control

-were founded largely on the permanency of tenure in

-the army. Political appointments were fewer, the

-average of personal character and devotion was

-higher. Army administration had fewer scandals

-than had that of the Indian Bureau. The partisan

-on either side in the sixties was prone to believe

-that his favorite branch of the service was honest

-and wise, while the other was inefficient, foolish,

-and corrupt. He failed to see that in the earliest

-phase of the policy, when there was no friction,

-and consequently little fighting, the problem was

-essentially civilian; that in the next period, when

-constant friction was provoking wars, it had become

-military; and that finally, when emigration and

-transportation had changed friction into overwhelming

-pressure, the wars would again cease. A large

-share of the disputes were due to the misunderstandings

-as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes

-should be under the bureau or the army. On the

-whole, even when the tribes were hostile, army

-control tended to increase the cost of management

-and the chance of injustice. There never was a time

-when a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals

-of police rather than those of soldiers, could not have

-done better than the army did. But the student,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">344</a></span>

-attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve

-it fully and justly as were its immediate custodians.

-He can at most steer in between the badly biassed

-"Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson, and the

-outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier,

-that the Indian must go.</p>

-

-<p>The demand of the army for the control of the

-Indians was never gratified. Around 1870 its friends

-were insistent that since the army had to bear the

-knocks of the Indian policy,&mdash;knocks, they claimed,

-generally due to mistakes of the bureau,&mdash;it ought to

-have the whole responsibility and the whole credit.

-The inertia which attaches to federal reforms held

-this one back, while the Indian problem itself

-changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary.

-Once the great wars of the sixties were done

-the tribes subsided into general peace. Their vigorous

-resistance was confined to the years when the

-last great wave of the white advance was surging

-over them. Then, confined to their reservations,

-they resumed the march to civilization.</p>

-

-<p>From the commencement of his term, Grant was

-willing to aid in at once reducing the abuses of the

-Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy on the

-plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done

-good work, which would have been more effective

-had coöperation between the army and the bureau

-been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted

-two millions to be used in maintaining peace on the

-plains, "among and with the several tribes ...<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">345</a></span>

-to promote civilization among said Indians, bring

-them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve

-their necessities, and encourage their efforts at self-support."

-The President was authorized at the same

-time to erect a board of not more than ten men,

-"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy,"

-who should, with the Secretary of the Interior,

-and without salary, exercise joint control over the

-expenditures of this or any money voted for the use

-of the Indian Department.</p>

-

-<p>The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed

-to give greater wisdom to the administration of the

-Indian policy and to minimize peculation in the

-bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of

-the peace party over the army. "The gentlemen

-who wrote the reports of the Commissioners revelled

-in riotous imaginations and discarded facts," sneered

-a friend of military control; but there was, more or

-less, a distinct improvement in the management of

-the reservation tribes after 1869; although, as the

-exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption was

-by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners

-and Grant sought to elevate the tone of

-agency control was through the religious, charitable,

-and missionary societies. These organizations,

-many of which had long maintained missionary

-schools among the more civilized tribes, were invited

-to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians

-for appointment by the bureau. On the whole

-these appointments were an improvement over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">346</a></span>

-men whom political influence had heretofore brought

-to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner

-and the board were again complaining of the character

-of the agents; but there was an increasing standard

-of criticism.</p>

-

-<p>In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the

-Interior in 1869, and since, the board gave much

-credit to the new peace policy. In 1869 it looked

-forward with confidence "to success in the effort to

-civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described

-"the remarkable spectacle seen this fall, on the plains

-of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado,

-of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of Dakota,

-Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo

-without occasioning any serious alarm among

-the thousands of white settlers whose cabins skirt

-the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872,

-"the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and

-Christianity has been rapid, the temper and inclination

-of all of them has greatly improved.... They

-show a more positive intention to comply with their

-own obligations, and to accept the advice of those

-in authority over them, and are in many cases disproving

-the assertion, that adult Indians cannot

-be induced to work." In 1906, in its <i>38th Annual

-Report</i>, there was still most marked improvement,

-"and for the last thirty years the legislation of

-Congress concerning Indians, their education, their

-allotment and settlement on lands of their own,

-their admission to citizenship, and the protection of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">347</a></span>

-their rights makes, upon the whole, a chapter of

-political history of which Americans may justly be

-proud."</p>

-

-<p>The board of Indian Commissioners believed that

-most of the obvious improvement in the Indian condition

-was due to the substitution of a peace policy for

-a policy of something else. It made a mistake in

-assuming that there had ever been a policy of war.

-So far as the United States government had been concerned

-the aim had always been peace and humanity,

-and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the

-Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy

-been administered. Even then it was distinctly

-temporary. The events of the sixties had involved

-such continuous friction and necessitated such severe

-repression that contemporaries might be pardoned

-for thinking that war was the policy rather than the

-cure. But the resistance of the tribes would generally

-have ceased by 1870, even without the new

-peace policy. Every mile of western railway lessened

-the Indians' capacity for resistance by increasing

-the government's ability to repress it. The Union

-Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific,

-Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, to say nothing

-of a multitude of private roads like the Chicago,

-Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio

-Grande, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and

-the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, were the real

-forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet

-the board was right in that its influence in bringing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">348</a></span>

-closer harmony between public opinion and the Indian

-Bureau, and in improving the tone of the bureau, had

-made the transformation of the savage into the citizen

-farmer more rapid.</p>

-

-<p>Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian

-Commissioners Congress took another long step

-towards a better condition by ordering that no more

-treaties with the Indian tribes should be made by

-President and Senate. For more than two years before

-1871 no treaty had been made and ratified, and

-now the policy was definitely changed. For ninety

-years the Indians had been treated as independent

-nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had

-been concluded with various tribes, the United States

-only once repudiating any of them. In 1863, after

-the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the

-tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had

-not applied to Indian relations the rule of international

-law that war terminates all existing treaties. The

-relation implied by the treaty had been anomalous.

-The tribes were at once independent and dependent.

-No foreign nation could treat with them; hence

-they were not free. No state could treat with them,

-and the Indian could not sue in United States courts;

-hence they were not Americans. The Supreme

-Court in the Cherokee cases had tried to define

-their unique status, but without great success. It

-was unfortunate for the Indians that the United

-States took their tribal existence seriously. The

-agreements had always a greater sanctity in appearance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">349</a></span>

-than in fact. Indians honestly unable to

-comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and

-often denying that they were in any wise bound

-by it, were held to fulfilment by the power

-of the United States. The United States often

-believed that treaty violation represented deliberate

-hostility of the tribes, when it signified only the

-unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to

-follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce

-treaties thus violated led constantly to wars

-whose justification the Indian could not see.</p>

-

-<p>The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making

-of any Indian treaty in the future. Hereafter when

-agreements became necessary, they were to be made,

-much as they had been in the past, but Congress

-was the ratifying power and not the Senate. The

-fiction of an independence which had held the Indians

-to a standard which they could not understand was

-here abandoned; and quite as much to the point,

-perhaps, the predominance of the Senate in Indian

-affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a

-whole. In no other branch of internal administration

-would the Senate have been permitted to make

-binding agreements, but here the fiction had given

-it a dominance ever since the organization of the

-government.</p>

-

-<p>In the thirty-five years following the abandonment

-of the Indian treaties the problems of management

-changed with the ascending civilization of the national

-wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian Commissioner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">350</a></span>

-in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day

-of deliverance from the fear of Indian hostilities,"

-while his successors in office saw his prophecy fulfilled.

-Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary of the

-Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement

-of management and the drafting of a positive policy.

-His application of the merit system to Indian

-appointments, which was a startling innovation in

-national politics, worked a great change after the

-petty thievery which had flourished in the presidency

-of General Grant. Grant had indeed desired to do

-well, and conditions had appreciably bettered,

-yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians

-to continue their peculations in instances which

-ranged from humble agents up to the Cabinet itself.

-Schurz not only corrected much of this, but the

-first report of his Commissioner, E.&nbsp;A. Hayt, outlined

-the preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides

-the continuance of concentration and education

-there were four policies which stood out in this report&mdash;economy

-in the administration of rations, that the

-Indians might not be pauperized; a special code

-of law for the Indian reserves; a well-organized

-Indian police to enforce the laws; and a division of

-reserve lands into farms which should be assigned

-to individual Indians in severalty. The administration

-of Secretary Schurz gave substance to all these

-policies.</p>

-

-<p>The progress of Indian education and civilization

-began to be a real thing during Hayes's presidency.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">351</a></span>

-Most of the wars were over, permanency in residence

-could be relied on to a considerable degree, the Indians

-could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In

-1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department,

-the Indian Office reported an Indian population

-of 256,127 for the United States, excluding

-Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing

-citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read.

-Among them had been erected both boarding and day

-schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the latter.

-"Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement,

-showing an increased and more regular

-attendance of pupils and a growing interest in education

-on the part of parents." Interest in the

-problem of Indian education had been aroused in

-the East as well as among the tribes during the preceding

-year or two, because of the experiment with

-which the name of R.&nbsp;H. Pratt was closely connected.

-The non-resident boarding school, where the children

-could be taken away from the tribe and educated

-among whites, had become a factor in Carlisle,

-Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt

-had opened the first of these with 147 students in

-November, 1879. His design had been to give to

-the boys and girls the rudiments of education and

-training in farming and mechanic arts. His experience

-had already, in 1880, shown this to be entirely

-practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled as

-soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals,

-marched to the music of their own band. Both sexes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">352</a></span>

-had exhibited at the Cumberland County Agricultural

-Fair, where prizes were awarded to many

-of them for quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness,

-tinware, and penmanship. Many of the students

-had increased their knowledge of white customs

-by going out in the summers to work in the fields or

-kitchens of farmers in the East. Here, too, they

-had shown the capacity for education and development

-which their bitterest frontier enemies had

-denied. In 1906 there were twenty-five of these

-schools with more than 9000 students in attendance.</p>

-

-<p>It was one thing, however, to take the brighter

-Indian children away from home and teach them

-the ways of white men, and quite another to persuade

-the main tribe to support itself by regular

-labor. The ration system was a pauperizing influence

-that removed the incentive to work. Trained

-mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton,

-or Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers

-for their trade, and no occupation but to sit around

-with their relatives and wait for rations. Too much

-can be made of the success of Indian education, but

-the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana

-Crows, for instance, were, in 1904, encouraged

-into agricultural rivalry by a county fair. Their

-congenital love for gambling was converted into competition

-over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906

-they had not been drawing rations for nearly two

-years. While their settling down was but a single

-incident in tribal education and not a general reform,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">353</a></span>

-it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian

-conditions since the warlike sixties. The brilliant

-green placard which announced their county fair for

-1906 bears witness to <span class="locked">this:&mdash;</span></p>

-

-<div class="poem-container"><div class="poem">

-<p class="p1 center">

-"CROWS, WAKE UP!</p>

-

-<p class="p1 center smaller">

-"Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.<br />

-"Begin Planting for it Now.<br />

-"Plant a Good Garden.<br />

-"Put in Wheat and Oats.<br />

-Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to the Fair.<br />

-Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best Exhibits.<br />

-"Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.</p>

-

-<p class="p0 in0 sigright">"<i>Committee.</i>"</p>

-</div></div>

-

-<p class="p1">A great practical obstruction in the road of economic

-independence for the Indians was the absence of a

-legal system governing their relations, and more

-particularly securing to them individual ownership

-of land. Treated as independent nations by the

-United States, no attempt had been made to pass

-civil or even criminal laws for them, while the tribal

-organizations had been too primitive to do much

-of this on their own account. Individual attempts

-at progress were often checked by the fact that crime

-went unpunished in the Indian Country. An Indian

-police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in

-1880, but the law respecting trespassers on Indian

-lands was inadequate, and Congress was slow in

-providing codes and courts for the reservations.

-The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts

-on his own authority in 1883; Congress extended

-certain laws over the tribes in 1885; and a little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">354</a></span>

-later provided salaries for the officials of the agency

-courts.</p>

-

-<p>An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in

-severalty by Indians marked a great step towards

-solidifying Indian civilization. There had been no

-greater obstacle to this civilization than communal

-ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of

-hunting, with agriculture as an incidental and rather

-degrading feature. Few of the tribes had any recognition

-of individual ownership. The educated Indian

-and the savage alike were forced into economic

-stagnation by the system. Education could accomplish

-little in face of it. The changes of the seventies

-brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated

-requests that Congress begin the breaking down of

-the tribal system through the substitution of Indian

-ownership.</p>

-

-<p>In isolated cases and by special treaty provisions

-a few of the Indians had been permitted to acquire

-lands and be blended in the body of American citizens.

-But no general statute existed until the passage

-of the Dawes bill in February, 1887. In this year

-the Commissioner estimated that there were 243,299

-Indians in the United States, occupying a total of

-213,117 square miles of land, nearly a section apiece.

-By the Dawes bill the President was given authority

-to divide the reserves among the Indians located on

-them, distributing the lands on the basis of a quarter

-section or 160 acres to each head of a family, an eighth

-section to single adults and orphans, and a sixteenth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">355</a></span>

-to each dependent child. It was provided also that

-when the allotments had been made, tribal ownership

-should cease, and the title to each farm should

-rest in the individual Indian or his heirs. But to

-forestall the improvident sale of this land the owner

-was to be denied the power to mortgage or dispose

-of it for at least twenty-five years. The United

-States was to hold it in trust for him for this time.</p>

-

-<p>Besides allowing the Indian to own his farm and

-thus take his step toward economic independence, the

-Dawes bill admitted him to citizenship. Once the

-lands had been allotted, the owners came within the

-full jurisdiction of the states or territories where

-they lived, and became amenable to and protected

-by the law as citizens of the United States.</p>

-

-<p>The policy which had been recommended since

-the time of Schurz became the accepted policy of the

-United States in 1887. "I fail to comprehend the

-full import of the allotment act if it was not the purpose

-of the Congress which passed it and the Executive

-whose signature made it a law ultimately to

-dissolve all tribal relations and to place each adult

-Indian on the broad platform of American citizenship,"

-wrote the Commissioner in 1887. For the

-next twenty years the reports of the office were filled

-with details of subdivision of reserves and the adjustment

-of the legal problems arising from the process.

-And in the twenty-first year the old Indian Country

-ceased to exist as such, coming into the Union as the

-state of Oklahoma.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">356</a></span>

-The progress of allotment under the Dawes bill

-steadily broke down the reserves of the so-called

-Indian Territory. Except the five civilized tribes,

-Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles,

-the inhabitants who had been colonized there

-since the Civil War wanted to take advantage of the

-act. The civilized tribes preferred a different and

-more independent system for themselves, and retained

-their tribal identity until 1906. In the transition

-it was found that granting citizenship to the

-Indian in a way increased his danger by opening him

-to the attack of the liquor dealer and depriving him

-of some of the special protection of the Indian Office.

-To meet this danger, as the period of tribal extinction

-drew near, the Burke act of 1906 modified and continued

-the provisions of the Dawes bill. The new

-statute postponed citizenship until the expiration

-of the twenty-five-year period of trust, while giving

-complete jurisdiction over the allottee to the United

-States in the interim. In special cases the Secretary

-of the Interior was allowed to release from the period

-of guardianship and trusteeship individual Indians

-who were competent to manage their own affairs, but

-for the generality the period of twenty-five years

-was considered "not too long a time for most Indians

-to serve their apprenticeship in civic responsibilities."</p>

-

-<p>Already the opening up to legal white settlement

-had begun. In the Dawes bill it was provided that

-after the lands had been allotted in severalty the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">357</a></span>

-undivided surplus might be bought by the United

-States and turned into the public domain for entry

-and settlement. Following this, large areas were

-purchased in 1888 and 1889, to be settled in 1890.

-The territory of Oklahoma, created in this year in

-the western end of Indian Territory, and "No Man's

-Land," north of Texas, marked the political beginning

-of the end of Indian Territory. It took nearly

-twenty years to complete it, through delays in the

-process of allotment and sale; but in these two decades

-the work was done thoroughly, the five civilized

-tribes divided their own lands and abandoned tribal

-government, and in November, 1908, the state of

-Oklahoma was admitted by President Roosevelt.</p>

-

-<p>The Indian relations, which were most belligerent

-in the sixties, had changed completely in the ensuing

-forty years. In part the change was due to a greater

-and more definite desire at Washington for peace,

-but chiefly it was environmental, due to the progress

-of settlement and transportation which overwhelmed

-the tribes, destroying their capacity to resist and

-embedding them firmly in the white population.

-Oklahoma marked the total abandonment of Monroe's

-policy of an Indian Country.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">358</a></span></p>

-

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">THE LAST STAND OF CHIEF JOSEPH AND

-SITTING BULL</span></h2>

-

-<p>The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians

-ceased with the termination of the Indian wars of

-the sixties. Here the resistance had most closely

-resembled a general war with the tribes in close

-alliance against the invader. With this obstacle overcome,

-the work left to be done in the conquest of the

-continent fell into two main classes: terminating

-Indian resistance by the suppression of sporadic

-outbreaks in remote byways and letting in the

-population. The new course of the Indian problem

-after 1869 led it speedily away from the part it had

-played in frontier advance until it became merely

-one of many social or race problems in the United

-States. It lost its special place as the great illustration

-of the difficulties of frontier life. But although

-the new course tended toward chronic peace, there

-were frequent relapses, here and there, which produced

-a series of Indian flurries after 1869. Never

-again do these episodes resemble, however remotely,

-a general Indian war.</p>

-

-<p>Human nature did not change with the adoption

-of the so-called peace policy. The government had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">359</a></span>

-constantly to be on guard against the dishonest agent,

-while improved facilities in communication increased

-the squatters' ability to intrude upon valuable lands.

-The Sioux treaty of 1868, whereby the United States

-abandoned the Powder River route and erected the

-great reserve in Dakota, west of the Missouri River,

-was scarcely dry before rumors of the discovery of

-gold in the Black Hills turned the eyes of prospectors

-thither.</p>

-

-<p>Early in 1870 citizens of Cheyenne and the territory

-of Wyoming organized a mining and prospecting

-company that professed an intention to explore the

-Big Horn country in northern Wyoming, but was

-believed by the Sioux to contemplate a visit to the

-Black Hills within their reserve. The local Sioux

-agent remonstrated against this, and General C.&nbsp;C.

-Augur was sent to Cheyenne to confer with the leaders

-of the expedition. He found Wyoming in a state of

-irritation against the Sioux treaty, which left the

-Indians in control of their Powder River country&mdash;the

-best third of the territory. He sympathized with

-the frontiersmen, but finally was forced by orders

-from Washington to prevent the expedition from

-starting into the field. Four years later this deferred

-reconnoissance took place as an official expedition

-under General Custer, with "great excitement among

-the whole Sioux." The approach from the northeast

-of the Northern Pacific, which had reached a

-landing at Bismarck on the Missouri before the panic

-of 1873, still further increased the apprehension of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">360</a></span>

-the tribes that they were to be dispossessed. The

-Indian Commissioner, in the end of 1874, believed

-that no harm would come of the expedition since no

-great gold finds had been made, but the Montana

-historian was nearer the truth when he wrote:

-"The whole Sioux nation was successfully defied."

-It was a clear violation of the tribal right, and necessarily

-emboldened the frontiersmen to prospect on

-their own account.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_360" class="figcenter" style="width: 541px;">

-  <img src="images/i-387.jpg" width="541" height="353" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Position of Reno on the Little Big Horn</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionc"><p>From a photograph made by Mr. W.&nbsp;R. Bowlin, of Chicago, and reproduced by his permission</p></div></div>

-

-<p>Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give

-countenance to the disgruntled warrior bands that

-resented the treaties already made, came the mismanagement

-of the Red Cloud agency. Professor

-O.&nbsp;C. Marsh, of Yale College, was stopped by Red

-Cloud, while on a geological visit to the Black Hills,

-in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the

-Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington

-samples of decayed flour and inferior rations which

-the Indian agent was issuing to the Oglala Sioux.

-With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded

-to study the new problem thus brought to his

-notice, and accumulated a mass of evidence which

-seemed to him to prove the existence of big plots to

-defraud the government, and mismanagement extending

-even to the Secretary of the Interior. He

-published his charges in pamphlet form, and wrote

-letters of protest to the President, in which he

-maintained that the Indian officials were trying

-harder to suppress his evidence than to correct the

-grievances of the Sioux. He managed to stir up so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">361</a></span>

-much interest in the East that the Board of Indian

-Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate

-the affairs of the Red Cloud agency. The

-report of the committee in October, 1875, whitewashed

-many of the individuals attacked by Professor

-Marsh, and exonerated others of guilt at the expense

-of their intelligence, but revealed abuses in the

-Indian Office which might fully justify uneasiness

-among the Sioux.</p>

-

-<p>To these tribes, already discontented because of

-their compression and sullen because of mismanagement,

-the entry of miners into the Black Hills country

-was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners were

-there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating

-disturbances and exaggerating in the Indian mind

-the value of the reserve, so that an attempt by the

-Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn

-came to nothing. The natural tendency of these

-forces was to drive the younger braves off the

-reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty bands

-that roamed at will and were scornful of those that

-lived in peace. Most important of the leaders

-of these bands was Sitting Bull.</p>

-

-<p>In December the Indian Commissioner, despite

-the Sioux privilege to pursue the chase, ordered all

-the Sioux to return to their reserves before February

-1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile.

-As yet the mutterings had not broken out in war,

-and the evidence does not show that conflict was

-inevitable. The tribes could not have got back on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">362</a></span>

-time had they wanted to; but their failure to return

-led the Indian Office to turn the Sioux over to the

-War Department. The army began by destroying

-a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested

-not by an enemy of the army, but by General

-H.&nbsp;H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who himself had fought

-the Sioux with marked success in 1862.</p>

-

-<p>With war now actually begun, three columns were

-sent into the field to arrest and restrain the hostile

-Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook, Gibbon,

-and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic

-of fighters. He was already well known for his

-Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier book. Sherman

-had described him in 1867 as "young, <i>very</i>

-brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry

-officer," and as "ready and willing now to fight the

-Indians." La Barge, who had carried some of

-Custer's regiment on his steamer <i>De Smet</i>, in

-1873, saw him as "an officer ... clad in buckskin

-trousers from the seams of which a large fringe was

-fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large

-gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited

-animal." His showy vanity and his admitted courage

-had already got him into more than one difficulty;

-now on June 25, 1876, his whole column

-of five companies, excepting only his battle horse,

-Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was destroyed in a

-battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had

-lived, he might perhaps have been cleared of the

-charge of disobedience, as Fetterman might ten years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">363</a></span>

-before, but, as it turned out, there were many to

-lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended

-before 1876 was over, though Sitting Bull with a

-small band escaped to Canada, where he worried

-the Dominion Government for several years. "I

-know of no instance in history," wrote Bishop

-Whipple of Minnesota, "where a great nation has so

-shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux

-were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the

-disappointed tribes settled down to another decade

-of quiescence.</p>

-

-<p>In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull

-a hero in the Centennial year was transferred to

-Chief Joseph, leader of the non-treaty Nez Percés, in

-the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been a

-friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since

-the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Living in the

-valleys of the Snake and its tributaries, it could

-easily have hindered the course of travel along the

-Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was

-always good. In 1855 it had begun to treat with

-the United States and had ceded considerable territory

-at the conference held by Governor Stevens

-with Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.</p>

-

-<p>The exigencies of the Civil War, failure of Congress

-to fulfil treaty stipulations, and the discovery of

-gold along the Snake served to change the character

-of the Nez Percés. Lawyer's annuity of five hundred

-dollars, as Principal Chief, was at best not royal,

-and when its vouchers had to be cashed in greenbacks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">364</a></span>

-at from forty-five to fifty cents on the dollar,

-he complained of hardship. It was difficult to persuade

-the savage that a depreciated greenback was

-as good as money. Congress was slow with the annuities

-promised in 1855. In 1861, only one Indian

-in six could have a blanket, while the 4393 yards of

-calico issued allowed under two yards to each Indian.

-The Commissioner commented mildly upon this, to

-the effect that "Giving a blanket to one Indian works

-no satisfaction to the other five, who receive none."

-The gold boom, with the resulting rise of Lewiston, in

-the heart of the reserve, brought in so many lawless

-miners that the treaty of 1855 was soon out of date.</p>

-

-<p>In 1863 a new treaty was held with Chief Lawyer

-and fifty other headmen, by which certain valleys

-were surrendered and the bounds of the Lapwai

-reserve agreed upon. Most of the Nez Percés accepted

-this, but Chief Joseph refused to sign and

-gathered about him a band of unreconciled, non-treaty

-braves who continued to hunt at will over the

-Wallowa Valley, which Lawyer and his followers had

-professed to cede. It was an interesting legal point

-as to the right of a non-treaty chief to claim to own

-lands ceded by the rest of his tribe. But Joseph,

-though discontented, was not dangerous, and there

-was little friction until settlers began to penetrate

-into his hunting-grounds. In 1873, President Grant

-created a Wallowa reserve for Joseph's Nez Percés,

-since they claimed this chiefly as their home. But

-when they showed no disposition to confine themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">365</a></span>

-to its limits, he revoked the order in 1875. The

-next year a commission, headed by the Secretary of

-the Interior, Zachary Chandler, was sent to persuade

-Joseph to settle down, but returned without success.

-Joseph stood upon his right to continue to occupy

-at pleasure the lands which had always belonged

-to the Nez Percés, and which he and his followers

-had never ceded. The commission recommended

-the segregation of the medicine-men and dreamers,

-especially Smohalla, who seemed to provide the

-inspiration for Joseph, and the military occupation

-of the Wallowa Valley in anticipation of an outbreak

-by the tribe against the incoming white settlers.

-These things were done in part, but in the spring of

-1877, "it becoming evident to Agent Monteith that

-all negotiations for the peaceful removal of Joseph

-and his band, with other non-treaty Nez Percé

-Indians, to the Lapwai Indian reservation in Idaho

-must fail of a satisfactory adjustment," the Indian

-Office gave it up, and turned the affair over to

-General O.&nbsp;O. Howard and the War Department.</p>

-

-<p>The conferences held by Howard with the leaders,

-in May, made it clear to them that their alternatives

-were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight. At first

-Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass

-and White Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater

-to which the tribe agreed to remove at once; but

-just before the day fixed for the removal, the murder

-of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge

-directed against the whites and the massacre of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">366</a></span>

-several. War immediately followed, for the next

-two months covering the borderland of Idaho and

-Montana with confusion. A whole volume by

-General Howard has been devoted to its details.

-Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the <i>North

-American Review</i> in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically

-in his <i>Massacres of the Mountains</i>, and the

-Montana Historical Society has published many

-articles concerning it. Considerably less is known of

-the more important wars which preceded it than of

-this struggle of the Nez Percés. In August the fighting

-turned to flight, Chief Joseph abandoning the

-Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone

-Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased

-him 1321 miles, across the Yellowstone Park toward

-the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve. Along

-the swift flight there were running battles from time

-to time, while the fugitives replenished their stores

-and stock from the country through which they

-passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front

-Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them

-off. Miles caught their trail in the end of September

-after they had crossed the Missouri River and

-had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting

-Bull had found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised

-the Nez Percé camp on Snake Creek, capturing six

-hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's

-band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later

-the stubborn chief surrendered to Colonel Miles.</p>

-

-<p>"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">367</a></span>

-Hayt asked at the end of 1877. For once an

-Indian band had conducted a war on white principles,

-obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation

-and torture. Joseph had by his sheer military

-skill won the admiration and respect of his military

-opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated

-the war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho.

-To exile they were sent, and Joseph's uprising ended

-as all such resistances must. The forcible invasion

-of the territory by the whites was maintained; the

-tribe was sent in punishment to malarial lands in

-Indian Territory, where they rapidly dwindled in

-number. There has been no adequate defence of the

-policy of the United States from first to last.</p>

-

-<p>The Modoc of northern California, and the

-Apache of Arizona and New Mexico fought against

-the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez Percés.

-The former broke out in resistance in the winter of

-1872&ndash;1873, after they had long been proscribed by

-California opinion. In March of 1873 they made

-their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General

-E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent

-to confer with them. In the war which resulted the

-Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced Charley,

-were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava

-beds of the Modoc country until regular soldiers

-finally corralled them all. Jack was hanged for

-murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley

-lived to settle down and reform with a portion of the

-tribe in Indian Territory.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">368</a></span>

-The Apache had always been a thorn in the

-flesh of the trifling population of Arizona and New

-Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and Indian

-Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard

-decade with Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had

-quieted down during the seventies and advanced

-towards economic independence. But the Apache

-were long in learning the virtues of non-resistance.

-Bell had found in Arizona a young girl whose adventures

-as a fifteen-year-old child served to explain the

-attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by

-Indians who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped

-her naked, knocked her senseless with a tomahawk,

-pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg with

-one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon

-her. The child had come to, and without food,

-clothes, or water, had found her way home over

-thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily

-inspired the white population with fear and

-hatred, while the continued residence of the sufferers

-in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the persistence of

-the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes

-in the end. Tucson had retaliated against such

-excesses of the red men by equal excesses of the

-whites. Without any immediate provocation, fourscore

-Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated

-under military supervision at Camp Grant, were

-massacred in cold blood.</p>

-

-<p>General George Crook alone was able to bring

-order into the Arizona frontier. From 1871 to 1875<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">369</a></span>

-he was there in command,&mdash;"the beau-ideal Indian

-fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged

-in constant campaigns against the "incorrigibly

-hostile," but before 1873 was over he had most

-of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police

-supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a

-brass identification check, so that it might be easier

-for his police to watch them. The tribes were passed

-back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook was

-transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately

-the Indian Commissioner commenced to concentrate

-the scattered tribes, but was hindered by

-hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as

-bitter as their hatred for the whites. First Victorio,

-and then Geronimo was the centre of the resistance

-to the concentration which placed hereditary enemies

-side by side. They protested against the sites assigned

-them, and successfully defied the Commissioner

-to carry out his orders. Crook was brought

-back to the department in 1882, and after another

-long war gradually established peace.</p>

-

-<p>Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876,

-returned to Dakota in the early eighties in time to

-witness the rapid settlement of the northern plains

-and the growth of the territories towards statehood.

-After his revolt the Black Hills had been taken away

-from the tribe, as had been the vague hunting rights

-over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood advanced

-in the later eighties, and as population piled

-up around the edges of the reserve, the time was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">370</a></span>

-ripe for the medicine-men to preach the coming

-of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his

-personal following. Bad crops which in these years

-produced populism in Kansas and Nebraska, had even

-greater menace for the half-civilized Indians. Agents

-and army officers became aware of the undercurrent

-of danger some months before trouble broke out.</p>

-

-<p>The state of South Dakota was admitted in November,

-1889. Just a year later the Bureau turned the

-Sioux country over to the army, and General Nelson

-A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in

-the vicinity of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies.

-The arrest of Sitting Bull, who claimed miraculous

-powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts" were

-supposed to give invulnerability to his followers,

-was attempted in December. The troops sent out

-were resisted, however, and in the męlée the prophet

-was killed. The war which followed was much

-noticed, but of little consequence. General Miles

-had plenty of troops and Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph

-stations conveyed news easily and safely.

-But when orders were issued two weeks after the

-death of Sitting Bull to disarm the camp at Wounded

-Knee, the savages resisted. The troops within

-reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their

-rapid-fire guns, regardless of age or sex, with such

-effect that more than two hundred Indian bodies,

-mostly women and children, were found dead upon

-the field.</p>

-

-<p>With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">371</a></span>

-the Indians, important enough to be called resistance,

-came to an end. There had been many other isolated

-cases of outbreak since the adoption of the

-peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and

-individual murders long after 1890. But there were,

-and could be, no more Indian wars. Many of the

-tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while

-lands in severalty had changed the point of view of

-many tribesmen. The relative strength of the two

-races was overwhelmingly in favor of the whites.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">372</a></span></p>

-

-<div>

-<h2 title="CHAPTER XXII LETTING IN THE POPULATION" class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a><br />

-

-<span class="subhead">LETTING IN THE POPULATION<a name="FNanchor_3" id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">3</a></span></h2>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="fnanchor">3</a> This chapter follows, in part, F.&nbsp;L. Paxson, "The Pacific Railroads

-and the Disappearance of the Frontier in America," in Ann.

-Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol. I, pp. 105&ndash;118.</p></div>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">

-<span class="iq">"Veil them, cover them, wall them round&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">Blossom, and creeper, and weed&mdash;<br /></span>

-<span class="i0">Let us forget the sight and the sound,<br /></span>

-<span class="i2">The smell and the touch of the breed!"<br /></span>

-</div></div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p class="p1">Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle,"

-upon the Indian village. The forces of nature were

-turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled at the

-growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and

-the wild pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the

-thatched huts dissolved in the torrents, and "by the

-end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle in full blast

-on the spot that had been under plough not six months

-before." The white man worked the opposite of this

-on what remained of the American desert in the last

-fifteen years of the history of the old frontier. In a

-decade and a half a greater change came over it than

-the previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890,

-it is fair to say that the frontier was no more.</p>

-

-<p>The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary

-line separating the farm lands and the unused West,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">373</a></span>had become nearly a circle before the compromise

-of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks

-it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the

-last generation. The flanks had widened out in the

-thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri, and Iowa had

-received their population. In the next ten years

-Texas and the Pacific settlements had carried the

-line further west until the circular shape of the

-frontier was clearly apparent by the middle of the

-century. And thus it stood, with changes only in

-detail, for a generation more. In whatever sense

-the word "frontier" is used, the fact is the same. If

-it be taken as the dividing line, as the area enclosed,

-or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the

-frontier of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier

-of 1850.</p>

-

-<p>The pressure on the frontier line had increased

-steadily during these thirty years. Population

-moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War. The

-agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in

-size and wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that

-became clearer as more citizens settled along it.

-East and south, it was close to the rainfall line which

-divides easy farming country from the semi-arid

-plains; west, it was a mountain range. In either

-case the country enclosed was too refractory to yield

-to the piecemeal process which had conquered the

-wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to

-expansion and hindrance to communication became

-of increasing consequence as population grew.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">374</a></span>

-Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural

-frontier was pressing against it. By 1860 the railway

-frontier had reached it. The former could not

-cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture

-offered by the lands beyond; the latter was

-restrained by the prohibitive cost of building railways

-through an entirely unsettled district. Private

-initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the continent;

-the one remaining task called for direct national

-aid.</p>

-

-<p>The influences operating upon this frontier of the

-Far West, though not making it less of a barrier, made

-it better known than any of the earlier frontiers. In

-the first place, the trails crossed it, with the result

-that its geography became well known throughout

-the country. No other frontier had been the site

-of a thoroughfare for many years before its actual

-settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the

-later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge

-of the West, and scattered groups of inhabitants here

-and there, without populating it in any sense. Finally

-the Indian friction produced the series of Indian

-wars which again called the wild West to the centre

-of the stage for many years.</p>

-

-<p>All of these forces served to advertise the existence

-of this frontier and its barrier character. They

-had coöperated to enlarge the railway movement,

-as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union

-Pacific was authorized to meet the new demand;

-and while the Union Pacific was under construction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">375</a></span>

-other roads to meet the same demands were chartered

-and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled

-the final barrier.</p>

-

-<p>Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation

-of the entire frontier between 1862 and 1871.

-The charter acts of the Northern Pacific, the Atlantic

-and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern

-Pacific at once opened the way for some five new

-continental lines and closed the period of direct federal

-aid to railway construction. The Northern Pacific

-received its charter on the same day that the

-Union Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864.

-It was authorized to join the waters of Lake Superior

-and Puget Sound, and was to receive a land grant of

-twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in

-the territories through which it should run. In the

-summer of 1866 a third continental route was provided

-for in the South along the line of the thirty-fifth

-parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific,

-was to build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque,

-New Mexico, to the Pacific, and to connect,

-near the eastern line of California, with the Southern

-Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised

-twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the

-territories. The Texas Pacific was chartered March

-3, 1871, as the last of the land grant railways. It

-received the usual grant, which was applicable only

-west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana

-and El Paso, it could receive no federal aid since in

-Texas there were no public lands. Its charter called<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">376</a></span>

-for construction to San Diego, but the Southern

-Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico,

-headed it off at El Paso, and it got no farther.</p>

-

-<p>To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways,

-Congress added others in the form of local

-or state grants in the same years, so that by 1871 all

-that the companies could ask for the future was

-lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the

-first time the federal government had taken an active

-initiative in providing for the destruction of a

-frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no longer

-with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence

-of a realization of the approaching frontier

-change.</p>

-

-<p>The new Pacific railways began to build just as the

-Union Pacific was completed and opened to traffic.

-In the cases of all, the development was slow, since

-the investing public had little confidence in the existence

-of a business large enough to maintain four

-systems, or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert.

-The first period of construction of all these roads terminated

-in 1873, when panic brought transportation

-projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of

-five years.</p>

-

-<p>Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done

-much to establish public credit during the war and

-had created a market of small buyers for investment

-securities on the strength of United States

-bonds, popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869

-and 1870. Within two years he is said to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">377</a></span>

-raised thirty millions for the construction of the road,

-making its building a financial possibility. And

-although he may have distorted the isotherm several

-degrees in order to picture his farm lands as semi-tropical

-in their luxuriance, as General Hazen charged,

-he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul

-her opportunity, and had run the main line of track

-through Fargo, on the Red, to Bismarck, on the

-Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty miles

-from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought

-expansion to an end.</p>

-

-<p>For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern

-Pacific was of fundamental importance. The

-railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota, Dakota, and

-much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential

-grain fields of the Red River region were virgin forest,

-and on the main line of the new road, for two thousand

-miles, hardly a trace of settled habitation existed.

-The panic of 1873 caught the Union Pacific

-at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable

-track extending in advance of the railroad

-frontier. The Atlantic and Pacific and Texas Pacific

-were less seriously overbuilt, but not less effectively

-checked. The former, starting from Springfield, had

-constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita,

-in Indian Territory, where it arrived in the fall of

-1871. It had meanwhile acquired some of the old

-Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track into

-St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita

-remained its terminus for several years, and when it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">378</a></span>

-emerged from the receiver's hands, it bore the new

-name of St. Louis and San Francisco.</p>

-

-<p>The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of

-local lines which expected, through federal incorporation,

-to reach the dignity of a continental railroad.

-It began its construction towards El Paso from

-Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state

-line, and reached the vicinity of Dallas and Fort

-Worth before the panic. It planned to get into St.

-Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and

-Southern, and into New Orleans over the New

-Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas, Arkansas,

-and Missouri became through these lines a

-centre of railway development, while in the near-by

-grazing country the meat-packing industries shortly

-found their sources of supply.</p>

-

-<p>The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated

-in 1873 could scarcely have been deferred for

-many years. The waste of the Civil War period, and

-the enthusiasm for economic development which

-followed it, invited the retribution that usually

-follows continued and widespread inflation. Already

-the completion of a national railway system was

-foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had

-been for railways at any cost, but the Granger

-activities following the panic gave warning of an

-approaching period when this should be changed

-into a demand for regulation of railroads. But

-as yet the frontier remained substantially intact,

-and until its railway system should be completed the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">379</a></span>

-Granger demand could not be translated into an

-effective movement for federal control. It was not

-until 1879 that the United States recovered from the

-depression following the crisis. In that year resumption

-marked the readjustment of national currency,

-reconstruction was over, and the railways entered

-upon the last five years of the culminating period in

-the history of the frontier. When the five years were

-over, five new continental routes were available

-for transportation.</p>

-

-<p>The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress

-across Texas when checked by the panic in the

-vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived, it pushed

-its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by

-a land grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never

-built. Corporations of California, Arizona, and

-New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern Pacific,

-constructed the line across the Colorado River

-and along the Gila, through lands acquired by the

-Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains were running over

-its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to New

-Orleans by the following October. In the course of

-this Southern Pacific construction, connection had

-been made with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé

-at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but through

-lack of harmony between the roads their junction

-was of little consequence.</p>

-

-<div id="ip_379" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">

-  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-408.jpg" width="600" height="374" alt="" />

-  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The Pacific Railroads, 1884</span></p></div>

-

-<div class="captionl"><p>This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads

-which existed everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower Missouri valleys.</p></div></div>

-

-<p>The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an

-additional line through southern Texas in the beginning

-of 1883. Around the Galveston, Harrisburg,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">381</a></span>

-and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other

-lines and begun double construction from San

-Antonio west, and from El Paso, or more accurately

-Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra

-Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new

-line and the Texas and Pacific used the same track.

-In later years the line through San Antonio and

-Houston became the main line of the Southern

-Pacific.</p>

-

-<p>A third connection of the Southern Pacific across

-Texas was operated before the end of 1883 over its

-Mojave extension in California and the Atlantic and

-Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic

-and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership,

-and come out as St. Louis and San Francisco.

-But its land grant had remained unused, while the

-Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé had reached Albuquerque

-and had exhausted its own land grant,

-received through the state of Kansas and ceasing

-at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter

-had passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch

-along the old Santa Fé trail to Santa Fé and Albuquerque.

-Here it came to an agreement with the St.

-Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were

-to build jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise,

-from Albuquerque into California. They

-built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not relishing

-a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege

-to meet the new road on the eastern boundary

-of California. Hence its Mojave branch was waiting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">382</a></span>

-at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific arrived

-there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the

-completion of bridges over the Colorado and Rio

-Grande this third eastern connection of the Southern

-Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were

-running through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.</p>

-

-<p>The names of Billings and Villard are most closely

-connected with the renascence of the Northern

-Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at the

-Missouri River, although it had built a few miles

-in Washington territory, around its new terminal

-city of Tacoma. The illumination of crisis times

-had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay

-Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in

-his palmy days. The existence of various land grant

-railways in Washington and Oregon made the revival

-difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer

-competition by both water and rail along the Columbia

-River, below Walla Walla. Under the presidency

-of Frederick Billings construction revived about

-1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri,

-and from Wallula, at the junction of the

-Columbia and Snake. From these points lines

-were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri

-divisions towards the continental divide. Below

-Wallula, the Columbia Valley traffic was shared by

-agreement with the Oregon Railway and Navigation

-Company, which, under the presidency of Henry

-Villard, owned the steamship and railway lines of

-Oregon. As the time for opening the through lines<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">383</a></span>

-approached, the question of Columbia River competition

-increased in serious aspect. Villard solved

-the problem through the agency of his famous

-blind pool, which still stands remarkable in railway

-finance. With the proceeds of the pool he

-organized the Oregon and Transcontinental as a

-holding company, and purchased a controlling interest

-in the rival roads. With harmony of plan

-thus insured, he assumed the presidency of the

-Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to complete and

-celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His

-celebration was elaborate, yet the <i>Nation</i> remarked

-that the "mere achievement of laying a continuous

-rail across the continent has long since been taken

-out of the realm of marvels, and the country can

-never feel again the thrill which the joining of the

-Central and Union Pacific lines gave it."</p>

-

-<p>The land grant railways completed these four

-eastern connections across the frontier in the period

-of culmination. Private capital added a fifth in the

-new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled

-by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the

-Denver and Rio Grande. The Burlington, built

-along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had

-competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of

-that point since June, 1882. West of Denver the

-narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio Grande had

-been advancing since 1870.</p>

-

-<p>General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia

-capitalists had, in 1870, secured a Colorado<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">384</a></span>

-charter for their Denver and Rio Grande. Started

-in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at

-Colorado Springs that autumn, and had continued

-south in later years. Like other roads it had progressed

-slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had

-been met at Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and

-Santa Fé. From Pueblo it contested successfully

-with this rival for the grand cańon of the Arkansas,

-and built up that valley through the Gunnison

-country and across the old Ute reserve, to Grand

-Junction. From the Utah line it had been continued

-to Ogden by an allied corporation. A

-through service to Ogden, inaugurated in the summer

-of 1883, brought competition to the Union Pacific

-throughout its whole extent.</p>

-

-<p>The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union

-Pacific had threatened in 1869, was easily accessible

-by 1884. Along six different lines between New

-Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to

-cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific

-states. No longer could any portion of the republic

-be considered as beyond the reach of civilization.

-Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in its

-presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for

-colonists, and through lines of railway iron bound

-the nation into an economic and political unit. "As

-the railroads overtook the successive lines of isolated

-frontier posts, and settlements spread out over

-country no longer requiring military protection,"

-wrote General P.&nbsp;H. Sheridan in 1882, "the army<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">385</a></span>

-vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into

-remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue

-its pioneer work. In rear of the advancing line

-of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and cabins of the

-frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful

-houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy

-towns of a people who knew how best to employ the

-vast resources of the great West. The civilization

-from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that

-rapidly approaching it from the direction of the

-Pacific, the long intervening strip of territory, extending

-from the British possessions to Old Mexico,

-yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines

-will entirely disappear and the mingling settlements

-absorb the remnants of the once powerful Indian

-nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly attempted to

-forbid the destined progress of the age." The

-deluge of population realized by Sheridan, and let in

-by the railways, had, by 1890, blotted the uninhabited

-frontier off the map. Local spots yet remained unpeopled,

-but the census of 1890 revealed no clear

-division between the unsettled West and the rest of

-the United States.</p>

-

-<p>New states in plains and mountains marked the

-abolition of the last frontier as they had the earlier.

-In less than ten years the gap between Minnesota

-and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and

-South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and

-Washington. In 1890, for the first time, a solid band

-of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific. Farther<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">386</a></span>

-south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new

-pressure. The Dawes bill released a fertile acreage

-to be distributed to the land hungry who had banked

-up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and

-Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890,

-while in eighteen more years, swallowing up the

-whole Indian Country, it had taken its place as a

-member of the Union. Between the northern tier

-of states and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown

-as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, the

-last creating eleven new counties in its eastern

-third in 1889, had seen their population densify under

-the stimulus of easy transportation. Much of the

-settlement had been premature, inviting failure,

-as populism later showed, but it left no area in the

-United States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large

-enough to be regarded as a national frontier. The

-last frontier, the same that Long had described as

-the American Desert in 1820, had been won.</p>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">387</a></span></p>

-

-<div id="sources">

-<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII">NOTE ON THE SOURCES</a></h2>

-

-<p>The fundamental ideas upon which all recent careful work in

-western history has been based were first stated by Frederick J.

-Turner, in his paper on <i>The Significance of the Frontier in American

-History</i>, in the <i>Annual Report of the Am. Hist. Assn.</i>, 1893.

-No comprehensive history of the trans-Mississippi West has yet

-appeared; Randall Parrish, <i>The Great Plains</i> (2d ed., Chicago,

-1907), is at best only a brief and superficial sketch; the histories

-of the several far western states by Hubert Howe Bancroft remain

-the most useful collection of secondary materials upon the

-subject. R.&nbsp;G. Thwaites, <i>Rocky Mountain Exploration</i> (N.Y.,

-1904); O.&nbsp;P. Austin, <i>Steps in the Expansion of our Territory</i>

-(N.Y., 1903); H. Gannett, <i>Boundaries of the United States and

-of the Several States and Territories</i> (<i>Bulletin of the U.S. Geological

-Survey</i>, No. 226, 1904); and <i>Organic Acts for the Territories of the

-United States with Notes thereon</i> (56th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc.

-148), are also of use.</p>

-

-<p>The local history of the West must yet be collected from many

-varieties of sources. The state historical societies have been

-active for many years, their more important collections comprising:

-<i>Publications of the Arkansas Hist. Assn.</i>, <i>Annals of Iowa</i>,

-<i>Iowa Hist. Record</i>, <i>Iowa Journal of Hist. and Politics</i>, <i>Collections

-of the Minnesota Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Trans. of the Kansas State Hist.

-Soc.</i>, <i>Trans. and Rep. of the Nebraska Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Proceedings of

-the Missouri Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Contrib. to the Hist. Soc. of Montana</i>,

-<i>Quart. of the Oregon Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Quart. of the Texas State Hist.

-Assn.</i>, <i>Collections of the Wisconsin State Hist. Soc.</i> The scattered

-but valuable fragments to be found in these files are to be supplemented

-by the narratives contained in the histories of the

-single states or sections, the more important of these being:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">388</a></span>

-T.&nbsp;H. Hittell, <i>California</i>; F. Hall, <i>Colorado</i>; J.&nbsp;C. Smiley, <i>Denver</i>

-(an unusually accurate and full piece of local history); W. Upham,

-<i>Minnesota in Three Centuries</i>; G.&nbsp;P. Garrison, <i>Texas</i>; E.&nbsp;H. Meany,

-<i>Washington</i>; J. Schafer, <i>Hist. of the Pacific Northwest</i>; R.&nbsp;G.

-Thwaites, <i>Wisconsin</i>, and the <i>Works</i> of H.&nbsp;H. Bancroft.</p>

-

-<p>The comprehensive collection of geographic data for the West

-is the <i>Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad from the

-Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean</i>, made by the War Department

-and published by Congress in twelve huge volumes, 1855&ndash;.

-The most important official predecessors of this survey left the

-following reports: E. James, <i>Account of an Expedition from

-Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains, performed in the Years 1819,

-1820, ... under the Command of Maj. S.&nbsp;H. Long</i> (Phila.,

-1823); J.&nbsp;C. Frémont, <i>Report of the Exploring Expeditions to the

-Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North

-California in the Years 1843&ndash;'44</i> (28th Cong., 2d sess., Sen. Doc.

-174); W.&nbsp;H. Emory, <i>Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Ft.

-Leavenworth ... to San Diego ...</i> (30th Cong., 1st sess., Ex.

-Doc. 41); H. Stansbury, <i>Exploration and Survey of the Valley of

-the Great Salt Lake of Utah ...</i> (32d Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Ex.

-Doc. 3). From the great number of personal narratives of

-western trips, those of James O. Pattie, John B. Wyeth, John K.

-Townsend, and Joel Palmer may be selected as typical and

-useful. All of these, as well as the James narrative of the Long

-expedition, are reprinted in the monumental R.&nbsp;G. Thwaites,

-<i>Early Western Travels</i>, which does not, however, give any aid for

-the period after 1850. Later travels of importance are J.&nbsp;I.

-Thornton, <i>Oregon and California in 1848 ...</i> (N.Y., 1849);

-Horace Greeley, <i>An Overland Journey from New York to San

-Francisco in the Summer of 1859</i> (N.Y., 1860); R.&nbsp;F. Burton,

-<i>The City of the Saints, and across the Rocky Mountains to California</i>

-(N.Y., 1862); R.&nbsp;B. Marcy, <i>The Prairie Traveller, a Handbook

-for Overland Expeditions</i> (edited by R.&nbsp;F. Burton, London,

-1863); F.&nbsp;C. Young, <i>Across the Plains in '65</i> (Denver, 1905);

-Samuel Bowles, <i>Across the Continent</i> (Springfield, 1861); Samuel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">389</a></span>

-Bowles, <i>Our New West, Records of Travels between the Mississippi

-River and the Pacific Ocean</i> (Hartford, 1869); W.&nbsp;A. Bell, <i>New

-Tracks in North America</i> (2d ed., London, 1870); J.&nbsp;H. Beadle,

-<i>The Undeveloped West, or Five Years in the Territories</i> (Phila.,

-1873).</p>

-

-<p>The classic account of traffic on the plains is Josiah Gregg,

-<i>Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé Trader</i>

-(many editions, and reprinted in Thwaites); H.&nbsp;M. Chittenden,

-<i>History of Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River</i> (N.Y.,

-1903), and <i>The American Fur Trade of the Far West</i> (N.Y.,

-1902), are the best modern accounts. A brilliant sketch is C.&nbsp;F.

-Lummis, <i>Pioneer Transportation in America, Its Curiosities and

-Romance</i> (<i>McClure's Magazine</i>, 1905). Other works of use are

-Henry Inman, <i>The Old Santa Fé Trail</i> (N.Y., 1898); Henry

-Inman and William F. Cody, <i>The Great Salt Lake Trail</i> (N.Y.,

-1898); F.&nbsp;A. Root and W.&nbsp;E. Connelley, <i>The Overland Stage to

-California</i> (Topeka, 1901); F.&nbsp;G. Young, <i>The Oregon Trail</i>, in

-<i>Oregon Hist. Soc. Quarterly</i>, Vol. I; F. Parkman, <i>The Oregon

-Trail</i>.</p>

-

-<p>Railway transportation in the Far West yet awaits its historian.

-Some useful antiquarian data are to be found in C.&nbsp;F. Carter,

-<i>When Railroads were New</i> (N.Y., 1909), and there are a few

-histories of single roads, the most valuable being J.&nbsp;P. Davis,

-<i>The Union Pacific Railway</i> (Chicago, 1894), and E.&nbsp;V. Smalley,

-<i>History of the Northern Pacific Railroad</i> (N.Y., 1883). L.&nbsp;H.

-Haney, <i>A Congressional History of Railways in the United States

-to 1850</i>; J.&nbsp;B. Sanborn, <i>Congressional Grants of Lands in Aid of

-Railways</i>, and B.&nbsp;H. Meyer, <i>The Northern Securities Case</i>, all in

-the <i>Bulletins</i> of the University of Wisconsin, contain much information

-and useful bibliographies. The local historical societies

-have published many brief articles on single lines. There

-is a bibliography of the continental railways in F.&nbsp;L. Paxson,

-<i>The Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in

-America</i>, in <i>Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn.</i>, 1907. Their social

-and political aspects may be traced in J.&nbsp;B. Crawford, <i>The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">390</a></span>

-Crédit Mobilier of America</i> (Boston, 1880) and E.&nbsp;W. Martin,

-<i>History of the Granger Movement</i> (1874). The sources, which

-are as yet uncollected, are largely in the government documents

-and the files of the economic and railroad periodicals.</p>

-

-<p>For half a century, during which the Indian problem reached

-and passed its most difficult places, the United States was negligent

-in publishing compilations of Indian laws and treaties.

-In 1837 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs published in Washington,

-<i>Treaties between the United States of America and the Several

-Indian Tribes, from 1778 to 1837: with a copious Table of Contents</i>.

-After this date, documents and correspondence were to

-be found only in the intricate sessional papers and the <i>Annual

-Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs</i>, which accompanied

-the reports of the Secretary of War, 1832&ndash;1849, and those

-of the Secretary of the Interior after 1849. In 1902 Congress

-published C.&nbsp;J. Kappler, <i>Indian Affairs, Laws, and Treaties</i>

-(57th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc. 452). Few historians have made

-serious use of these compilations or reports. Two other government

-documents of great value in the history of Indian negotiations

-are, Thomas Donaldson, <i>The Public Domain</i> (47th Cong., 2d

-sess., H. Misc. Doc. 45, Pt. 4), and C.&nbsp;C. Royce, <i>Indian Land

-Cessions in the United States</i> (with many charts, in 18th <i>Ann.

-Rep. of the Bureau of Am. Ethnology</i>, Pt. 2, 1896&ndash;1897). Most

-special works on the Indians are partisan, spectacular, or ill

-informed; occasionally they have all these qualities. A few of

-the most accessible are: A.&nbsp;H. Abel, <i>History of the Events

-resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi</i> (in <i>Ann.

-Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn.</i>, 1906, an elaborate and scholarly

-work); J.&nbsp;P. Dunn, <i>Massacres of the Mountains, a History of the

-Indian Wars of the Far West</i> (N.Y., 1886; a relatively critical

-work, with some bibliography); R.&nbsp;I. Dodge, <i>Our Wild Indians ...</i>

-(Hartford, 1883); G.&nbsp;E. Edwards, <i>The Red Man and the White

-Man in North America from its Discovery to the Present Time</i>

-(Boston, 1882; a series of Lowell Institute lectures, by no means

-so valuable as the pretentious title would indicate); I.&nbsp;V.&nbsp;D.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">391</a></span>

-Heard, <i>History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863</i>

-(N.Y., 1863; a contemporary and useful narrative); O.&nbsp;O. Howard,

-<i>Nez Perce Joseph, an Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his

-Confederates, his Enemies, his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and

-Capture</i> (Boston, 1881; this is General Howard's personal vindication);

-Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson, <i>A Century of Dishonor, a

-Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of

-the Indian Tribes</i> (N.Y., 1881; highly colored and partisan);

-G.&nbsp;W. Manypenny, <i>Our Indian Wards</i> (Cincinnati, 1880; by a

-former Indian Commissioner); L.&nbsp;E. Textor, <i>Official Relations

-between the United States and the Sioux Indians</i> (Palo Alto, 1896;

-one of the few scholarly and dispassionate works on the Indians);

-F.&nbsp;A. Walker, <i>The Indian Question</i> (Boston, 1874; three essays by

-a former Indian Commissioner); C.&nbsp;T. Brady, <i>Indian Fights and

-Fighters</i> and <i>Northwestern Fights and Fighters</i> (N.Y., 1907; two

-volumes in his series of <i>American Fights and Fighters</i>, prepared

-for consumers of popular sensational literature, but containing

-much valuable detail, and some critical judgments).</p>

-

-<p>Nearly every incident in the history of Indian relations has

-been made the subject of investigations by the War and Interior

-departments. The resulting collections of papers are to be found

-in the congressional documents, through the indexes. They are

-too numerous to be listed here. The searcher should look for reports

-from the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Interior,

-or the Postmaster-general, for court-martial proceedings, and

-for reports of special committees of Congress. Dunn gives some

-classified lists in his <i>Massacres of the Mountains</i>.</p>

-

-<p>There is a rapidly increasing mass of individual biography and

-reminiscence for the West during this period. Some works of

-this class which have been found useful here are: W.&nbsp;M. Meigs,

-<i>Thomas Hart Benton</i> (Phila., 1904); C.&nbsp;W. Upham, <i>Life, Explorations,

-and Public Services of John Charles Frémont</i> (40th thousand,

-Boston, 1856); S.&nbsp;B. Harding, <i>Life of George B. Smith, Founder of

-Sedalia, Missouri</i> (Sedalia, 1907); P.&nbsp;H. Burnett, <i>Recollections and

-Opinions of an Old Pioneer</i> (N.Y., 1880; by one who had followed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">392</a></span>

-the Oregon trail and had later become governor of California);

-A. Johnson, <i>S.&nbsp;A. Douglas</i> (N.Y., 1908; one of the most significant

-biographies of recent years); H. Stevens, <i>Life of Isaac

-Ingalls Stevens</i> (Boston, 1900); R.&nbsp;S. Thorndike, <i>The Sherman

-Letters</i> (N.Y., 1894; full of references to frontier conditions in the

-sixties); P.&nbsp;H. Sheridan, <i>Personal Memoirs</i> (London, 1888; with

-a good map of the Indian war of 1867&ndash;1868, which the later

-edition has dropped); E.&nbsp;P. Oberholtzer, <i>Jay Cooke, Financier

-of the Civil War</i> (Phila., 1907; with details of Northern Pacific

-railway finance); H. Villard, <i>Memoirs</i> (Boston, 1904; the life of

-an active railway financier); Alexander Majors, <i>Seventy Years on

-the Frontier</i> (N.Y., 1893; the reminiscences of one who had belonged

-to the great firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell); G.&nbsp;R.

-Brown, <i>Reminiscences of William M. Stewart of Nevada</i> (1908).</p>

-

-<p>Miscellaneous works indicating various types of materials

-which have been drawn upon are: O.&nbsp;J. Hollister, <i>The Mines of

-Colorado</i> (Springfield, 1867; a miners' handbook); S. Mowry,

-<i>Arizona and Sonora</i> (3d ed., 1864; written in the spirit of a mining

-prospectus); T.&nbsp;B.&nbsp;H. Stenhouse, <i>The Rocky Mountain Saints</i>

-(London, 1874; a credible account from a Mormon missionary

-who had recanted without bitterness); W.&nbsp;A. Linn, <i>The Story

-of the Mormons</i> (N.Y., 1902; the only critical history of the

-Mormons, but having a strong Gentile bias); T.&nbsp;J. Dimsdale, <i>The

-Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains</i>

-(2d ed., Virginia City, 1882; a good description of the

-social order of the mining camp).</p>

-</div>

-

-<hr />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">393</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="newpage p4 index">

-<h2 class="nobreak"><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX">INDEX</a></h2>

-

-<ul>

-<li>Acton, Minnesota, Sioux massacre at, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Alder Gulch mines, Idaho, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Anthony, Major Scott J., <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Apache Indians, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>treaty of 1853 with, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</li>

-  <li>troubles with, in Arizona, <a href="#Page_162">162&ndash;163</a>;</li>

-  <li>last struggles of, against whites, <a href="#Page_368">368&ndash;369</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Arapaho Indians, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a> ff., <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>Medicine Lodge treaty with, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>

-  <li>issue of arms to, <a href="#Page_312">312&ndash;313</a>;</li>

-  <li>join in war of 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313&ndash;318</a>;</li>

-  <li>Custer's defeat of, <a href="#Page_317">317&ndash;318</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Arapahoe, county of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Arickara Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Arizona, beginnings of, <a href="#Page_158">158</a> ff.;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>erection of territory of, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Arkansas, boundaries of, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>admission as a state, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Army, question of control of Indian affairs by, <a href="#Page_324">324&ndash;344</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Assiniboin Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Atchison, Senator, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Atlantic and Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>becomes the St. Louis and San Francisco, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Augur, General C.&nbsp;C., <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Auraria settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Bannack City, mining centre, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bannock Indians, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Beadle, John H., on western railways and their builders, <a href="#Page_332">332&ndash;333</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bear Flag Republic, the, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Becknell, William, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Beckwith, Lieut. E.&nbsp;G., Pacific railway survey by, <a href="#Page_203">203&ndash;206</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bell, English traveller, on railway building in the West, <a href="#Page_329">329&ndash;331</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Benton, Thomas Hart, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>interest of, in railways, <a href="#Page_193">193&ndash;194</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Bent's Fort, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Billings, Frederick, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Blackfoot Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Black Hawk, Colorado, village of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Black Hawk, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Black Hawk War, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25&ndash;26</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Black Hills, discovery of gold in, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>troubles with Indians resulting from discovery, <a href="#Page_361">361</a> ff.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Black Kettle, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_255">255&ndash;261</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>leads war party in 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>

-  <li>death of, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Blind pool, Villard's, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Boisé mines, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Boulder, Colorado, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bowles, Samuel, on railway terminal towns, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Box family outrage, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bridge across the Mississippi, the first, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bridger, "Jim," <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Brown, John, murder of Kansans by, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Brulé Sioux Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bull Bear, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bureau of Indian Affairs, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Burlington, capital of Iowa territory, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>description of, in 1840, <a href="#Page_47">47&ndash;48</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Burnett, governor of California, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Bushwhacking in Kansas during Civil War, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">394</a></span><br /></li>

-<li>Butterfield, John, mail and express route of, <a href="#Page_177">177</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Byers, Denver editor, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Caddo Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>California, early American designs on, <a href="#Page_104">104&ndash;105</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>becomes American possession, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li>

-  <li>discovery of gold in, and results, <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;113</a>;</li>

-  <li>population in 1850, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>

-  <li>local railways constructed in, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>

-  <li>Central Pacific Railway in, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Camels, experiment with, in Texas, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Camp Grant massacre, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Canals, land grants in aid of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Canby, E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S., <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>murder of, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Carleton, Colonel J.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Carlyle, George H., <a href="#Page_250">250&ndash;251</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Carrington, Colonel Henry B., <a href="#Page_274">274&ndash;275</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Carson, Kit, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Carson City, <a href="#Page_157">157&ndash;158</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Carson County, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cass, Lewis, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Census of Indians, in 1880, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Central City, Colorado, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Central Overland, California, and Pike's Peak Express, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Central Pacific of California Railway, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>description of construction of, <a href="#Page_325">325&ndash;335</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Cherokee Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cherokee Neutral Strip, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cheyenne, founding of, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>consequence of, as a railway junction, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Cheyenne Indians, massacre of, at Sand Creek, <a href="#Page_260">260&ndash;261</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>assigned lands in Indian Territory, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;</li>

-  <li>Medicine Lodge treaty with, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>

-  <li>issue of arms to, <a href="#Page_312">312&ndash;313</a>;</li>

-  <li>begin war against whites in 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>

-  <li>Custer's defeat of, <a href="#Page_317">317&ndash;318</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Chickasaw Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Chief Joseph, leader of Nez Percé Indians, <a href="#Page_363">363&ndash;365</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>military skill shown by, in retreat of Nez Percés, <a href="#Page_366">366&ndash;367</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Chief Lawyer, <a href="#Page_363">363&ndash;364</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Chinese labor for railway building, <a href="#Page_326">326&ndash;327</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Chippewa Indians, <a href="#Page_26">26&ndash;27</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Chittenden, Hiram Martin, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;71</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Chivington, J.&nbsp;M., <a href="#Page_229">229&ndash;230</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>massacre of Indians at Sand Creek by, <a href="#Page_260">260&ndash;261</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Civil War, the West during the, <a href="#Page_225">225</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Claims associations, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Clark, Governor, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Clemens, S.&nbsp;L., quoted, <a href="#Page_186">186&ndash;187</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cody, William F., <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Colley, Major, Indian agent, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Colorado, first settlements in, <a href="#Page_142">142&ndash;145</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>movement for separate government for, <a href="#Page_146">146</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>Senate bill for erection of territory of, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</li>

-  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</li>

-  <li>admission of, and first governor, <a href="#Page_154">154&ndash;155</a>;</li>

-  <li>during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_228">228&ndash;230</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Colorado-Idaho plan, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Comanche Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Comstock lode, the, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Conestoga wagons, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Connor, General Patrick E., <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cooke, Jay, railway promotion and later failure of, <a href="#Page_376">376&ndash;377</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cooper, Colonel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Council Bluffs, importance of, as a railway terminus, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Council Grove, rendezvous of Santa Fé traders, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63&ndash;64</a>.<br /></li>

-<li><i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">Crédit Mobilier</i>, the, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Creek Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Crocker, Charles, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">395</a></span><br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>activity of, as a railway builder, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Crook, General George, <a href="#Page_368">368&ndash;369</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Crow Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Culbertson, Alexander, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Cumberland Road, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Custer, General, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a> ff., <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>commands in attack on Cheyenne, <a href="#Page_316">316&ndash;318</a>;</li>

-  <li>romantic character of, and death in Sioux war, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Dakota, erection and growth of territory of, <a href="#Page_166">166&ndash;167</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>Idaho created from a part of, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Dawes bill of 1887, for division of lands among Indians, <a href="#Page_354">354&ndash;355</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>effect of, on Indian reserves, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Delaware Indians, settlement of, in the West, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Demoine County created, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Denver, settlement of, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>early caucuses and conventions at, <a href="#Page_147">147&ndash;149</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Denver and Rio Grande Railway, <a href="#Page_383">383&ndash;384</a>.<br /></li>

-<li><a id="Desert"></a>Desert, tradition of a great American, <a href="#Page_11">11&ndash;13</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>disappearance of tradition, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</li>

-  <li>Kansas formed out of a portion of, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>

-  <li>final conquest by railways of region known as, <a href="#Page_384">384&ndash;386</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Digger Indians, <a href="#Page_203">203&ndash;204</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Dillon, President, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Dodge, Henry, <a href="#Page_35">35&ndash;36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37&ndash;38</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328&ndash;329</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Dole, W.&nbsp;P., Indian Commissioner, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Donnelly, Ignatius, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Douglas, Stephen A., <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213&ndash;214</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Downing, Major Jacob, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Dubuque, lead mines at, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>as a mining camp, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Dubuque County created, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Education of Indians, <a href="#Page_351">351&ndash;352</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Emigrant Aid Society, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Emory, Lieut.-Col., survey by, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Erie Canal, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Evans, Governor, war against Indians conducted by, <a href="#Page_253">253</a> ff.;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Ewbank Station massacre, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Fairs, agricultural, for Indians, <a href="#Page_352">352&ndash;353</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Falls line, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Far West, Mormon headquarters at, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fetterman, Captain W.&nbsp;J., <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277&ndash;278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>slaughter of, by Indians, <a href="#Page_280">280&ndash;281</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Fiske, Captain James L., <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fitzpatrick, Indian agent, <a href="#Page_122">122&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Armstrong, purchase at, of Indian lands, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Benton, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Bridger, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort C.&nbsp;F. Smith, <a href="#Page_275">275&ndash;277</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Hall, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Kearney, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Laramie, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>treaties with Indians signed at, in 1851, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>;</li>

-  <li>conference of Peace Commission with Indians held at (1867), <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Fort Larned, conference with Indians at, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Leavenworth, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Philip Kearney, Indian fight at (1866), <a href="#Page_274">274&ndash;275</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>extermination of Fetterman's party at, <a href="#Page_280">280&ndash;282</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Fort Pierre, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Ridgely, Sioux attack on, <a href="#Page_235">235&ndash;236</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Snelling, <a href="#Page_33">33&ndash;34</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Sully conference, <a href="#Page_271">271&ndash;272</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Whipple, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Winnebago, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fort Wise, treaty with Indians signed at, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Forty-niners, <a href="#Page_109">109&ndash;118</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Fox Indians, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Flandrau, Judge Charles E., <a href="#Page_236">236&ndash;237</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">396</a></span><br /></li>

-<li>Franklin, town of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Freighting on the plains, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Frémont, John C., <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>explorations of, beyond the Rockies, <a href="#Page_73">73&ndash;75</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>;</li>

-  <li>senator from California, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Fur traders, pioneer western, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;71</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Galbraith, Thomas J., Indian agent, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Geary, John W., <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Georgetown, Colorado, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Geronimo, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Gilpin, William, first governor of Colorado Territory, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</li>

-  <li>responsibility assumed by, during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_228">228&ndash;229</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Gold, discovery of, in California, <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;113</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>in Pike's Peak region, <a href="#Page_141">141&ndash;142</a>;</li>

-  <li>in the Black Hills, <a href="#Page_359">359&ndash;361</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Grattan, Lieutenant, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Great American desert. <i>See</i> <a href="#Desert">Desert</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Great Salt Lake. <i>See</i> <a href="#Salt_Lake">Salt Lake</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Greeley, Horace, western adventures of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Gregg, Josiah, <a href="#Page_61">61&ndash;62</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Grosventre Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Guerrilla conflicts during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_230">230&ndash;233</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Gunnison, Captain J.&nbsp;W., <a href="#Page_204">204&ndash;205</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Hancock, General W.&nbsp;S., <a href="#Page_306">306&ndash;311</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Hand-cart incident in Mormon emigration, <a href="#Page_100">100&ndash;101</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Harney, General, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Harte, Bret, verses by, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Hayt, E.&nbsp;A., Indian Commissioner, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Hazen, General W.&nbsp;B., <a href="#Page_320">320&ndash;321</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Helena, growth of city of, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Highland settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Holladay, Ben, <a href="#Page_186">186&ndash;190</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>losses from Indians by, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Hopkins, Mark, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Howard, General O.&nbsp;O., <a href="#Page_365">365&ndash;366</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Hungate family, murder of, by Indians, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Hunkpapa Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Hunter, General, in charge of Department of Kansas during Civil War, <a href="#Page_230">230&ndash;231</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Huntington, Collis P., <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Idaho, proposed name for Colorado, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>establishment of territory of, <a href="#Page_166">166&ndash;167</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Idaho Springs, settlement of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Illinois, opening of, to whites, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Illinois Central Railroad, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216&ndash;218</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Independence, town of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>outfitting post of traders, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>

-  <li>Mormons at, <a href="#Page_89">89&ndash;90</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Indian agents, position of, in regard to Indian affairs, <a href="#Page_304">304&ndash;305</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>question regarding, as opposed to military control of Indians, <a href="#Page_342">342&ndash;343</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Indian Bureau, creation of, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>transference from War Department to the Interior, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</li>

-  <li>history of the, <a href="#Page_341">341</a> ff.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Indian Commissioners, Board of, created in 1869, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Indian Intercourse Act, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Indian Territory, position of Indians in, during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_240">240&ndash;241</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>breaking up of, following allotment of lands to individual Indians, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li><a id="Indians"></a>Indians, numbers of, in United States, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>governmental policy regarding, <a href="#Page_16">16</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>Monroe's policy of removal of, to western lands, <a href="#Page_18">18&ndash;19</a>;</li>

-  <li>treaties of 1825 with, <a href="#Page_19">19&ndash;20</a>;</li>

-  <li>allotment of territory among, on western frontier, <a href="#Page_20">20&ndash;30</a>;</li>

-  <li>troubles with, resulting from Oregon, California, and Mormon emigrations, <a href="#Page_119">119&ndash;123</a>;</li>

-  <li>fresh treaties with at Upper Platte agency in 1851, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">397</a></span></li>

-  <li>further cession of lands in Indian Country by, in 1854, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>

-  <li>treatment of, by Arizona settlers, <a href="#Page_162">162&ndash;163</a>;</li>

-  <li>danger to overland mail and express business from, <a href="#Page_187">187&ndash;188</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>;</li>

-  <li>Digger Indians, <a href="#Page_203">203&ndash;204</a>;</li>

-  <li>the Sioux war in Minnesota, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>effect of the Civil War on, <a href="#Page_240">240&ndash;242</a>;</li>

-  <li>causes of restlessness of, during Civil War, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>antagonism of, aroused by advance westward of whites, <a href="#Page_244">244&ndash;252</a>;</li>

-  <li>conditions leading to Sioux war, <a href="#Page_264">264</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>war with plains Sioux (1866), <a href="#Page_273">273&ndash;283</a>;</li>

-  <li>the discussion as to proper treatment of, <a href="#Page_284">284&ndash;288</a>;</li>

-  <li>appointment of Peace Commissioner of 1867 to end Cheyenne and Sioux troubles, <a href="#Page_289">289&ndash;290</a>;</li>

-  <li>Medicine Lodge treaties concluded with, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>

-  <li>report and recommendations of Peace Commission, <a href="#Page_296">296&ndash;298</a>;</li>

-  <li>interval of peace with, <a href="#Page_302">302&ndash;303</a>;</li>

-  <li>continued troubles with, and causes, <a href="#Page_304">304</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>war begun by Arapahoes and Cheyenne in 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>

-  <li>war of 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313&ndash;318</a>;</li>

-  <li>President Grant appoints board of civilian Indian commissioners, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>railway builders' troubles with, <a href="#Page_328">328&ndash;329</a>;</li>

-  <li>question of civilian or military control of, <a href="#Page_342">342&ndash;344</a>;</li>

-  <li>Board of Commissioners, appointed for (1869), <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</li>

-  <li>Congress decides to make no more treaties with, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>;</li>

-  <li>mistaken policy of treaties, <a href="#Page_348">348&ndash;349</a>;</li>

-  <li>census of, in 1880, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>

-  <li>agricultural fairs for, <a href="#Page_352">352&ndash;353</a>;</li>

-  <li>individual ownership of land by, <a href="#Page_354">354&ndash;357</a>;</li>

-  <li>effect of allotment of lands among, on Indian reserves, <a href="#Page_356">356&ndash;357</a>;</li>

-  <li>end of Monroe's policy, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>;</li>

-  <li>last struggles of the Sioux, Nez Percés, and Apaches, <a href="#Page_361">361&ndash;371</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Inkpaduta's massacre, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Inman, Colonel Henry, quoted, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Iowa, Indian lands out of which formed, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Iowa Indians, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Jackson, Helen Hunt, work by, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Jefferson, early name of state of Colorado, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Johnston, Albert Sidney, commands army against Mormons, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>escapes to the South, on opening of the Civil War, <a href="#Page_226">226&ndash;227</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Jones and Russell, firm of, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Judah, Theodore D., <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Julesburg, station on overland mail route, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Kanesville, Iowa, founding of, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /></li>

-<li><a id="Kansa_Indians"></a>Kansa Indians, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kansas, reasons for settlement of, <a href="#Page_124">124&ndash;125</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>

-  <li>the slavery struggle in, <a href="#Page_129">129&ndash;131</a>;</li>

-  <li>squatters on Indian lands in, <a href="#Page_131">131&ndash;132</a>;</li>

-  <li>further contests between abolition and pro-slave parties, <a href="#Page_132">132&ndash;136</a>;</li>

-  <li>admission to the union in 1861, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</li>

-  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;</li>

-  <li>during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_230">230&ndash;233</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Kansas-Nebraska bill, <a href="#Page_128">128&ndash;129</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kansas Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kaskaskia Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kaw Indians. <i>See</i> <a href="#Kansa_Indians">Kansa Indians</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kearny, Stephen W., <a href="#Page_65">65&ndash;66</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kendall, Superintendent of Indian department, quoted, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Keokuk, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kickapoo Indians, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kiowa Indians, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Kirtland, Ohio, temporary headquarters of Mormons, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Labor question in railway construction, <a href="#Page_326">326&ndash;327</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">398</a></span><br /></li>

-<li>Lake-to-Gulf railway scheme, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Land, allotment of, to Indians as individuals, <a href="#Page_354">354&ndash;357</a>.<br /></li>

-<li><a id="Land_grants"></a>Land grants in aid of railways, <a href="#Page_215">215&ndash;218</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Land titles, pioneers' difficulties over, <a href="#Page_46">46&ndash;47</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Larimer, William, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Last Chance Gulch, Idaho, mining district, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Lawrence, Amos A., <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Lawrence, Kansas, settlement of, <a href="#Page_130">130&ndash;131</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>visit of Missouri mob to, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>

-  <li>Quantrill's raid on, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Lead mines about Dubuque, <a href="#Page_34">34&ndash;35</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Leavenworth, J.&nbsp;H., Indian agent, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308&ndash;309</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Leavenworth constitution, <a href="#Page_135">135&ndash;136</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Lecompton constitution, <a href="#Page_135">135&ndash;136</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Lewiston, Washington, founding of, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Linn, Senator, <a href="#Page_72">72&ndash;73</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Liquor question in Oregon, <a href="#Page_81">81&ndash;82</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Little Big Horn, battle of the, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Little Blue Water, defeat of Brulé Sioux at, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Little Crow, Sioux chief, <a href="#Page_235">235&ndash;239</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Little Raven, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Long, Major Stephen H., <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">McClellan, George B., survey for Pacific railway by, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Madison, Wisconsin, development of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mails, carriage of, to frontier points, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Manypenny, George W., <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Marsh, O.&nbsp;C., bad treatment of Indians revealed by, <a href="#Page_360">360&ndash;361</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Marshall, James W., <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;109</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Medicine Lodge Creek, conference with Indians at, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Menominee Indians, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Methodist missionaries to western Indians, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mexican War, Army of the West in the, <a href="#Page_65">65&ndash;66</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Miami Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Michigan, territory and state of, <a href="#Page_39">39&ndash;40</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Miles, General Nelson A., as an Indian fighter, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Milwaukee, founding of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mines, trails leading to, <a href="#Page_169">169&ndash;170</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Miniconjou Indians, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mining, lead, <a href="#Page_34">34&ndash;35</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>gold, <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;113</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141&ndash;142</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156&ndash;157</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359&ndash;361</a>;</li>

-  <li>silver, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Mining camps, description of, <a href="#Page_170">170&ndash;173</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Minnesota, organization of, as a territory, <a href="#Page_48">48&ndash;49</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>Sioux war in, in 1862, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Missionaries, pioneer, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>civilization and education of Indians by, <a href="#Page_345">345&ndash;346</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Missoula County, Washington Territory, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Missouri Indians, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Modoc Indians, last war of the, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Modoc Jack, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mojave branch of Southern Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_381">381&ndash;382</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Monroe's policy toward Indians, <a href="#Page_18">18&ndash;19</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>end of, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Montana, creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Montana settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Monteith, Indian Agent, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mormons, the, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> ff., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mowry, Sylvester, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Mullan Road, the, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Murphy, Thomas, Indian superintendent, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Nauvoo, Mormon settlement of, <a href="#Page_91">91&ndash;94</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Navaho Indians, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Nebraska, movement for a territory of, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">399</a></span><br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>

-  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Neutral Line, the, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Nevada, beginnings of, <a href="#Page_156">156&ndash;158</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>New Mexico, the early trade to, <a href="#Page_53">53&ndash;69</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>boundaries of, in 1854, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>

-  <li>during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_229">229&ndash;230</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>New Ulm, Minnesota, fight with Sioux Indians at, <a href="#Page_236">236&ndash;237</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Nez Percé Indians, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363&ndash;365</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>precipitation of war with, in 1877, <a href="#Page_365">365&ndash;366</a>;</li>

-  <li>defeat and disposal of tribe, <a href="#Page_366">366&ndash;367</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Niles, Hezekiah, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Noland, Fent, <a href="#Page_42">42&ndash;43</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>No Man's Land, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Northern Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Oglala Sioux, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Oklahoma, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Omaha, cause of growth of, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Omaha Indians, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Oregon, fur traders and early pioneers, in, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;72</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>emigration to, in 1844&ndash;1847, <a href="#Page_75">75&ndash;76</a>;</li>

-  <li>provisional government organized by settlers in, <a href="#Page_79">79&ndash;80</a>;</li>

-  <li>region included under name, <a href="#Page_83">83&ndash;84</a>;</li>

-  <li>territory of, organized (1848), <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>

-  <li>population in 1850, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>

-  <li>boundaries of, in 1854, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>

-  <li>territory of Washington cut from, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>

-  <li>railway lines in, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Oregon trail, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;85</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>course of the, <a href="#Page_78">78&ndash;79</a>;</li>

-  <li>the Mormons on the, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> ff.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Osage Indians, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Oto Indians, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Ottawa Indians, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Overland mail, the, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Owyhee mining district, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Paiute Indians, murder of Captain Gunnison by, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Palmer, General William J., <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Panic, of 1837, <a href="#Page_43">43&ndash;44</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>of 1857, <a href="#Page_51">51&ndash;52</a>;</li>

-  <li>of 1873, <a href="#Page_377">377&ndash;379</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Parke, Lieut. J.&nbsp;G., survey for Pacific railway by, <a href="#Page_207">207&ndash;208</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Peace Commission of 1867, to conclude Cheyenne and Sioux wars, <a href="#Page_289">289&ndash;290</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>Medicine Lodge treaties concluded by, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>

-  <li>report of, quoted, <a href="#Page_296">296&ndash;298</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Pennsylvania Portage Railway, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Peoria Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Piankashaw Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Pike, Zebulon M., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Pike's Peak, discovery of gold about, <a href="#Page_141">141&ndash;142</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>the rush to, <a href="#Page_142">142&ndash;145</a>;</li>

-  <li>reaction from boom, <a href="#Page_145">145&ndash;146</a>;</li>

-  <li>origin of Colorado Territory in the Pike's Peak boom, <a href="#Page_146">146&ndash;155</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>"Pike's Peak Guide," the, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Plum Creek massacre, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Pony express, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182&ndash;185</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Pope, Captain John, survey by, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Popular sovereignty, doctrine of, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Poston, Charles D., <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Potawatomi Indians, <a href="#Page_26">26&ndash;27</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Powder River expedition, <a href="#Page_273">273&ndash;274</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Powder River war with Indians, <a href="#Page_276">276&ndash;283</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Powell, Major James, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Prairie du Chien, treaty made with Indians at, <a href="#Page_20">20&ndash;21</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>second treaty of (1830), <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Prairie schooners, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Pratt, R.&nbsp;H., education of Indians attempted by, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Price's Missouri expedition, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Quantrill's raid into Kansas, <a href="#Page_231">231&ndash;232</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Quapaw Indians, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Railways, early craze for building, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>advance of, in the fifties, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</li>

-  <li>first thoughts about a Pacific road, <a href="#Page_192">192</a> ff.;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">400</a></span></li>

-  <li>surveys for Pacific, <a href="#Page_192">192</a> ff., <a href="#Page_197">197&ndash;203</a>;</li>

-  <li>bearing of slavery question on transcontinental, <a href="#Page_211">211&ndash;214</a>;</li>

-  <li>Senator Douglas's bill, <a href="#Page_213">213&ndash;214</a>;</li>

-  <li>land grants in aid of, <a href="#Page_215">215&ndash;218</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>

-  <li>Indian hostilities caused by advance of the, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>;</li>

-  <li>description of construction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific roads, <a href="#Page_325">325&ndash;335</a>;</li>

-  <li>scandals connected with building of roads, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>

-  <li>description of formal junction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific, <a href="#Page_336">336&ndash;337</a>;</li>

-  <li>effect of roads in bringing peace upon the plains, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;</li>

-  <li>charter acts of the Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>

-  <li>slow development of the later Pacific roads, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</li>

-  <li>the five new continental routes and their connections, <a href="#Page_379">379&ndash;382</a>;</li>

-  <li>Northern Pacific, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>;</li>

-  <li>Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>;</li>

-  <li>Denver and Rio Grande, <a href="#Page_383">383&ndash;384</a>;</li>

-  <li>disappearance of frontier through extension of lines of, and conquest of Great American Desert, <a href="#Page_384">384&ndash;386</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Ration system, pauperization of Indians by, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Real estate speculation along western railways, <a href="#Page_333">333&ndash;334</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Red Cloud, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291&ndash;292</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Reeder, Andrew H., governor of Kansas Territory, <a href="#Page_131">131&ndash;133</a>.<br /></li>

-<li><i>Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes</i>, <a href="#Page_286">286&ndash;287</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Rhodes, James Ford, cited, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Riggs, Rev. S.&nbsp;R., <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Riley, Major, <a href="#Page_59">59&ndash;60</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Rio Grande, struggle for the, in Civil War, <a href="#Page_228">228&ndash;230</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Robinson, Dr. Charles, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>elected governor of Kansas, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li><i>Rocky Mountain News</i>, the, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Roman Nose, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Ross, John, Cherokee chief, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Russell, William H., <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Russell, Majors, and Waddell, firm of, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">St. Charles settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>merged into Denver, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>St. Paul, Sioux Indian reserve at, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>early fort near site of, <a href="#Page_33">33&ndash;34</a>;</li>

-  <li>first settlement at, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Saline River raid by Indians, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br /></li>

-<li><a id="Salt_Lake"></a>Salt Lake, Frémont's visit to, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>settlement of Mormons at, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</li>

-  <li>population of, in 1850, <a href="#Page_117">117&ndash;118</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Sand Creek, massacre of Cheyenne Indians at, <a href="#Page_260">260&ndash;261</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sans Arcs Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Santa Fé, trade with, <a href="#Page_53">53&ndash;69</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Santa Fé trail, Indians along the, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>beginnings of the (1822), <a href="#Page_56">56&ndash;58</a>;</li>

-  <li>course of the, <a href="#Page_64">64&ndash;65</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Satanta, Kiowa Indian chief, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sauk Indians, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Saxton, Lieutenant, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Scandals, railway-building, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Scar-faced Charley, Modoc Indian leader, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Schofield, General John M., <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Schools for Indians, <a href="#Page_351">351&ndash;352</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Schurz, Carl, policy of, toward Indians, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Seminole Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Seneca Indians, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Shannon, Wilson, governor of Kansas, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Shawnee Indians, <a href="#Page_23">23&ndash;24</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sheridan, General, in command against Indians, <a href="#Page_310">310&ndash;323</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_384">384&ndash;385</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Sherman, John, quoted on Indian matters, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sherman, W.&nbsp;T., quoted, <a href="#Page_143">143&ndash;144</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>instructions issued to Sheridan by, in Indian war of 1868, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Shoshoni Indians, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sibley, General H.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237&ndash;238</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">401</a></span><br /></li>

-<li>Silver mining, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Sioux Indians, treaty of 1825 affecting the, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>location of, in 1837, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</li>

-  <li>surrender of lands in Minnesota by, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</li>

-  <li>treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>;</li>

-  <li>war with, in Minnesota, in 1862, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>trial and punishment of, for Minnesota outrages, <a href="#Page_239">239&ndash;240</a>;</li>

-  <li>bands composing the plains Sioux, <a href="#Page_264">264&ndash;265</a>;</li>

-  <li>war with the plains Sioux in 1866, <a href="#Page_264">264&ndash;283</a>;</li>

-  <li>lands assigned to, by Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</li>

-  <li>sources of irritation between white settlers and, in 1870, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>

-  <li>disturbance of, by discovery of gold in the Black Hills, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>

-  <li>war with, in 1876, <a href="#Page_362">362&ndash;363</a>;</li>

-  <li>crushing of, by United States forces, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Sitting Bull, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>career of, as leader of insurgent Sioux, <a href="#Page_362">362&ndash;363</a>;</li>

-  <li>settles in Canada, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>;</li>

-  <li>returns to United States, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>

-  <li>death of, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Slade, Jack, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Slavery question, in territories, <a href="#Page_128">128</a> ff.;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>bearing of, on transcontinental railway question, <a href="#Page_211">211&ndash;214</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Slough, Colonel John P., <a href="#Page_229">229&ndash;230</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Smith, Joseph, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90&ndash;93</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Smohalla, medicine-man, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sod breaking, Iowa, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Solomon River raid, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Southern Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375&ndash;376</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>South Pass, the gateway to Oregon, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Southport, founding of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Spirit Lake massacre, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Stanford, Leland, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Stansbury, Lieutenant, survey by, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_114">114&ndash;115</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Steamboats as factors in emigration, <a href="#Page_40">40&ndash;41</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Steele, Robert W., governor of Jefferson Territory (Colorado), <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Stevens, Isaac I., <a href="#Page_197">197&ndash;203</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Stuart, Granville and James, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Subsidies to railways, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li><i>See</i> <a href="#Land_grants">Land grants</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Sully, General Alfred, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Surveys for Pacific railway, <a href="#Page_192">192</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Sutter, John A., <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107&ndash;109</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Sweetwater mines, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Telegraph system, inauguration of transcontinental, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>freedom of, from Indian interference, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Ten Eyck, Captain, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Texas, railway building in, <a href="#Page_375">375&ndash;376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a> ff.<br /></li>

-<li>Texas Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375&ndash;376</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Thayer, Eli, <a href="#Page_129">129&ndash;130</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Tippecanoe, battle of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Topeka constitution, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Traders, wrongs done to Indians by, <a href="#Page_234">234&ndash;235</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Treaties with Indians, <a href="#Page_19">19&ndash;20</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>fallacy of, <a href="#Page_348">348&ndash;349</a>.</li>

-  <li><i>See</i> <a href="#Indians">Indians</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Tucson, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Union Pacific Railway, the, <a href="#Page_211">211</a> ff.;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>reason for name, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>

-  <li>incorporation of company, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>

-  <li>route of, <a href="#Page_221">221&ndash;222</a>;</li>

-  <li>land grants in aid of, <a href="#Page_222">222</a> (<i>see</i> <a href="#Land_grants">Land grants</a>);</li>

-  <li>financing of project, <a href="#Page_222">222&ndash;223</a>;</li>

-  <li>progress in construction of, <a href="#Page_298">298&ndash;299</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;</li>

-  <li>description of construction of, <a href="#Page_325">325&ndash;335</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Utah, territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_101">101&ndash;102</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>

-  <li>partition of Nevada from, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff.;</li>

-  <li>derivation of name from Ute Indians, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Victorio, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Vigilance committees in mining camps, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Villard, Henry, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">402</a></span><br /></li>

-<li>Vinita, terminus of Atlantic and Pacific road, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Virginia City, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168&ndash;169</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Wagons, Conestoga, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>overland mail coaches, <a href="#Page_178">178&ndash;179</a>;</li>

-  <li>numbers employed in overland freight business, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Wakarusa War, <a href="#Page_133">133&ndash;134</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Walker, General Francis A., <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Walker, Robert J., <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Washington, creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>mining in, <a href="#Page_164">164&ndash;166</a>;</li>

-  <li>a part of Idaho formed from, <a href="#Page_166">166&ndash;167</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Washita, battle of the, <a href="#Page_317">317&ndash;318</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wayne, Anthony, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wea Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wells, Fargo, and Company, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Whipple, Lieut. A.&nbsp;W., survey for Pacific railway by, <a href="#Page_206">206&ndash;207</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>White, Dr. Elijah, <a href="#Page_75">75&ndash;76</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>White Antelope, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Whitman, Marcus, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80&ndash;81</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Whitney, Asa, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Willamette provisional government, <a href="#Page_79">79&ndash;80</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Williams, Beverly D., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Williamson, Lieut. R.&nbsp;S., survey by, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wilson, Hill P., Indian trader, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Winnebago Indians, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wisconsin, opening of, to whites, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-<li>Wounded Knee, Indian fight at, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wyeth, Nathaniel J., <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wynkoop, E.&nbsp;W., <a href="#Page_255">255&ndash;259</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312&ndash;313</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Wyoming, territory of, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br /></li>

-

-<li class="p1">Yankton Sioux, the, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Yerba Buena, village of, later San Francisco, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.<br /></li>

-<li>Young, Brigham, <a href="#Page_93">93&ndash;94</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a> ff., <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;<br />

-  <ul>

-  <li>made governor of Utah Territory, <a href="#Page_101">101&ndash;102</a>.</li>

-  </ul></li>

-</ul>

-</div>

-

-<div class="newpage p4 transnote">

-<h2 class="nobreak"><a name="Transcribers_Notes" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcribers' Note</a></h2>

-

-<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant

-preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.</p>

-

-<p>Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unpaired

-quotation marks were retained. For example, the paragraph beginning on page

-<a href="#Page_311">311</a> with "There is little doubt" and ending on

-page <a href="#Page_313">313</a> with "sincerity of their protestations"

-contains an unpaired quotation mark.</p>

-

-<p>Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.</p>

-

-<p>Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.</p>

-

-<p>Text uses both "reconnaissance" and "reconnoissance"; both retained.</p>

-

-<p>Text mostly uses "Santa Fé", so three occurrences of "Sante Fé" have

-been changed.</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-<p>&nbsp;</p>

-<hr class="full" />

-<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER***</p>

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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45699 ***</div>
+<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Last American Frontier, by Frederic L.
+(Frederic Logan) Paxson</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      <a href="https://archive.org/details/fronlastamerican00paxsrich">
+      https://archive.org/details/fronlastamerican00paxsrich</a>
+    </td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div id="i_cover" class="figcenter" style="width: 542px;"><img class="nobdr" src="images/cover.jpg" width="542" height="800" alt="cover" /></div>
+
+<h1>STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY</h1>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div id="if_i-002" class="figcenter" style="width: 108px;"><img class="newpage p4 nobdr" src="images/i-002.jpg" width="108" height="34" alt="" /></div>
+
+<p class="center">
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+<span class="small">NEW YORK ¡ BOSTON ¡ CHICAGO<br />
+ATLANTA ¡ SAN FRANCISCO</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">MACMILLAN &amp; CO., Limited</span><br />
+<span class="small">LONDON ¡ BOMBAY ¡ CALCUTTA<br />
+MELBOURNE</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.</span><br />
+<span class="small">TORONTO</span></p>
+
+<div id="i_frontis" class="figcenter" style="width: 521px;"><img class="newpage p4" src="images/i-004.jpg" width="521" height="357" alt="" /></div>
+
+<p class="newpage p4 center vspace xlarge bold">
+THE<br />
+LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER</p>
+
+<p class="p2 center vspace">BY<br />
+<span class="large">FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON</span><br />
+<span class="smaller">JUNIOR PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY<br />
+IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN</span></p>
+
+<p class="p2 center"><i>ILLUSTRATED</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="p2 center vspace">New York<br />
+<span class="larger">THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</span><br />
+1910<br />
+<span class="smaller"><i>All rights reserved</i></span></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="newpage p4 center small vspace">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1910,<br />
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</span><br />
+<span class="smaller">Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.</span></p>
+
+<p class="p2 center small">Norwood Press<br />
+J. S. Cushing Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith Co.<br />
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">v</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</a></h2>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="sigright">FREDERIC L. PAXSON.</p>
+
+<p class="smaller"><span class="smcap">Ann Arbor</span>, August 7, 1909.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">vii</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h2>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table summary="Contents">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td></tr>
+  <tr class="small">
+    <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr">PAGE</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Westward Movement</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Indian Frontier</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Iowa and the New Northwest</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Santa FĂŠ Trail</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Oregon Trail</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Overland with the Mormons</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">California and the Forty-niners</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Kansas and the Indian Frontier</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl">"<span class="smcap">Pike's Peak or Bust!</span>"</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">viii</a></span></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">From Arizona to Montana</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Overland Mail</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Engineers' Frontier</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Union Pacific Railroad</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Plains in the Civil War</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cheyenne War</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Sioux War</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Peace Commission and the Open Way</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_284">284</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Black Kettle's Last Raid</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The First of the Railways</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The New Indian Policy</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_340">340</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">ix</a></span></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Last Stand: Chief Joseph and Sitting Bull</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_358">358</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Letting in the Population</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_372">372</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc chap" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Bibliographical Note</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_387">387</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">xi</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS">LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</a></h2>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table summary="List of Illustrations">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Prairie Schooner</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr" colspan="2"><a href="#i_frontis"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+  <tr class="small">
+    <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr">PAGE</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: Indian Country and Agricultural Frontier, 1840&ndash;1841</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_22">22</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Chief Keokuk</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_30">30</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Iowa Sod Plow.</span> (From a Cut belonging to the Historical Department of Iowa.)</td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_46">46</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: Overland Trails</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_56">57</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Fort Laramie, 1842</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_78">78</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The West in 1849</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_120">120</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The West in 1854</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_140">140</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl">"<span class="smcap">Ho for the Yellow Stone</span>"</td>
+    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_144">144</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Mining Camp</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">"</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_158">158</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Fort Snelling</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">"</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_204">204</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Red Cloud and Professor Marsh</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">"</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_274">274</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The West in 1863</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_300">300</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Position of Reno on the Little Big Horn</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc"><i>facing</i></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_360">360</a></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Map: The Pacific Railroads, 1884</span></td>
+    <td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#ip_379">380</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_LAST_AMERICAN_FRONTIER" id="THE_LAST_AMERICAN_FRONTIER">THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER</a></h2>
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT</span></h2>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The line of the frontier was generally parallel to
+the coast in 1700. By 1800 it had assumed the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>
+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&ndash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>
+East. A new state for every year was the western
+accompaniment.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
+the valleys farther west than to strike out across
+country for lands nearer home but lacking the convenience
+of the natural route.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&ndash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>
+lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,
+threatened to become a constant quantity.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE INDIAN FRONTIER</span></h2>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
+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,&mdash;and too
+often they were real,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"domestic dependent nations," Justice
+Marshall later called them&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>
+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,&mdash;to the further limits of the
+Louisiana Purchase, which lay beyond the line of
+the western frontier.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="locked">Osage<a name="FNanchor_1" id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">1</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="fnanchor">1</a> My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed upon
+by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American Ethnology, and
+printed in C.&nbsp;J. Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, 57th
+Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452, Serial 4253, p. 1021.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span></p></div>
+
+<p>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 FĂŠ trade had begun to tempt caravans
+up the Arkansas valley and across the plains. To
+preserve peace along the Santa FĂŠ 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 FĂŠ, and gave
+the United States title to ample lands west of the
+frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.</p>
+
+<p>The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
+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.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span></p>
+
+<div id="ip_22" class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-036.jpg" width="353" height="600" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Indian Country and Agricultural Frontier, 1840&ndash;1841</span></p></div>
+  <div class="captionl">
+<p>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.</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 reĂŤnforced
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>While the north flank of the Indian frontier was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_30" class="figcenter" style="width: 356px;">
+  <img src="images/i-045.jpg" width="356" height="542" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Chief Keokuk</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionl"><p>From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C.&nbsp;F. Davis. Reproduced
+by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST</span></h2>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 reĂŤnforcements 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">bon mot</i>; and wields the pen or the Bowie<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>
+choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it
+could for a community still suffering from the results
+of the panic.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_46" class="figcenter" style="width: 360px;"><img class="nobdr" src="images/i-062.jpg" width="360" height="153" alt="" /><div class="caption"><span class="smcap">Iowa Sod Plow</span></div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
+sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest
+bidder,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
+its neighbors had been, while its first period was over
+before any railroad played an immediate part in its
+development.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>
+and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever
+or cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL</span></h2>
+
+<p>England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible
+as the interior provinces of Spain, which
+stretched up into the country between the Rio
+Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred
+miles above Vera Cruz. Before the English
+seaboard had received its earliest colonists, the
+hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters
+of the Rio Grande, where her outposts had been
+planted around the little adobe village of Santa FĂŠ.
+For more than two hundred years this life had gone
+on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened
+by contact with the world or admixture of
+foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility characteristic
+of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions
+and restrictions of the law, communication with
+these villages of Chihuahua and New Mexico had
+been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills
+by the pack-trains of the king.</p>
+
+<p>It was no stately procession that wound up into
+the hills yearly to supply the Mexican frontier.
+From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through Mexico
+City, and thence north along the highlands through
+San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
+thence to Chihuahua, and up the valley of the
+Rio Grande to Santa FĂŠ climbed the long pack-trains
+and the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the
+provinces their whole supply from outside. The
+civilization of the provincial life might fairly be
+measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of
+this transportation route. Nearly two thousand
+miles, as the road meandered, of river, mountain
+gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the
+mule-drivers of the caravans. What their pack-animals
+could not carry, could not go. What had
+large bulk in proportion to its value must stay
+behind. The ancient commerce of the Orient,
+carried on camels across the Arabian desert, could
+afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and
+precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree,
+the world's contribution to these remote towns was
+confined largely to textiles, drugs, and trinkets of
+adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population
+of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for
+more than two centuries without an effort to improve
+upon them. Their resignation gives some credit to
+the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which
+restricted their importation to the defined route and
+the single port. It is due as much, however, to the
+hard geographic fact which made Vera Cruz and
+Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors,
+until in the nineteenth century another civilization
+came within hailing distance, at its frontier in the
+bend of the Missouri.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>
+The Spanish provincials were at once willing to
+endure the rigors of the commercial system and to
+smuggle when they had a chance. So long as it
+was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan
+than to develop other sources of supply the caravans
+flourished without competition. It was not until
+after the expulsion of Spain and the independence of
+Mexico that a rival supply became important, but
+there are enough isolated events before this time to
+show what had to occur just so soon as the United
+States frontier came within range.</p>
+
+<p>The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish
+captivity did something to reveal the existence of a
+possible market in Santa FĂŠ. He had been engaged
+in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana
+purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the
+Rio Grande while searching for the head waters of
+the Red River. Here he was arrested, in 1807, by
+Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.
+After a short detention he was escorted to
+the limits of the United States, where he was released.
+He carried home the news of high prices and profitable
+markets existing among the Mexicans.</p>
+
+<p>In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify
+the statements of Pike. Rumor had come to the
+States of an insurrection in upper Mexico, which
+might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the
+revolt had been suppressed before the dozen or so of
+reckless Americans who crossed the plains had arrived
+at their destination. The Spanish authorities,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
+restored to power and renewed vigor, received them
+with open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua,
+some for ten years, while the traffic which they
+had hoped to inaugurate remained still in the future.
+Their release came only with the independence of
+Mexico, which quickly broke down the barrier against
+importation and the foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>The Santa FĂŠ trade commenced when the news of
+the Mexican revolution reached the border. Late
+in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell, chancing
+a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took
+a small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in
+what proved to be a profitable speculation. He
+returned to the States in time to lead out a large
+party in the following summer. So long as the
+United States frontier lay east of the Missouri River
+there could have been no western traffic, but now
+that settlement had reached the Indian Country,
+and river steamers had made easy freighting from
+Pittsburg to Franklin or Independence, Santa FĂŠ
+was nearer to the United States seaboard markets
+than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the
+American desert and the Indian frontier made by
+this earliest of the overland trails.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_56" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-073.jpg" width="600" height="446" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Overland Trails</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California appeared
+about 1845; the Santa FĂŠ trail had been used since 1821. The overland
+mail of 1858 followed the southern route.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the
+Santa FĂŠ trade, but it saw the first wagons taken
+across the plains. The freight capacity of the mule-train
+placed a narrow limit upon the profits and
+extent of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled
+over the rough trails was a matter of considerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>
+doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper attempted
+it in this year. The experiment was so successful
+that within two years the pack-train was generally
+abandoned for the wagons by the Santa FĂŠ traders.
+The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton
+goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics,
+calicoes, domestic, shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom
+shirtings, and cotton hose," were in high
+demand. There were also "a few woollen goods,
+consisting of super blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths,
+and shawls, crapes, bombazettes, some light articles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>
+of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses." Backward
+bound their freights were lighter. Many of the
+wagons, indeed, were sold as part of the cargo. The
+returning merchants brought some beaver skins and
+mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and
+silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.</p>
+
+<p>Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings,
+could not escape the public eye. The patron of the
+West came early to its aid. Senator Thomas Hart
+Benton had taken his seat from the new state of
+Missouri just in time to notice and report upon the
+traffic. No public man was more confirmed in his
+friendship for the frontier trade than Senator
+Benton. The fur companies found him always on
+hand to get them favors or to "turn aside the whip of
+calamity." Because of his influence his son-in-law,
+FrĂŠmont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness.
+Now, in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement.
+A large policy in the building of public
+roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.
+In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided
+$30,000 to mark and build a wagon road
+from Missouri to the United States border on the
+Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road
+reported some annoyance from the Indians, whose
+hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around
+their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and
+Kansa treaties of 1825 these tribes agreed to let the
+traders traverse the country in peace.</p>
+
+<p>Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>
+Santa FĂŠ trade. The long journey from the fringe
+of settlement to the Spanish towns eight hundred
+miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican
+soil, crossing the international boundary on the
+Arkansas near the hundredth meridian. The Indians
+of the route knew no national lines, and found
+a convenient refuge against pursuers from either
+nation in crossing the border. There was no military
+protection to the frontier at the American end of the
+trail until in 1827 the war department erected a new
+post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it
+Fort Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were
+stationed to guard the border and protect the traders.
+The post was due as much to the new Indian concentration
+policy as to the Santa FĂŠ trade. Its
+significance was double. Yet no one seems to have
+foreseen that the development of the trade through
+the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment
+of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.</p>
+
+<p>From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of
+regulars convoyed the caravans to the Southwest.
+In 1829 four companies of the sixth infantry, under
+Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan
+at the usual place of organization, Council Grove,
+a few days west of the Missouri line, and marched
+with it to the confines of the United States. Along
+the march there had been some worry from the Indians.
+After the caravan and escort had separated
+at the Arkansas the former, going on alone into
+Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard before<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>
+it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose
+promptly to the occasion. He immediately crossed
+the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the consequences
+of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the
+Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican
+authorities furnished an escort of troops which
+marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who
+had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all
+summer, met them. He entertained the Mexican
+officers with drill while they responded with a parade,
+chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report
+declares, and then he brought the traders back to the
+States by the beginning of November.</p>
+
+<p>There was some criticism in the United States of
+this costly use of troops to protect a private trade.
+Hezekiah Niles, who was always pleading for high
+protection to manufactures and receiving less than
+he wanted, complained that the use of four companies
+during a whole season was extravagant protection
+for a trade whose annual profits were not
+over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely
+repeated after 1829. Fort Leavenworth and the
+troops gave moral rather than direct support. Colonel
+Dodge, with his dragoons,&mdash;for infantry were
+soon seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,&mdash;made
+long expeditions and demonstrations in the
+thirties, reaching even to the slopes of the Rockies.
+And the Santa FĂŠ caravans continued until the forties
+in relative safety.</p>
+
+<p>Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>
+event of great consequence in the history of the
+Santa FĂŠ trail. Josiah Gregg, impelled by ill health
+to seek a change of climate, made his first trip to
+Santa FĂŠ in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg
+would call for no more comment than would any one
+who crossed the plains eight times in a single decade.
+But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was
+watching and thinking during his entire career,
+examining into the details of Mexican life and history
+and tabulating the figures of the traffic. When he
+finally retired from the plains life which he had come
+to love so well, he produced, in two small volumes,
+the great classic of the trade: "The Commerce of
+the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa FĂŠ Trader."
+It is still possible to check up details and add small
+bits of fact to supplement the history and description
+of this commerce given by Gregg, but his book
+remains, and is likely to remain, the fullest and best
+source of information. Gregg had power of scientific
+observation and historical imagination, which,
+added to unusual literary ability, produced a masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p>The Santa FĂŠ trade, begun in 1822, continued with
+moderate growth until 1843. This was its period of
+pioneer development. After the Mexican War the
+commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its
+greatest volume in the sixties, just before the construction
+of the Pacific railways. But in its later
+years it was a matter of greater routine and less
+general interest than in those years of commencement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>
+during which it was educating the United States
+to a more complete knowledge of the southern portion
+of the American desert. Gregg gives a table
+in which he shows the approximate value of the trade
+for its first twenty-two years. To-day it seems
+strange that so trifling a commerce should have been
+national in its character and influence. In only one
+year, 1843, does he find that the eastern value of the
+goods sent to Santa FĂŠ was above a quarter of a
+million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,
+but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter
+million mark. In nine years it was under $100,000.
+The men involved were a mere handful. At the
+start nearly every one of the seventy men in the
+caravan was himself a proprietor. The total number
+increased more rapidly than the number of independent
+owners. Three hundred and fifty were the
+most employed in any one year. The twenty-six
+wagons of 1824 became two hundred and thirty
+in 1843, but only four times in the interval were
+there so many as a hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the Santa FĂŠ trade was national in its importance.
+Its romance contained a constant appeal
+to a public that was reading the Indian tales of James
+Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship
+and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country
+with quaint people and strange habitations. The
+American desert, not much more than a chartless
+sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must
+have confirmation of the truth that frontier causes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>
+have produced results far beyond their normal
+measure, such confirmation may be found here.</p>
+
+<p>The traders to Santa FĂŠ commonly travelled together
+in a single caravan for safety. In the earlier
+years they started overland from some Missouri
+town&mdash;Franklin most often&mdash;to a rendezvous at
+Council Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth
+and an increasing navigation of the Missouri River
+made possible a starting-point further west than
+Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the
+Missouri in 1828 its place was taken by the new settlement
+of Independence, further up the river and only
+twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at
+Independence was done most of the general outfitting
+in the thirties. For the greater part of the year
+the town was dead, but for a few weeks in the spring
+it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the frontier.
+Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for
+mules and oxen, building and repairing wagons and
+ox-yokes, and in the evening drinking and gambling
+among the hard men soon to leave port for the
+Southwest,&mdash;all these gave to Independence its name
+and place. From Independence to Council Grove,
+some one hundred and fifty miles, across the border,
+the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove
+they halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a
+general company for self-defence. Here in ordinary
+years the assembled traders elected a captain whose
+responsibility was complete, and whose authority
+was as great as he could make it by his own force.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span>
+Under him were lieutenants, and under the command
+of these the whole company was organized in guards
+and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company
+was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal
+vigilance was the price of safety.</p>
+
+<p>The unit of the caravan was the wagon,&mdash;the
+same Pittsburg or Conestoga wagon that moved
+frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to
+travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve
+mules or oxen, and carried from three to five thousand
+pounds of cargo. Over the wagon were large
+arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn
+water and protect the contents. The careful freighter
+used two thicknesses of sheetings, while the canny
+one slipped in between them a pair of blankets,
+which might thus increase his comfort outward
+bound, and be in an inconspicuous place to elude
+the vigilance of the customs officials at Santa FĂŠ.
+Arms, mounts, and general equipment were innumerable
+in variation, but the prairie schooner, as
+its white canopy soon named it, survived through
+its own superiority.</p>
+
+<p>At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey
+now became one across a treeless prairie, with
+water all too rare, and habitations entirely lacking.
+The first stage of the trail crossed the country, nearly
+west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two
+hundred and seventy miles from Independence. Up
+the Arkansas it ran on, past Chouteau's Island, to
+Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>
+traders had established a post. Water was most
+scarce. Whether the caravan crossed the river at
+the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's Fort to
+follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader
+and on stock. His oxen often reached Santa FĂŠ
+with scarcely enough strength left to stand alone.
+But with reasonable success and skilful guidance the
+caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties
+and at last enter Santa FĂŠ, seven hundred and eighty
+miles away, in from six to seven weeks from Independence.</p>
+
+<p>When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri
+frontier was familiar with all of the long trail to Santa
+FĂŠ. Even in the East there had come to be some real
+interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert
+and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the
+strategy of the war was the organization of an Army
+of the West at Fort Leavenworth, with orders to
+march overland against Mexico and Upper California.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command
+of the invading army, which he recruited largely
+from the frontier and into which he incorporated a
+battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the
+summer of 1846, near Council Bluffs, on their way to
+the Rocky Mountains and the country beyond.
+Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken
+him in 1845 all the way to the mountains and back
+in the interest of policing the trails. By the end of
+June he was ready to begin the march towards
+Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>
+to be a common rendezvous. To this point the
+army marched in separate columns, far enough apart
+to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder
+from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was
+little more than a pleasure jaunt. The trail was well
+known, and Indians, never likely to run heedlessly
+into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's
+Fort the advance assumed more of a military aspect,
+for the enemy's country had been entered and
+resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the
+mountain passes north of Santa FĂŠ. But the resistance
+came to naught, while the army, footsore and
+hot, marched easily into Santa FĂŠ on August 18, 1846.
+In the palace of the governor the conquering officers
+were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the
+provinces would permit. "We were too thirsty to
+judge of its merits," wrote one of them of the native
+wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything
+liquid and cool was palatable." With little more
+than the formality of taking possession New Mexico
+thus fell into the hands of the United States, while
+the war of conquest advanced further to the West.
+In the end of September Kearny started out from
+Santa FĂŠ for California, where he arrived early in
+the following January.</p>
+
+<p>The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary
+of the United States to the Gila and the Pacific,
+broadening the area of the desert within the United
+States and raising new problems of long-distance
+government in connection with the populations of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>
+New Mexico and California. The Santa FĂŠ trail,
+with its continuance west of the Rio Grande, became
+the attenuated bond between the East and the West.
+From the Missouri frontier to California the way was
+through the desert and the Indian Country, with
+regular settlements in only one region along the route.
+The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit
+trade disappeared with the conquest, so that the
+traffic with the Southwest and California boomed
+during the fifties.</p>
+
+<p>The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions
+which had never been dreamed of before the conquest.
+Kearny's baggage-trains started a new era in plains
+freighting. The armies had continuously to be
+supplied. Regular communication had to be maintained
+for the new Southwest. But the freighting
+was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the
+Santa FĂŠ traders. It became a matter of business,
+running smoothly along familiar channels. It ceased
+to have to do with the extension of geographic knowledge
+and came to have significance chiefly in connection
+with the organization of overland commerce.
+Between the Mexican and Civil wars was its new
+period of life. Finally, in the seventies, it gradually
+receded into history as the tentacles of the continental
+railway system advanced into the desert.</p>
+
+<p>The Santa FĂŠ trail was the first beaten path thrust
+in advance of the western frontier. Even to-day its
+course may be followed by the wheel ruts for much of
+the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>
+FĂŠ. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind
+it at the start, not touching it again until the end
+was reached. For nearly fifty years after the trade
+began, this character of the desert remained substantially
+unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which
+had rushed west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped
+at the bend, and though the trail continued, settlement
+would not follow it. The Indian country and
+the American desert remained intact, while the Santa
+FĂŠ trail, in advance of settlement, pointed the way of
+manifest destiny, as no one of the eastern trails had
+ever done. When the new states grew up on the Pacific,
+the desert became as an ocean traversed only
+by the prairie schooners in their beaten paths.
+Islands of settlement served but to accentuate the
+unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain
+West.</p>
+
+<p>The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the
+statesmen of the twenties as the limit of American
+advance. It might have continued thus had there
+really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of
+the trade to Santa FĂŠ created a new interest and a
+connecting road. In nearly the same years the call
+of the fur trade led to the tracing of another path in
+the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and
+the fur trade had stirred up so much interest beyond
+the Rockies that before Kearny marched his army
+into Santa FĂŠ another trail of importance equal to
+his had been run to Oregon.</p>
+
+<p>The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span>
+upon the ability of the United States to keep whites
+out of the Indian Country. But with Oregon and
+Santa FĂŠ beyond, this could never be. The trails
+had already shown the fallacy of the frontier policy
+before it had become a fact in 1840.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE OREGON TRAIL</span></h2>
+
+<p>The Santa FĂŠ trade had just been started upon
+its long career when trappers discovered in the Rocky
+Mountains, not far from where the forty-second
+parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy
+crossing by which access might be had from the waters
+of the upper Platte to those of the Pacific Slope.
+South Pass, as this passage through the hills soon
+came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon. As
+yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested
+soil upon the Pacific, but in years to come a whole
+civilization was to pour over the upper trail to people
+the valley of the Columbia and claim it for new states.
+The Santa FĂŠ trail was chiefly the route of commerce.
+The Oregon trail became the pathway of a people
+westward bound.</p>
+
+<p>In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the
+fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed
+an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill
+and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before
+the surveyor and his transit brought them within
+the circle of recorded facts. The historian of the
+fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden, has
+tracked out many of them with the same laborious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span>
+industry that carried them after the beaver and the
+other marketable furs. When they first appeared is
+lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in
+the period between the journey of Lewis and Clark,
+in 1805, and the rise of Independence as an outfitting
+post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That they discovered
+every important geographic fact of the West
+is quite as certain as it is that their discoveries were
+often barren, were generally unrecorded in a formal
+way, and exercised little influence upon subsequent
+settlement and discovery. Their place in history is
+similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains
+of the thirteenth century who knew and charted the
+shore of the Mediterranean at a time when scientific
+geographers were yet living on a flat earth and shaping
+cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although
+the fur-traders, with their great companies
+behind them, did less to direct the future than their
+knowledge of geography might have warranted, they
+managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast
+early in the century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a
+pawn in the game between the British and American
+organizations, whose control over Oregon was so
+confusing that Great Britain and the United States,
+in 1818, gave up the task of drawing a boundary
+when they reached the Rockies, and allowed the country
+beyond to remain under joint occupation.</p>
+
+<p>In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to
+the profits of the fur trade as an inducement to visit
+Oregon. By 1832 the trading prospects had incited<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span>
+migration outside the regular companies. Nathaniel
+J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He
+repeated the journey with a second party in 1834.
+The Methodist church sent a body of missionaries
+to convert the western Indians in this latter year.
+The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out
+the redoubtable Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before
+the thirties were over Oregon had become a household
+word through the combined reports of traders
+and missionaries. Its fertility and climate were
+common themes in the lyceums and on the lecture
+platform; while the fact that this garden might
+through prompt migration be wrested from the
+British gave an added inducement. Joint occupation
+was yet the rule, but the time was approaching
+when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time
+when Oregon ought to become the admitted property
+of the United States. The thirties ended with no
+large migration begun. But the financial crisis of
+1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great
+Lakes, provided an impoverished and restless population
+ready to try the chance in the farthest West.</p>
+
+<p>A growing public interest in Oregon roused the
+United States government to action in the early
+forties. The Indians of the Northwest were in need
+of an agent and sound advice. The exact location
+of the trail, though the trail itself was fairly well
+known, had not been ascertained. Into the hands
+of the senators from Missouri fell the task of inspiring
+the action and directing the result. Senator<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
+Linn was the father of bills and resolutions looking
+towards a territory west of the mountains; while
+Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new
+son-in-law, John C. FrĂŠmont, a detail in command
+of an exploring party to the South Pass.</p>
+
+<p>The career of FrĂŠmont, the Pathfinder, covers
+twenty years of great publicity, beginning with his
+first command in 1842. On June 10, of this year,
+with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed
+from Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten
+miles above its mouth. He shortly left the Kansas,
+crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte, and
+followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's
+Fort in northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty
+days. From St. Vrain's he skirted the foothills north
+to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the Sweetwater,
+he reached his destination at South Pass on
+August 8, just one day previous to the signing of the
+great English treaty at Washington. At South Pass
+his journey of observation was substantially over.
+He continued, however, for a few days along the
+Wind River Range, climbing a mountain peak and
+naming it for himself. By October he was back in
+St. Louis with his party.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1843, FrĂŠmont started upon a
+second and more extended governmental exploration
+to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail along
+the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St.
+Vrain's, whence he made a detour south to Boiling
+Spring and Bent's trading-post on the Arkansas River.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
+Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon
+for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided
+his company, sending part of it over his course of
+1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while he led his
+own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the
+Medicine Bow Range, and across North Park, where
+rises the North Platte. Before reaching Fort Hall,
+where he was to reunite his party, he made another
+detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like
+Balboa as he looked upon the inland sea. From Fort
+Hall, which he reached on September 18, he followed
+the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the
+Dalles of the Columbia.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the ocean could be reached by any river
+between the Columbia and Colorado was a matter of
+much interest to persons concerned with the control
+of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the
+trappers, had not yet received scientific record when
+FrĂŠmont started south from the Dalles in November,
+1843, to ascertain them. His march across the Nevada
+desert was made in the dead of winter under
+difficulties that would have brought a less resolute
+explorer to a stop. It ended in March, 1844, at
+Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento Valley, with half
+his horses left upon the road. His homeward march
+carried him into southern California and around the
+sources of the Colorado, proving by recorded observation
+the difficult character of the country between
+the mountains and the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>In following years the Pathfinder revisited the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>
+scenes of these two expeditions upon which his reputation
+is chiefly based. A man of resolution and moderate
+ability, the glory attendant upon his work turned
+his head. His later failures in the face of military
+problems far beyond his comprehension tended to
+belittle the significance of his earlier career, but history
+may well agree with the eminent English traveller,
+Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground
+passed over by Colonel FrĂŠmont was perfectly well
+known to the old trappers and traders, as the interior
+of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese pombeiros.
+But this fact takes nothing away from the
+honors of the man who first surveyed and scientifically
+observed the country." Through these two
+journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition
+above the American intellectual horizon. "The
+American Eagle," quoth the <i>Platte (Missouri) Eagle</i>
+in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser [<i xml:lang="la" lang="la">sic</i>]
+of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the
+Pacific. Destiny has willed it."</p>
+
+<p>The year in which FrĂŠmont made his first expedition
+to the mountains was also the year of the first
+formal, conducted emigration to Oregon. Missionaries
+beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress
+the appointment of an American representative and
+magistrate for the country, with such effect that
+Dr. Elijah White, who had some acquaintance with
+Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the
+spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration
+of homeseekers that peopled Oregon during<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>
+the next ten years. His emigration was not large,
+perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons;
+but it seems to have been larger than he expected,
+and large enough to raise doubt as to the
+practicability of taking so many persons across the
+plains at once. In the decade following, every May,
+when pasturage was fresh and green, saw pioneers
+gathering, with or without premeditation, at the
+bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence
+and its neighbor villages continued to be the
+posts of outfit. How many in the aggregate crossed
+the plains can never be determined, in spite of the
+efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record
+their names. The distinguishing feature of the
+emigration was its spontaneous individualistic character.
+Small parties, too late for the caravan, frequently
+set forth alone. Single families tried it
+often enough to have their wanderings recorded in
+the border papers. In the spring following the crossing
+of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds
+at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand
+in all is probably not too high. In 1844 the
+tide subsided a little, but in 1845 it established a
+new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and in
+1847 ran between four and five thousand. These
+were the highest figures, yet throughout the decade
+the current flowed unceasingly.</p>
+
+<p>The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years,
+may be taken as typical of the Oregon movement.
+Early in the year faces turned toward the Missouri<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
+rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and
+young, with wagons and cattle, household equipment,
+primitive sawmills, and all the impedimenta of civilization
+were to be found in the hopeful crowd. For
+some days after departure the unwieldy party, a
+thousand strong, with twice as many cattle and
+beasts of burden, held together under Burnett, their
+chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control
+soon split the company. In addition to the general
+fear that the number was dangerously high, the poorer
+emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some of the latter
+had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,
+and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian
+thieves during his long night watches he felt the
+injustice which compelled him to protect the property
+of another. Hence the party broke early in
+June. A "cow column" was formed of those who
+had many cattle and heavy belongings; the lighter
+body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting
+distance; and under two captains the procession
+moved on. The way was tedious rather than difficult,
+but habit soon developed in the trains a life
+that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the
+migrants of 1842 had written, was a "great country
+for unmarried gals." Courtship and marriage began
+almost before the States were out of sight.
+Death and burial, crime and punishment, filled out
+the round of human experience, while Dr. Whitman
+was more than once called upon in his professional
+capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span></p>
+
+<div id="ip_78" class="figcenter" style="width: 519px;">
+  <img src="images/i-095.jpg" width="519" height="288" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Fort Laramie in 1842</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>From a sketch made to illustrate FrĂŠmont's report.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed
+in the United States. It started from the
+Missouri River anywhere between Independence and
+Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence
+was the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural
+frontier advanced through Iowa in the forties numerous
+new crossings and ferries were made further
+up the stream. From the various ferries the start
+began, as did the Santa FĂŠ trade, sometime in May.
+By many roads the wagons moved westward towards
+the point from which the single trail extended to the
+mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte
+River reaches its most southerly point, these routes
+from the border were nearly as numerous as the caravans,
+but here began the single highway along the
+river valley, on its southern side. At this point,
+in the years immediately after the Mexican War, the
+United States founded a military post to protect
+the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W.
+Kearny, commander of the Army of the West. From
+Fort Kearney (custom soon changed the spelling
+of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie
+Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork.
+Fort Laramie itself was bought from the fur company
+and converted into a military post which became
+a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.
+Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the
+trail to South Pass, where, through a gap twenty
+miles in width, the main commerce between the
+Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span>
+Beyond South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the
+next post of importance on the road. From Fort
+Hall to Fort BoisĂŠ the trail continued down the
+Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to
+meet the Columbia near Walla Walla.</p>
+
+<p>The journey to Oregon took about five months.
+Its deliberate, domesticated progress was as different
+as might be from the commercial rush to Santa
+FĂŠ. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily
+get caught in the early mountain winter, but with
+a prompt start and a wise guide, or pilot, winter
+always found the homeseeker in his promised land.
+"This is the right manner to settle the Oregon
+question," wrote Niles, after he had counted over
+the emigrants of 1844.</p>
+
+<p>Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon
+the pioneers already there had taken the law to
+themselves and organized a provisional government
+in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under
+the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was
+one of considerable uncertainty. National interests
+prompted settlers to hope and work for future control
+by one country or the other, while advantage
+seemed to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the
+generous factor of the British fur companies. But
+the aggressive Americans of the early migrations were
+restive under British leadership. They were fearful
+also lest future American emigration might carry
+political control out of their hands into the management
+of newcomers. Death and inheritance among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
+their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions.
+In May, 1843, with all the ease invariably
+shown by men of Anglo-Saxon blood when isolated
+together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary
+association for government and adopted a code of
+laws.</p>
+
+<p>Self-confidence, the common asset of the West,
+was not absent in this newest American community.
+"A few months since," wrote Elijah White, "at our
+Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the
+colony of Wallamette held out the most flattering
+encouragement to immigrants of any colony on the
+globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of
+Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the
+course of events. "During my up-country excursion,
+the whites of the colony convened, and formed a code
+of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves
+during the absence of law from our mother country,
+adopting in almost all respects the Iowa code. In this
+I was consulted, and encouraged the measure, as it
+was so manifestly necessary for the collection of
+debts, securing rights in claims, and the regulation of
+general intercourse among the whites."</p>
+
+<p>A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress
+for the extension of United States laws and jurisdiction
+over the territory. His journey was six
+months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,
+who went to Boston to save the missions of the
+American Board from abandonment, and might with
+better justice than Whitman's be called the ride to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>
+save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being
+lost, however dilatory Congress might be. The little
+illegitimate government settled down to work, its
+legislative committee enacted whatever laws were
+needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law
+and order prevailed.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the action of the Americans must have
+been meddlesome and annoying to the English and
+Canadian trappers. In the free manners of the first
+half of the nineteenth century the use of strong
+drink was common throughout the country and universal
+along the frontier. "A family could get along
+very well without butter, wheat bread, sugar, or tea,
+but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping
+as corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses.
+It was always present at the house raising, harvesting,
+road working, shooting matches, corn husking,
+weddings, and dances. It was never out of order
+'where two or three were gathered together.'" Yet
+along with this frequent intemperance, a violent
+abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of
+the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new
+Northwest, full of the new crusade and ready to
+support it. Despite the lack of legal right, though
+with every moral justification, attempts were made to
+crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells
+of a mass meeting authorizing him to take action on
+his own responsibility; of his enlisting a band of
+coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the distillery in
+a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>
+<span class="smcap smaller">P.M.</span> The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and
+all the apparatus well accorded. Two hogsheads and
+eight barrels of slush or beer were standing ready for
+distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses. No
+liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled.
+Having resolved on my course, I left no time
+for reflection, but at once upset the nearest cask,
+when my noble volunteers immediately seconded
+my measures, making a river of beer in a moment;
+nor did we stop till the kettle was raised, and elevated
+in triumph at the prow of our boat, and every
+cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to
+pieces and utterly destroyed. We then returned,
+in high cheer, to the town, where our presence and
+report gave general joy."</p>
+
+<p>The provisional government lasted for several
+years, with a fair degree of respect shown to it by its
+citizens. Like other provisional governments, it
+was weakest when revenue was in question, but its
+courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the
+settlers. It was long after regular settlement began
+before Congress acquired sure title to the country
+and could pass laws for it.</p>
+
+<p>The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties,
+thus broke out loudly in the forties. Emigrants then
+rushed west in the great migrations with deliberate
+purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded,
+with absolute confidence, that Congress
+protect them in their new homes. The stories of the
+election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>
+erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all
+belong to an intimate study of the Oregon trail.</p>
+
+<p>In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important
+question in practical politics. Well-informed
+historians no longer believe that the annexation of
+Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of
+slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states
+and more southern senators. All along the frontier,
+whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, or in Arkansas,
+Alabama, and Mississippi, population was
+restive under hard times and its own congenital instinct
+to move west to cheaper lands. Speculation
+of the thirties had loaded up the eastern states with
+debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape
+with honor, but from under which their individual
+citizens could emigrate. Wherever farm
+lands were known, there went the home-seekers, and
+it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the
+presence, in the platform, of a party that appealed to
+the great plain people, of planks for the reannexation
+of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With a Democratic
+party strongest in the South, the former extension
+was closer to the heart, but the whole West
+could subscribe to both.</p>
+
+<p>Oregon included the whole domain west of the
+Rockies, between Spanish Mexico at 42° and Russian
+America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´. Its
+northern and southern boundaries were clearly established
+in British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern
+limit by the old treaty of 1818 was the continental<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>
+divide, since the United States and Great
+Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it.
+Title which should justify a claim to it was so equally
+divided between the contesting countries that it would
+be difficult to make out a positive claim for either,
+while in fact a compromise based upon equal division
+was entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon
+with an eagerness that saw no flaw in the United
+States title. That the democratic party was sincere
+in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with
+respect to the rank and file of the organization than
+with the leaders of the party. Certain it is that just
+so soon as the execution of the Texas pledge provoked
+a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a
+westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his
+words and agree with his British adversary quickly.</p>
+
+<p>Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to
+serve a year's notice on Great Britain and bring joint
+occupation to an end. But more pacific advices
+prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary
+of State, so that the United States agreed to accept
+an equitable division instead of the whole or none.
+The Senate, consulted in advance upon the change of
+policy, gave its approval both before and after to the
+treaty which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the
+boundary line of 49° from the Rockies to the Pacific.
+The settled half of Oregon and the greater part of
+the Columbia River thus became American territory,
+subject to such legislation as Congress should
+prescribe.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result
+of the establishment of the first clear American
+title on the Pacific. All that the United States had
+secured in the division was given the popular name.
+Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,
+popular agricultural conquest, had established the
+first detached American colony, with the desert
+separating it from the mother country. The trail
+was already well known to thousands, and so clearly
+defined by wheel ruts and dĂŠbris along the sides
+that even the blind could scarce wander from the
+beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient
+for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at
+once paved the way for the legitimate territory and
+revealed the high degree of law and morality prevailing
+in the population. Already the older settlers
+were prosperous, and the first chapter in the history
+of Oregon was over. A second great trail had still
+further weakened the hold of the American desert
+over the American mind, endangering, too, the
+Indian policy that was dependent upon the desert
+for its continuance.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS</span></h2>
+
+<p>The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon
+is but a small portion of the whole history of the
+Oregon trail. The trail was not only the road to
+Oregon, but it was the chief road across the continent.
+Santa FĂŠ dominated a southern route that was important
+in commerce and conquest, and that could
+be extended west to the Pacific. But the deep ravine
+of the Colorado River splits the United States
+into sections with little chance of intercourse below
+the fortieth parallel. To-day, in only two places
+south of Colorado do railroads bridge it; only
+one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The
+southern trail could not be compared in its traffic or
+significance with the great middle highway by South
+Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri
+River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to
+California and Great Salt Lake.</p>
+
+<p>Of the waves of influence that drew population
+along the trail, the Oregon fever came first; but while
+it was still raging, there came the Mormon trek that
+is without any parallel in American history. Throughout
+the lifetime of the trails the American desert
+extended almost unbroken from the bend of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>
+Missouri to California and Oregon. The Mormon
+settlement in Utah became at once the most considerable
+colony within this area, and by its own
+fertility emphasized the barren nature of the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet,
+but it would be fair to ascribe the parentage of the
+sect to that emotional upheaval of the twenties and
+thirties which broke down barriers of caste and
+politics, ruptured many of the ordinary Christian
+churches, and produced new revelations and new
+prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely
+one of these, more astute perhaps than the others,
+having much of the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed
+had had before him, and able to direct and
+hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet
+might have been able to arouse. History teaches
+that it is easy to provoke religious enthusiasm,
+however improbable or fraudulent the guides or
+revelations may be; but that the founding of a
+church upon it is a task for greatest statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>The discovery of the golden plates and the magic
+spectacles, and the building upon them of a militant
+church has little part in the conquest of the
+frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for
+the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other
+than as a joke, and its perpetrator as a successful
+charlatan. Mormon apologists and their enemies
+have gone over the details of its production without
+establishing much sure evidence on either side. The
+theological teaching of the church seems to put less<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>
+stress upon it than its supposed miraculous origin
+would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain, with his
+light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome
+to read, but there is nothing vicious in its
+teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable&mdash;it
+is 'smouched' from the New Testament and no
+credit given." Converts came slowly to the new
+prophet at the start, for he was but one of many
+teachers crying in the wilderness, and those who had
+known him best in his youth were least ready to see
+in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring
+of 1830 it was possible to organize, in western New
+York, the body which Rigdon was later to christen
+the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
+By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to
+Kirtland, Ohio, where proselyting had proved to be
+successful in both religion and finance.</p>
+
+<p>Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new
+sect. Revelations came in upon the prophet rapidly,
+pointing out the details of organization and administration,
+the duty of missionary activity among the
+Indians and gentiles, and the future home further
+to the west. Scouts were sent to the Indian Country
+at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland the
+leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts
+who, by 1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in
+hopeful numbers. The frontier of this decade was
+equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,
+banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates
+possessed the germ of leadership to take advantage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>
+of every chance. Until the panic of 1837 they flourished,
+apparently not always beyond reproach in
+financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had
+the right to throw the stone. Antagonism, already
+appearing against the church, was due partly to an
+essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors
+and partly to the whole-souled union between church
+and life which distinguished the Mormons from the
+other sects. Their political complexion was identical
+with their religion,&mdash;a combination which
+always has aroused resentment in America.</p>
+
+<p>For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract
+in Missouri, not far from Independence, close to
+the Indians whose conversion was a part of the Mormon
+duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa
+FĂŠ were by-words along the Missouri, the Mormons
+were getting a precarious foothold near the commencement
+of the trails. The population around Independence
+was distinctly inhospitable, with the result
+that petty violence appeared, in which it is hard to
+place the blame. There was a calm assurance among
+the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit
+the earth. Their neighbors maintained that poultry
+and stock were unsafe in their vicinity because of
+this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges
+of well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all
+the bickerings the sources of information are partisan
+and cloudy with prejudice, so that it is easier to see
+the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit. From
+the south side of the Missouri around Independence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>
+the Saints were finally driven across the river by
+armed mobs; a transaction in which the Missourians
+spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the peace.
+North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached
+in a few miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell
+County, they settled down at last, to build their
+tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of
+1838 their corner-stone was laid.</p>
+
+<p>Far West remained their goal in belief longer than
+in fact. Before 1838 ended they had been forced to
+agree to leave Missouri; yet they returned in secret
+to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and continued
+to dream of this as their future home. Up to
+the time of their expulsion from Missouri in 1838
+they are not proved to have been guilty of any crime
+that could extenuate the gross intolerance which
+turned them out. As individuals they could live
+among Gentiles in peace. It seems to have been the
+collective soul of the church that was unbearable to
+the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had
+facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled
+it from Missouri, in a few more years drove them
+again on their migrations. The cohesion of the
+church in politics, economics, and religion explains
+the opposition which it cannot well excuse.</p>
+
+<p>In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old
+Fort Madison ferry which led into the half-breed
+country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered a village
+of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement
+from which the business genius of Smith<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>
+now purchased it on easy terms. It was occupied in
+1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a new tabernacle
+was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken
+young clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet
+had now developed into a successful man of affairs,
+with ambitions that reached even to the presidency
+at Washington. With a strong sect behind him,
+money at his disposal, and supernatural powers in
+which all faithful saints believed, Joseph could go
+far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen
+thousand by the end of 1840.</p>
+
+<p>Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely
+contested presidential election, at a time when the
+state feared to lose its population in an emigration
+to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to
+be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the
+Mormons insured for themselves a hearty welcome
+from both Democrats and Whigs. A complaisant
+legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of
+privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so
+that the ideal of the Mormons of a state within the
+state was fully realized. The town council was
+emancipated from state control, its courts were independent,
+and its militia was substantially at the beck
+of Smith. Proselyting and good management built
+up the town rapidly. To an importunate creditor
+Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but
+to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of
+milk and honey. Here it began to be noticed that
+desertions from the church were not uncommon; that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>
+conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks.
+It was noised about that the wealthy convert had
+the warmest reception, but was led on to let his
+religious passion work his impoverishment for the
+good of the cause.</p>
+
+<p>Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the
+church took the decisive step that carried Mormonism
+beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable, religious
+sects. Rumors of immorality circulated
+among the Gentile neighbors. It was bad enough,
+they thought, to have the Mormons chronic petty
+thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail
+among the leaders was more than could be endured
+by a community that did not count this form of iniquity
+among its own excesses. The Mormons were
+in general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen
+until they took to this. At the time, all immorality
+was denounced and denied by the prophet
+and his friends, but in later years the church made
+public a revelation concerning celestial or plural
+marriage, with the admission that Joseph Smith had
+received it in the summer of 1843. Never does
+Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent
+as its enemies have charged. But no church countenancing
+the practice could hope to be endured by
+an American community. The odium of practising it
+was increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It
+was only a matter of time until the Mormons should
+resume their march.</p>
+
+<p>The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>
+by the murder of Joseph Smith, and Hyrum
+his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the summer
+of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an
+attack upon the Saints similar to that in Missouri.
+Under promise of protection the Smiths had surrendered
+themselves. Their martyrdom at once
+disgraced the state in which it could be possible, and
+gave to Mormonism in a murdered prophet a mighty
+bond of union. The reins of government fell into
+hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young
+succeeded Joseph Smith.</p>
+
+<p>Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a
+formal way president of the church, but his authority
+was complete in fact after the death of Joseph.
+A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain
+knew him, and has left an estimate of him which
+must be close to truth. He was "a man of great
+ability. Apparently deficient in education and
+refinement, he was fair and honest in his dealings,
+and seemed extremely liberal in conversation upon
+religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so
+Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates,
+"as anything but a religious fanatic or even enthusiast;
+but he knew how to make use of the fanaticism
+of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly
+after the murder of Joseph it became clear that
+Nauvoo must be abandoned, and Brigham began to
+consider an exodus across the plains so familiar
+by hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky
+Mountains beyond the limits of the United States.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
+Persecution, for the persecuted can never see two
+sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened
+eviction came in the autumn of 1845. In 1846 the
+last great trek began.</p>
+
+<p>The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at
+Nauvoo as early as February, 1846. By the hundred,
+in the spring of the year, the wagons of the persecuted
+sect were ferried across the river. Five
+hundred and thirty-nine teams within a single
+week in May is the report of one observer. Property
+which could be commuted into the outfit for the
+march was carefully preserved and used. The
+rest, the tidy houses, the simple furniture, the careful
+farms (for the backbone of the church was its well-to-do
+middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced
+sale to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full
+of real estate vultures hoping to thrive upon the
+Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more
+abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple
+within the year.</p>
+
+<p>Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as
+Brigham Young liked to call his headquarters,
+advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer allowed.
+To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy
+railway follows the Mormon road for many miles, but
+in 1846 the western half of Iowa territory was Indian
+Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and
+Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over,
+but who were in possession at this time. Along the
+line of march camps were built by advance parties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>
+to be used in succession by the following thousands.
+The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri
+River, near Council Bluffs, where as yet no city stood,
+to plant a crop of grain, since manna could not be
+relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of
+the population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter
+quarters not far above the present site of Omaha,
+preserving the orderly life of the society, and enduring
+hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate
+by gaiety and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi
+country of Iowa, opposite their winter
+quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all
+the way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the
+Platte Mormon detachments were scattered along the
+roads. The destination was yet in doubt. Westward
+it surely was, but it is improbable that even
+Brigham knew just where.</p>
+
+<p>The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted
+and driven westward like themselves, kindly at
+first, but discontent came as the winter residence
+was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha,
+west of the Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit
+Mormon settlement, but east, in the abandoned
+Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain
+Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several
+years. A permanent residence here was not desired
+even by the Mormons themselves. Spring in 1847
+found them preparing to resume the march.</p>
+
+<p>In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance
+of no less a person than Brigham Young started out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
+the Platte trail in search of Zion. One hundred and
+forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred
+and seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they
+took along, if the figures of one of their historians
+may be accepted. Under strict military order,
+the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is
+one of the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no
+sooner selected their abode beyond the line of the
+United States in their flight from persecution than
+conquest from Mexico extended the United States
+beyond them to the Pacific. They themselves aided
+in this defeat of their plan, since from among them
+Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army
+of invasion.</p>
+
+<p>Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and
+beyond, the prospectors followed the well-beaten
+trail. Oregon homeseekers had been cutting it deep
+in the prairie sod for five years. West of South
+Pass they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on
+the 24th of July, 1847, Brigham gazed upon the
+waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious
+premeditation, so far as is known, and against the
+advice of one of the most experienced of mountain
+guides, this valley by a later-day Dead Sea was chosen
+for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground
+was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were
+commenced at once, and within a month the town site
+was baptized the City of the Great Salt Lake.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the advance guard the main body remained
+in winter quarters, making ready for their difficult<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
+search for the promised land; moving at last in the
+late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere
+would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph
+relied but little upon supernatural aid in keeping his
+flock under control. Commonly he depended upon
+human wisdom and executive direction. But upon
+the eve of his own departure from winter quarters
+he had made public, for the direction of the main
+body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will of
+the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their
+Journeyings to the West." Such revelations as this,
+had they been repeated, might well have created
+or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration
+of the leader. The order given was such as a wise
+source of inspiration might have formed after constant
+intercourse with emigrants and traders upon
+the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers
+of the way.</p>
+
+<p>"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of
+Latter-day Saints, and those who journey with them,"
+read the revelation, "be organized into companies,
+with a covenant and a promise to keep all the
+commandments and statutes of the Lord our God.
+Let the companies be organized with captains of
+hundreds, and captains of fifties, and captains of tens,
+with a president and counsellor at their head, under
+direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be
+our covenant, that we will walk in all the ordinances
+of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>"Let each company provide itself with all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>
+teams, wagons, provisions, and all other necessaries
+for the journey that they can. When the companies
+are organized, let them go with all their might, to
+prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company,
+with their captains and presidents, decide
+how many can go next spring; then choose out a sufficient
+number of able-bodied and expert men to take
+teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers
+to prepare for putting in the spring crops. Let each
+company bear an equal proportion, according to the
+dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the
+widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those
+who have gone with the army, that the cries of the
+widow and the fatherless come not up into the ears
+of the Lord against his people.</p>
+
+<p>"Let each company prepare houses and fields
+for raising grain for those who are to remain behind
+this season; and this is the will of the Lord concerning
+this people.</p>
+
+<p>"Let every man use all his influence and property
+to remove this people to the place where the Lord
+shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do this with
+a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed
+in your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields,
+and in your houses, and in your families...."</p>
+
+<p>The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk
+Horn River, whence the head of the procession
+moved late in June and early in July. In careful organization,
+with camps under guard and wagons
+always in corral at night, detachments moved on in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
+quick succession. Kanesville and a large body
+remained behind for another year or longer, but
+before Brigham had laid out his city and started
+east the emigration of 1847 was well upon its way.
+The foremost began to come into the city by September.
+By October the new city in the desert had
+nearly four thousand inhabitants. The march had
+been made with little suffering and slight mortality.
+No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the
+trail.</p>
+
+<p>The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to
+become an oasis in the American desert, supporting
+the only agricultural community existing therein during
+nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the
+Mormons at the start. In Illinois and Missouri
+they were used to wood and water; here they found
+neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to
+carry their water to their crops in a way in which
+their leader had more confidence than themselves.
+The urgency of Brigham in setting his first detachment
+to work on fields and crops was not unwise,
+since for two years there was a real question of food
+to keep the colony alive. Inexperience in irrigating
+agriculture and plagues of crickets kept down the
+early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its
+maintenance does still more credit to its skilful
+leadership. Its people, apart from foreign converts
+who came in later years, were of the stuff that had
+colonized the middle West and won a foothold in
+Oregon; but nowhere did an emigration so nearly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>
+create a land which it enjoyed as here. A paternal
+government dictated every effort, outlined the
+streets and farms, detailed parties to explore the
+vicinity and start new centres of life. Little was
+left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical
+success and a high state of general welfare rewarded
+the Saints for their implicit obedience to authority.</p>
+
+<p>Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became
+as common as that to Oregon in the years following
+1847, but, except in the disastrous hand-cart episode
+of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial
+increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living
+in the West, who, walking all the way, with their own
+hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled carts from
+the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad
+management in handling proselytes the hand-cart
+catastrophe was chiefly due. From the beginning
+missionary activity had been pressed throughout
+the United States and even in Europe. In England
+and Scandinavia the lower classes took kindly to the
+promises, too often impracticable, it must be believed,
+of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon
+success abroad. The convert with property could
+pay his way to the Missouri border and join the ordinary
+annual procession. But the poor, whose wealth
+was not equal to the moderately costly emigration,
+were a problem until the emigration society
+determined to cut expenses by reducing equipment
+and substituting pushcarts and human power for the
+prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span>
+In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants
+left Liverpool, at contract rates, for Iowa City,
+where the parties were to be organized and ample
+equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised
+to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found
+that slovenly management had not built enough of
+the carts. Delayed by the necessary construction
+of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the
+trail until late in the summer,&mdash;too late for a successful
+trip, as a few of their more cautious advisers
+had said. The earliest company got through to
+Salt Lake City in September with considerable success.
+It was hard and toilsome to push the carts;
+women and children suffered badly, but the task
+was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains
+broke down the last company. A friendly historian
+speaks of a loss of sixty-seven out of a party of four
+hundred and twenty. Throughout the United States
+the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling
+against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom,
+with clothing going and food quite gone, increased
+the conviction that the Mormon hierarchy
+was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.</p>
+
+<p>That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of
+the whole United States came to be believed as well.
+In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement three years old,
+Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending
+from the Rockies to California, between 37° and 42°,
+and the President had made Brigham Young its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>
+governor. The close association of the Mormon
+church and politics had prevented peaceful relations
+from existing between its people and the federal
+officers of the territory, while Washington prejudiced
+a situation already difficult by sending to Utah
+officers and judges, some of whom could not have
+commanded respect even where the sway of United
+States authority was complete. The vicious influence
+of politics in territorial appointments, which the
+territories always resented, was specially dangerous
+in the case of a territory already feeling itself persecuted
+for conscience' sake. Yet it was not impossible
+for a tactful and respectable federal officer to do
+business in Utah. For several years relations increased
+in bad temper, both sides appealing constantly
+to President and Congress, until it appeared,
+as was the fact, that the United States authority
+had become as nothing in Utah and with the church.
+Among the earliest of President Buchanan's acts
+was the preparation of an army which should reĂŤstablish
+United States prestige among the Mormons.
+Large wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth
+in the summer of 1857, with an army under
+Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and
+again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.</p>
+
+<p>The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base,
+and operating in a desert against plainsmen of remarkable
+skill, the army was helpless. At will, the
+Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply
+trains, confining their attacks to property rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>
+than to armed forces. When the army reached
+Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his
+people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned.
+With difficulty could the army of invasion have
+lived through the winter without aid. In the spring
+of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons,
+being invulnerable, were forgiven. The army
+marched down the trail again.</p>
+
+<p>The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island
+settlements in the heart of the desert. The very
+isolation of Utah gave it prominence. What religious
+enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization,
+shrewd leadership and resulting prosperity supplied.
+The first impulse moving population across the plains
+had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as the result.
+Religion was the next, producing Utah. The
+lust for gold followed close upon the second, calling
+into life California, and then in a later decade sprinkling
+little camps over all the mountain West. The
+Mormons would have fared much worse had their
+leader not located his stake of Zion near the point
+where the trail to the Southwest deviated from the
+Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay
+tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through
+his oasis on their way to California.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS</span></h2>
+
+<p>On his second exploring trip, John C. FrĂŠmont
+had worked his way south over the Nevada desert
+until at last he crossed the mountains and found
+himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in
+1844 a small group of Americans had already been
+established for several years. Mexican California
+was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient
+central government that the province had
+almost fallen away of its own weight. John A.
+Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was the
+magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed
+a liberal hospitality to the Pathfinder's
+party.</p>
+
+<p>In 1845, FrĂŠmont started on his third trip, this
+time entering California by a southern route and
+finding himself at Sutter's early in 1846. In some
+respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance
+of a filibustering party from the start.
+When it crossed the Rockies, it began to trespass
+upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with whom
+the United States was yet at peace. Whether the
+explorer was actually instructed to detach California<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>
+from Mexico, or whether he only imagined that such
+action would be approved at home, is likely never
+to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were
+already under orders in the event of war to seize
+California at once; and Polk was from the start ambitious
+to round out the American territory on the
+Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were
+at variance with their Mexican neighbors, who resented
+the steady influx of foreign blood. Between
+1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased.
+And in June, 1846, certain of them, professing to
+believe that they were to be attacked, seized the
+Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors
+of what they called their Bear Flag Republic.
+FrĂŠmont, near at hand, countenanced and supported
+their act, if he did not suggest it.</p>
+
+<p>The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly
+after the American population in California had begun
+its little revolution. FrĂŠmont was in his glory
+for a time as the responsible head of American
+power in the province. Naval commanders under
+their own orders coĂśperated along the coast so
+effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,
+learned that the conquest was substantially complete,
+soon after he left Santa FĂŠ, and was able to
+send most of his own force back. California fell
+into American hands almost without a struggle,
+leaving the invaders in possession early in 1847.
+In January of that year the little village of Yerba
+Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>
+American occupants began the sale of lots along the
+water front and the construction of a great seaport.</p>
+
+<p>The relations of Oregon and California to the
+occupation of the West were much the same in 1847.
+Both had been coveted by the United States. Both
+had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come
+first because it was most easily reached by the great
+trail, and because it had no considerable body of
+foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It was, under
+the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field
+for colonization. But California had been the
+territory of Mexico and was occupied by a strange
+population. In the early forties there were from
+4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province,
+living the easy agricultural life of the Spanish
+colonist. The missions and the Indians had decayed
+during the past generation. The population
+was light hearted and generous. It quarrelled
+loudly, but had the Latin-American knack for
+bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized
+by long association with those trappers who had
+visited it since the twenties, and the settlers who had
+begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied
+foreign territory it had not invited American colonization
+as Oregon had done. Hence the Oregon
+movement had been going on three or four years before
+any considerable bodies of emigrants broke
+away from the trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out
+homes in California. If war had not come, American
+immigration into California would have progressed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>
+after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities
+would have allowed. As it was, the actual conquest
+removed the barrier, so that California migration
+in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon
+under the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement.
+The settlement of the Mormons at Salt
+Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at
+the head of the most perilous section of the California
+trail. Both Mormons and Californians profited
+by its traffic.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to California, the treaty which closed
+the Mexican War merely recognized an accomplished
+fact. By right of conquest California had changed
+hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid
+the penalty under that organic law of politics which
+forbids a nation to sit still when others are moving.
+In no conceivable way could the occupation of California
+have been prevented, and if the war over
+Texas had not come in 1846, a war over California
+must shortly have occurred. By the treaty of
+Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory
+which she had never been able to develop, and made
+way for the erection of the new America on the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in
+California was John A. Sutter, whose establishment
+on the Sacramento had been a centre of the new
+life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government
+he had erected his adobe buildings in the usual
+semi-fortified style that distinguished the isolated
+ranch. He was ready for trade, or agriculture, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>
+war if need be, possessing within his own domain
+equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and
+supplies. As his ranch prospered, and as Americans
+increased in San Francisco and on the Sacramento,
+the prospects of Sutter steadily improved.
+In 1847 he made ready to reap an additional share
+of profit from the boom by building a sawmill on his
+estate. Among his men there had been for some
+months a shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W.
+Marshall, who had been chiefly carpenter while in
+Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall
+was sent out to find a place where timber and water-power
+should be near enough together to make a
+profitable mill site. He found his spot on the south
+bank of the American, which is a tributary of the
+Sacramento, some forty-five miles northeast of
+Sacramento.</p>
+
+<p>In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall
+came to their agreement by which the former was to
+furnish all supplies and the latter was to build the
+mill and operate it on shares. Construction was
+begun before the year ended, and was substantially
+completed in January, 1848. Experience showed
+the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too
+shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of
+turning the river into it by night to wash out earth
+and deepen the channel. Here it was that after one
+of these flushings, toward the end of January, he
+picked up glittering flakes which looked to him like
+gold.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span>
+With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter,
+at the ranch. Together they tested the flakes in
+the apothecary's shop, proving the reality of the
+discovery before returning to the mill to prospect
+more fully.</p>
+
+<p>For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None
+could tell how large the field might be, but he saw
+clearly that once the news of the find got abroad, the
+whole population would rush madly to the diggings.
+His ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under
+way, all needed labor. But none would work for
+hire with free gold to be had for the taking. The
+discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks,
+but the news leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands
+in a few days, and reached even to San Francisco in
+the form of rumor before February was over. A
+new force had appeared to change the balance of
+the West and to excite the whole United States.</p>
+
+<p>The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two
+parts: the earlier including the population of California,
+near enough to hear of the find and get to
+the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the
+world, but could not start until the news had percolated
+by devious and tedious courses to centres
+of population thousands of miles away. The movement
+within California started in March and April.</p>
+
+<p>Further prospecting showed that over large areas
+around the American and Sacramento rivers free
+gold could be obtained by the simple processes of
+placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span>
+or eight men was the most profitable tool, but a
+tin dishpan would do in an emergency. San Francisco
+was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and
+was not excited even by the first of April, but as
+nuggets and bags of dust appeared in quantity, the
+doubters turned to enthusiasts. Farms were abandoned,
+town houses were deserted, stores were closed,
+while every able-bodied man tramped off to the
+north to try his luck. The city which had flourished
+and expanded since the beginning of 1847 became
+an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper
+is mute witness of the desertion, lapsing into
+silence for a month after May 29th because its hands
+had disappeared. Farther south in California the
+news spread as spring advanced, turning by June
+nearly every face toward Sacramento.</p>
+
+<p>The public authorities took cognizance of the find
+during the summer. It was forced upon them by
+the wholesale desertions of troops who could not
+stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor
+Mason, who represented the sovereignty of
+the United States, visited the scenes in person and
+described the situation in their official letters home.
+The former got his news off to the Secretary of State
+by the 1st of June; the latter wrote on August 17;
+together they became the authoritative messengers
+that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk
+published some of their documents in his message to
+Congress in December, 1848. The rumors had
+reached the East as early as September, but now,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
+writes Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."</p>
+
+<p>How to get to California became a great popular
+question in the winter of 1848&ndash;1849. The public
+mind was well prepared for long migrations through
+the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the
+journals for at least six years. Route, time, method,
+and cost were all to be considered. Migration, of
+a sort, began at once.</p>
+
+<p>Land and water offered a choice of ways to California.
+The former route was now closed for the
+winter and could not be used until spring should
+produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the
+impetuous and the well-to-do could start immediately
+by sea. All along the seaboard enterprising
+ship-owners announced sailings for California, by
+the Horn or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired
+hulks were called again into commission for
+the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many
+were willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery,
+Congress had arranged for a postal service, <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">via</i>
+Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company
+had been organized to work the contracts. The
+<i>California</i> had left New York in the fall of 1848
+to run on the western end of the route. It had
+sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news
+of gold on the South American coast, had begun to
+load up at Latin ports. When it reached Panama,
+a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many times beyond
+its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
+over its accommodations. On February 28, 1849,
+it reached San Francisco at last, starting the influx
+from the world at large.</p>
+
+<p>The water route was too costly for most of the
+gold-seekers, who were forced to wait for spring,
+when the trails would be open. Various routes then
+guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most
+of all they crowded once more the great Platte trail.
+Oregon migration and the Mormon flight had
+familiarized this route to all the world. For its first
+stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any
+turnpike in our country."</p>
+
+<p>The usual crowd, which every May for several
+years had brought to the Missouri River crossings
+around Fort Leavenworth, was reĂŤnforced in 1849
+and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle
+regiment of regulars was there, bound for Forts
+Laramie and Hall to erect new frontier posts. Lieutenant
+Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying
+party which was to prospect for a railway route to
+Salt Lake. By thousands and tens of thousands
+others came, tempted by the call of gold. This
+was the cheap and popular route. Every western
+farmer was ready to start, with his own wagons and
+his own stock. The townsman could easily buy the
+simple equipment of the plains. The poor could
+work their way, driving cattle for the better-off.
+Through inexperience and congestion the journey
+was likely to be hard, but any one might undertake
+it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>
+wagons had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and
+1500 more at the other ferries.</p>
+
+<p>Familiarity had done much to divest the overland
+journey of its terrors. We hear in this, and even in
+earlier years, of a sort of plains travel de luxe, of
+wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from the weather
+and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the
+world as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury,
+hurrying out in June and overtaking the trains,
+was impressed with the picturesque character of the
+emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in
+company with multitudes of emigrants the whole
+day," he wrote on June 12. "The road has been lined
+to a long extent with their wagons, whose white
+covers, glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a
+distance, ships upon the ocean.... We passed
+also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon,
+drawn by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household
+furniture. Behind followed a covered cart
+containing the wife, driving herself, and a host of
+babies&mdash;the whole bound to the land of promise,
+of the distance to which, however, they seemed to
+have not the most remote idea. To the tail of the
+cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls;
+two milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare,
+upon the back of which was perched a little, brown-faced,
+barefooted girl, not more than seven years old,
+while a small sucking colt brought up the rear."
+Travellers eastward bound, meeting the procession,
+reported the hundreds and thousands whom they met.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+The organization of the trains was not unlike that
+of the Oregonians and the Mormons, though generally
+less formal than either of these. The wagons
+were commonly grouped in companies for protection,
+little needed, since the Indians were at peace during
+most of 1849. At nightfall the long columns came
+to rest and worked their wagons into the corral which
+was the typical plains encampment. To form this
+the wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with
+its tongue overlapping the vehicle ahead, and each
+fastened to the next with the brake or yoke chains.
+An opening at one end allowed for driving in the
+stock, which could here be protected from stampede
+or Indian theft. In emergency the circle of wagons
+formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside ordinary
+Indian attacks. When the companies had been
+on the road for a few weeks the forming of the corral
+became an easy military man&oelig;uvre. The itinerant
+circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of
+prairie schooners.</p>
+
+<p>The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by
+worse sufferings than the trail had yet known. Cholera
+broke out among the trains at the start. It
+stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five
+thousand graves, until they reached the hills beyond
+Fort Laramie. The price of inexperience, too, had
+to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock died.
+The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this.
+On July 27, Stansbury observed: "To-day we find
+additional and melancholy evidence of the difficulties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>
+encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before
+halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had
+been broken up, the spokes of the wheels taken to
+make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or otherwise
+destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with
+articles that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and
+steel, large blacksmiths' anvils and bellows, crowbars,
+drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels, axes, lead,
+trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,
+cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels,
+harness, clothing, bacon, and beans, were found along
+the road in pretty much the order in which they have
+been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen,
+lying in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained
+a part of the trouble." In twenty-four miles
+he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and twenty-seven
+dead oxen.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done,
+came the worst perils. In the dust and heat of the
+Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away, so that
+thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake,
+or were forced on foot to struggle with thirst and
+starvation.</p>
+
+<p>The number of the overland emigrants can never
+be told with accuracy. Perhaps the truest estimate
+is that of the great California historian who counts
+it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and
+reached the gold fields.</p>
+
+<p>It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California
+after July, 1849, when the overland folk began<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>
+to arrive. All countries and all stations in society
+had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000 or
+more whites who were there in the end of the year.
+The farmer, the amateur prospector, and the professional
+gambler mingled in the crowd. Loose
+women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who
+had come by sea contained an over-share of the undesirable
+element that proposed to live upon the recklessness
+and vices of the miners. The overland emigrants
+were largely of farmer stock; whether they
+had possessed frontier experience or not before the
+start, the 3000-mile journey toughened and seasoned
+all who reached California. Nearly all possessed
+the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.</p>
+
+<p>The experience of Oregon might point to the future
+of California when its strenuous population
+arrived upon the unprepared community. The
+Mexican government had been ejected by war. A
+military government erected by the United States
+still held its temporary sway, but felt out of place as
+the controlling power over a civilian American population.
+The new inhabitants were much in need of
+law, and had the American dislike for military authority.
+Immediately Congress was petitioned to
+form a territorial government for the new El Dorado.
+But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of
+slavery and freedom in the Southwest during its
+session of 1848&ndash;1849. It adjourned with nothing
+done for California. The mining population was irritated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>
+but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It
+had already organized its miners' courts and begun
+to execute summary justice in emergencies. It was
+quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion of
+its administrative officers and erect its state government
+without the consent of Congress. The military
+governor called the popular convention; the
+constitution framed during September, 1849, was ratified
+by popular vote on November 13; a few days
+later Governor Riley surrendered his authority into
+the hands of the elected governor, Burnett, and the
+officials of the new state. All this was done spontaneously
+and easily. There was no sanction in law
+for California until Congress admitted it in September,
+1850, receiving as one of its first senators, John
+C. FrĂŠmont.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon
+slavery in the Southwest, a compromise made necessary
+by the appearance on the Pacific of a new America.
+The "call of the West and the lust for gold"
+had done their work in creating a new centre of life
+beyond the quondam desert.</p>
+
+<p>The census of 1850 revealed something of the
+nature of this population. Probably 125,000 whites,
+though it was difficult to count them and impossible
+to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon
+and California. Nine-tenths of these were in the
+latter colony. More than 11,000 were found in the
+settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many
+more than 3000 Americans were scattered among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
+the Mexican population along the Rio Grande.
+The great trails had seen most of these home-seekers
+marching westward over the desert and across the
+Indian frontier which in the blindness of statecraft
+had been completed for all time in 1840.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER</span></h2>
+
+<p>The long line separating the Indian and agricultural
+frontiers was in 1850 but little farther west
+than the point which it had reached by 1820. Then
+it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it
+remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung
+out during this generation, including Arkansas on the
+south and Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin on the
+north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War
+the line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri
+at its bend. West of this spot it had been kept
+from going by the tradition of the desert and the
+pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind
+had filled up with population, Oregon and California
+had appeared across the desert, but the barrier had
+not been pushed away.</p>
+
+<p>Through the great trails which penetrated the
+desert accurate knowledge of the Far West had begun
+to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike and Long
+had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and
+covetous eyes had been cast upon the Indian
+lands across the border,&mdash;lands from which the
+tribes were never to be removed without their consent,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
+and which were never to be included in any
+organized territory or state. Most of the traffic
+over the trails and through this country had been in
+defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes
+had granted rights of transit, but such privileges as
+were needed and used by the Oregon, and California,
+and Utah hordes were far in excess of these. Most
+of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon
+Indian lands as well as violators of treaty provisions.
+Trouble with the Indians had begun early in the migrations.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_120" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-138.jpg" width="600" height="441" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The West in 1849</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The Southwest
+acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the
+Indian office had foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>
+have occurred during the spring of the last
+and present year [1845] from the passing of emigrants
+for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country.
+Large companies have frequently rendezvoused on
+the Indian lands for months previous to the period
+of their starting. The emigrants have two advantages
+in crossing into the Indian Country at an early
+period of the spring; one, the facility of grazing their
+stock on the rushes with which the lands abound;
+and the other, that they cross the Missouri River at
+their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be
+forced by the military to put back. This passing
+of the emigrants through the Indian Country without
+their permission must, I fear, result in an unpleasant
+collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the
+whites have no right to be in their country without
+their consent; and the upper tribes, who subsist on
+game, complain that the buffalo are wantonly killed
+and scared off, which renders their only means of
+subsistence every year more precarious." FrĂŠmont
+had seen, in 1842, that this invasion of the Indian
+Country could not be kept up safely without a show
+of military force, and had recommended a post at the
+point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.</p>
+
+<p>The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated
+the relations with the tribes, while the Indian
+agents continually called upon Congress to redress
+or stop the wrongs being done as often by panic-stricken
+emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate
+persuasion and force," wrote the Commissioner in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>
+1854, "some of these tribes have been removed, step
+by step, from mountain to valley, and from river to
+plain, until they have been pushed halfway across
+the continent. They can go no further; on the
+ground they now occupy the crisis must be met, and
+their future determined.... [There] they are, and
+as they are, with outstanding obligations in their
+behalf of the most solemn and imperative character,
+voluntarily assumed by the government." But a
+relentless westward movement that had no regard
+for rights of Mexico in either Texas or California
+could not be expected to notice the rights of savages
+even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens
+rights not inferior to those conceded by the government
+"to wandering nations of savages." A shrewd
+and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who had
+the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in
+1853. "But one course remains," he wrote, "which
+promises any permanent relief to them, or any lasting
+benefit to the country in which they dwell. That
+is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse
+laws' as will invite the residence of traders
+amongst them, and <i>open the whole Indian territory
+to settlement</i>. In this manner will be introduced
+amongst them those who will set the example of
+developing the resources of the soil, of which the
+Indians have not now the most distant idea; who
+will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial
+to their nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly,
+to those modes of life which can alone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>
+secure them from the miseries of penury. Trade is
+the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor
+of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of
+all hereafter.... The present 'intercourse laws'
+too, so far as they are calculated to protect the
+Indians from the evils of civilized life&mdash;from the
+sale of ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals&mdash;are
+nothing more than a dead letter; while, so far
+as they contribute to exclude the benefits of civilization
+from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly
+enforced."</p>
+
+<p>In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress
+from the War Department to the Interior, with
+the idea that the Indians would be better off under
+civilian than military control, and shortly after this
+negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements
+with the tribes. The Sioux were persuaded
+in the summer of 1851 to make way for increasing
+population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the
+same year the tribes of the western plains were induced
+to make concessions.</p>
+
+<p>The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte
+agency at Fort Laramie in 1851 were in the interest
+of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had spent
+the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne
+and Arapaho to the conference. Shoshoni
+were brought in from the West. From the north of
+the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara,
+Grosventres, and Crows. The treaties here concluded
+were never ratified in full, but for fifteen years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
+Congress paid various annuities provided by them,
+and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right
+of the United States to make roads across the plains
+and to fortify them with military posts was fully
+agreed to, while the Indians pledged themselves to
+commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two
+years later, at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a
+conference with the plains Indians of the south,
+Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of
+faith, which the Indians did not have in the Government,
+nor the Government in them."</p>
+
+<p>Overland traffic was made more safe for several
+years by these treaties. Such friction and fighting
+as occurred in the fifties were due chiefly to the excesses
+and the fears of the emigrants themselves.
+But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern
+tribes along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were
+in constant danger of dispossession by the advance of
+the frontier itself.</p>
+
+<p>The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in
+the early fifties, was the impending danger threatening
+the peace of the border. There was not as yet
+any special need to extend colonization across the
+Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota
+were but sparsely inhabited. Settlers for
+years might be accommodated farther to the east.
+But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and
+aroused passions in both North and South. Motives
+were so thoroughly mixed that participants
+were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>
+themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge,
+political ambition, all mingled with pure philanthropy
+and a reasonable fear of outside interference with
+domestic institutions. The compromise had settled
+the future of the new lands, but between Missouri
+and the mountains lay the residue of the Louisiana
+purchase, divided truly by the Missouri compromise
+line of 36° 30', but not yet settled. Ambition to
+possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for
+freedom was stimulated by the debate and the fears
+of outside interference. The nearest part of the
+unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence
+it was that Kansas came within the public vision first.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible to trace a movement for territorial
+organization in the Indian Country back to 1850 or
+even earlier. Certain of the more intelligent of the
+Indian colonists had been able to read the signs of
+the times, with the result that organized effort for a
+territory of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot
+country and had besieged Congress between
+1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment
+were the Indians and the laws. Experience
+had long demonstrated the unwisdom of permitting
+Indians and emigrants to live in the same districts.
+The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties
+based upon them, had guaranteed in particular that
+no territory or state should ever be organized in this
+country. Good faith and the physical presence of
+the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory
+could appear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>
+The guarantee of permanency was based upon
+treaty, and in the eye of Congress was not so sacred
+that it could not be modified by treaty. As it became
+clear that the demand for the opening of these
+lands would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared
+for the inevitable by ordering, in March, 1853,
+a series of negotiations with the tribes west of Missouri
+with a view to the cession of more country.
+The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W.
+Manypenny, who later wrote a book on "Our Indian
+Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to
+the Indians the hard news that they were expected
+once more to vacate. He found the tribes uneasy
+and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering over
+their lands, had set them thinking. There had been
+no actual white settlement up to October, 1853, so
+Manypenny declared, but the chiefs feared that he
+was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The
+Indian mind had some difficulty in comprehending
+the difference between ceding their land by treaty
+and losing it by force.</p>
+
+<p>At a long series of council fires the Commissioner
+soothed away some of the apprehensions, but found
+a stubborn resistance when he came to talk of ceding
+all the reserves and moving to new homes. The
+tribes, under pressure, were ready to part with some
+of their lands, but wanted to retain enough to live
+on. When he talked to them of the Great Father
+in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony
+of the situation; the guarantee of permanency had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span>
+been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged for a
+series of treaties in the following year.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with
+most of the tribes fronting on Missouri between 37°
+and 42° 40'. Some of these had been persuaded to
+move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of
+the thirties. Others, always resident there, had
+accepted curtailed reserves. The Omaha faced the
+Missouri, north of the Platte. South of the Platte
+were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes
+of Missouri, the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The
+Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas, and around
+Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization
+of a high order. The Shawnee, immediately
+south of the Kansas, were also well advanced in agriculture
+in the permanent home they had accepted.
+The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea
+and Piankashaw, and the Miami were further south.
+From those tribes more than thirteen million acres of
+land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered
+and reduced reserves the Indians retained for
+themselves about one-tenth of what they ceded.
+Generally, when the final signing came, under the
+persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the
+strange surroundings of Washington, the chiefs
+surrendered the lands outright and with no condition.</p>
+
+<p>Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to
+give title at once and held out for conditions of sale.
+The Iowa, the confederated minor tribes, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
+notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust
+to the United States, with the treaty pledge that the
+lands so yielded should be sold at public auction to
+the highest bidder, the remainders should then be
+offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre,
+and the final remnants should be disposed of by the
+United States, the accruing funds being held in trust
+by the United States for the Indians. By the end
+of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In
+July, 1854, Congress provided a land office for the
+territory of Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>While the Indian negotiations were in progress,
+Senator Douglas was forcing his Kansas-Nebraska
+bill at Washington. The bill had failed in 1853,
+partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of
+the Indian agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the
+Democratic party carried it along relentlessly. With
+words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as Rhodes
+has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed
+by the westward movement, subversive of the national
+pledge, and, blind as he was, destructive as
+well of his party and his own political future. The
+support of President Pierce and the coĂśperation of
+Jefferson Davis were his in the struggle. It was not
+his intent, he declared, to legislate slavery into or
+out of the territories; he proposed to leave that to
+the people themselves. To this principle he gave the
+name of "popular sovereignty," "and the name was
+a far greater invention than the doctrine." With
+rising opposition all about him, he repealed the Missouri<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+compromise which in 1820 had divided the
+Indian Country by the line of 36° 30' into free and
+slave areas, and created within these limits the new
+territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was
+signed by the President on May 30, 1854. In later
+years this day has been observed as a memorial to
+those who lost their lives in fighting the battle which
+he provoked.</p>
+
+<p>With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri
+compromise repealed, eager partisans prepared in
+the spring of 1854 to colonize the new territories
+in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the
+slavery side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was
+to be reckoned as one of the leaders. Young men
+of the South were urged to move, with their slaves
+and their possessions, into the new territories,
+and thus secure these for their cherished institution.
+If votes should fail them in the future, the
+Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization
+of voters might be counted upon. Missouri,
+directly adjacent to Kansas, and a slave state,
+naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing
+the erection of a free state on her western boundary.
+The northern states had been stirred by the act as
+deeply as the South. In New England the bill was
+not yet passed when leaders of the abolition movement
+prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer,
+of Worcester, urged during the spring that friends of
+freedom could do no better work than aid in the
+colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>
+state, in April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant
+Aid Society, through which he proposed to aid
+suitable men to move into the debatable land.
+Churches and schools were to be provided for them.
+A stern New England abolition spirit was to be fostered
+by them. And they were not to be left without
+the usual border means of defence. Amos A. Lawrence,
+of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made
+Thayer's scheme financially possible. Dr. Charles
+Robinson was their choice for leader of emigration
+and local representative in Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated
+little by the ordinary westward impulse but greatly
+by political ambition and sectional rivalry. As
+late as October, 1853, there had been almost no
+whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they
+began to come in, in increasing numbers. The
+Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at once, before
+the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before
+land offices had been opened. The approach was
+by the Missouri River steamers to Kansas City and
+Westport, near the bend of the river, where was the
+gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north
+of the Kansas River, was not yet open to legal occupation,
+but the Shawnee lands had been ceded completely
+and would soon be ready. So the New England
+companies worked their way on foot, or in hired
+wagons, up the right bank of the Kansas, hunting
+for eligible sites. About thirty miles west of the
+Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>
+picked their spot late in July. The town of Lawrence
+grew out of their cluster of tents and cabins.</p>
+
+<p>It was more than two months after the arrival of
+the squatters at Lawrence before the first governor
+of the new territory, Andrew H. Reeder, made his
+appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established
+civil government in Kansas. One of his first experiences
+was with the attempt of United States officers
+at the post to secure for themselves pieces of the Delaware
+lands which surrounded it. "While lying at
+the fort," wrote a surveyor who left early in September
+to run the Nebraska boundary line, "we
+heard a great deal about those d&mdash;d squatters who
+were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None
+of the Delaware lands were open to settlement, since
+the United States had pledged itself to sell them all
+at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But
+certain speculators, including officers of the regular
+army, organized a town company to preĂŤmpt a site
+near the fort, where they thought they foresaw the
+great city of the West. They relied on the immunity
+which usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands,
+and seem even to have used United States soldiers
+to build their shanties. They had begun to dispose
+of their building lots "in this discreditable business"
+four weeks before the first of the Delaware trust
+lands were put on sale.</p>
+
+<p>However bitter toward each other, the settlers
+were agreed in their attitude toward the Indians, and
+squatted regardless of Indian rights or United States<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>
+laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his legislature,
+first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort
+Riley ejected it; then at the Shawnee mission, close
+to Kansas City, where his presence and its were
+equally without authority of law. He established
+election precincts in unceded lands, and voting places
+at spots where no white man could go without violating
+the law. The legal snarl into which the
+settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the
+Indian policy. It is even intimated that Governor
+Reeder was interested in a land scheme at Pawnee
+similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.</p>
+
+<p>The fight for Kansas began immediately after the
+arrival of Governor Reeder and the earliest immigrants.
+The settlers actually in residence at the
+commencement of 1855 seem to have been about
+8500. Propinquity gave Missouri an advantage at
+the start, when the North was not yet fully aroused.
+At an election for territorial legislature held on
+March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was
+revealed in all its fulness when more than 6000
+votes were counted among a population which
+had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men
+had ridden over in organized bands to colonize
+the precincts and carry the election. The whole
+area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride
+of the Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that
+Governor Reeder disavowed certain of the results,
+yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July, 1855,
+was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
+while the rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri
+code of law, thus laying the foundations for a slave
+state.</p>
+
+<p>The political struggle over Kansas became more
+intense on the border and more absorbing in the
+nation in the next four years. The free-state men,
+as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known,
+disavowed the first legislature on the ground of its
+fraudulent election, while President Pierce steadily
+supported it from Washington. Governor Reeder
+was removed during its session, seemingly because
+he had thrown doubts upon its validity. Protesting
+against it, the northerners held a series of meetings
+in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some
+twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and
+crystallized their opposition under Dr. Robinson.
+Their efforts culminated at Topeka in October in a
+spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary, convention
+which framed a free-state constitution for
+Kansas and provided for erecting a rival administration.
+Dr. Robinson became its governor.</p>
+
+<p>Before the first legislature under the Topeka
+constitution assembled, Kansas had still further
+trouble. Private violence and mob attacks began
+during the fall of 1855. What is known as the
+Wakarusa War occurred in November, when Sheriff
+Jones of Douglas County tried to arrest some free-state
+men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance
+reĂŤnforced with Sharpe rifles from New
+England. Governor Wilson Shannon, who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
+succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility
+continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly
+the centre of northern settlement and the
+object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri mob
+visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving
+presence, it is said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel
+and printing shop, and burned the residence of Dr.
+Robinson.</p>
+
+<p>In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river
+and attacked Lecompton, but within a week of the
+sacking of Lawrence retribution was visited upon the
+pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were
+murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by
+a group of fanatical free-state men. Just what
+provocation John Brown and his family had received
+which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In
+many instances individual anti-slavery men retaliated
+lawlessly upon their enemies. But the leaders
+of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring
+Brown and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts.
+It is certain that in this struggle the free-state party,
+in general, wanted peaceful settlement of the country,
+and were staking their fortunes and families upon it.
+They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression
+was no part of their platform.</p>
+
+<p>The course of Governor Shannon reached its end
+in the summer of 1856. He was disliked by the free-state
+faction, while his personal habits gave no respectability
+to the pro-slave cause. At the end of
+his rĂŠgime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>
+constitution was prevented by federal troops
+from convening in session at Topeka. A few weeks
+later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and
+established his seat of government in Lecompton,
+by this time a village of some twenty houses. It
+took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only
+six weeks to fall out with the pro-slave element and
+the federal land officers. He resigned in March, 1857.</p>
+
+<p>Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed
+Geary, the first official attempt at a constitution was
+entered upon. The legislature had already summoned
+a convention which sat at Lecompton during
+September and October. Its constitution, which
+was essentially pro-slavery, however it was read, was
+ratified before the end of the year and submitted to
+Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which
+called the convention had fallen into free-state hands,
+disavowed the constitution, and summoned another
+convention. At Leavenworth this convention
+framed a free-state constitution in March, which was
+ratified by popular vote in May, 1858. Governor
+Walker had already resigned in December, 1857.
+Through holding an honest election and purging the
+returns of slave-state frauds he had enabled the free-state
+party to secure the legislature. Southerner
+though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty
+of the administration in Kansas. He had yielded
+to the evidence of his eyes, that the population of
+Kansas possessed a large free-state majority. But
+so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span>
+Even Senator Douglas, the patron of the popular
+sovereignty doctrine, had now broken with President
+Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to
+form their own institutions. No attention was ever
+paid by Congress to this Leavenworth constitution,
+but when the Lecompton constitution was finally
+submitted to the people by Congress, in August,
+1858, it was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a
+total of 13,000. Kansas was henceforth in the hands
+of the actual settlers. A year later, at Wyandotte,
+it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last
+entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the
+Wyandotte Convention," says one of the local historians,
+"there were a few Democrats and one or
+two cranks, and probably both were of some use in
+their way."</p>
+
+<p>There had been no white population in Kansas in
+1853, and no special desire to create one. But the
+political struggle had advertised the territory on a
+large scale, while the whole West was under the influence
+of the agricultural boom that was extending
+settlement into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
+Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found that about
+8500 had come in since the erection of the territory.
+The rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles
+and the stories of Lawrence and Potawatomi,
+instead of frightening settlers away, drew them there
+in increasing thousands. Some few came from the
+South, but the northern majority was overwhelming
+before the panic of 1857 laid its heavy hand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
+upon expansion. There was a white population of
+106,390 in 1860.</p>
+
+<p>The westward movement, under its normal influences,
+had extended the range of prosperous agricultural
+settlement into the Northwest in this past
+decade. It had coĂśperated in the extension into that
+part of the old desert now known as Kansas. But
+chiefly politics, and secondly the call of the West,
+is the order of causes which must explain the first
+westward advance of the agricultural frontier since
+1820. Even in 1860 the population of Kansas was
+almost exclusively within a three days' journey of
+the Missouri bend.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 title="CHAPTER IX PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST" class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"<a name="FNanchor_2" id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">2</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="fnanchor">2</a> This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The Territory
+of Colorado" which was published in <i>The American Historical
+Review</i> in October, 1906.</p></div>
+
+<p class="p2">The territory of Kansas completed the political
+organization of the prairies. Before 1854 there had
+been a great stretch of land beyond Missouri and
+the Indian frontier without any semblance of organization
+or law. Indeed within the area whites had
+been forbidden to enter, since here was the final
+abode of the Indians. But with the Kansas-Nebraska
+act all this was changed. In five years a
+series of amorphous territories had been provided for
+by law.</p>
+
+<p>Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct
+divisions. From the Canadian border to the
+fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended. Kansas lay
+between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the
+old Indian Country, now much reduced by partition,
+embraced the rest. The whole plains country,
+east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial
+projects. Indian Territory was without the
+government which its name implied, but popular
+parlance regarded it as the others and refused to
+see any difference among them.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span></p>
+<p>Beyond the mountain wall which formed the
+western boundary of Kansas and Nebraska lay four
+other territories equally without particular reason
+for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in
+1846, had been divided in 1853 by a line starting
+at the mouth of the Columbia and running east to the
+Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its
+northern side. The Utah territory which figured in
+the compromise of 1850, and which Mormon migration
+had made necessary, extended between California
+and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42° to New
+Mexico at 37°. New Mexico, also of the compromise
+year, reached from Texas to California, south
+of 37°, and possessed at its northeast corner a panhandle
+which carried it north to 38° in order to leave
+in it certain old Mexican settlements.</p>
+
+<p>These divisions of the West embraced in 1854
+the whole of the country between California and the
+states. As yet their boundaries were arbitrary and
+temporary, but they presaged movements of population
+which during the next quarter century should
+break them up still further and provide real colonies
+in place of the desert and the Indian Country.
+Congress had no formative part in the work. Population
+broke down barriers and showed the way,
+while laws followed and legalized what had been
+done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the
+mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains
+no prophecy of the four states which were shortly to
+appear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span></p>
+
+<div id="ip_140" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-158.jpg" width="600" height="448" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The West in 1854</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky
+Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>For several decades the area of Kansas territory,
+and the southern part of Nebraska, had been well
+known as the range of the plains Indians,&mdash;Pawnee
+and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche
+and Apache. Through this range the caravans
+had gone. Here had been constant military
+expeditions as well. It was a common summer's
+campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort
+Leavenworth to the mountains by either the Arkansas
+or Platte route, to skirt the eastern slopes along
+the southern fork of the Platte, and return home
+by the other trail. Those military demonstrations,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>
+which were believed to be needed to impress the
+tribes, had made this march a regular performance.
+Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner
+and Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous
+others in between. A well-known trail had
+been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on the
+north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte
+at Cherry Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and
+on to Bent's Fort and the New Mexican towns.
+Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end.
+Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling
+over slavery, but they had scarcely scratched the
+soil for one-fourth of the length of the territory.</p>
+
+<p>The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme
+west of Kansas, lay between the great trails, so that
+it was off the course of the chief migrations, and
+none visited it for its own sake. The deviating
+trails, which commenced at the Missouri bend, were
+some 250 miles apart at the one hundred and third
+meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized
+in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose
+the hills around Pike's Peak, which rumor came in
+three years more to tip with gold.</p>
+
+<p>The discovery of gold in California prepared the
+public for similar finds in other parts of the West.
+With many of the emigrants prospecting had become
+a habit that sent small bands into the mountain
+valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories
+of success in various regions arose repeatedly during
+the fifties and are so reasonable that it is not possible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>
+to determine with certainty the first finds in many
+localities. Any mountain stream in the whole
+system might be expected to contain some gold, but
+deposits large enough to justify a boom were slow
+in coming.</p>
+
+<p>In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to
+Omaha from the mountains, confirmed the rumors
+of a new discovery that had been persistent for several
+months. The previous summer had seen organized
+attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region
+the deposits whose existence had been believed in,
+more or less, since 1850. Parties from the gold
+fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton
+are known to have been in the field and to have
+started various mushroom settlements. El Paso,
+near the present site of Colorado Springs, appeared,
+as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the
+South Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry
+Creek,&mdash;Montana, Auraria, Highland, and St.
+Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the
+States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by
+trifling finds, remained to occupy their flimsy cabins
+or to jump the claims of the absentees. In the
+sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold
+the finders and to start a small migration thither
+in the autumn. In the early winter the groups on
+Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the name of
+Denver City.</p>
+
+<p>The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri
+Valley at the strategic moment when the newness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
+Kansas had worn off, and the depression of 1857 had
+brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier. The
+adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to
+move, had been reĂŤnforced by individuals down on
+their luck and reduced to any sort of extremity.
+The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration
+to the new diggings which started in the fall of 1858
+and assumed great volume in the spring of 1859.</p>
+
+<p>The edge of the border for these emigrants was not
+much farther west than it had been for emigrants of
+the preceding decade. A few miles from the Missouri
+River all traces of Kansas or Nebraska disappeared,
+whether one advanced by the Platte or the Arkansas,
+or by the intermediate routes of the Smoky Hill and
+Republican. The destination was less than half as
+far away as California had been. No mountains and
+no terrible deserts were to be crossed. The costs and
+hardships of the journey were less than any that had
+heretofore separated the frontier from a western goal.
+There is a glimpse of the bustling life around the head
+of the trails in a letter which General W.&nbsp;T. Sherman
+wrote to his brother John from Leavenworth City,
+on April 30, 1859: "At this moment we are in
+the midst of a rush to Pike's Peak. Steamboats
+arrive in twos and threes each day, loaded with
+people for the new gold region. The streets are full
+of people buying flour, bacon, and groceries, with
+wagons and outfits, and all around the town are
+little camps preparing to go west. A daily stage
+goes west to Fort Riley, 135 miles, and every morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>
+two spring wagons, drawn by four mules and capable
+of carrying six passengers, start for the Peak, distance
+six hundred miles, the journey to be made in
+twelve days. As yet the stages all go out and don't
+return, according to the plan for distributing the
+carriages; but as soon as they are distributed, there
+will be two going and two returning, making a good
+line of stages to Pike's Peak. Strange to say, even
+yet, although probably 25,000 people have actually
+gone, we are without authentic advices of gold. Accounts
+are generally favorable as to words and descriptions,
+but no positive physical evidence comes
+in the shape of gold, and I will be incredulous until I
+know some considerable quantity comes in in way
+of trade."</p>
+
+<div id="ip_144" class="figcenter" style="width: 438px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-163.jpg" width="438" height="600" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p>"<span class="smcap">Ho for the Yellow Stone</span>"</p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>Reproduced by permission of the Montana Historical Society, from the original handbill in
+its possession.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>Throughout the United States newspapers gave full
+notice to the new boom, while a "Pike's Peak Guide,"
+based on a journal kept by one of the early parties,
+found a ready sale. No single movement had ever
+carried so heavy a migration upon the plains as this,
+which in one year must have taken nearly 100,000
+pioneers to the mountains. "Pike's Peak or Bust!"
+was a common motto blazoned on their wagon
+covers. The sawmill, the press, and the stage-coach
+were all early on the field. Byers, long a great
+editor in Denver, arrived in April to distribute an
+edition of his <i>Rocky Mountain News</i>, which he had
+printed on one side before leaving Omaha. Thenceforth
+the diggings were consistently advertised by a
+resident enthusiast. Early in May the first coach of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>
+the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company
+brought Henry Villard into Denver. In June came
+no less a personage than Horace Greeley to see for
+himself the new wonder. "Mine eyes have never yet
+been blessed with the sight of any floor whatever
+in either Denver or Auraria," he could write of the
+village of huts which he inspected. The seal of
+approval which his letters set upon the enterprise
+did much to encourage it.</p>
+
+<p>With the rush of prospectors to the hills, numerous
+new camps quickly appeared. Thirty
+miles north along the foothills and mesas Boulder
+marked the exit of a mountain creek upon the
+plains. Behind Denver, in Clear Creek Valley,
+were Golden, at the mouth, and Black Hawk and
+Central City upon the north fork of the stream.
+Idaho Springs and Georgetown were on its south
+fork. Here in the Gregory district was the active
+life of the diggings. The great extent of the gold
+belt to the southwest was not yet fully known.
+Farther south was Pueblo, on the Arkansas, and a
+line of little settlements working up the valley, by
+Canyon City to Oro, where Leadville now stands.</p>
+
+<p>Reaction followed close upon the heels of the
+boom, beginning its work before the last of the outward
+bound had reached the diggings. Gold was
+to be found in trifling quantities in many places,
+but the mob of inexperienced miners had little
+chance for fortune. The great deposits, which were
+some months in being discovered, were in refractory<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span>
+quartz lodes, calling for heavy stamp mills, chemical
+processes, and, above all, great capital for their
+working. Even for laborers there was no demand
+commensurate with the number of the fifty-niners.
+Hence, more than half of these found their way
+back to the border before the year was over, bitter,
+disgusted, and poor, scrawling on deserted wagons, in
+answer to the outward motto, "Busted! By Gosh!"</p>
+
+<p>The problem of government was born when the
+first squatters ran the lines of Denver City. Here
+was a new settlement far away from the seat of territorial
+government, while the government itself was
+impotent. Kansas had no legislature competent to
+administer law at home&mdash;far less in outlying colonies.
+But spontaneous self-government came easily to the
+new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers
+in his diary, "that within two weeks of the
+arrival of a few dozen Americans in a wilderness, they
+set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States
+Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory!
+But we are of a fast race and in a fast age and must
+prod along." An early snow in November, 1858,
+had confined the miners to their cabins and started
+politics. The result had been the election of two
+delegates, one to Congress and one to Kansas legislature,
+both to ask for governmental direction. Kansas
+responded in a few weeks, creating five new
+counties west of 104°, and chartering a city of St.
+Charles, long after St. Charles had been merged into
+Denver. Congress did nothing.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span>
+The prospective immigration of 1859 inspired
+further and more comprehensive attempts at local
+government. It was well understood that the news
+of gold would send in upon Denver a wave of population
+and perhaps a reign of lawlessness. The
+adjournment of Congress without action in their
+behalf made it certain that there could be no aid from
+this quarter for at least a year, and became the
+occasion for a caucus in Denver over which William
+Larimer presided on April 11, 1859. As a result of
+this caucus, a call was issued for a convention of
+representatives of the neighboring mining camps to
+meet in the same place four days later. On April
+15, six camps met through their delegates, "being
+fully impressed with the belief, from early and recent
+precedents, of the power and benefits and duty of
+self-government," and feeling an imperative necessity
+"for an immediate and adequate government,
+for the large population now here and soon to be
+among us ... and also believing that a territorial
+government is not such as our large and peculiarly
+situated population demands."</p>
+
+<p>The deliberations thus informally started ended in
+a formal call for a constitutional convention to meet
+in Denver on the first Monday in June, for the purpose,
+as an address to the people stated, of framing a
+constitution for a new "state of Jefferson." "Shall
+it be," the address demanded, "the government of
+the knife and the revolver, or shall we unite in forming
+here in our golden country, among the ravines and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>
+gulches of the Rocky Mountains, and the fertile
+valleys of the Arkansas and the Platte, a new
+and independent State?" The boundaries of the
+prospective state were named in the call as the one
+hundred and second and one hundred and tenth
+meridians of longitude, and the thirty-seventh
+and forty-third parallels of north latitude&mdash;including
+with true frontier amplitude large portions of
+Utah and Nebraska and nearly half of Wyoming,
+in addition to the present state of Colorado.</p>
+
+<p>When the statehood convention met in Denver on
+June 6, the time was inopportune for concluding
+the movement, since the reaction had set in. The
+height of the gold boom was over, and the return
+migration left it somewhat doubtful whether any
+permanent population would remain in the country
+to need a state. So the convention met on the 6th,
+appointed some eight drafting committees, and adjourned,
+to await developments, until August 1.
+By this later date, the line had been drawn between
+the confident and the discouraged elements in the
+population, and for six days the convention worked
+upon the question of statehood. As to permanency
+there was now no doubt; but the body divided into
+two nearly equal groups, one advocating immediate
+statehood, the other shrinking from the heavy taxation
+incident to a state establishment and so preferring
+a territorial government with a federal treasury
+behind it. The body, too badly split to reach a conclusion
+itself, compromised by preparing the way<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>
+for either development and leaving the choice to a
+public vote. A state constitution was drawn up
+on one hand; on the other, was prepared a memorial
+to Congress praying for a territorial government, and
+both documents were submitted to a vote on September
+5. Pursuant to the memorial, which was
+adopted, another election was held on October 3,
+at which the local agent of the new Leavenworth
+and Pike's Peak Express Company, Beverly D.
+Williams, was chosen as delegate to Congress.</p>
+
+<p>The adoption of the territorial memorial failed to
+meet the need for immediate government or to
+prevent the advocates of such government from
+working out a provisional arrangement pending the
+action of Congress. On the day that Williams was
+elected, these advocates chose delegates for a preliminary
+territorial constitutional convention which
+met a week later. "Here we go," commented
+Byers, "a regular triple-headed government machine;
+south of 40 deg. we hang on to the skirts of Kansas;
+north of 40 deg. to those of Nebraska; straddling the
+line, we have just elected a Delegate to the United
+States Congress from the 'Territory of Jefferson,'
+and ere long we will have in full blast a provisional
+government of Rocky Mountain growth and manufacture."
+In this convention of October 10, 1859,
+the name of Jefferson was retained for the new
+territory; the boundaries of April 15 were retained,
+and a government similar to the highest type of
+territorial establishment was provided for. If the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>
+convention had met on the authority of an enabling
+act, its career could not have been more dignified.
+Its constitution was readily adopted, while officers
+under it were chosen in an orderly election on October
+24. Robert W. Steele, of Ohio, became its governor.
+On November 7 he met his legislature and delivered
+his first inaugural address.</p>
+
+<p>The territory of Jefferson which thus came into
+existence in the Pike's Peak region illustrates well
+the spirit of the American frontier. The fundamental
+principle of American government which Byers expressed
+in connection with it is applicable at all
+times in similar situations. "We claim," he wrote
+in his <i>Rocky Mountain News</i>, "that any body, or
+community of American citizens, which from any
+cause or under any circumstance is cut off from, or
+from isolation is so situated as not to be under, any
+active and protecting branch of the central government,
+have a right, if on American soil, to frame a
+government, and enact such laws and regulations as
+may be necessary for their own safety, protection,
+and happiness, always with the condition precedent,
+that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central
+government shall extend an <i>effective</i> organization
+and laws over them, give it their unqualified support
+and obedience." The life of the spontaneous commonwealth
+thus called into existence is a creditable
+witness to the American instinct for orderly government.</p>
+
+<p>When Congress met in December, 1859, the provisional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>
+territory of Jefferson was in operation, while
+its delegates in Washington were urging the need for
+governmental action. To their influence, President
+Buchanan added, on February 20, 1860, a message
+transmitting the petition from the Pike's Peak country.
+The Senate, upon April 3, received a report
+from the Committee on Territories introducing Senate
+Bill No. 366, for the erection of Colorado territory,
+while Grow of Pennsylvania reported to the
+House on May 10 a bill to erect in the same region a
+territory of Idaho. The name of Jefferson disappeared
+from the project in the spring of 1860, its
+place being taken by sundry other names for the same
+mountain area. Several weeks were given, in part,
+to debate over this Colorado-Idaho scheme, though
+as usual the debate turned less upon the need for
+this territorial government than upon the attitude
+which the bill should take toward the slavery issue.
+The slavery controversy prevented territorial legislation
+in this session, but the reasonableness of the
+Colorado demand was well established.</p>
+
+<p>The territory of Jefferson, as organized in November,
+1859, had been from the first recognized as
+merely a temporary expedient. The movement
+for it had gained weight in the summer of that year
+from the probability that it need not be maintained
+for many months. When Congress, however, failed
+in the ensuing session of 1859&ndash;1860 to grant the
+relief for which the pioneers had prayed, the wisdom
+of continuing for a second year the life of a government<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span>
+admitted to be illegal came into question.
+The first session of its legislature had lasted from
+November 7, 1859, to January 25, 1860. It
+had passed comprehensive laws for the regulation of
+titles in lands, water, and mines, and had adopted
+civil and criminal codes. Its courts had been established
+and had operated with some show of
+authority. But the service and obedience to the
+government had been voluntary, no funds being on
+hand for the payment of salaries and expenses. One
+of the pioneers from Vermont wrote home, "There is
+no hopes [<i xml:lang="la" lang="la">sic</i>] of perfect quiet in our governmental
+matters until we are securely under the wing of our
+National Eagle." In his proclamation calling the
+second election Governor Steele announced that
+"all persons who expect to be elected to any of the
+above offices should bear in mind that there will be
+no salaries or per diem allowed from this territory,
+but that the General Government will be memorialized
+to aid us in our adversity."</p>
+
+<p>Upon this question of revenue the territory of
+Jefferson was wrecked. Taxes could not be collected,
+since citizens had only to plead grave doubts
+as to the legality in order to evade payment. "We
+have tried a Provisional Government, and how has
+it worked," asked William Larimer in announcing
+his candidacy for the office of territorial delegate.
+"It did well enough until an attempt was made to
+tax the people to support it." More than this, the
+real need for the government became less apparent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>
+as 1860 advanced, for the scattered communities
+learned how to obtain a reasonable peace without
+it. American mining camps are peculiarly free from
+the need for superimposed government. The new
+camp at once organizes itself on a democratic basis,
+and in mass meeting registers claims, hears and
+decides suits, and administers summary justice.
+Since the Pike's Peak country was only a group of
+mining camps, there proved to be little immediate
+need for a central government, for in the local mining-district
+organizations all of the most pressing
+needs of the communities could be satisfied. So
+loyalty to the territory of Jefferson, in the districts
+outside of Denver, waned during 1860, and in the
+summer of that year had virtually disappeared. Its
+administration, however, held together. Governor
+Steele made efforts to rehabilitate its authority,
+was himself reĂŤlected, and met another legislature
+in November.</p>
+
+<p>When the thirty-sixth Congress met for its second
+session in December, 1860, the Jefferson organization
+was in the second year of its life, yet in Congress
+there was no better prospect of quick action than
+there had been since 1857. Indeed the election of
+Lincoln brought out the eloquence of the slavery
+question with a renewed vigor that monopolized the
+time and strength of Congress until the end of January.
+Had not the departure of the southern members
+to their states cleared the way for action, it
+is highly improbable that even this session would
+have produced results of importance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span>
+Grow had announced in the beginning of the session
+a territorial platform similar to that which had
+been under debate for three years. Until the close
+of January the southern valedictories held the floor,
+but at last the admission of Kansas, on January 29,
+1861, revealed the fact that pro-slavery opposition
+had departed and that the long-deferred territorial
+scheme could have a fair chance. On the very day
+that Kansas was admitted, with its western boundary
+at the twenty-fifth meridian from Washington, the
+Senate revived its bill No. 366 of the last session
+and took up its deliberation upon a territory for
+Pike's Peak. Only by chance did the name Colorado
+remain attached to the bill. Idaho was at one
+time adopted, but was amended out in favor of the
+original name when the bill at last passed the Senate.
+The boundaries were cut down from those which the
+territory had provided for itself. Two degrees were
+taken from the north of the territory, and three
+from the west. In this shape, between 37° and
+41° north latitude, and 25° and 32° of longitude
+west of Washington, the bill received the signature
+of President Buchanan on February 28. The
+absence of serious debate in the passage of this
+Colorado act is excellent evidence of the merit of
+the scheme and the reasons for its being so long
+deferred.</p>
+
+<p>President Buchanan, content with approving the
+bill, left the appointment of the first officials for
+Colorado to his successor. In the multitude of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span>
+greater problems facing President Lincoln, this was
+neglected for several weeks, but he finally commissioned
+General William Gilpin as the first
+governor of the territory. Gilpin had long known
+the mountain frontier; he had commanded a detachment
+on the Santa FĂŠ trail in the forties, and he had
+written prophetic books upon the future of the
+country to which he was now sent. His loyalty
+was unquestioned and his readiness to assume responsibility
+went so far as perhaps to cease to be a
+virtue. He arrived in Denver on May 29, 1861,
+and within a few days was ready to take charge of
+the government and to receive from the hands of
+Governor Steele such authority as remained in the
+provisional territory of Jefferson.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA</span></h2>
+
+<p>The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of
+mining episodes which, within fifteen years of the
+discoveries in California, let in the light of exploration
+and settlement upon hundreds of valleys
+scattered over the whole of the Rocky Mountain
+West. The men who exploited California had
+generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by
+bitter experience; but the next decade developed a
+professional class, mobile as quicksilver, restless
+and adventurous as all the West, which permeated
+into the most remote recesses of the mountains and
+produced before the Civil War was over, as the direct
+result of their search for gold, not only Colorado,
+but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana.
+Activity was constant during these years all along
+the continental divide. New camps were being
+born overnight, old ones were abandoned by magic.
+Here and there cities rose and remained to mark
+success in the search. Abandoned huts and half-worked
+diggings were scars covering a fourth of the
+continent.</p>
+
+<p>Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the
+largest of migrations, but while Denver was being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>
+settled there began, farther west, a boom which for
+the present outdid it in significance. The old
+California trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada
+desert and entered California by various passes
+through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts
+had been planted along this trail by Mormons and
+others during the fifties, until in 1854 the legislature
+of Utah had created a Carson County in the west
+end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements
+along the river of the same name. Small discoveries
+of gold were enough to draw to this district a floating
+population which founded a Carson City as early as
+1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement
+until after the finding of a marvellously
+rich vein of silver near Gold Hill in the spring of 1859.
+Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a few
+miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the
+famous Comstock lode, upon which it was possible
+within five years to build a state.</p>
+
+<p>The California population, already rushing about
+from one boom to another in perpetual prospecting,
+seized eagerly upon this new district in western
+Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and
+Placerville was crowded beyond capacity, while
+hundreds marched over the mountains on foot.
+"There was no difficulty in reaching the newly
+discovered region of boundless wealth," asserted a
+journalistic visitor. "It lay on the public highway
+to California, on the borders of the state. From
+Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
+Peak and Salt Lake, the tide of emigration poured
+in. Transportation from San Francisco was easy.
+I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead
+of winter, when the mountains were covered with
+snow." Carson City had existed before the great
+discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade
+southerner, nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed
+it, while the typical population of the mining camps
+piled in around the two.</p>
+
+<p>In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The
+new pony express ran through the heart of the
+fields and aided in advertising them east and west.
+Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye.
+Both camps obtained their territorial acts within the
+same week, that of Nevada receiving Buchanan's
+signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west
+of the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became
+the new territory which, through the need of
+the union for loyal votes, gained its admission as
+a state in three more years.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_158" class="figcenter" style="width: 541px;">
+  <img src="images/i-179.jpg" width="541" height="353" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The Mining Camp</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the Montana Historical Society.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>The rush to Carson valley drew attention away
+from another mining enterprise further south. In
+the western half of New Mexico, between the Rio
+Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful
+mining ever since the acquisition of the territory.
+The southwest boundary of the United States after
+the Mexican War was defined in words that could not
+possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This
+fact, together with knowledge that an easy railway
+grade ran south of the Gila River, had led in 1853<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
+to the purchase of additional land from Mexico
+and the definition of a better boundary in the
+Gadsden treaty. In these lands of the Gadsden
+purchase old mines came to light in the years immediately
+following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles
+D. Poston were most active in promoting the mining
+companies which revived abandoned claims and developed
+new ones near the old Spanish towns of
+Tubac and Tucson. The region was too remote
+and life too hard for the individual miner to have
+much chance. Organized mining companies here
+took the place of the detached prospector of Colorado
+and Nevada. Disappointed miners from California
+came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee
+of San Francisco did more to populate the
+new Territory than the silver mines. Tucson became
+the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and
+crime.... It was literally a paradise of devils."
+Excessive dryness, long distances, and Apache depredation
+discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys
+of the early fifties and the passage of the overland
+mail through the camps in 1858 advertised the
+Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.</p>
+
+<p>The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the
+time the Mowry mines and others in the Santa Cruz
+Valley, holding them in check till a second mineral
+area in western New Mexico should be found.
+United States army posts were abandoned, confederate
+agents moved in, and Indians became bold.
+The federal authority was not reĂŤstablished until<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>
+Colonel J.&nbsp;H. Carleton led his California column
+across the Colorado and through New Mexico to
+Tucson early in 1862. During the next two years
+he maintained his headquarters at Santa FĂŠ, carried
+on punitive campaigns against the Navaho and the
+Apache, and encouraged mining.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian campaigns of Carleton and his aides
+in New Mexico have aroused much controversy.
+There were no treaty rights by which the United
+States had privileges of colonization and development.
+It was forcible entry and retention, maintained
+in the face of bitter opposition. Carleton,
+with Kit Carson's assistance, waged a war of scarcely
+concealed extermination. They understood, he reported
+to Washington, "the direct application of
+force as a law. If its application be removed, that
+moment they become lawless. This has been tried
+over and over and over again, and at great expense.
+The purpose now is never to relax the application
+of force with a people that can no more be trusted
+than you can trust the wolves that run through
+their mountains; to gather them together little by
+little, on to a reservation, away from the haunts,
+and hills, and hiding-places of their country, and
+then to be kind to them; there teach their children
+how to read and write, teach them the arts of peace;
+teach them the truths of Christianity. Soon they
+will acquire new habits, new ideas, new modes of
+life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them
+all the latent longings for murdering and robbing;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
+the young ones will take their places without these
+longings; and thus, little by little, they will become
+a happy and contented people."</p>
+
+<p>Mowry's mines had been seized by Carleton at
+the start, as tainted with treason. The whole
+Tucson district was believed to be so thoroughly in
+sympathy with the confederacy that the commanding
+officer was much relieved when rumors came of a
+new placer gold field along the left bank of the Colorado
+River, around Bill Williams Creek. Thither
+the population of the territory moved as fast as it
+could. Teamsters and other army employees deserted
+freely. Carleton deliberately encouraged
+surveying and prospecting, and wrote personally
+to General Halleck and Postmaster-general Blair,
+congratulating them because his California column
+had found the gold with which to suppress the confederacy.
+"One of the richest gold countries in
+the world," he described it to be, destined to be the
+centre of a new territorial life, and to throw into the
+shade "the insignificant village of Tucson."</p>
+
+<p>The population of the silver camp had begun
+to urge Congress to provide a territory independent
+of New Mexico, immediately after the development
+of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had
+been sent to Washington in the usual style. But
+congressional indifference to new territories had
+blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened
+the case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian
+wards and their rights, the Superintendent of Indian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>
+Affairs had told of the sad peril of the "unprotected
+miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear
+title. They would offer to the "numerous and
+warlike tribes" an irresistible opportunity. The
+territorial act was finally passed on February 24,
+1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart
+of the new gold field, at Fort Whipple, near which
+the city of Prescott soon appeared.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by
+the erection of a territorial government. There never
+came in a population large enough to intimidate
+the tribes, while bad management from the start
+provoked needless wars. Most serious were the
+Apache troubles which began in 1861 and ceased
+only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies.
+In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp
+Grant in 1871, when citizens of Tucson, with careful
+premeditation, murdered in cold blood more
+than eighty Apache, men, women, and children.
+The degree of provocation is uncertain, but the
+disposition of Tucson, as Mowry has phrased it,
+was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice of
+the attack: "There is only one way to wage war
+against the Apache. A steady, persistent campaign
+must be made, following them to their haunts&mdash;hunting
+them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.'
+They must be surrounded, starved into coming in,
+surprised or inveigled&mdash;by white flags, or any other
+method, human or divine&mdash;and then put to death.
+If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>
+who thinks himself a philanthropist, I can only say
+that I pity without respecting his mistaken sympathy.
+A man might as well have sympathy for
+a rattlesnake or a tiger."</p>
+
+<p>The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by
+climate and inaccessibility, brought life into the
+extreme Southwest. Those of Nevada worked the
+partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old
+Oregon country gave out its gold in these same
+years as miners opened up the valleys of the Snake
+and the head waters of the Missouri River. Right
+on the crest of the continental divide appeared the
+northern group of mining camps.</p>
+
+<p>The territory of Washington had been cut away
+from Oregon at its own request and with Oregon's
+consent in 1853. It had no great population and
+was the subject of no agricultural boom as Oregon
+had been, but the small settlements on Puget Sound
+and around Olympia were too far from the Willamette
+country for convenient government. When
+Oregon was admitted in 1859, Washington was
+made to include all the Oregon country outside the
+state, embracing the present Washington and Idaho,
+portions of Montana and Wyoming, and extending
+to the continental divide. Through it ran the overland
+trail from Fort Hall almost to Walla Walla.
+Because of its urging Congress built a new wagon
+road that was passable by 1860 from Fort Benton,
+on the upper Missouri, to the junction of the Columbia
+and Snake. Farther east the active business<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span>
+of the American Fur Company had by 1859 established
+steamboat communication from St. Louis
+to Fort Benton, so that an overland route to rival
+the old Platte trail was now available.</p>
+
+<p>In eastern Washington the most important of the
+Indians were the Nez PercĂŠs, whose peaceful habits
+and friendly disposition had been noted since the
+days of Lewis and Clark, and who had permitted
+their valley of the Snake to become a main route to
+Oregon. Treaties with these had been made in 1855
+by Governor Stevens, in accordance with which
+most of the tribe were in 1860 living on their reserve
+at the junction of the Clearwater and Snake, and
+were fairly prosperous. Here as elsewhere was the
+specific agreement that no whites save government
+employees should be allowed in the Indian Country;
+but in the summer of 1861 the news that gold had
+been found along the Clearwater brought the agreement
+to naught. Gold had actually been discovered
+the summer before. In the spring of 1861 pack
+trains from Walla Walla brought a horde of miners
+east over the range, while steamboats soon found
+their way up the Snake. In the fork between the
+Clearwater and Snake was a good landing where, in
+the autumn of 1861, sprang up the new Lewiston,
+named in honor of the great explorer, acting as
+centre of life for five thousand miners in the district,
+and showing by its very existence on the Indian reserve
+the futility of treaty restrictions in the face
+of the gold fever. The troubles of the Indian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>
+department were great. "To attempt to restrain
+miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to
+restrain the whirlwind," reported Superintendent
+Kendall. "The history of California, Australia,
+Frazer river, and even of the country of which I am
+now writing, furnishes abundant evidence of the
+attractive power of even only reported gold discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed
+fact, and are equalled in richness by few recorded
+discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility of preventing
+miners from going to the mines, I have refrained
+from taking any steps which, by certain
+want of success, would tend to weaken the force of
+the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided
+giving any consent to unauthorized statements,
+and verbally instructed the agent in charge that,
+while he might not be able to enforce the laws for
+want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt
+to lay out a town at the juncture of the Snake
+and Clearwater rivers, as he had expressed a desire
+of doing."</p>
+
+<p>Continued developments proved that Lewiston
+was in the centre of a region of unusual mineral
+wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed closely
+by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary
+of the Snake, a little farther south. The BoisĂŠ
+mines came on the heels of this boom, being followed
+by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of the great
+bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+the usual flood of miners from the whole West. Before
+1862 was over eastern Washington had outgrown
+the bounds of the territorial government on Puget
+Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the
+placers of the Colorado Valley, and the Carson and
+Virginia City camps, these called for and received
+a new territorial establishment.</p>
+
+<p>In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska
+had met along a common boundary at the
+top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington
+was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape
+under the pressure of a small but active population
+north of its seat of government. The centres of
+population in Nebraska north of the Platte River
+represented chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota.
+Emigrating from these states farmers had by
+1860 opened the country on the left bank of the Missouri,
+in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri
+traffic had developed both shores of the river
+past Fort Pierre and Fort Union to Fort Benton, by
+1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people
+here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along
+the line of the Missouri and the forty-third parallel.
+Dakota had been created out of the country thus cut
+loose and in two years more shared in the fate
+of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in
+1863 to provide home rule for the miners of the
+new mineral region. It included a great rectangle,
+on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah
+and Nebraska, west to its present western boundary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>
+at Oregon and 117°, east to 104°, the present
+eastern line of Montana and Wyoming. Dakota
+and Washington were cut down for its sake.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed, in 1862 and 1863, as though every little
+rivulet in the whole mountain country possessed its
+treasures to be given up to the first prospector with
+the hardihood to tickle its soil. Four important
+districts along the upper course of the Snake, not to
+mention hundreds of minor ones, lent substance to
+this appearance. Almost before Idaho could be organized
+its area of settlement had broadened enough
+to make its own division in the near future a certainty.
+East of the Bitter Root Mountains, in the
+head waters of the Missouri tributaries, came a long
+series of new booms.</p>
+
+<p>When the American Fur Company pushed its
+little steamer <i>Chippewa</i> up to the vicinity of Fort
+Benton in 1859, none realized that a new era for
+the upper Missouri had nearly arrived. For half
+a century the fur trade had been followed in this
+region and had dotted the country with tiny forts
+and palisades, but there had been no immigration,
+and no reason for any. The Mullan road, which
+Congress had authorized in 1855, was in course of
+construction from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, but
+as yet there were few immigrants to follow the new
+route. Considerably before the territory of Idaho
+was created, however, the active prospectors of the
+Snake Valley had crossed the range and inspected
+most of the Blackfoot country in the direction of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
+Fort Benton. They had organized for themselves
+a Missoula County, Washington territory, in July,
+1862, an act which may be taken as the beginning
+of an entirely new movement.</p>
+
+<p>Two brothers, James and Granville Stuart, were
+the leaders in developing new mineral areas east of
+the main range. After experience in California and
+several years of life along the trails, they settled
+down in the Deer Lodge Valley, and began to open
+up their mines in 1861. They accomplished little
+this year since the steamboat to Fort Benton, carrying
+supplies, was burned, and their trip to Walla
+Walla for shovels and picks took up the rest of the
+season. But early in 1862 they were hard and successfully
+at work. ReĂŤnforcements, destined for the
+Salmon River mines farther west, came to them in
+June; one party from Fort Benton, the other from
+the Colorado diggings, and both were easily persuaded
+to stay and join in organizing Missoula
+County. Bannack City became the centre of their
+operations.</p>
+
+<p>Alder Gulch and Virginia City were, in 1863, a
+second focus for the mines of eastern Idaho. Their
+deposits had been found by accident by a prospecting
+party which was returning to Bannack City after
+an unsuccessful trip. The party, which had been
+investigating the Big Horn Mountains, discovered
+Alder Gulch between the Beaver Head and Madison
+rivers, early in June. With an accurate knowledge
+of the mining population, the discoverers organized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span>
+the mining district and registered their own
+claims before revealing the location of the new diggings.
+Then came a stampede from Bannack City
+which gave to Virginia City a population of 10,000
+by 1864.</p>
+
+<p>Another mining district, in Last Chance Gulch,
+gave rise in 1864 to Helena, the last of the great boom
+towns of this period. Its situation as well as its
+resources aided in the growth of Helena, which lay a
+little west of the Madison fork of the Missouri, and
+in the direct line from Bannack and Virginia City to
+Fort Benton. Only 142 miles of easy staging above
+the head of Missouri River navigation, it was a
+natural post on the main line of travel to the northwest
+fields.</p>
+
+<p>The excitement over Bannack and Virginia and
+Helena overlapped in years the period of similar
+boom in Idaho. It had begun even before Idaho
+had been created. When this was once organized,
+the same inconveniences which had justified it,
+justified as well its division to provide home rule for
+the miners east of the Bitter Root range. An act of
+1864 created Montana territory with the boundaries
+which the state possesses to-day, while that part of
+Idaho south of Montana, now Wyoming, was temporarily
+reattached to Dakota. Idaho assumed its
+present form. The simultaneous development in all
+portions of the great West of rich mining camps did
+much to attract public attention as well as population.</p>
+
+<p>In 1863 nearly all of the camps were flourishing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>
+The mountains were occupied for the whole distance
+from Mexico to Canada, while the trails were
+crowded with emigrants hunting for fortune. The
+old trails bore much of the burden of migration as
+usual, but new spurs were opened to meet new needs.
+In the north, the Mullan road had made easy travel
+from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, and had been completed
+since 1862. Congress authorized in 1864 a new
+road from eastern Nebraska, which should run north
+of the Platte trail, and the war department had sent
+out personally conducted parties of emigrants from
+the vicinity of St. Paul. The Idaho and Montana
+mines were accessible from Fort Hall, the former by
+the old emigrant road, the latter by a new northeast
+road to Virginia City. The Carson mines were on
+the main line of the California road. The Arizona
+fields were commonly reached from California, by
+way of Fort Yuma.</p>
+
+<p>The shifting population which inhabited the new
+territories invites and at the same time defies description.
+It was made up chiefly of young men.
+Respectable women were not unknown, but were so
+few in number as to have little measurable influence
+upon social life. In many towns they were in the
+minority, even among their sex, since the easily won
+wealth of the camps attracted dissolute women who
+cannot be numbered but who must be imagined.
+The social tone of the various camps was determined
+by the preponderance of men, the absence of regular
+labor, and the speculative fever which was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>
+justification of their existence. The political tone
+was determined by the nature of the population, the
+character of the industry, and the remoteness from
+a seat of government. Combined, these factors produced
+a type of life the like of which America had
+never known, and whose picturesque qualities have
+blinded the thoughtless into believing that it was romantic.
+It was at best a hard bitter struggle with
+the dark places only accentuated by the tinsel of
+gambling and adventure.</p>
+
+<p>A single street meandering along a valley, with one-story
+huts flanking it in irregular rows, was the typical
+mining camp. The saloon and the general store,
+sometimes combined, were its representative institutions.
+Deep ruts along the street bore witness to
+the heavy wheels of the freighters, while horses
+loosely tied to all available posts at once revealed the
+regular means of locomotion, and by the careless
+way they were left about showed that this sort of
+property was not likely to be stolen. The mining
+population centring here lived a life of contrasts.
+The desolation and loneliness of prospecting and
+working claims alternated with the excitement of
+coming to town. Few decent beings habitually
+lived in the towns. The resident population expected
+to live off the miners, either in way of trade,
+or worse. The bar, the gambling-house, the dance-hall
+have been made too common in description to
+need further account. In the reaction against loneliness,
+the extremes of drunkenness, debauchery, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span>
+murder were only too frequent in these places of
+amusement.</p>
+
+<p>That the camps did not destroy themselves in their
+own frenzy is a tribute to the solid qualities which
+underlay the recklessness and shiftlessness of much
+of the population. In most of the camps there came
+a time when decency finally asserted itself in the
+only possible way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity
+with which these camps had drawn their hundreds
+and their thousands into the fastnesses of the
+territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary
+law and regular institutions. Law and the
+politician followed fast enough, but there was generally
+an interval after the discovery during which such
+peace prevailed as the community itself demanded.
+In absence of sheriff and constable, and jail in which
+to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance committee was
+the only protection of the new camp. Such summary
+justice as these committees commonly executed is
+evidence of innate tendency toward law and order,
+not of their defiance. The typical camp passed
+through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start,
+then came an era of invasion by hordes of miners
+and disreputable hangers-on, with accompanying violence
+and crime. Following this, the vigilance committee,
+in its stern repression of a few of the crudest
+sins, marks the beginning of a reign of law.</p>
+
+<p>The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized
+the United States with the whole area of the
+nation, and dispelled most of the remaining tradition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span>
+of desert which hung over the mountain West.
+They attracted a large floating population, they
+secured the completion of the political map through
+the erection of new territories, and they emphasized
+loudly the need for national transportation on a
+larger scale than the trail and the stage coach could
+permit. But they did not directly secure the presence
+of permanent population in the new territories.
+Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants
+as soon as the first flush of discovery was over.
+Montana, Idaho, and Colorado declined rapidly to a
+fraction of their largest size. None of them was successful
+in securing a large permanent population until
+agriculture had gained firm foothold. Many indeed
+who came to mine remained to plough, but the permanent
+populating of the Far West was the work of
+railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the
+mining camps had served their purpose in revealing
+the nature of the whole of the national domain.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE OVERLAND MAIL</span></h2>
+
+<p>Close upon the heels of the overland migrations
+came an organized traffic to supply their needs.
+Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all the later gold
+fields, drew population away from the old Missouri
+border, scattered it in little groups over the face of
+the desert, and left it there crying for sustenance.
+Many of the new colonies were not self-supporting
+for a decade or more; few of them were independent
+within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand
+for necessities and luxuries which must be
+hauled from the states to the new market by the
+routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled.
+Greater than their need for material supplies was that
+for intellectual stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and
+the regular carriage of the mails were constantly demanded
+of the express companies and the post-office
+department. To meet this pressure there was organized
+in the fifties a great system of wagon traffic.
+In the years from 1858 to 1869 it reached its mighty
+culmination; while its possibilities of speed, order,
+and convenience had only just come to be realized
+when the continental railways brought this agency
+of transportation to an end.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>
+The individual emigrant who had gathered together
+his family, his flocks, and his household
+goods, who had cut away from the life at home and
+staked everything on his new venture, was the unit
+in the great migrations. There was no regular provision
+for going unless one could form his own self-contained
+and self-supporting party. Various bands
+grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence,
+but the characteristic feature of the emigration was
+private initiative. The home-seekers had no power
+in themselves to maintain communication with
+the old country, yet they had no disposition to be
+forgotten or to forget. Professional freighting companies
+and carriers of mails appeared just as soon as
+the traffic promised a profit.</p>
+
+<p>A water mail to California had been arranged even
+before the gold discovery lent a new interest to the
+Pacific Coast. From New York to the Isthmus,
+and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be
+carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company,
+which sent the nucleus of its fleet around
+Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The arrival
+of the first mail in San Francisco in February,
+1849, commenced the regular public communication
+between the United States and the new colonies.
+For the places lying away from the coast, mails were
+hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon,
+Utah, New Mexico, and California were given a
+measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.</p>
+
+<p>There is little interest in the earlier phases of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span>
+overland mail service save in that they foreshadowed
+greater things. A stage line was started from Independence
+to Santa FĂŠ in the summer of 1849;
+another contract was let to a man named Woodson
+for a monthly carriage to Salt Lake City. Neither
+of the carriers made a serious attempt to stock his
+route or open stations. Their stages advanced under
+the same conditions, and with little more rapidity
+than the ordinary emigrant or freighter. Mormon
+interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying
+Company at about this time. For four or five years
+both government and private industry were experimenting
+with the problems of long-distance wagon
+traffic,&mdash;the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the stations,
+the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort
+made in 1856, by the War Department, to acclimate
+the Saharan camel on the American desert as a beast
+of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for
+the experiment, in execution of which Secretary
+Davis sent Lieutenant H.&nbsp;C. Wayne to the Levant to
+purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels
+were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio.
+There is a long congressional document filled
+with the correspondence of this attempt and embellished
+with cuts of types of camels and equipment.</p>
+
+<p>While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas
+plains, Congress made a more definite movement
+towards supplying the Pacific Slope with adequate
+service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
+1857 to call for bids for an overland mail which, in
+a single organization, should join the Missouri to
+Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run
+at a high scheduled speed. The service which the
+Postmaster-general invited in his advertisement
+was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or semi-monthly at
+his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years;
+it was to carry through the mails in four-horse
+wagons in not more than twenty-five days. A long
+list of bidders, including most of the firms engaged in
+plains freighting, responded with their bids and
+itineraries; from them the department selected the
+offer of a company headed by one John Butterfield,
+and explained to the public in 1857 the reasons for its
+choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract
+was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made
+a junction near the western border of Arkansas,
+and proceeded thence through Preston, Texas, El
+Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails
+the company was to receive $600,000 a year. The
+choice of the most southern of routes required considerable
+explanation, since the best-known road ran
+by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this
+latter route the Postmaster-general pointed out the
+cold and snow of winter, and claimed that the experience
+of the department during seven years proved
+the impossibility of maintaining a regular service
+here. A second available road had been revealed
+by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across northern
+Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>
+this was likewise too long and too severe. The best
+route, in his mind&mdash;the one open all the year,
+through a temperate climate, suitable for migration
+as well as traffic&mdash;was this southern route, via El
+Paso. It is well to remember that the administration
+which made this choice was democratic and of
+strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific
+railway was expected to follow the course of the
+overland mail.</p>
+
+<p>The first overland coaches left the opposite ends
+of the line on September 15, 1858. The east-bound
+stage carried an agent of the Post-office Department,
+whose report states that the through trip to Tipton,
+Missouri, and thence by rail to St. Louis, was made
+in 20 days, 18 hours, 26 minutes, actual time. "I
+cordially congratulate you upon the result," wired
+President Buchanan to Butterfield. "It is a glorious
+triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements
+will soon follow the course of the road, and
+the East and West will be bound together by a chain
+of living Americans which can never be broken."
+The route was 2795 miles long. For nearly all the
+way there was no settlement upon which the stages
+could rely. The company built such stations as it
+needed.</p>
+
+<p>The vehicle of the overland mail, the most interesting
+vehicle of the plains, was the coach manufactured
+by the Abbott-Downing Company of Concord,
+New Hampshire. No better wagon for the purpose
+has been devised. Its heavy wheels, with wide, thick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>
+tires, were set far apart to prevent capsizing. Its
+body, braced with iron bands, and built of stout white
+oak, was slung on leather thoroughbraces which took
+the strain better and were more nearly unbreakable
+than any other springs. Inside were generally three
+seats, for three passengers each, though at times
+as many as fourteen besides the driver and messenger
+were carried. Adjustable curtains kept out
+part of the rain and cold. High up in front sat the
+driver, with a passenger or two on the box and a large
+assortment of packages tucked away beneath his
+seat. Behind the body was the triangular "boot"
+in which were stowed the passengers' boxes and the
+mail sacks. The overflow of mail went inside under
+the seats. Mr. Clemens tells of filling the whole
+body three feet deep with mail, and of the passengers
+being forced to sprawl out on the irregular bed thus
+made for them. Complaining letter-writers tell of
+sacks carried between the axles and the body, under
+the coach, and of the disasters to letters and contents
+resulting from fording streams. Drawn by four galloping
+mules and painted a gaudy red or green, the
+coach was a visible emblem of spectacular western
+advance. Horace Greeley's coach, bright red, was
+once charged by a herd of enraged buffaloes and
+overturned, to the discomfort and injury of the venerable
+editor.</p>
+
+<p>It was no comfortable or luxurious trip that the
+overland passenger had, with all the sumptuous
+equipment of the new route. The time limit was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span>
+twenty-five days, reduced in practice to twenty-two
+or twenty-three, at the price of constant travel day
+and night, regardless of weather or convenience.
+One passenger who declined to follow this route has
+left his reason why. The "Southern, known as the
+Butterfield or American Express, offered to start me
+in an ambulance from St. Louis, and to pass me
+through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on the Gila
+River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate
+portion of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and
+nights&mdash;twenty-five being schedule time&mdash;must be
+spent in that ambulance; passengers becoming crazy
+by whiskey, mixed with want of sleep, are often
+obliged to be strapped to their seats; their meals,
+despatched during the ten-minute halts, are simply
+abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate
+malarious; lamps may not be used at night for fear of
+non-existent Indians: briefly there is no end to this
+Via Mala's miseries." But the alternative which
+confronted this traveller in 1860 was scarcely more
+pleasant. "You may start by stage to the gold regions
+about Denver City or Pike's Peak, and thence,
+if not accidentally or purposely shot, you may proceed
+by an uncertain ox train to Great Salt Lake City,
+which latter part cannot take less than thirty-five
+days."</p>
+
+<p>Once upon the road, the passenger might nearly as
+well have been at sea. There was no turning back.
+His discomforts and dangers became inevitable.
+The stations erected along the trail were chiefly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>
+for the benefit of the live stock. Horses and mules
+must be kept in good shape, whatever happened to
+passengers. Some of the depots, "home stations,"
+had a family in residence, a dwelling of logs, adobe,
+or sod, and offered bacon, potatoes, bread, and coffee
+of a sort, to those who were not too squeamish. The
+others, or "swing" stations, had little but a corral
+and a haystack, with a few stock tenders. The
+drivers were often drunk and commonly profane.
+The overseers and division superintendents differed
+from them only in being a little more resolute and
+dangerous. Freighting and coaching were not child's
+play for either passengers or employees.</p>
+
+<p>The Butterfield Overland Express began to work
+its six year contract in September, 1858. Other
+coach and mail services increased the number of
+continental routes to three by 1860. From New
+Orleans, by way of San Antonio and El Paso, a
+weekly service had been organized, but its importance
+was far less than that of the great route, and
+not equal to that by way of the Great Salt Lake.</p>
+
+<p>Staging over the Platte trail began on a large scale
+with the discovery of gold near Pike's Peak in 1858.
+The Mormon mails, interrupted by the Mormon
+War, had been revived; but a new concern had sprung
+up under the name of the Leavenworth and Pike's
+Peak Express Company. The firm of Jones and
+Russell, soon to give way to Russell, Majors, and
+Waddell, had seen the possibilities of the new boom
+camps, and had inaugurated regular stage service in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>
+May, 1859. Henry Villard rode out in the first
+coach. Horace Greeley followed in June. After
+some experimenting in routes, the line accepted
+a considerable part of the Platte trail, leaving the
+road at the forks of the river. Here Julesburg
+came into existence as the most picturesque home
+station on the plains. It was at this station that
+Jack Slade, whom Mark Twain found to be a mild,
+hospitable, coffee-sharing man, cut off the ears of
+old Jules, after the latter had emptied two barrels of
+bird-shot into him. It was "celebrated for its desperadoes,"
+wrote General Dodge. "No twenty-four
+hours passed without its contribution to Boots Hill
+(the cemetery whose every occupant was buried in
+his boots), and homicide was performed in the most
+genial and whole-souled way."</p>
+
+<p>Before the Denver coach had been running for a
+year another enterprise had brought the central
+route into greater prominence. Butterfield had given
+California news in less than twenty-five days from
+the Missouri, but California wanted more even than
+this, until the electric telegraph should come. Senator
+Gwin urged upon the great freight concern the
+starting of a faster service for light mails only. It
+was William H. Russell who, to meet this supposed
+demand, organized a pony express, which he announced
+to a startled public in the end of March.
+Across the continent from Placerville to St. Joseph
+he built his stations from nine to fifteen miles apart,
+nearly two hundred in all. He supplied these with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span>
+tenders and riders, stocked them with fodder and
+fleet American horses, and started his first riders at
+both ends on the 3d of April, 1860.</p>
+
+<p>Only letters of great commercial importance could
+be carried by the new express. They were written
+on tissue paper, packed into a small, light saddlebag,
+and passed from rider to rider along the route.
+The time announced in the schedule was ten days,&mdash;two
+weeks better than Butterfield's best. To make
+it called for constant motion at top speed, with
+horses trained to the work and changed every few
+miles. The carriers were slight men of 135 pounds
+or under, whose nerve and endurance could stand
+the strain. Often mere boys were employed in the
+dangerous service. Rain or snow or death made
+no difference to the express. Dangers of falling at
+night, of missing precipitous mountain roads where
+advance at a walk was perilous, had to be faced.
+When Indians were hostile, this new risk had to be
+run. But for eighteen months the service was continued
+as announced. It ceased only when the overland
+telegraph, in October, 1861, declared its readiness
+to handle through business.</p>
+
+<p>In the pony express was the spectacular perfection
+of overland service. Its best record was some
+hours under eight days. It was conducted along
+the well-known trail from St. Joseph to Forts Kearney,
+Laramie, and Bridger; thence to Great Salt
+Lake City, and by way of Carson City to Placerville
+and Sacramento. It carried the news in a time when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span>
+every day brought new rumors of war and disunion,
+in the pregnant campaign of 1860 and through the
+opening of the Civil War. The records of its riders
+at times approached the marvellous. One lad,
+William F. Cody, who has since lived to become the
+personal embodiment of the Far West as Buffalo
+Bill, rode more than 320 consecutive miles on a single
+tour. The literature of the plains is full of instances
+of courage and endurance shown in carrying through
+the despatches.</p>
+
+<p>The Butterfield mail was transferred to the central
+route of the pony express in the summer of 1861.
+For two and a half years it had run steadily along
+its southern route, proving the entire practicability
+of carrying on such a service. But its expense had
+been out of all proportion to its revenue. In 1859
+the Postmaster-general reported that its total receipts
+from mails had been $27,229.94, as against a
+cost of $600,000. It is not unlikely that the fast
+service would have been dropped had not the new
+military necessity of 1861 forbidden any act which
+might loosen the bonds between the Pacific and the
+Atlantic states. Congress contemplated the approach
+of war and authorized early in 1861 the abandonment
+of the southern route through the confederate
+territory, and the transfer of the service to
+the line of the pony express. To secure additional
+safety the mails were sent by way of Davenport,
+Iowa, and Omaha, to Fort Kearney a few times, but
+Atchison became the starting-point at last, while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
+military force was used to keep the route free from
+interference. The transfer worked a shortening of
+from five to seven days over the southern route.</p>
+
+<p>In the autumn of 1861, when the overland mail
+and the pony express were both running at top speed
+along the Platte trail, the overland service reached
+its highest point. In October the telegraph brought
+an end to the express. "The Pacific to the Atlantic
+sends greeting," ran the first message over the new
+wire, "and may both oceans be dry before a foot of all
+the land that lies between them shall belong to any
+other than one united country." Probably the pony
+express had done its share in keeping touch between
+California and the Union. Certainly only its national
+purpose justified its existence, since it was run
+at a loss that brought ruin to Russell, its backer, and
+to Majors and Waddell, his partners.</p>
+
+<p>Russell, Majors, and Waddell, with the biggest
+freighting business of the plains, had gone heavily
+into passenger and express service in 1859&ndash;1860.
+Russell had forced through the pony express against
+the wishes of his partners, carried away from practical
+considerations by the magnitude of the idea.
+The transfer of the southern overland to their route
+increased their business and responsibility. The
+future of the route steadily looked larger. "Every
+day," wrote the Postmaster-general, "brings intelligence
+of the discovery of new mines of gold and
+silver in the region traversed by this mail route,
+which gives assurance that it will not be many years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>
+before it will be protected and supported throughout
+the greater part of the route by a civilized population."
+Under the name of the Central Overland,
+California, and Pike's Peak Express the firm tried to
+keep up a struggle too great for them. "Clean out
+of Cash and Poor Pay" is said to have been an irreverent
+nickname coined by one of their drivers. As
+their embarrassments steadily increased, their notes
+were given to a rival contractor who was already beginning
+local routes to reach the mining camps of
+eastern Washington. Ben Holladay had been the
+power behind the company for several months before
+the courts gave him control of their overland stage
+line in 1862. The greatest names in this overland
+business are first Butterfield, then Russell, Majors,
+and Waddell, and then Ben Holladay, whose power
+lasted until he sold out to Wells, Fargo, and Company
+in 1866. Ben Holladay was the magnate of the
+plains during the early sixties. A hostile critic,
+Henry Villard, has written that he was "a genuine
+specimen of the successful Western pioneer of former
+days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful, false, and
+cunning." In later days he carried his speculation
+into railways and navigation, but already his was the
+name most often heard in the West. Mark Twain,
+who has left in "Roughing It" the best picture of
+life in the Far West in this decade, speaks lightly of
+him when he tells of a youth travelling in the Holy
+Land with a reverend preceptor who was impressing
+upon him the greatness of Moses, "'the great guide,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span>
+soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack,
+from this spot where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a
+fearful desert three hundred miles in extent&mdash;and
+across that desert that wonderful man brought the
+children of Israel!&mdash;guiding them with unfailing
+sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation
+and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and
+landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of
+this very spot. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing
+to do, Jack. Think of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Forty years? Only three hundred miles?'"
+replied Jack. "'Humph! Ben Holladay would have
+fetched them through in thirty-six hours!'"</p>
+
+<p>Under Holladay's control the passenger and express
+service were developed into what was probably
+the greatest one-man institution in America. He
+directed not only the central overland, but spur lines
+with government contracts to upper California,
+Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. He travelled up and
+down the line constantly himself, attending in person
+to business in Washington and on the Pacific. The
+greatest difficulties in his service were the Indians
+and progress as stated in the railway. Man and
+nature could be fought off and overcome, but the life
+of the stage-coach was limited before it was begun.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian danger along the trails had steadily
+increased since the commencement of the migrations.
+For many years it had not been large, since there
+was room for all and the emigrants held well to the
+beaten track. But the gold camps had introduced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span>
+settlers into new sections, and had sent prospectors
+into all the Indian Country. The opening of new
+roads to the Pacific increased the pressure, until the
+Indians began to believe that the end was at hand
+unless they should bestir themselves. The last years
+of the overland service, between 1862 and 1868,
+were hence filled with Indian attacks. Often for
+weeks no coach could go through. Once, by premeditation,
+every station for nearly two hundred
+miles was destroyed overnight, Julesburg, the greatest
+of them all, being in the list. The presence of
+troops to defend seemed only to increase the zeal of
+the red men to destroy.</p>
+
+<p>Besides these losses, which lessened his profits and
+threatened ruin, Holladay had to meet competition
+in his own trade, and detraction as well. Captain
+James L. Fiske, who had broken a new road through
+from Minnesota to Montana, came east in 1863, "by
+the 'overland stage,' travelling over the saline plains
+of Laramie and Colorado Territory and the sand
+deserts of Nebraska and Kansas. The country was
+strewed with the skeletons and carcases of cattle,
+and the graves of the early Mormon and California
+pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst emigrant
+route that I have ever travelled; much of the
+road is through deep sand, feed is very scanty, a
+great deal of the water is alkaline, and the snows in
+winter render it impassable for trains. The stage
+line is wretchedly managed. The company undertake
+to furnish travellers with meals, (at a dollar a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
+meal,) but very frequently on arriving at a station
+there was nothing to eat, the supplies had not been
+sent on. On one occasion we fasted for thirty-six
+hours. The stages were sometimes in a miserable
+condition. We were put into a coach one night with
+only two boards left in the bottom. On remonstrating
+with the driver, we were told to hold on by the
+sides."</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay
+controlled a monopoly in stage service between the
+Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The express
+companies and railways met him at the ends of his
+link, but had to accept his terms for intermediate
+traffic. In the summer of 1865 a competing firm
+started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on
+the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that
+Indian dangers here were greater than along the
+Platte, and it learned how near it was to bankruptcy
+when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had
+sent his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand
+a more detailed statement of resources and conditions
+than the Overland Despatch itself possessed.
+He purchased easily at his own price and so ended
+this danger of competition.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the character of the overland traffic that
+any day might bring a successful rival, or loss by
+accident. Holladay seems to have realized that the
+advantages secured by priority were over, and that
+the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866
+he sold out his lines to the greatest of his competitors,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>
+Wells, Fargo, and Company. He sold out wisely.
+The new concern lost on its purchase through the
+rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the
+Pacific railway had advanced so far that the end of
+the mail route was moved to Fort Kearney in November.
+By May, 1869, some years earlier than
+Wells, Fargo had estimated, the road was done. And
+on the completion of the Union and Central Pacific
+railways the great period of the overland mail was
+ended.</p>
+
+<p>Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland
+freight that lacked the seeming romance of the
+former, but possessed quite as much of real significance.
+No one has numbered the trains of wagons
+that supplied the Far West. Santa FĂŠ wagons they
+were now; Pennsylvania or Pittsburg wagons they
+had been called in the early days of the Santa FĂŠ
+trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the
+remoter time of the trans-Alleghany migrations.
+But whatever their name, they retained the characteristics
+of the wagons and caravans of the earlier
+period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons,
+organized in trains of twenty-six, from the Butterfield
+Overland Despatch in 1866. Six thousand
+were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in
+1865. One of the drivers on the overland mail,
+Frank Root, relates that Russell, Majors, and Waddell
+owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height
+of their business. The long trains, crawling along
+half hidden in their clouds of dust, with the noises<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>
+of the animals and the profanity of the drivers, were
+the physical bond between the sections. The mail
+and express served politics and intellect; the freighters
+provided the comforts and decencies of life.</p>
+
+<p>The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the
+first migrations. Its growth during the fifties and
+its triumphant period in the sixties were great arguments
+in favor of the construction of railways to
+take its place. It came to an end when the first
+continental railroad was completed in 1869. For
+decades after this time the stages still found useful
+service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional
+exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the
+railways were following them closely, for a new period
+of American history had begun.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER</span></h2>
+
+<p>In a national way, the South struggling against
+the North prevented the early location of a Pacific
+railway. Locally, every village on the Mississippi
+from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus
+and had advocates throughout its section of
+the country. The list of claimants is a catalogue
+of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans, Vicksburg,
+Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and
+Duluth were all entered in the competition. By
+1860 the idea had received general acceptance; no
+one in the future need urge its adoption, but the
+greatest part of the work remained to be done.</p>
+
+<p>Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway
+was of uncertain origin and parentage. Just
+so soon as there was a railroad anywhere, it was
+inevitable that some enterprising visionary should
+project one in imagination to the extremity of the
+continent. The railway speculation, with which the
+East was seething during the administrations of
+Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West,
+so that the group of men advocating a railway to
+connect the oceans were but the product of their
+time.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span>
+Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney,
+a New York merchant interested in the China
+trade and eager to win the commerce of the Orient
+for the United States. Others had declared such a
+road to be possible before he presented his memorial
+to Congress in 1845, but none had staked so much
+upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted
+a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and
+was at last convinced that "the time is not far distant
+when Oregon will become ... a separate
+nation" unless communication should "unite them
+to us." He petitioned Congress in January, 1845,
+for a franchise and a grant of land, that the national
+road might be accomplished; and for many years he
+agitated persistently for his project.</p>
+
+<p>The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest,
+coming in the years immediately after the commencement
+of Whitney's advocacy, gave new point to
+arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional
+element. So long as Oregon constituted the
+whole American frontage on the Pacific it was idle
+to debate railway routes south of South Pass. This
+was the only known, practicable route, and it was
+the course recommended by all the projectors, down
+to Whitney. But with California won, the other
+trails by El Paso and Santa FĂŠ came into consideration
+and at once tempted the South to make the
+railway tributary to its own interests.</p>
+
+<p>Chief among the politicians who fell in with the
+growing railway movement was Senator Benton, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>
+tried to place himself at its head. "The man is
+alive, full grown, and is listening to what I say
+(without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October,
+1844, "who will yet see the Asiatic commerce
+traversing the North Pacific Ocean&mdash;entering the
+Oregon River&mdash;climbing the western slopes of the
+Rocky Mountains&mdash;issuing from its gorges&mdash;and
+spreading its fertilizing streams over our wide-extended
+Union!" After this date there was no subject
+closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy
+was constant. His last word in the Senate was
+concerning it. In 1849 he carried off its feet the
+St. Louis railroad convention with his eloquent
+appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron
+road, and make it from sea to sea&mdash;States and
+individuals making it east of the Mississippi, the
+nation making it west. Let us ... rise above
+everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ...
+build the great road ... which shall be adorned
+with ... the colossal statue of the great Columbus&mdash;whose
+design it accomplishes, hewn from a
+granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains,
+overlooking the road ... pointing with outstretched
+arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying
+passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"</p>
+
+<p>By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad
+could be built along the Platte route, and it was
+believed that the mountains could be penetrated in
+several other places, but the process of surveying with
+reference to a particular railway had not yet been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span>
+begun. It is possible and perhaps instructive to make
+a rough grouping, in two classes divided by the year
+1842, of the explorations before 1853. So late as
+FrĂŠmont's day it was not generally known whether a
+great river entered the Pacific between the Columbia
+and the Colorado. Prior to 1842 the explorations
+are to be regarded as "incidents" and "adventures"
+in more or less unknown countries. The narratives
+were popular rather than scientific, representing the
+experiences of parties surveying boundary lines or
+locating wagon roads, of troops marching to remote
+posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and casual
+explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed
+a large mass of detailed but unorganized information
+concerning the country where the continental railway
+must run. But Lieutenant FrĂŠmont, in 1842,
+commenced the effort by the United States to acquire
+accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the West.
+In 1842, 1843, and 1845 FrĂŠmont conducted the three
+Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him
+for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by
+Charles Preuss for his second expedition, confined
+itself in strict scientific fashion to the facts actually
+observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the
+best map made before 1853. The individual expeditions
+which in the later forties filled in the details
+of portions of the FrĂŠmont map are too numerous
+for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before
+1853, all serving to extend both general and particular
+knowledge of the West. To these was added a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>
+great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants
+and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific
+knowledge of nearly all the West, and accurate
+information concerning some portions of it. The
+railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction
+in which the roads must run, but no road could well
+be located without a more comprehensive survey
+than had yet been made.</p>
+
+<p>The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was
+founded almost exclusively upon general and inaccurate
+knowledge of the West. The exact location
+of the line was naturally left for the professional
+civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself
+with general principles. Frequently these were
+sufficient, yet, as in the case of Benton, misinformation
+led to the waste of strength upon routes unquestionably
+bad. But there was slight danger of
+the United States being led into an unwise route,
+since in the diversity of routes suggested there was
+deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as the idea
+was received with unanimity, the routes were fought
+with increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved
+in 1852 when the choice of routes had become more
+important than the method of construction.</p>
+
+<p>In 1852&ndash;1853 Congress worked upon one of the
+many bills to construct the much-desired railway to
+the Pacific. It was discovered that an absolute
+majority in favor of the work existed, but the enemies
+of the measure, virulent in proportion as they were
+in the minority, were able to sow well-fertilized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span>
+dissent. They admitted and gloried in the intrigue
+which enabled them to command through the time-honored
+method of division. They defeated the road
+in this Congress. But when the army appropriation
+bill came along in February, 1853, Senator
+Gwin asked for an amendment for a survey. He
+doubted the wisdom of a survey, since, "if any route
+is reported to this body as the best, those that may
+be rejected will always go against the one selected."
+But he admitted himself to be as a drowning man
+who "will catch at straws," and begged that $150,000
+be allowed to the President for a survey of the best
+routes from the Mississippi to the Pacific, the survey
+to be conducted by the Corps of Topographical Engineers
+of the regular army. To a non-committal
+measure like this the opposition could make slight
+resistance. The Senate, by a vote of 31 to 16, added
+this amendment to the army appropriation bill,
+while the House concurred in nearly the same proportion.
+The first positive official act towards the
+construction of the road was here taken.</p>
+
+<p>Under the orders of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of
+War, well-organized exploring parties took to the
+field in the spring of 1853. Farthest north, Isaac
+I. Stevens, bound for his post as first governor of
+Washington territory, conducted a line of survey to
+the Pacific between the parallels of 47° and 49°,
+north latitude. South of the Stevens survey, four
+other lines were worked out. Near the parallels of
+41° and 42°, the old South Pass route was again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>
+examined. FrÊmont's favorite line, between 38°
+and 39°, received consideration. A thirty-fifth parallel
+route was examined in great detail, while on this
+and another along the thirty-second parallel the
+most friendly attentions of the War Department
+were lavished. The second and third routes had
+few important friends. Governor Stevens, because
+he was a first-rate fighter, secured full space for the
+survey in his charge. But the thirty-second and
+thirty-fifth parallel routes were those which were
+expected to make good.</p>
+
+<p>Governor Stevens left Washington on May 9,
+1853, for St. Louis, where he made arrangements with
+the American Fur Company to transport a large part
+of his supplies by river to Fort Union. From St.
+Louis he ascended the Mississippi by steamer to
+St. Paul, near which city Camp Pierce, his first
+organized camp, had been established. Here he
+issued his instructions and worked into shape his
+party,&mdash;to say nothing of his 172 half-broken mules.
+"Not a single full team of broken animals could be
+selected, and well broken riding animals were essential,
+for most of the gentlemen of the scientific corps
+were unaccustomed to riding." One of the engineers
+dislocated a shoulder before he conquered his steed.</p>
+
+<p>The party assigned to Governor Stevens's command
+was recruited with reference to the varied demands
+of a general exploring and scientific reconnaissance.
+Besides enlisted men and laborers, it included engineers,
+a topographer, an artist, a surgeon and naturalist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>
+an astronomer, a meteorologist, and a geologist.
+Its two large volumes of report include elaborate
+illustrations and appendices on botany and seven
+different varieties of zoĂślogy in addition to the geographical
+details required for the railway.</p>
+
+<p>The expedition, in its various branches, attacked
+the northernmost route simultaneously in several
+places. Governor Stevens led the eastern division
+from St. Paul. A small body of his men, with much
+of the supplies, were sent up the Missouri in the
+American Fur Company's boat to Fort Union, there
+to make local observations and await the arrival of
+the governor. United there the party continued
+overland to Fort Benton and the mountains. Six
+years later than this it would have been possible to
+ascend by boat all the way to Fort Benton, but as
+yet no steamer had gone much above Fort Union.
+From the Pacific end the second main division operated.
+Governor Stevens secured the recall of Captain
+George B. McClellan from duty in Texas, and
+his detail in command of a corps which was to proceed
+to the mouth of the Columbia River and start
+an eastward survey. In advance of McClellan,
+Lieutenant Saxton was to hurry on to erect a
+supply depot in the Bitter Root Valley, and then
+to cross the divide and make a junction with the
+main party.</p>
+
+<p>From Governor Stevens's reports it would seem
+that his survey was a triumphal progress. To his
+threefold capacities as commander, governor, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
+Indian superintendent, nature had added a magnifying
+eye and an unrestrained enthusiasm. No
+formal expedition had traversed his route since the
+day of Lewis and Clark. The Indians could still be
+impressed by the physical appearance of the whites.
+His vanity led him at each success or escape from
+accident to congratulate himself on the antecedent
+wisdom which had warded off the danger. But
+withal, his report was thorough and his party was
+loyal. The <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">voyageurs</i> whom he had engaged received
+his special praise. "They are thorough woodsmen
+and just the men for prairie life also, going into the
+water as pleasantly as a spaniel, and remaining
+there as long as needed."</p>
+
+<p>Across the undulating fertile plains the party
+advanced from St. Paul with little difficulty. Its
+draught animals steadily improved in health and
+strength. The Indians were friendly and honest.
+"My father," said Old Crane of the Assiniboin,
+"our hearts are good; we are poor and have not
+much.... Our good father has told us about this
+road. I do not see how it will benefit us, and I fear
+my people will be driven from these plains before
+the white men." In fifty-five days Fort Union was
+reached. Here the American Fur Company maintained
+an extensive post in a stockade 250 feet square,
+and carried on a large trade with "the Assiniboines,
+the Gros Ventres, the Crows, and other migratory
+bands of Indians." At Fort Union, Alexander
+Culbertson, the agent, became the guide of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span>
+party, which proceeded west on August 10. From
+Fort Union it was nearly 400 miles to Fort Benton,
+which then stood on the left bank of the Missouri,
+some eighteen miles below the falls. The country,
+though less friendly than that east of the Missouri,
+offered little difficulty to the party, which covered the
+distance in three weeks. A week later, September 8,
+a party sent on from Fort Benton met Lieutenant
+Saxton coming east.</p>
+
+<p>The chief problems of the Stevens survey lay west
+of Fort Benton, in the passes of the continental divide.
+Lieutenant Saxton had left Vancouver early
+in July, crossed the Cascades with difficulty, and
+started up the Columbia from the Dalles on July 18.
+He reached Fort Walla Walla on the 27th, and proceeded
+thence with a half-breed guide through the
+country of the Spokan and the C&oelig;ur d'Alene.
+Crossing the Snake, he broke his only mercurial
+barometer and was forced thereafter to rely on his
+aneroid. Deviating to the north, he crossed Lake
+Pend d'Oreille on August 10, and reached St. Mary's
+village, in the Bitter Root Valley, on August 28. St.
+Mary's village, among the Flatheads, had been established
+by the Jesuit fathers, and had advanced
+considerably, as Indian civilization went. Here
+Saxton erected his supply depot, from which he advanced
+with a smaller escort to join the main party.
+Always, even in the heart of the mountains, the country
+exceeded his expectations. "Nature seemed to
+have intended it for the great highway across the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>
+continent, and it appeared to offer but little obstruction
+to the passage of a railroad."</p>
+
+<p>Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced
+his party at Fort Benton, stored much of his
+government property there, and started west with a
+pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved
+on September 22, anxious lest snow should catch
+him in the mountains. At Fort Benton he left a
+detachment to make meteorological observations
+during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left
+another under Lieutenant Mullan. On October 7
+he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley for
+Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's
+party, which had been spending a difficult season in
+the passes of the Cascade range. Because of overcautious
+advice which McClellan here gave him,
+and since his animals were tired out with the summer's
+hardships, he practically ended his survey for
+1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia
+to Olympia and his new territory.</p>
+
+<p>The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to
+make one of the first of the Pacific railway reports.
+His was the only survey from the Mississippi to the
+ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30,
+1854, it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled
+reports. In 1859 he submitted his "narrative
+and final report" which the Senate ordered Secretary
+of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February
+of that year. This document is printed as supplement
+to Volume I, but really consists of two large<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
+volumes which are commonly bound together as
+Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes
+of the reports, his are filled with lithographs and engravings
+of fauna, flora, and topography.</p>
+
+<p>The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by
+Lieutenant E.&nbsp;G. Beckwith, of the third artillery, in
+the summer of 1854. East of Fort Bridger, the War
+Department felt it unnecessary to make a special
+survey, since FrĂŠmont had traversed and described
+the country several times and Stansbury had surveyed
+it carefully as recently as 1849&ndash;1850. At
+the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt
+Lake. During April he visited the Green River
+Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by his surveys the
+entire practicability of railway construction here.
+In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake
+and passed along the Humboldt to the Sacramento
+Valley. He had no important adventures and was
+impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians,
+whose grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups"
+were frequently seen. As his band approached the
+Indians would fearfully cache their belongings in
+the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed
+a novel and ludicrous sight of wretchedness to see
+them approach their bush and attempt, slyly (for
+they still tried to conceal from me what they were
+about), to repossess themselves of their treasures,
+one bringing out a piece of old buckskin, a couple of
+feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn; another a
+half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>
+sewed together, which he would swing over his
+shoulders by a string&mdash;his only blanket or clothing;
+while a third brought out a blue string, which he
+girded about him and walked away in full dress&mdash;one
+of the lords of the soil." It needed no special
+emphasis in Beckwith's report to prove that a railway
+could follow this middle route, since thousands
+of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_204" class="figcenter" style="width: 541px;">
+  <img src="images/i-227.jpg" width="541" height="355" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Fort Snelling</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>From an old photograph, loaned by Horace B. Hudson, of Minneapolis.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>Beckwith, who started his forty-second parallel
+survey from Salt Lake City, had reached that point
+as one of the officers in Gunnison's unfortunate
+party. Captain J.&nbsp;W. Gunnison had followed
+Governor Stevens into St. Louis in 1853. His field
+of exploration, the route of 38°-39°, was by no means
+new to him since he had been to Utah with Stansbury
+in 1849 and 1850, and had already written one of
+the best books upon the Mormon settlement. He
+carried his party up the Missouri to a fitting-out
+camp just below the mouth of the Kansas River,
+five miles from Westport. Like other commanders
+he spent much time at the start in "breaking in wild
+mules," with which he advanced in rain and mud
+on June 23. For more than two weeks his party
+moved in parallel columns along the Santa FĂŠ road
+and the Smoky Hill fork of the Kansas. Near
+Walnut creek on the Santa FĂŠ road they united, and
+soon were following the Arkansas River towards the
+mountains. At Fort Atkinson they found a horde
+of the plains Indians waiting for Major Fitzpatrick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span>
+to make a treaty with them. Always their observations
+were taken with regularity. One day Captain
+Gunnison spent in vain efforts to secure specimens
+of the elusive prairie dog. On August 1, when they
+were ready to leave the Arkansas and plunge southwest
+into the Sangre de Cristo range, they were
+gratified "by a clear and beautiful view of the Spanish
+Peaks."</p>
+
+<p>This thirty-ninth parallel route, which had been a
+favorite with FrĂŠmont, crossed the divide near the
+head of the Rio Grande. Its grades, which were
+difficult and steep at best, followed the Huerfano
+Valley and Cochetopa Pass. Across the pass,
+Gunnison began his descent of the arid alkali valley
+of the Uncompahgre,&mdash;a valley to-day about to
+blossom as the rose because of the irrigation canal
+and tunnel bringing to it the waters of the neighboring
+Gunnison River. With heavy labor, intense heat,
+and weakening teams, Gunnison struggled on through
+September and October towards Salt Lake in Utah
+territory. Near Sevier Lake he lost his life. Before
+daybreak, on October 26, he and a small detachment
+of men were surprised by a band of young Paiute.
+When the rest of his party hurried up to the
+rescue, they found his body "pierced with fifteen
+arrows," and seven of his men lying dead around
+him. Beckwith, who succeeded to the command,
+led the remainder of the party to Salt Lake City,
+where public opinion was ready to charge the Mormons
+with the murder. Beckwith believed this to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>
+entirely false, and made use of the friendly assistance
+of Brigham Young, who persuaded the chiefs of the
+tribe to return the instruments and records which
+had been stolen from the party.</p>
+
+<p>The route surveyed by Captain Gunnison passed
+around the northern end of the ravine of the Colorado
+River, which almost completely separates the Southwest
+from the United States. Farther south, within
+the United States, were only two available points
+at which railways could cross the caĂąon, at Fort
+Yuma and near the Mojave River. Towards these
+crossings the thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallel
+surveys were directed.</p>
+
+<p>Second only to Governor Stevens's in its extent
+was the exploration conducted by Lieutenant A.&nbsp;W.
+Whipple from Fort Smith on the Arkansas to Los
+Angeles along the thirty-fifth parallel. Like that
+of Governor Stevens this route was not the channel
+of any regular traffic, although later it was to have
+some share in the organized overland commerce.
+Here also was found a line that contained only two
+or three serious obstacles to be overcome. Whipple's
+instructions planned for him to begin his observations
+at the Mississippi, but he believed that the
+navigable Arkansas River and the railways already
+projected in that state made it needless to commence
+farther east than Fort Smith, on the edge of the
+Indian Country. He began his survey on July
+14, 1853. His westward march was for two months
+up the right bank of the Canadian River, as it traversed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>
+the Choctaw and Chickasaw reserves, to the
+hundredth meridian, where it emerged from the panhandle
+of Texas, and across the panhandle into New
+Mexico. After crossing the upper waters of the
+Rio Pecos he reached the Rio Grande at Albuquerque,
+where his party tarried for a month or more, working
+over their observations, making local explorations,
+and sending back to Washington an account of their
+proceedings thus far. Towards the middle of November
+they started on toward the Colorado Chiquita
+and the Bill Williams Fork, through "a region over
+which no white man is supposed to have passed."
+The severest difficulties of the trip were found near
+the valley of the Colorado River, which was entered
+at the junction of the Bill Williams Fork and followed
+north for several days. A crossing here was made
+near the supposed mouth of the Mojave River at a
+place where porphyritic and trap dykes, outcropping,
+gave rise to the name of the Needles. The river
+was crossed February 27, 1854, three weeks before
+the party reached Los Angeles.</p>
+
+<p>South of the route of Lieutenant Whipple, the
+thirty-second parallel survey was run to the Fort
+Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. No attempt
+was made in this case at a comprehensive survey
+under a single leader. Instead, the section from the
+Rio Grande at El Paso to the Red River at Preston,
+Texas, was run by John Pope, brevet captain in the
+topographical engineers, in the spring of 1854.
+Lieutenant J.&nbsp;G. Parke carried the line at the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span>
+time from the Pimas villages on the Gila to the Rio
+Grande. West of the Pimas villages to the Colorado,
+a reconnoissance made by Lieutenant-colonel Emory
+in 1847 was drawn upon. The lines in California
+were surveyed by yet a different party. Here again
+an easy route was discovered to exist. Within the
+states of California and Oregon various connecting
+lines were surveyed by parties under Lieutenant
+R.&nbsp;S. Williamson in 1855.</p>
+
+<p>The evidence accumulated by the Pacific railway
+surveys began to pour in upon the War Department
+in the spring of 1854. Partial reports at first, elaborate
+and minute scientific articles following later, made
+up a series which by the close of the decade filled the
+twelve enormous volumes of the published papers.
+Rarely have efforts so great accomplished so little
+in the way of actual contribution to knowledge. The
+chief importance of the surveys was in proving by
+scientific observation what was already a commonplace
+among laymen&mdash;that the continent was
+traversable in many places, and that the incidental
+problems of railway construction were in finance
+rather than in engineering. The engineers stood
+ready to build the road any time and almost anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>The Secretary of War submitted to Congress the
+first instalment of his report under the resolution
+of March 3, 1853, on February 27, 1855. As yet the
+labors of compilation and examination of the field
+manuscripts were by no means completed, but he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span>
+was able to make general statements about the
+probability of success. At five points the continental
+divide had been crossed; over four of these railways
+were entirely practicable, although the shortest
+of the routes to San Francisco ran by the one pass,
+Cochetopa, where it would be unreasonable to construct
+a road.</p>
+
+<p>From the routes surveyed, Secretary Davis recommended
+one as "the most practicable and economical
+route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the
+Pacific Ocean." In all cases cost, speed of construction,
+and ease in operation needed to be ascertained
+and compared. The estimates guessed at by
+the parties in the field, and revised by the War Department,
+pointed to the southernmost as the most
+desirable route. To reach this conclusion it was
+necessary to accuse Governor Stevens of underestimating
+the cost of labor along his northern line;
+but the figures as taken were conclusive. On this
+thirty-second parallel route, declared the Secretary
+of War, "the progress of the work will be regulated
+chiefly by the speed with which cross-ties and rails
+can be delivered and laid.... The few difficult
+points ... would delay the work but an inconsiderable
+period.... The climate on this route is such
+as to cause less interruption to the work than on any
+other route. Not only is this the shortest and least
+costly route to the Pacific, but it is the shortest and
+cheapest route to San Francisco, the greatest commercial
+city on our western coast; while the aggregate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span>
+length of railroad lines connecting it at its eastern
+terminus with the Atlantic and Gulf seaports is less
+than the aggregate connection with any other route."</p>
+
+<p>The Pacific railway surveys had been ordered as
+the only step which Congress in its situation of deadlock
+could take. Senator Gwin had long ago told
+his fears that the advocates of the disappointed routes
+would unite to hinder the fortunate one. To the
+South, as to Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, the
+thirty-second parallel route was satisfactory; but
+there was as little chance of building a railway as
+there had been in 1850. In days to come, discussion
+of railways might be founded upon facts rather than
+hopes and fears, but either unanimity or compromise
+was in a fairly remote future. The overland traffic,
+which was assuming great volume as the surveys
+progressed, had yet nearly fifteen years before the
+railway should drive it out of existence. And no
+railway could even be started before war had
+removed one of the contesting sections from the floor
+of Congress.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in the years since Asa Whitney had begun his
+agitation the railways of the East had constantly
+expanded. The first bridge to cross the Mississippi
+was under construction when Davis reported in 1855.
+The Illinois Central was opened in 1856. When the
+Civil War began, the railway frontier had become
+coterminous with the agricultural frontier, and both
+were ready to span the gap which separated them
+from the Pacific.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD</span></h2>
+
+<p>It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of
+the Union Pacific Railroad that the period of agitation
+was approaching probable success when the latter
+was deferred because of the rivalry of sections and
+localities into which the scheme was thrown. From
+about 1850 until 1853 it indeed seemed likely that
+the road would be built just so soon as the terminus
+could be agreed upon. To be sure, there was keen
+rivalry over this; yet the rivalry did not go beyond
+local jealousies and might readily be compromised.
+After the reports of the surveys were completed and
+presented to Congress the problem took on a new aspect
+which promised postponement until a far greater
+question could be solved. Slavery and the Pacific
+railroad are concrete illustrations of the two horns
+of the national dilemma.</p>
+
+<p>As a national project, the railway raised the problem
+of its construction under national auspices.
+Was the United States, or should it become, a nation
+competent to undertake the work? With no hesitation,
+many of the advocates of the measure answered
+yes. Yet even among the friends of the
+road the query frequently evoked the other answer.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>
+Slavery had already taken its place as an institution
+peculiar to a single section. Its defence and perpetuation
+depended largely upon proving the contrary
+of the proposition that the Pacific railroad
+demanded. For the purposes of slavery defence the
+United States must remain a mere federation, limited
+in powers and lacking in the attributes of sovereignty
+and nationality. Looking back upon this struggle,
+with half a century gone by, it becomes clear that the
+final answer upon both questions, slavery and railway,
+had to be postponed until the more fundamental
+question of federal character had been worked out.
+The antitheses were clear, even as Lincoln saw them
+in 1858. Slavery and localism on the one hand,
+railway and nationalism on the other, were engaged
+in a vital struggle for recognition. Together they
+were incompatible. One or the other must survive
+alone. Lincoln saw a portion of the problem,
+and he sketched the answer: "I do not expect the
+Union to be dissolved,&mdash;I do not expect the house
+to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided."</p>
+
+<p>The stages of the Pacific railroad movement are
+clearly marked through all these squabbles. Agitation
+came first, until conviction and acceptance
+were general. This was the era of Asa Whitney.
+Reconnoissance and survey followed, in a decade
+covering approximately 1847&ndash;1857. Organization
+came last, beginning in tentative schemes which
+counted for little, passing through a long series of
+intricate debates in Congress, and being merged in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>
+the larger question of nationality, but culminating
+finally in the first Pacific railroad bills of 1862 and
+1864.</p>
+
+<p>When Congress began its session of 1853&ndash;1854,
+most of the surveying parties contemplated by the
+act of the previous March were still in the field. The
+reports ordered were not yet available, and Congress
+recognized the inexpediency of proceeding farther
+without the facts. It is notable, however, that both
+houses at this time created select committees to
+consider propositions for a railway. Both of these
+committees reported bills, but neither received
+sanction even in the house of its friends. The next
+session, 1854&ndash;1855, saw the great struggle between
+Douglas and Benton.</p>
+
+<p>Stephen A. Douglas, who had triumphantly carried
+through his Kansas-Nebraska bill in the preceding
+May, started a railway bill in the Senate in 1855.
+As finally considered and passed by the Senate, his
+bill provided for three railroads: a Northern Pacific,
+from the western border of Wisconsin to Puget Sound;
+a Southern Pacific, from the western border of Texas
+to the Pacific; and a Central Pacific, from Missouri
+or Iowa to San Francisco. They were to be constructed
+by private parties under contracts to be let
+jointly by the Secretaries of War and Interior and
+the Postmaster-general. Ultimately they were to
+become the property of the United States and the
+states through which they passed. The House of
+Representatives, led by Benton in the interests of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>
+central road, declined to pass the Douglas measure.
+Before its final rejection, it was amended to please
+Benton and his allies by the restriction to a single
+trunk line from San Francisco, with eastern branches
+diverging to Lake Superior, Missouri or Iowa, and
+Memphis.</p>
+
+<p>During the two years following the rejection of the
+Douglas scheme by the allied malcontents, the select
+committees on the Pacific railways had few propositions
+to consider, while Congress paid little attention
+to the general matter. Absorbing interest in politics,
+the new Republican party, and the campaign of 1856
+were responsible for part of the neglect. The conviction
+of the dominant Democrats that the nation
+had no power to perform the task was responsible
+for more. The transition from a question of
+selfish localism to one of national policy which
+should require the whole strength of the nation for
+its solution was under way. The northern friends of
+the railway were disheartened by the southern tendencies
+of the Democratic administration which
+lasted till 1861. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of
+War, was followed by Floyd, of Virginia, who believed
+with his predecessor that the southern was the most
+eligible route. At the same time, Aaron V. Brown,
+of Tennessee, Postmaster-general, was awarding the
+postal contract for an overland mail to Butterfield's
+southern route in spite of the fact that Congress
+had probably intended the central route to be
+employed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>
+Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress
+show the difficulties under which the railroad labored.
+Many bills were started, but few could get
+through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed
+a bill. In 1860 the House passed one which the
+Senate amended to death. In the session of 1860&ndash;1861
+its serious consideration was crowded out by
+the incipiency of war.</p>
+
+<p>Through the long years of debate over the organization
+of the road, the nature of its management
+and the nature of its governmental aid were much
+in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the
+United States had undertaken no such scheme,
+while the Cumberland road, vastly less in magnitude
+than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties
+to last a generation. That there must be some
+connection between the road and the public lands
+had been seen even before Whitney commenced
+his advocacy. The nature of that connection was
+worked out incidentally to other movements while
+the Whitney scheme was under fire.</p>
+
+<p>The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements
+in transportation had been hinted at as far back as
+the admission of Ohio, but it had not received its full
+development until the railroad period began. To
+some extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands
+had been allotted to the states to aid in canal
+building, but when the railroad promoters started
+their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the
+history of the public domain was commenced. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>
+definitive fight over the issue of land grants for railways
+took place in connection with the Illinois
+Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years
+from 1847 to 1850.</p>
+
+<p>The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made
+its appearance before the panic of 1837. The northwest
+states were now building their own railroads,
+and this enterprise was designed to connect the
+Galena lead country with the junction of the Ohio
+and Mississippi by a road running parallel to the
+Mississippi through the whole length of the state of
+Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran
+naturally from east to west, seeking termini on the
+Mississippi and at the Alleghany crossings. This
+one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making
+useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a
+country where yet the prairie hen held uncontested
+sway. There was little population or freight to justify
+it, and hence the project, though it guised itself in at
+least three different corporate garments before 1845,
+failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse
+railways, on whose junctions it had counted,
+crossed its right-of-way before 1850. La Salle,
+Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its
+line worth marking on a large-scale map, while
+Chicago was yet under forty thousand in population.</p>
+
+<p>Men who in the following decade led the Pacific
+railway agitation promoted the Illinois Central idea
+in the years immediately preceding 1850. Both
+Breese and Douglas of Illinois claimed the parentage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span>
+of the bill which eventually passed Congress in 1850,
+and by opening the way to public aid for railway
+transportation commenced the period of the land-grant
+railroads. Already in some of the canal grants
+the method of aid had been outlined, alternate sections
+of land along the line of the canal being conveyed
+to the company to aid it in its work. The
+theory underlying the granting of alternate sections
+in the familiar checker-board fashion was that the
+public lands, while inaccessible, had slight value, but
+once reached by communication the alternate sections
+reserved by the United States would bring a
+higher price than the whole would have done without
+the canal, while the construction company would be
+aided without expense to any one. The application
+of this principle to railroads came rather slowly in a
+Congress somewhat disturbed by a doubt as to its
+power to devote the public resources to internal improvements.
+The sectional character of the Illinois
+Central railway was against it until its promoters enlarged
+the scheme into a Lake-to-Gulf railway by
+including plans for a continuation to Mobile from
+the Ohio. With southern aid thus enticed to its
+support, the bill became a law in 1850. By its terms,
+the alternate sections of land in a strip ten miles
+wide were given to the interested states to be used
+for the construction of the Illinois Central and the
+Mobile and Ohio. The grants were made directly
+to the states because of constitutional objections to
+construction within a state without its consent and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span>
+approval. It was twelve years before Congress was
+ready to give the lands directly to the railroad company.</p>
+
+<p>The decade following the Illinois Central grant
+was crowded with applications from other states for
+grants upon the same terms. In this period of speculative
+construction before the panic of 1857, every
+western state wanted all the aid it could get. In a
+single session seven states asked for nearly fourteen
+million acres of land, while before 1857 some five
+thousand miles of railway had been aided by land
+grants.</p>
+
+<p>When Asa Whitney began his agitation for the
+Pacific railway, he asked for a huge land grant, but
+the machinery and methods of the grants had not
+yet become familiar to Congress. During the subsequent
+fifteen years of agitation and survey the
+method was worked out, so that when political conditions
+made it possible to build the road, there had
+ceased to be great difficulty in connection with its
+subsidy.</p>
+
+<p>The sectional problem, which had reached its full
+development in Congress by 1857, prevented any
+action in the interest of a Pacific railway so long as it
+should remain unchanged. As the bickerings widened
+into war, the railway still remained a practical
+impossibility. But after war had removed from
+Congress the representatives of the southern states
+the way was cleared for action. When Congress
+met in its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">219</a></span>
+favor of southern routes was silenced by disunion.
+It remained only to choose among the routes lying
+north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize
+the construction along one of them of the railway
+which all admitted to be possible of construction,
+and to which military need in preservation of the
+union had now added an imperative quality.</p>
+
+<p>The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a
+Pacific railway, and handed them over to the regular
+session of 1861&ndash;1862 as unfinished business. In the
+lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah,
+a young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave
+powerful aid to the final settlement of route and
+means. Judah had come east in the autumn in
+company with one of the newly elected California
+representatives. During the long sea voyage he
+had drilled into his companion, who happily was later
+appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of
+the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem
+which he had acquired in his advocacy of the railway
+on the Pacific Coast. California had begun the construction
+of local railways several years before the
+war broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant
+need and prayer. Her own corporations were
+planned with reference to the time when tracks from
+the East should cross her border and find her local
+creations waiting for connections with them.</p>
+
+<p>When the advent of war promised an early maturity
+for the scheme, a few Californians organized
+the most significant of the California railways, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>
+Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company
+was incorporated, having for its leading spirits Judah,
+its chief engineer, and Collis Potter Huntington,
+Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford,
+soon to be governor of the state. Its founders
+were all men of moderate means, but they had the best
+of that foresight and initiative in which the frontier
+was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861
+Judah prospected for routes across the mountains
+into Utah territory, where the new silver fields
+around Carson indicated the probable course of a
+route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on
+to Washington in the fall to aid in the quick settlement
+of the long-debated question.</p>
+
+<p>Judah's interest in a special California road coincided
+well with the needs and desires of Congress.
+Already various bills were in the hands of the select
+committees of both houses. The southern interest
+was gone. The only remaining rivalries were
+among St. Louis, Chicago, and the new Minnesota;
+while the first of these was tainted by the doubtful
+loyalty of Missouri, and the last was embarrassed
+by the newness of its territory and its lack of population.
+The Sioux were yet in control of much
+of the country beyond St. Paul. Out of this rivalry
+Chicago and a central route could emerge triumphant.</p>
+
+<p>The spring of 1862 witnessed a long debate over a
+Union Pacific railroad to meet the new military needs
+of the United States as well as to satisfy the old economic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>
+necessities. Why it was called "Union" is
+somewhat in doubt. Bancroft thinks its name was
+descriptive of the various local roads which were
+bound together in the single continental scheme.
+Davis, on the contrary, is inclined to believe that the
+name was in contrast to the "Disunion" route of the
+thirty-second parallel, since the route chosen was
+to run entirely through loyal territory. Whatever
+the reason, however, the Union Pacific Railroad Company
+was incorporated on the 1st of July, 1862.</p>
+
+<p>Under the act of incorporation a continental railway
+was to be constructed by several companies.
+Within the limits of California, the Central Pacific
+of California, already organized and well managed,
+was to have the privilege. Between the boundary
+line of California and Nevada and the hundredth
+meridian, the new Union Pacific was to be the constructing
+company. On the hundredth meridian, at
+some point between the Republican River in Kansas
+and the Platte River in Nebraska, radiating lines
+were to advance to various eastern frontier points,
+somewhat after the fashion of Benton's bill of 1855.
+Thus the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western of
+Kansas was authorized to connect this point with
+the Missouri River, south of the mouth of the Kansas,
+with a branch to Atchison and St. Joseph in connection
+with the Hannibal and St. Joseph of Missouri.
+The Union Pacific itself was required to build two
+more connections; one to run from the hundredth
+meridian to some point on the west boundary of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>
+Iowa, to be fixed by the President of the United
+States, and another to Sioux City, Iowa, whenever
+a line from the east should reach that place.</p>
+
+<p>The aid offered for the construction of these lines
+was more generous than any previously provided by
+Congress. In the first place, the roads were entitled
+to a right-of-way four hundred feet wide, with permission
+to take material for construction from adjacent
+parts of the public domain. Secondly, the
+roads were to receive ten sections of land for each mile
+of track on the familiar alternate section principle.
+Finally, the United States was to lend to the roads
+bonds to the amount of $16,000 per mile, on the
+level, $32,000 in the foothills, and $48,000 in
+the mountains, to facilitate construction. If not
+completed and open by 1876, the whole line was to be
+forfeited to the United States. If completed, the
+loan of bonds was to be repaid out of subsequent
+earnings.</p>
+
+<p>The Central Pacific of California was prompt in its
+acceptance of the terms of the act of July 1, 1862.
+It proceeded with its organization, broke ground at
+Sacramento on February 22, 1863, and had a few
+miles of track in operation before the next year closed.
+But the Union Pacific was slow. "While fighting
+to retain eleven refractory states," wrote one irritated
+critic of the act, "the nation permitted itself
+to be cozened out of territory sufficient to form
+twelve new republics." Yet great as were the offered
+grants, eastern capital was reluctant to put life<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>
+into the new route across the plains. That it could
+ever pay, was seriously doubted. Chances for more
+certain and profitable investment in the East were
+frequent in the years of war-time prosperity.
+Although the railroad organized according to the
+terms of the law, subscribers to the stock of the Union
+Pacific were hard to find, and the road lay dormant
+for two more years until Congress revised its offer
+and increased its terms.</p>
+
+<p>In the session of 1863&ndash;1864 the general subject
+was again approached. Writes Davis, "The opinion
+was almost universal that additional legislation
+was needed to make the Act of 1862 effective, but the
+point where the limit of aid to patriotic capitalists
+should be set was difficult to determine." It was,
+and remained, the belief of the opponents of the bill
+now passed that "lobbyists, male and female, ...
+shysters and adventurers" had much to do with the
+success of the measure. In its most essential parts,
+the new bill of 1864 increased the degree of government
+aid to the companies. The land grant was
+doubled from ten sections per mile of track to
+twenty, and the road was allowed to borrow of the
+general public, on first mortgage bonds, money to the
+amount of the United States loan, which was reduced
+by a self-denying ordinance to the status of a
+second mortgage. With these added inducements,
+the Union Pacific was finally begun.</p>
+
+<p>The project at last under way in 1864&ndash;1865, as
+Davis graphically pictures it, "was thoroughly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span>
+saturated and fairly dripping with the elements of
+adventure and romance." But he overstates his
+case when he goes on to remark that, "Before the
+building of the Pacific railway most of the wide
+expanse of territory west of the Missouri was <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">terra
+incognita</i> to the mass of Americans." For twenty
+years the railway had been under agitation; during
+the whole period population had crossed the great
+desert in increasing thousands; new states had
+banked up around its circumference, east, west, and
+south, while Kansas had been thrust into its middle;
+new camps had dotted its interior. The great West
+was by no means unknown, but with the construction
+of the railway the American frontier entered upon
+its final phase.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR</span></h2>
+
+<p>That the fate of the outlying colonies of the
+United States should have aroused grave concerns
+at the beginning of the Civil War is not surprising.
+California and Oregon, Carson City, Denver, and
+the other mining camps were indeed on the same continent
+with the contending factions, but the degree
+of their isolation was so great that they might as well
+have been separated by an ocean. Their inhabitants
+were more mixed than those of any portion of
+the older states, while in several of the communities
+the parties were so evenly divided as to raise doubts
+of the loyalty of the whole. "The malignant secession
+element of this Territory," wrote Governor Gilpin
+of Colorado, in October, 1861, "has numbered
+7,500. It has been ably and secretly organized from
+November last, and requires extreme and extraordinary
+measures to meet and control its onslaught."
+At best, the western population was scanty and scattered
+over a frontier that still possessed its virgin
+character in most respects, though hovering at the
+edge of a period of transition. An English observer,
+hopeful for the worst, announced in the middle of the
+war that "When that 'late lamented institution,'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">226</a></span>
+the once United States, shall have passed away, and
+when, after this detestable and fratricidal war&mdash;the
+most disgraceful to human nature that civilization
+ever witnessed&mdash;the New World shall be restored
+to order and tranquility, our shikaris will not
+forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel
+suffices to transport them from fallow deer and
+pheasant shooting to the haunts of the bison and the
+grizzly bear. There is little chance of these animals
+being 'improved off' the Prairies, or even of their
+becoming rare during the lifetime of the present
+generation." The factors of most consequence in
+shaping the course of the great plains during the Civil
+War were those of mixed population, of ever present
+Indian danger, and of isolation. Though the plains
+had no effect upon the outcome of the war, the war
+furthered the work already under way of making
+known the West, clearing off the Indians, and preparing
+for future settlement.</p>
+
+<p>Like the rest of the United States the West was
+organized into military divisions for whose good order
+commanding officers were made responsible. At
+times the burden of military control fell chiefly
+upon the shoulders of territorial governors; again,
+special divisions were organized to meet particular
+needs, and generals of experience were detached from
+the main armies to direct movements in the West.</p>
+
+<p>Among the earliest of the episodes which drew
+attention to the western departments was the resignation
+of Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span>
+Department of the Pacific, and his rather spectacular
+flight across New Mexico, to join the confederate
+forces. From various directions, federal troops were
+sent to head him off, but he succeeded in evading all
+these and reaching safety at the Rio Grande by
+August 1. Here he could take an overland stage
+for the rest of his journey. The department which
+he abandoned included the whole West beyond
+the Rockies except Utah and present New Mexico.
+The country between the mountains and Missouri
+constituted the Department of the West. As the
+war advanced, new departments were created and
+boundaries were shifted at convenience. The Department
+of the Pacific remained an almost constant
+quantity throughout. A Department of the Northwest,
+covering the territory of the Sioux Indians,
+was created in September, 1862, for the better defence
+of Minnesota and Wisconsin. To this command
+Pope was assigned after his removal from the
+command of the Army of Virginia. Until the close
+of the war, when the great leaders were distributed
+and Sheridan received the Department of the Southwest,
+no detail of equal importance was made to a
+western department.</p>
+
+<p>The fighting on the plains was rarely important
+enough to receive the dignified name of battle.
+There were plenty of marching and reconnoitring,
+much police duty along the trails, occasional skirmishes
+with organized troops or guerrillas, aggressive
+campaigns against the Indians, and campaigns in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span>
+defence of the agricultural frontier. But the armies
+so occupied were small and inexperienced. Commonly
+regiments of local volunteers were used in
+these movements, or returned captives who were on
+parole to serve no more against the confederacy.
+Disciplined veterans were rarely to be found. As a
+consequence of the spasmodic character of the plains
+warfare and the inferior quality of the troops available,
+western movements were often hampered and
+occasionally made useless.</p>
+
+<p>The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important
+as any of the military operations on the plains. At
+the beginning of the war the confederate forces
+seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear
+the way for Johnston as he hurried east. The
+Tucson country was occupied about the same time,
+so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts
+were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the
+Rio Grande, with New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado
+threatened. In December General Henry Hopkins
+Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops
+in the upper Rio Grande, while Colonel E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S.
+Canby, from Fort Craig, organized the resistance
+against further extension of the confederate power.</p>
+
+<p>Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio
+Grande country, around Santa FĂŠ and Albuquerque,
+aroused federal apprehensions in the winter of 1862.
+Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened
+at the danger within his own territory, and scarcely
+needed the order which came from Fort Leavenworth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span>
+through General Hunter to reĂŤnforce Canby and
+look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility
+easily, drew upon the federal treasury for funds
+which had not been allowed him, and shortly had
+the first Colorado, and a part of the second Colorado
+volunteers marching south to join the defensive
+columns. It is difficult to define this march in terms
+applicable to movements of war. At least one soldier
+in the second Colorado took with him two children
+and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the
+regiment and praising the chivalry of the soldiers,
+apparently oblivious of the fact that it is not a
+soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's
+family. But with wife and children, and the degree
+of individualism and insubordination which these
+imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched south
+to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was
+sure.</p>
+
+<p>As Sibley pushed up the river, passing Fort Craig
+and brushing aside a small force at Valverde, the
+Colorado forces reached Fort Union. Between
+Fort Union and Albuquerque, which Sibley entered
+easily, was the turning-point in the campaign. On
+March 26, 1862, Major J.&nbsp;M. Chivington had a successful
+skirmish at Johnson's ranch in Apache CaĂąon,
+about twenty miles southeast of Santa FĂŠ. Two
+days later, at Pigeon's ranch, a more decisive check
+was given to the confederates, but Colonel John P.
+Slough, senior volunteer in command, fell back upon
+Fort Union after the engagement, while the confederates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span>
+were left free to occupy Santa FĂŠ. A few days
+later Slough was deposed in the Colorado regiment,
+Chivington made colonel, and the advance on Santa
+FĂŠ begun again. Sibley, now caught between Canby
+advancing from Fort Craig and Chivington coming
+through Apache CaĂąon from Fort Union, evacuated
+Santa FĂŠ on April 7, falling back to Albuquerque.
+The union troops, taking Santa FĂŠ on April 12, hurried
+down the Rio Grande after Sibley in his final
+retreat. New Mexico was saved, and its security
+brought tranquillity to Colorado. The Colorado
+volunteers were back in Denver for the winter of
+1862&ndash;1863, but Gilpin, whose vigorous and independent
+support had made possible their campaign, had
+been dismissed from his post as governor.</p>
+
+<p>Along the frontier of struggle campaigns of this
+sort occurred from time to time, receiving little attention
+from the authorities who were directing
+weightier movements at the centre. Less formal
+than these, and more provocative of bitter feeling,
+were the attacks of guerrillas along the central frontier,&mdash;chiefly
+the Missouri border and eastern
+Kansas. Here the passions of the struggle for Kansas
+had not entirely cooled down, southern sympathizers
+were easily found, and communities divided
+among themselves were the more intense in their
+animosities.</p>
+
+<p>The Department of Kansas, where the most aggravated
+of these guerrilla conflicts occurred, was
+organized in November, 1861, under Major-general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span>
+Hunter. From his headquarters at Leavenworth
+the commanding officer directed the affairs of Kansas,
+Nebraska, Dakota, Colorado, and "the Indian Territory
+west of Arkansas." The department was often
+shifted and reshaped to meet the needs of the frontier.
+A year later the Department of the Northwest
+was cut away from it, after the Sioux outbreak, its
+own name was changed to Missouri, and the states
+of Missouri and Arkansas were added to it. Still
+later it was modified again. But here throughout
+the war continued the troubles produced by the
+mixture of frontier and farm-lands, partisan whites
+and Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Bushwhacking, a composite of private murder
+and public attack, troubled the Kansas frontier from
+an early period of the war. It was easily aroused
+because of public animosities, and difficult to suppress
+because its participating parties retired quickly
+into the body of peace-professing citizens. In it,
+asserted General Order No. 13, of June 26, 1862,
+"rebel fiends lay in wait for their prey to assassinate
+Union soldiers and citizens; it is therefore ... especially
+directed that whenever any of this class of
+offenders shall be captured, they shall not be treated
+as prisoners of war but be summarily tried by drumhead
+court-martial, and if proved guilty, be executed
+... on the spot."</p>
+
+<p>In August, 1863, occurred Quantrill's notable raid
+into Kansas to terrify the border which was already
+harassed enough. The old border hatred between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span>
+Kansas and Missouri had been intensified by the
+"murders, robberies, and arson" which had characterized
+the irregular warfare carried on by both
+sides. In western Missouri, loyal unionists were
+not safe outside the federal lines; here the guerrillas
+came and went at pleasure; and here, about August
+18, Quantrill assembled a band of some three hundred
+men for a foray into Kansas. On the 20th he
+entered Kansas, heading at once for Lawrence,
+which he surprised on the 21st. Although the city
+arsenal contained plenty of arms and the town
+could have mustered 500 men on "half an hour's
+notice," the guerrilla band met no resistance. It
+"robbed most of the stores and banks, and burned
+one hundred and eighty-five buildings, including one-fourth
+of the private residences and nearly all of the
+business houses of the town, and, with circumstances
+of the most fiendish atrocity, murdered 140 unarmed
+men." The retreat of Quantrill was followed by a
+vigorous federal pursuit and a partial devastation of
+the adjacent Missouri counties. Kansas, indignant,
+was in arms at once, protesting directly to President
+Lincoln of the "imbecility and incapacity" of Major-general
+John M. Schofield, commanding the Department
+of the Missouri, "whose policy has opened
+Kansas to invasion and butchery." Instead of carrying
+out an unimpeded pursuit of the guerrillas,
+Schofield had to devote his strength to keeping the
+state of Kansas from declaring war against and
+wreaking indiscriminate vengeance upon the state<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span>
+of Missouri. A year after Quantrill's raid came
+Price's Missouri expedition, with its pitched battles
+near Kansas City and Westport, and its pursuit
+through southern Missouri, where confederate sympathizers
+and the partisan politics of this presidential
+year made punitive campaigns anything but
+easy.</p>
+
+<p>Carleton's march into New Mexico has already
+been described in connection with the mining boom
+of Arizona. The silver mines of the Santa Cruz
+Valley had drawn American population to Tubac and
+Tucson several years before the war; while the confederate
+successes in the upper Rio Grande in the
+summer of 1861 had compelled federal evacuation of
+the district. Colonel E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S. Canby devoted the
+small force at his command to regaining the country
+around Albuquerque and Santa FĂŠ, while the relief
+of the forts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado
+was intrusted to Carleton's California Column.
+After May, 1862, Carleton was firmly established in
+Tucson, and later he was given command of the whole
+Department of New Mexico. Of fighting with the
+confederates there was almost none. He prosecuted,
+instead, Apache and Navaho wars, and exploited the
+new gold fields which were now found. In much of
+the West, as in his New Mexico, occasional ebullitions
+of confederate sympathizers occurred, but the
+military task of the commanders was easy.</p>
+
+<p>The military problem of the plains was one of
+police, with the extinction of guerrilla warfare and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span>
+the pacification of Indians as its chief elements.
+The careers of Canby, Carleton, and Gilpin indicate
+the nature of the western strategic warfare, Schofield's
+illustrates that of guerrilla fighting, the Minnesota
+outbreak that of the Indian relations.</p>
+
+<p>In the Northwest, where the agricultural expansion
+of the fifties had worked so great changes, the
+pressure on the tribes had steadily increased. In
+1851 the Sioux bands had ceded most of their territory
+in Minnesota, and had agreed upon a reduced
+reserve in the St. Peter's, or Minnesota, Valley. But
+the terms of this treaty had been delayed in enforcement,
+while bad management on the part of the
+United States and the habitual frontier disregard of
+Indian rights created tense feelings, which might
+break loose at any time. No single grievance of the
+Indians caused more trouble than that over traders'
+claims. The improvident savages bought largely
+of the traders, on credit, at extortionate prices. The
+traders could afford the risk because when treaties
+of cession were made, their influence was generally
+able to get inserted in the treaty a clause for satisfying
+claims against individuals out of the tribal funds
+before these were handed over to the savages. The
+memory of the savage was short, and when he found
+that his allowance, the price for his lands, had gone
+into the traders' pockets, he could not realize that it
+had gone to pay his debts, but felt, somehow, defrauded.
+The answer would have been to prevent
+trade with the Indians on credit. But the traders'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">235</a></span>
+influence at Washington was great. It would be an
+interesting study to investigate the connection between
+traders' bills and agitation for new cessions,
+since the latter generally meant satisfaction of the
+former.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Sioux there were factional feelings that
+had aroused the apprehensions of their agents before
+the war broke out. The "blanket" Indians continually
+mocked at the "farmers" who took kindly
+to the efforts of the United States for their agricultural
+civilization. There was civil strife among the
+progressives and irreconcilables which made it
+difficult to say what was the disposition of the whole
+nation. The condition was so unstable that an accidental
+row, culminating in the murder of five whites
+at Acton, in Meeker County, brought down the most
+serious Indian massacre the frontier had yet seen.</p>
+
+<p>There was no more occasion for a general uprising
+in 1862 than there had been for several years. The
+wiser Indians realized the futility of such a course.
+Yet Little Crow, inclined though he was to peace,
+fell in with the radicals as the tribe discussed their
+policy; and he determined that since a massacre
+had been commenced they had best make it as thorough
+as possible. Retribution was certain whether
+they continued war or not, and the farmer Indians
+were unlikely to be distinguished from the blankets
+by angry frontiersmen. The attack fell first upon the
+stores at the lower agency, twenty miles above Fort
+Ridgely, whence refugee whites fled to Fort Ridgely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>
+with news of the outbreak. All day, on the 18th of
+August, massacres occurred along the St. Peter's,
+from near New Ulm to the Yellow Medicine River.
+The incidents of Indian war were all there, in surprise,
+slaughter of women and children, mutilation
+and torture.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, Tuesday the 19th, the increasing
+bands fell upon the rambling village of New Ulm,
+twenty-eight miles above Mankato, where fugitives
+had gathered and where Judge Charles E. Flandrau
+hastily organized a garrison for defence. He had
+been at St. Peter's when the news arrived, and had
+led a relief band through the drenching rain, reaching
+New Ulm in the evening. On Wednesday afternoon
+Little Crow, his band still growing&mdash;the Sioux
+could muster some 1300 warriors&mdash;surprised Fort
+Ridgely, though with no success. On Thursday he
+renewed the attack with a force now dwindling because
+of individual plundering expeditions which drew
+his men to various parts of the neighboring country.
+On Friday he attacked once more.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the
+river again to renew his fight upon New Ulm, which,
+unmolested since Tuesday, had been increasing its
+defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites
+in a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen,
+cool and determined, of unerring aim;
+but most were German settlers, recently arrived, and
+often terrified by their new experiences. During
+the week of horrors the depredations covered the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span>
+Minnesota frontier and lapped over into Iowa and
+Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated,
+or led captive into the wilderness, were common.
+Stories of those who survived these dangers form a
+large part of the local literature of this section of the
+Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become
+so desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the
+town and led its whole remaining population to safety
+at Mankato.</p>
+
+<p>Long before the week of suffering was over, aid
+had been started to the harassed frontier. Governor
+Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to Mendota, and there
+organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota
+Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from
+him of Rio Grande fame, commanded the column
+and reached St. Peter's with his advance on Friday.
+By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the
+panic and restore peace and repopulate the deserted
+country. He was now joined by Ignatius Donnelly,
+Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater speed.
+The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th,
+they had reached Fort Ridgely, passing through country
+"abandoned by the inhabitants; the houses, in
+many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture
+undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors
+or through the cultivated fields." The country had
+been settled up to the very edge of the Fort Ridgely
+reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only partially
+devastated. Donnelly commented in his report
+upon the prayer-books and old German trunks of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">238</a></span>
+"Johann Schwartz," strewn upon the ground in one
+place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored,
+and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent,
+Thomas J. Galbraith, who was at Fort Ridgely during
+the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737 whites
+were known to have been massacred.</p>
+
+<p>Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at
+first to reconnoitre and bury the dead, then to follow
+the Indians and rescue the captives. More than once
+the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off
+prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify
+or prevent punishment for the original outbreak.
+Early in September there were pitched battles at
+Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake.
+At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was
+able not only to defeat the tribes and take nearly
+2000 prisoners, but to release 227 women and children,
+who had been the "prime object," from whose
+"pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The
+Indians were handed over under arrest to Agent
+Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower Agency,
+and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.</p>
+
+<p>The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's
+massacre at Spirit Lake was still remembered
+and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in
+battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders
+escaped. In 1863, Pope, who had been called to
+command a new department in the Northwest, organized
+a general campaign against the tribes, sending
+Sibley up the Minnesota River to drive them west,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span>
+and Sully up the Missouri to head them off, planning
+to catch and crush them between the two columns.
+The man&oelig;uvre was badly timed and failed, while
+punishment drifted gradually into a prolonged war.</p>
+
+<p>Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with
+judicial irony, on the farmer Sioux who had been
+drawn reluctantly into the struggle. At the Lower
+Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while
+more than four hundred of their men were singled
+out for trial for murder. Nothing is more significant
+of the anomalous nature of the Indian relation than
+this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The United
+States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt
+free to punish individuals as though they were citizens
+of the United States. The military commission
+sat at Redwood for several weeks with the missionary
+and linguist, Rev. S.&nbsp;R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand
+Jury of the court." Three hundred and three were
+condemned to death by the court for murder, rape,
+and arson, their condemnation starting a wave of
+protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner,
+W.&nbsp;P. Dole. To the indignation of the
+frontier, naturally revengeful and never impartial,
+President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the case
+of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of
+them were hanged on a single scaffold at Mankato
+on December 26, 1862. The innocent and uncondemned
+were punished also, when Congress confiscated
+all their Minnesota reserve in 1863, and
+transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span>
+Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found
+for them.</p>
+
+<p>All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota
+to the Rio Grande, were problems that drew the West
+into the movement of the Civil War. The situation
+was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere
+did the Indians suffer between the millstones as they
+did in the Indian Territory, where the Cherokee and
+Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and Seminole,
+had been colonized in the years of creation of the
+Indian frontier. For a generation these nations
+had resided in comparative peace and advancing
+civilization, but they were undone by causes which
+they could not control.</p>
+
+<p>The confederacy was no sooner organized than its
+commissioners demanded of the tribes colonized west
+of Arkansas their allegiance and support, professing
+to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the
+United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized
+and better, this demand raised difficulties which
+would have been a strain on any diplomacy. If
+they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate
+forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and
+already coveting their lands, would cut them to pieces.
+If they adhered to the confederacy and the latter
+lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the
+United States. Yet they were too weak to stand
+alone and were forced to go one way or other. The
+resulting policy was temporizing and brought to
+them a large measure of punishment from both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span>
+sides, and the heavy subsequent wrath of the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p>John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation,
+tried to maintain his neutrality at the commencement
+of the conflict, but the fiction of Indian nationality
+was too slight for his effort to be successful. During
+the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against
+the confederate control to which he succumbed by
+August, when confederate troops had overrun most
+of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents had
+surrendered United States property to the enemy.
+The war which followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts
+of Kansas, with the addition of the Indian element.</p>
+
+<p>By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate
+control. When the Indian Territory forts&mdash;Gibson,
+Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb&mdash;fell
+into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their
+homes and sought protection within the United
+States lines. Almost the only way to fight a war in
+which a population is generally divided, is by means
+of depopulation and concentration. Along the
+Verdigris River, in southeast Kansas, these Indian
+refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number of
+6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as
+best he could, and organized them to fight when that
+was possible. With the return of federal success in
+the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas
+during the next two years, the natives began to
+return to their homes. But the relation of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span>
+tribes to the United States was tainted. The compulsory
+cession of their western lands which came at
+the close of the conflict belongs to a later chapter and
+the beginnings of Oklahoma. Here, as elsewhere,
+the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.</p>
+
+<p>The great plains and the Far West were only the
+outskirts of the Civil War. At no time did they shape
+its course, for the Civil War was, from their point of
+view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East,
+and merely an episode in the grander development
+of the United States. The way is opening ever
+wider for the historian who shall see in this material
+development and progress of civilization the central
+thread of American history, and in accordance with
+it, retail the story. But during the years of sectional
+strife the West was occasionally connected with the
+struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly
+into a period in which it came to be the admitted
+centre of interest. The last stand of the Indians
+against the onrush of settlement is a warfare with an
+identity of its own.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CHEYENNE WAR</span></h2>
+
+<p>It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous
+restlessness of the Indians during and after the
+Civil War to the evil machinations of the Confederacy.
+It has been plausible to charge that agents of the
+South passed among the tribes, inciting them to
+outbreak by pointing out the preoccupation of the
+United States and the defencelessness of the frontier.
+Popular narratives often repeat this charge when
+dealing with the wars and depredations, whether
+among the Sioux of Minnesota, or the Northwest
+tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians
+of the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus
+to harass the enemy it is not improbable that it
+would have done it. It is not impossible that it
+actually did it. But at least the charge has not been
+proved. No one has produced direct evidence to
+show the existence of agents or their connection with
+the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general
+belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs
+have admitted, regretfully, their inability to add
+incitement of Indians to the charges against the
+South. If such a cause were needed to explain the
+increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span>
+while to search further in the hope of establishing it,
+but nothing occurred in these wars which cannot be
+accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and
+well authenticated.</p>
+
+<p>Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly
+on friendly terms with the United States.
+Occasional wars broke this friendship, and frequent
+massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another,
+for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the
+frontiersman was reckless and inconsiderate. But
+the outbreaks were exceptional, they were easily
+put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By
+1865 this condition had changed over most of the
+West. Warfare had become systematic and widely
+spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks
+in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or
+at least similar reactions from similar provocations.
+From 1865, for nearly five years, these wars continued
+with only intervals of truce, or professed peace;
+while during a long period after 1870, when most of
+the tribes were suppressed and well policed, upheavals
+occurred which were clearly to be connected with
+the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from
+peace to war has caused many to charge it to the
+South. It is, however, connected with the culmination
+of the westward movement, which more than explains
+it.</p>
+
+<p>For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement
+of the events before 1861 is needed. By 1840 the
+agricultural frontier of the United States had reached<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span>
+the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes,
+with plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains.
+In the generation following appeared the heavy
+traffic along the overland trails, the advance of the
+frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific
+railway surveys. Each of these served to compress
+the Indians and restrict their range. Accompanying
+these came curtailing of reserves, shifting of residences
+to less desirable grounds, and individual
+maltreatment to a degree which makes marvellous
+the incapacity, weakness, and patience of the Indians.
+Occasionally they struggled, but always they
+lost. The scalped and mutilated pioneer, with
+his haystacks burning and his stock run off, is a
+vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic
+than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable,
+and moving to let the white man in.</p>
+
+<p>The necessary results of white encroachment were
+destruction of game and education of the Indian to
+the luxuries and vices of the white man. At a time
+when starvation was threatening because of the
+disappearance of the buffalo and other food animals,
+he became aware of the superior diet of the whites
+and the ease with which robbery could be accomplished.
+In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier
+than ever. The railway surveys reached nearly
+every corner of the Indian Country. In the next
+few years came the prospectors who started hundreds
+of mining camps beyond the line of settlements,
+while the engineers began to stick the advancing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span>
+heads of railways out from the Missouri frontier and
+into the buffalo range.</p>
+
+<p>Even the Indian could see the approaching end.
+It needed no confederate envoy to assure him that
+the United States could be attacked. His own
+hunger and the white peril were persuading him to
+defend his hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the
+widespread Indian wars of the later sixties, uniformity
+of action came without much previous
+coĂśperation. A general Indian league against the
+whites was never raised. The general war, upon
+dissection and analysis, breaks up into a multitude
+of little wars, each having its own particular causes,
+which, in many instances, if the word of the most
+expert frontiersmen is to be believed, ran back into
+cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.</p>
+
+<p>The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of
+the general wars, with causes rising from the treaties
+of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux in 1851. The
+plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly
+stated in this year. "We are constrained to say,"
+wrote the men who made these treaties, "that in our
+opinion <i>the time has come</i> when the extinguishment
+of the Indian title to this region should no longer be
+delayed, if government would not have the mortification,
+on the one hand, of confessing its inability to
+protect the Indian from encroachment; or be subject
+to the painful necessity, upon the other, of
+ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a
+land which they desire to make their homes, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">247</a></span>
+which, without their occupancy and labor, will be
+comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties
+concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie
+were equally the fountains of discontent which
+boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at
+last to one of the most horrible incidents of the
+plains war.</p>
+
+<p>In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt
+to partition the plains among the tribes was made.
+The lines agreed upon recognized existing conditions
+to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in consideration
+of which the savages agreed to stay at
+peace, to allow free migration along the trails, and
+to keep within their boundaries. The Sioux here
+agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The
+Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as
+lying between the Platte and the Arkansas, the mountains
+and, roughly, the hundred and first meridian.
+For ten years after these treaties the last-named
+tribes kept the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon
+settlers or emigrants. They even allowed the Senate
+in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the term of
+the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.</p>
+
+<p>In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians
+lay off the beaten tracks and apart from contact with
+the whites. Their home was in the triangle between
+the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them
+that offered almost insuperable obstacles to those
+who would cross the continent through their domain.
+The Gunnison railroad survey, which was run along<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">248</a></span>
+the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa
+Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range
+at this point. Accordingly, a decade which built up
+Oregon and California made little impression on this
+section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry
+Creek. Then came the deluge.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on
+crossed the plains to the Pike's Peak country in
+1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst of the
+Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than
+the right of transit over these lands," admitted the
+Peace Commissioners in 1868. Yet they "took
+possession of them for the purpose of mining, and,
+against the protest of the Indians, founded cities,
+established farms, and opened roads. Before 1861
+the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven from
+the mountain regions down upon the waters of
+the Arkansas, and were becoming sullen and discontented
+because of this violation of their rights."
+The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in
+their possession, pledging the United States to prevent
+depredations by the whites, but here, as in most
+similar cases, the guarantees had no weight in the
+face of a population under way. The Indians were
+brushed aside, the United States agents made no
+real attempts to enforce the treaty, and within a few
+months the settlers were demanding protection
+against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw
+their former homes and hunting grounds overrun by a
+greedy population, thirsting for gold," continued the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span>
+Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east
+to the plains, and soon found themselves the objects
+of jealousy and hatred. They too must go. The
+presence of the injured is too often painful to the
+wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of
+guilt. It now became apparent that what had been
+taken by force must be retained by the ravisher,
+and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a
+treaty consecrating the act."</p>
+
+<p>Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho
+and Cheyenne strove to defend their lands and to
+drive out the intruders, a war in which the United
+States ought to have coĂśperated with the Indians,
+a treaty of cession followed. On February 18, 1861,
+at Fort Wise, which was the new name for Bent's
+old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed
+by which these tribes gave up much of the great range
+reserved for them in 1851, and accepted in its place,
+with what were believed to be greater guarantees, a
+triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by
+Sand Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by
+the Arkansas and Purgatory rivers; and extending
+west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand
+Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the
+Ute on the other side of the range, not long after
+this, are another part of the same story of mining
+aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed
+to remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from
+under the feet of the restless prospectors. For years
+they had kept the peace in the face of great provocation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span>
+For three years more they put up with white
+encroachment before their war began.</p>
+
+<p>The Colorado miners, like those of the other boom
+camps, had been loud in their demand for transportation.
+To satisfy this, overland traffic had been
+organized on a large scale, while during 1862 the
+stage and freight service of the plains fell under the
+control of Ben Holladay. Early in August, 1864,
+Holladay was nearly driven out of business. About
+the 10th of the month, simultaneous attacks were
+made along his mail line from the Little Blue River
+to within eighty miles of Denver. In the forays,
+stations were sacked and burned, isolated farms were
+wiped out, small parties on the trails were destroyed.
+At Ewbank Station, a family of ten "was massacred
+and scalped, and one of the females, besides having
+suffered the latter inhuman barbarity, was pinned to
+the earth by a stake thrust through her person, in a
+most revolting manner; ... at Plum Creek ...
+nine persons were murdered, their train, consisting
+of ten wagons, burnt, and two women and two children
+captured.... The old Indian traders ...
+and the settlers ... abandoned their habitations."
+For a distance of 370 miles, Holladay's general superintendent
+declared, every ranch but one was "deserted
+and the property abandoned to the Indians."</p>
+
+<p>Fifteen years after the destruction of his stations,
+Holladay was still claiming damages from the United
+States and presenting affidavits from his men which
+revealed the character of the attacks. George H.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span>
+Carlyle told how his stage was chased by Indians for
+twenty miles, how he had helped to bury the mutilated
+bodies of the Plum Creek victims, and how
+within a week the route had to be abandoned, and
+every ranch from Fort Kearney to Julesburg was
+deserted. The division agent told how property
+had been lost in the hurried flight. To save some of
+the stock, fodder and supplies had to be sacrificed,&mdash;hundreds
+of sacks of corn, scores of tons of hay,
+besides the buildings and their equipment. Nowhere
+were the Indians overbold in their attacks. In small
+bands they waited their time to take the stations by
+surprise. Well-armed coaches might expect to get
+through with little more than a few random shots,
+but along the hilltops they could often see the savages
+waiting in safety for them to pass. Indian warfare
+was not one of organized bodies and formal man&oelig;uvres.
+Only when cornered did the Indian
+stand to fight. But in wild, unexpected descents
+the tribes fell upon the lines of communication,
+reducing the frontier to an abject terror overnight.</p>
+
+<p>The destruction of the stage route was not the first,
+though it was the most general hostility which
+marked the commencement of a new Indian war.
+Since the spring of 1864 events had occurred which
+in the absence of a more rigorous control than the
+Indian Department possessed, were likely to lead to
+trouble. The Cheyenne had been dissatisfied with
+the Fort Wise treaty ever since its conclusion. The
+Sioux were carrying on a prolonged war. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">252</a></span>
+Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were ready to be
+started on the war-path. It was the old story of
+too much compression and isolated attacks going
+unpunished. Whatever the merits of an original
+controversy, the only way to keep the savages under
+control was to make fair retribution follow close upon
+the commission of an outrage. But the punishment
+needed to be fair.</p>
+
+<p>In April, 1864, a ranchman named Ripley came
+into one of the camps on the South Platte and declared
+that some Indians had stolen his stock. Perhaps
+his statement was true; but it must be remembered
+that the ranchman whose stock strayed away
+was prone to charge theft against the Indians, and
+that there is only Ripley's own word that he ever
+had any stock. Captain Sanborn, commanding, sent
+out a troop of cavalry to recover the animals. They
+came upon some Indians with horses which Ripley
+claimed as his, and in an attempt to disarm them, a
+fight occurred in which the troop was driven off.
+Their lieutenant thought the Indians were Cheyenne.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks after this, Major Jacob Downing,
+who had been in Camp Sanborn inspecting troops,
+came into Denver and got from Colonel Chivington
+about forty men, with whom "to go against the
+Indians." Downing later swore that he found the
+Cheyenne village at Cedar Bluffs. "We commenced
+shooting; I ordered the men to commence killing
+them.... They lost ... some twenty-six killed
+and thirty wounded.... I burnt up their lodges and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span>
+everything I could get hold of.... We captured
+about one hundred head of stock, which was distributed
+among the boys."</p>
+
+<p>On the 12th of June, a family living on Box Elder
+Creek, twenty miles east of Denver, was murdered
+by the Indians. Hungate, his wife, and two children
+were killed, the house burned, and fifty or sixty head
+of stock run off. When the "scalped and horribly
+mangled bodies" were brought into Denver, the
+population, already uneasy, was thrown into panic by
+this appearance of danger so close to the city. Governor
+Evans began at once to organize the militia for
+home defence and to appeal to Washington for help.</p>
+
+<p>By the time of the attack upon the stage line it
+was clear that an Indian war existed, involving in
+varying degrees parts of the Arapaho, Cheyenne,
+Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the
+causes which provoked it were considerably in doubt.
+On the frontier there was no hesitation in charging
+it all to the innate savagery of the tribes. Governor
+Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the
+Indians might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a
+general peace on the plains, until after a severe
+chastisement of the Indians for these depredations."</p>
+
+<p>In restoring tranquillity the frontier had to rely
+largely upon its own resources. Its own Second
+Colorado was away doing duty in the Missouri campaign,
+while the eastern military situation presented
+no probability of troops being available to help out
+the West. Colonel Chivington and Governor John<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span>
+Evans, with the long-distance aid of General Curtis,
+were forced to make their own plans and execute
+them.</p>
+
+<p>As early as June, Governor Evans began his corrective
+measures, appealing first to Washington for
+permission to raise extra troops, and then endeavoring
+to separate the friendly and warlike Indians in
+order that the former "should not fall victims to the
+impossibility of soldiers discriminating between them
+and the hostile, upon whom they must, to do any
+good, inflict the most severe chastisement." To
+this end, and with the consent of the Indian Department,
+he sent out a proclamation, addressed to "the
+friendly Indians of the Plains," directing them to
+keep away from those who were at war, and as evidence
+of friendship to congregate around the agencies
+for safety. Forts Lyons, Laramie, Larned, and
+Camp Collins were designated as concentration
+points for the several tribes. "None but those who
+intend to be friendly with the whites must come to
+these places. The families of those who have gone
+to war with the whites must be kept away from
+among the friendly Indians. The war on hostile
+Indians will be continued until they are all effectually
+subdued." The Indians, frankly at war, paid no
+attention to this invitation. Two small bands only
+sought the cover of the agencies, and with their
+exception, so Governor Evans reported on October
+15, the proclamation "met no response from any of
+the Indians of the plains."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">255</a></span>
+The war parties became larger and more general
+as the summer advanced, driving whites off the plains
+between the two trails for several hundred miles. But
+as fall approached, the tribes as usual sought peace.
+The Indians' time for war was summer. Without
+supplies, they were unable to fight through the winter,
+so that autumn brought them into a mood well
+disposed to peace, reservations, and government
+rations. Major Colley, the agent on the Sand Creek
+reserve at Fort Lyon, received an overture early in
+September. In a letter written for them on August
+29, by a trader, Black Kettle, of the Cheyenne, and
+other chiefs declared their readiness to make a peace
+if all the tribes were included in it. As an olive
+branch, they offered to give up seven white prisoners.
+They admitted that five war parties, three Cheyenne
+and two Arapaho, were yet in the field.</p>
+
+<p>Upon receipt of Black Kettle's letter, Major E.
+W. Wynkoop, military commander at Fort Lyon,
+marched with 130 men to the Cheyenne camp at
+Bend of Timbers, some eighty miles northeast of
+Fort Lyons. Here he found "from six to eight
+hundred Indian warriors drawn up in line of battle
+and prepared to fight." He avoided fighting, demanded
+and received the prisoners, and held a council
+with the chiefs. Here he told them that he had
+no authority to conclude a peace, but offered to conduct
+a group of chiefs to Denver, for a conference
+with Governor Evans.</p>
+
+<p>On September 28, Governor Evans held a council<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span>
+with the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs brought in
+by Major Wynkoop; Black Kettle and White Antelope
+being the most important. Black Kettle
+opened the conference with an appeal to the governor
+in which he alluded to his delivery of the prisoners
+and Wynkoop's invitation to visit Denver. "We
+have come with our eyes shut, following his handful
+of men, like coming through the fire," Black Kettle
+went on. "All we ask is that we may have peace
+with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand.
+You are our father. We have been travelling
+through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since
+the war began. These braves who are with me are
+all willing to do what I say. We want to take good
+tidings home to our people, that they may sleep in
+peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers
+here to understand that we are for peace, and
+that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken
+by them for enemies." To him Governor
+Evans responded that this submission was a long time
+coming, and that the nation had gone to war, refusing
+to listen to overtures of peace. This Black Kettle
+admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"So far as making a treaty now is concerned,"
+continued Governor Evans, "we are in no condition
+to do it.... You, so far, have had the advantage; but
+the time is near at hand when the plains will swarm
+with United States soldiers. I have learned that
+you understand that as the whites are at war among
+themselves, you think you can now drive the whites<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span>
+from this country; but this reliance is false. The
+Great Father at Washington has men enough to drive
+all the Indians off the plains, and whip the rebels
+at the same time. Now the war with the whites is
+nearly through, and the Great Father will not
+know what to do with all his soldiers, except to send
+them after the Indians on the plains. My proposition
+to the friendly Indians has gone out; [I] shall be
+glad to have them all come in under it. I have no
+new proposition to make. Another reason that I am
+not in a condition to make a treaty is that war is
+begun, and the power to make a treaty of peace has
+passed to the great war chief." He further counselled
+them to make terms with the military authorities
+before they could hope to talk of peace. No prospect
+of an immediate treaty was given to the chiefs.
+Evans disclaimed further powers, and Colonel Chivington
+closed the council, saying: "I am not a big
+war chief, but all the soldiers in this country are at my
+command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians
+is to fight them until they lay down their arms
+and submit." The same evening came a despatch
+from Major-general Curtis, at Fort Leavenworth,
+confirming the non-committal attitude of Evans and
+Chivington: "I want no peace till the Indians
+suffer more.... I fear Agent of the Interior Department
+will be ready to make presents too soon....
+No peace must be made without my directions."</p>
+
+<p>The chiefs were escorted home without their peace
+or any promise of it, Governor Evans believing that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span>
+the great body of the tribes was still hostile, and that
+a decisive winter campaign was needed to destroy
+their lingering notion that the whites might be driven
+from the plains. Black Kettle had been advised at
+the council to surrender to the soldiers, Major Wynkoop
+at Fort Lyon being mentioned as most available.
+Many of his tribe acted on the suggestion, so
+that on October 20 Agent Colley, their constant
+friend, reported that "nearly all the Arapahoes are
+now encamped near this place and desire to remain
+friendly, and make reparation for the damages
+committed by them."</p>
+
+<p>The Indians unquestionably were ready to make
+peace after their fashion and according to their
+ability. There is no evidence that they were reconciled
+to their defeat, but long experience had accustomed
+them to fighting in the summer and drawing
+rations as peaceful in the winter. The young
+men, in part, were still upon the war-path, but the
+tribes and the head chiefs were anxious to go upon a
+winter basis. Their interpreter who had attended
+the conference swore that they left Denver, "perfectly
+contented, deeming that the matter was settled,"
+that upon their return to Fort Lyon, Major
+Wynkoop gave them permission to bring their families
+in under the fort where he could watch them
+better; and that "accordingly the chiefs went after
+their families and villages and brought them in,
+... satisfied that they were in perfect security and
+safety."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">259</a></span>
+While the Indians gathered around the fort,
+Major Wynkoop sent to General Curtis for advice
+and orders respecting them. Before the orders arrived,
+however, he was relieved from command and
+Major Scott J. Anthony, of the First Colorado Cavalry,
+was detailed in his place. After holding a conference
+with the Indians and Anthony, in which
+the latter renewed the permission for the bands to
+camp near the fort, he left Fort Lyons on November
+26. Anthony meanwhile had become convinced that
+he was exceeding his authority. First he disarmed
+the savages, receiving only a few old and worn-out
+weapons. Then he returned these and ordered the
+Indians away from Fort Lyons. They moved forty
+miles away and encamped on Sand Creek.</p>
+
+<p>The Colorado authorities had no idea of calling it
+a peace. Governor Evans had scolded Wynkoop
+for bringing the chiefs in to Denver. He had received
+special permission and had raised a hundred-day
+regiment for an Indian campaign. If he should
+now make peace, Washington would think he had
+misrepresented the situation and put the government
+to needless expense. "What shall I do with
+the third regiment, if I make peace?" he demanded
+of Wynkoop. They were "raised to kill Indians,
+and they must kill Indians."</p>
+
+<p>Acting on the supposition that the war was still on,
+Colonel Chivington led the Third Colorado, and a
+part of the First Colorado Cavalry, from 900 to 1000
+strong, to Fort Lyons in November, arriving two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span>
+days after Wynkoop departed. He picketed the
+fort, to prevent the news of his arrival from getting
+out, and conferred on the situation with Major
+Anthony, who, swore Major Downing, wished he
+would attack the Sand Creek camp and would have
+done so himself had he possessed troops enough.
+Three days before, Anthony had given a present to
+Black Kettle out of his own pocket. As the result of
+the council of war, Chivington started from Fort
+Lyon at nine o'clock, on the night of the 28th.</p>
+
+<p>About daybreak on November 29 Chivington's
+force reached the Cheyenne village on Sand Creek,
+where Black Kettle, White Antelope, and some
+500 of their band, mostly women and children,
+were encamped in the belief that they had made
+their peace. They had received no pledge of this,
+but past practice explained their confidence. The
+village was surrounded by troops who began to fire
+as soon as it was light. "We killed as many as we
+could; the village was destroyed and burned," declared
+Downing, who further professed, "I think
+and earnestly believe the Indians to be an obstacle to
+civilization, and should be exterminated." White
+Antelope was killed at the first attack, refusing to
+leave the field, stating that it was the fault of Black
+Kettle, others, and himself that occasioned the massacre,
+and that he would die. Black Kettle, refusing
+to leave the field, was carried off by his young men.
+The latter had raised an American flag and a white
+flag in his effort to stop the fight.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span>
+The firing began, swore interpreter Smith, on
+the northeast side of Sand Creek, near Black Kettle's
+lodge. Driven thence, the disorderly horde of
+savages retreated to War Bonnet's lodge at the upper
+end of the village, some few of them armed but most
+making no resistance. Up the dry bottom of Sand
+Creek they ran, with the troops in wild charge close
+behind. In the hollows of the banks they sought
+refuge, but the soldiers dragged them out, killing
+seventy or eighty with the worst barbarities Smith
+had seen: "All manner of depredations were inflicted
+on their persons; they were scalped, their
+brains knocked out; the men used their knives,
+ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked
+them in the head with their guns, beat their brains
+out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the
+word." The affidavits of soldiers engaged in the
+attack are printed in the government documents.
+They are too disgusting to be more than referred to
+elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>Here at last was the culmination of the plains war
+of 1864 in the "Chivington massacre," which has been
+the centre of bitter controversy ever since its heroes
+marched into Denver with their bloody trophies. It
+was without question Indian fighting at its worst, yet
+it was successful in that the Indian hostilities stopped
+and a new treaty was easily obtained by the whites
+in 1865. The East denounced Chivington, and the
+Indian Commissioner described the event in 1865 as
+a butchery "in cold blood by troops in the service of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">262</a></span>
+the United States." "Comment cannot magnify
+the horror," said the <i>Nation</i>. The heart of the question
+had to do with the matter of good faith. At no
+time did the military or Colorado authorities admit
+or even appear to admit that the war was over.
+They regarded the campaign as punitive and necessary
+for the foundation of a secure peace. The Indians,
+on the other hand, believed that they had surrendered
+and were anxious to be let alone. Too often
+their wish in similar cases had been gratified, to the
+prolongation of destructive wars. What here occurred
+was horrible from any standard of civilized
+criticism. But even among civilized nations war is
+an unpleasant thing, and war with savages is most
+merciful, in the long run, when it speaks the savages'
+own tongue with no uncertain accent. That such
+extreme measures could occur was the result of the
+impossible situation on the plains. "My opinion,"
+said Agent Colley, "is that white men and wild
+Indians cannot live in the same country in peace."
+With several different and diverging authorities over
+them, with a white population wanting their reserves
+and anxious for a provocation that might justify retaliation
+upon them, little difficulties were certain to
+lead to big results. It was true that the tribes were
+being dispossessed of lands which they believed to belong
+to them. It was equally true that an Indian war
+could terrify a whole frontier and that stern repression
+was its best cure. The blame which was accorded
+to Chivington left out of account the terror in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span>
+Colorado, which was no less real because the whites
+were the aggressors. The slaughter and mutilation
+of Indian women and children did much to embitter
+Eastern critics, who did not realize that the only way
+to crush an Indian war is to destroy the base of supplies,&mdash;the
+camp where the women are busy helping
+to keep the men in the field; and who overlooked
+also the fact that in the mĂŞlĂŠe the squaws were quite
+as dangerous as the bucks. Indiscriminate blame
+and equally indiscriminate praise have been accorded
+because of the Sand Creek affair. The terrible
+event was the result of the orderly working of causes
+over which individuals had little control.</p>
+
+<p>In October, 1865, a peace conference was held on
+the Little Arkansas at which terms were agreed
+upon with Apache, Kiowa and Comanche, Arapaho
+and Cheyenne, while the last named surrendered
+their reserve at Sand Creek. For four years after
+this, owing to delays in the Senate and ambiguity
+in the agreements, they had no fixed abode. Later
+they were given room in the Indian Territory in lands
+taken from the civilized tribes.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">264</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE SIOUX WAR</span></h2>
+
+<p>The struggle for the possession of the plains worked
+the displacement of the Indian tribes. At the beginning,
+the invasion of Kansas had undone the work
+accomplished in erecting the Indian frontier. The
+occupation of Minnesota led surely to the downfall
+and transportation of the Sioux of the Mississippi.
+Gold in Colorado attracted multitudes who made
+peace impossible for the Indians of the southern
+plains. The Sioux of the northern plains came within
+the influence of the overland march in the same years
+with similar results.</p>
+
+<p>The northern Sioux, commonly known as the Sioux
+of the plains, and distinguished from their relatives
+the Sioux of the Mississippi, had participated in the
+treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, had granted rights
+of transit to the whites, and had been recognized
+themselves as nomadic bands occupying the plains
+north of the Platte River. Heretofore they had had
+no treaty relations with the United States, being far
+beyond the frontier. Their people, 16,000 perhaps,
+were grouped roughly in various bands: BrulĂŠ,
+Yankton, Yanktonai, Blackfoot, Hunkpapa, Sans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span>
+Arcs, and Miniconjou. Their dependence on the
+chase made them more dependent on the annuities
+provided them at Laramie. As the game diminished
+the annuity increased in relative importance, and
+scarcely made a fair equivalent for what they lost.
+Yet on the whole, they imitated their neighbors, the
+Cheyenne and Arapaho, and kept the peace.</p>
+
+<p>Almost the only time that the pledge was broken
+was in the autumn of 1854. Continual trains of
+immigrants passing through the Sioux country made
+it nearly impossible to prevent friction between the
+races in which the blame was quite likely to fall upon
+the timorous homeseekers. On August 17, 1854, a
+cow strayed away from a band of Mormons encamped
+a few miles from Fort Laramie. Some have it that
+the cow was lame, and therefore abandoned; but
+whatever the cause, the cow was found, killed, and
+eaten by a small band of hungry Miniconjou Sioux.
+The charge of theft was brought into camp at Laramie,
+not by the Mormons, but by The Bear, chief of
+the BrulĂŠ, and Lieutenant Grattan with an escort of
+twenty-nine men, a twelve-pounder and a mountain
+howitzer, was sent out the next day to arrest the
+Indian who had slaughtered the animal. At the
+Indian village the culprit was not forthcoming,
+Grattan's drunken interpreter roughened a diplomacy
+which at best was none too tactful, and at last
+the troops fired into the lodge which was said to contain
+the offender. No one of the troops got away
+from the enraged Sioux, who, after their anger had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span>
+led them to retaliate, followed it up by plundering the
+near-by post of the fur company. Commissioner
+Manypenny believed that this action by the troops
+was illegal and unnecessary from the start, since the
+Mormons could legally have been reimbursed from
+the Indian funds by the agent.</p>
+
+<p>No general war followed this outbreak. A few
+braves went on the war-path and rumors of great
+things reached the East, but General Harney, sent
+out with three regiments to end the Sioux war in
+1855, found little opposition and fought only one
+important battle. On the Little Blue Water, in
+September, 1855, he fell upon Little Thunder's
+band of BrulĂŠ Sioux and killed or wounded nearly
+a hundred of them. There is some doubt whether
+this band had anything to do with the Grattan episode,
+or whether it was even at war, but the defeat
+was, as Agent Twiss described it, "a thunderclap
+to them." For the first time they learned the
+mighty power of the United States, and General
+Harney made good use of this object lesson in the
+peace council which he held with them in March,
+1856. The treaty here agreed upon was never
+legalized, and remained only a sort of <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">modus vivendi</i>
+for the following years. The Sioux tribes were so
+loosely organized that the authority of the chiefs
+had little weight; young braves did as they pleased
+regardless of engagements supposed to bind the
+tribes. But the lesson of the defeat lasted long in
+the memory of the plains tribes, so that they gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span>
+little trouble until the wars of 1864 broke out.
+Meanwhile Chouteau's old Fort Pierre on the Missouri
+was bought by the United States and made
+a military post for the control of these upper tribes.</p>
+
+<p>Before the plains Sioux broke out again, the Minnesota
+uprising had led the Mississippi Sioux to their
+defeat. Some were executed in the fall of 1862,
+others were transported to the Missouri Valley; still
+others got away to the Northwest, there to continue
+a profitless war that kept up fighting for several
+years. Meanwhile came the plains war of 1864 in
+which the tribes south of the Platte were chiefly
+concerned, and in which men at the centre of the
+line thought there were evidences of an alliance between
+northern and southern tribes. Thus Governor
+Evans wrote of "information furnished me,
+through various sources, of an alliance of the Cheyenne
+and a part of the Arapahoe tribes with the
+Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians of the south,
+and the great family of the Sioux Indians of the north
+upon the plains," and the Indian Commissioner accepted
+the notion. But, like the question of intrigue,
+this was a matter of belief rather than of
+proof; while local causes to account for the disorder
+are easily found. Yet it is true that during 1864
+and 1865 the northern Sioux became uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>During 1865, though the causes likely to lead to
+hostilities were in no wise changed, efforts were made
+to reach agreements with the plains tribes. The
+Cheyenne, humbled at Sand Creek, were readily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">268</a></span>
+handled at the Little Arkansas treaty in October.
+They there surrendered to the United States all their
+reserve in Colorado and accepted a new one, which
+they never actually received, south of the Arkansas,
+and bound themselves not to camp within ten miles
+of the route to Santa FĂŠ. On the other side, "to
+heal the wounds caused by the Chivington affair,"
+special appropriations were made by the United
+States to the widows and orphans of those who had
+been killed. The Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche
+joined in similar treaties. During the same week, in
+1865, a special commission made treaties of peace with
+nine of the Sioux tribes, including the remnants of
+the Mississippi bands. "These treaties were made,"
+commented the Commissioner, "and the Indians, in
+spite of the great suffering from cold and want of
+food endured during the very severe winter of 1865&ndash;66,
+and consequent temptation to plunder to procure
+the absolute necessaries of life, faithfully kept
+the peace."</p>
+
+<p>In September, 1865, the steamer <i>Calypso</i> struggled
+up the shallow Missouri River, carrying a party of
+commissioners to Fort Sully, there to make these
+treaties with the Sioux. Congress had provided
+$20,000 for a special negotiation before adjourning
+in March, 1865, and General Sully, who was yet conducting
+the prolonged Sioux War, had pointed out
+the place most suitable for the conference. The first
+council was held on October 6.</p>
+
+<p>The military authorities were far from eager to hold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">269</a></span>
+this council. Already the breach between the military
+power responsible for policing the plains and
+the civilian department which managed the tribes
+was wide. Thus General Pope, commanding the
+Department of the Missouri, grumbled to Grant in
+June that whenever Indian hostilities occurred, the
+Indian Department, which was really responsible,
+blamed the soldiers for causing them. He complained
+of the divided jurisdiction and of the policy
+of buying treaties from the tribes by presents made
+at the councils. In reference to this special treaty
+he had "only to say that the Sioux Indians have
+been attacking everybody in their region of country;
+and only lately ... attacked in heavy force Fort
+Rice, on the upper Missouri, well fortified and garrisoned
+by four companies of infantry with artillery.
+If these things show any desire for peace, I confess
+I am not able to perceive it."</p>
+
+<p>In future years this breach was to become wider
+yet. At Sand Creek the military authorities had
+justified the attack against the criticism of the local
+Indian agents and Eastern philanthropists. There
+was indeed plenty of evidence of misconduct on both
+sides. If the troops were guilty on the charge of being
+over-ready to fight&mdash;and here the words of Governor
+Evans were prophetic, "Now the war ... is
+nearly through, and the Great Father will not know
+what to do with all his soldiers, except to send them
+after the Indians on the plains,"&mdash;the Indian agents
+often succumbed to the opportunity for petty thieving.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span>
+The case of one of the agents of the Yankton
+Sioux illustrates this. It was his custom each
+year to have the chiefs of his tribe sign general receipts
+for everything sent to the agency. Thus at
+the end of the year he could turn in Indians' vouchers
+and report nothing on hand. But the receipt did not
+mean that the Indian had got the goods; although
+signed for, these were left in the hands of the agent
+to be given out as needed. The inference is strong
+that many of the supplies intended for and signed
+for by the Indians went into the pocket of the agent.
+During the third quarter of 1863 this agent claimed
+to have issued to his charges: "One pair of bay horses,
+7 years old; ... 1 dozen 17-inch mill files; ... 6
+dozen Seidlitz powders; 6 pounds compound syrup
+of squills; 6 dozen Ayer's pills; ... 3 bottles of
+rose water; ... 1 pound of wax; ... 1 ream of
+vouchers; ... ½ M 6434 8½-inch official envelopes;
+... 4 bottles 8-ounce mucilage." So great was
+this particular agent's power that it was nearly impossible
+to get evidence against him. "If I do, he
+will fix it so I'll never get anything in the world and
+he will drive me out of the country," was typical of
+the attitude of his neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for
+it quarrelling, it is no wonder that the charges suffered.
+But the ill results came more from the impossible
+situation than from abuse on either side. It
+needs often to be reiterated that the heart of the
+Indian question was in the infiltration of greedy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span>
+timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who could
+not be restrained by any process known to American
+government. In the conflict between two civilizations,
+the lower must succumb. Neither the
+War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible
+for most of the troubles; yet of the two, the
+former, through readiness to fight and to hold the
+savage to a standard of warfare which he could not
+understand, was the greater offender. It was not
+so great an offender, however, as the selfish interests
+of those engaged in trading with the Indians would
+make it out to be.</p>
+
+<p>The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty
+signed on October 10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory.
+Many of the western Sioux did not
+come at all. Even the eastern were only partially
+represented. And among tribes in which the central
+authority of the chiefs was weak, full representation
+was necessary to secure a binding peace. The commissioners,
+after most pacific efforts, were "unable
+to ascertain the existence of any really amicable
+feeling among these people towards the government."
+The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the
+treaty which resulted did little more than repeat
+the terms of the treaty of 1851, binding the Indians
+to permit roads to be opened through their country
+and to keep away from the trails.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were
+bound by the treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie
+treaty of 1851 had never had full force of law because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span>
+the Senate had added amendments to it, which
+all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although
+Congress had appropriated the annuities
+specified in the treaty the binding force of the document
+was not great on savages. The Fort Sully
+treaty was deficient in that it did not represent all of
+the interested tribes. In making Indian treaties at
+all, the United States acted upon a convenient fiction
+that the Indians had authorities with power to bind;
+whereas the leaders had little control over their followers
+and after nearly every treaty there were
+many bands that could claim to have been left out
+altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed,
+and the United States proceeded in 1865
+and 1866 to use its specified rights in opening roads
+through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.</p>
+
+<p>The mines of Montana and Idaho, which had attracted
+notice and emigration in the early sixties,
+were still the objective points of a large traffic. They
+were somewhat off the beaten routes, being accessible
+by the Missouri River and Fort Benton, or by
+the Platte trail and a northern branch from near
+Fort Hall to Virginia City. To bring them into
+more direct connection with the East an available
+route from Fort Laramie was undertaken in 1865.
+The new trail left the main road near Fort Laramie,
+crossed to the north side of the Platte, and ran off
+to the northwest. Shortly after leaving the Platte
+the road got into the charming foothill country
+where the slopes "are all covered with a fine growth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span>
+of grass, and in every valley there is either a rushing
+stream or some quiet babbling brook of pure, clear
+snow-water filled with trout, the banks lined with
+trees&mdash;wild cherry, quaking asp, some birch,
+willow, and cottonwood." To the left, and not far
+distant, were the Big Horn Mountains. To the
+right could sometimes be seen in the distance the
+shadowy billows of the Black Hills. Running to
+the north and draining the valley were the Powder
+and Tongue rivers, both tributaries of the Yellowstone.
+Here were water, timber, and forage, coal
+and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the
+Indians, "the very heart of their hunting-grounds."
+In a single day's ride were seen "bear, buffalo, elk,
+deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens." With
+little exaggeration it was described as a "natural
+source of recuperation and supply to moving, hunting,
+and roving bands of all tribes, and their lodge
+trails cross it in great numbers from north to south."
+Through this land, keeping east of the Big Horn
+Mountains and running around their northern end
+into the Yellowstone Valley, was to run the new Powder
+River road to Montana. The Sioux treaties
+were to have their severest testing in the selection
+of choice hunting-grounds for an emigrant road, for
+it was one of the certainties in the opening of new
+roads that game vanished in the face of emigration.</p>
+
+<p>While the commissioners were negotiating their
+treaty at Fort Sully, the first Powder River expedition,
+in its attempt to open this new road by the short<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span>
+and direct route from Fort Laramie to Bozeman and
+the Montana mines, was undoing their work. In the
+summer of 1865 General Patrick E. Connor, with a
+miscellaneous force of 1600, including a detachment
+of ex-Confederate troops who had enlisted in the
+United States army to fight Indians, started from
+Fort Laramie for the mouth of the Rosebuds on the
+Yellowstone, by way of the Powder River. Old Jim
+Bridger, the incarnation of this country, led them,
+swearing mightily at "these damn paper-collar
+soldiers," who knew so little of the Indians. There
+was plenty of fighting as Connor pushed into the
+Yellowstone, but he was relieved from command in
+September and the troops were drawn back, so that
+there were no definitive results of the expedition of
+1865.</p>
+
+<p>In 1866, in spite of the fact that the Sioux of this
+region, through their leader Red Cloud, had refused
+to yield the ground or even to treat concerning it,
+Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered by General
+Pope to command the Mountain District, Department
+of the Platte, and to erect and garrison posts
+for the control of the Powder River road. On December
+21 of this year, Captain W.&nbsp;J. Fetterman,
+of his command, and seventy-eight officers and men
+were killed near Fort Philip Kearney in a fight whose
+merits aroused nearly as much acrimonious discussion
+as the Sand Creek massacre.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_274" class="figcenter" style="width: 356px;">
+  <img src="images/i-299.jpg" width="356" height="542" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Red Cloud and Professor Marsh</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>From a cut lent by Professor Warren K. Moorehead, of Andover, Mass.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>The events leading up to the catastrophe at Fort
+Philip Kearney, a catastrophe so complete that none<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span>
+of its white participants escaped to tell what happened,
+were connected with Carrington's work in
+building forts. He had been detailed for the work
+in the spring, and after a conference at Fort Kearney,
+Nebraska, with General Sherman, had marched his
+men in nineteen days to Fort Laramie. He reached
+Fort Reno, which became his headquarters, on June
+28. On the march, if his orders were obeyed, his
+soldiers were scrupulous in their regard for the Indians.
+His orders issued for the control of emigrants
+passing along the Powder River route were equally
+careful. Thirty men were to constitute the minimum
+single party; these were to travel with a military
+pass, which was to be scrutinized by the commanding
+officer of each post. The trains were
+ordered to hold together and were warned that
+"nearly all danger from Indians lies in the recklessness
+of travellers. A small party, when separated,
+either sell whiskey to or fire upon scattering Indians,
+or get into disputes with them, and somebody is hurt.
+An insult to an Indian is resented by the Indians
+against the first white men they meet, and innocent
+travellers suffer."</p>
+
+<p>Carrington's orders were to garrison Fort Reno
+and build new forts on the Powder, Big Horn, and
+Yellowstone rivers, and cover the road. The last-named
+fort was later cut away because of his insufficient
+force, but Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C.&nbsp;F.
+Smith were located during July and August. The
+former stood on a little plateau formed between the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span>
+two Pineys as they emerge from the Big Horn Mountains.
+Its site was surveyed and occupied on July 15.
+Already Carrington was complaining that he had too
+few men for his work. With eight companies of
+eighty men each, and most of these new recruits, he
+had to garrison his long line, all the while building
+and protecting his stockades and fortifications. "I
+am my own engineer, draughtsman, and visit my
+pickets and guards nightly, with scarcely a day or
+night without attempts to steal stock." Worse than
+this, his military equipment was inadequate. Only
+his band, specially armed for the expedition, had
+Spencer carbines and enough ammunition. His
+main force, still armed with Springfield rifles, had
+under fifty rounds to the man.</p>
+
+<p>The Indians, Cheyenne and Sioux, were, all through
+the summer, showing no sign of accepting the invasion
+of the hunting-grounds without a fight. Yet
+Carrington reported on August 29 that he was holding
+them off; that Fort C.&nbsp;F. Smith on the Big Horn
+had been occupied; that parties of fifty well-armed
+men could get through safely if they were careful.
+The Indians, he said, "are bent on robbery; they only
+fight when assured of personal security and remunerative
+stealings; they are divided among themselves."</p>
+
+<p>With the sites for forts C.&nbsp;F. Smith and Philip
+Kearney selected, the work of construction proceeded
+during the autumn. A sawmill, sent out from the
+states, was kept hard at work. Wood was cut on
+the adjacent hills and speedily converted into cabins<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span>
+and palisades which approached completion before
+winter set in. It was construction during a state of
+siege, however. Instead of pacifying the valley the
+construction of the forts aggravated the Sioux hostility
+so that constant watchfulness was needed.
+That the trains sent out to gather wood were not
+seriously injured was due to rigorous discipline. The
+wagons moved twenty or more at a time, with guards,
+and in two parallel columns. At first sight of Indians
+they drove into corral and signalled back to
+the lookouts at the fort for help. Occasionally men
+were indeed cut out by the Indians, who in turn
+suffered considerable loss; but Carrington reduced
+his own losses to a minimum. Friendly Indians were
+rarely seen. They were allowed to come to the fort,
+by the main road and with a white flag, but few
+availed themselves of the privilege. The Sioux
+were up in arms, and in large numbers hung about the
+Tongue and Powder river valleys waiting for their
+chance.</p>
+
+<p>Early in December occurred an incident revealing
+the danger of annihilation which threatened Carrington's
+command. At one o'clock on the afternoon of
+the sixth a messenger reported to the garrison at
+Fort Philip Kearney that the wood train was attacked
+by Indians four miles away. Carrington immediately
+had every horse at the post mounted. For
+the main relief he sent out a column under Brevet
+Lieutenant-colonel Fetterman, who had just arrived
+at the fort, while he led in person a flanking party to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span>
+cut off the Indians' retreat. The mercury was below
+zero. Carrington was thrown into the water of
+Peno Creek when his horse stumbled through breaking
+ice. Fetterman's party found the wood train
+in corral and standing off the attack with success.
+The savages retreated as the relief approached and
+were pursued for five miles, when they turned and
+offered battle. Just as the fighting began, most of
+the cavalry broke away from Fetterman, leaving
+him and some fourteen others surrounded by Indians
+and attacked on three sides. He held them off,
+however, until Carrington came in sight and the Indians
+fled. Why Lieutenant Bingham retreated with
+his cavalry and left Fetterman in such danger was
+never explained, for the Indians killed him and one
+of his non-commissioned officers, while several other
+privates were wounded. The Indians, once the
+fight was over, disappeared among the hills, and
+Carrington had no force with which to follow them.
+In reporting the battle that night he renewed his
+requests for men and officers. He had but six officers
+for the six companies at Fort Philip Kearney. He
+was totally unable to take the aggressive because
+of the defences which had constantly to be maintained.</p>
+
+<p>In this fashion the fall advanced in the Powder
+River Valley. The forts were finished. The Indian
+hostilities increased. The little, overworked force
+of Carrington, chopping, building, guarding, and
+fighting, struggled to fulfil its orders. If one should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">279</a></span>
+criticise Carrington, the attack would be chiefly that
+he looked to defensive measures in the Indian war.
+He did indeed ask for troops, officers, and equipment,
+but his despatches and his own vindication show little
+evidence that he realized the need for large reĂŤnforcements
+for the specific purpose of a punitive
+campaign. More skilful Indian fighters knew that
+the Indians could and would keep up indefinitely
+this sort of filibustering against the forts, and that a
+vigorous move against their own villages was the
+surest means to secure peace. In Indian warfare,
+even more perhaps than in civilized, it is advantageous
+to destroy the enemy's base of supplies.</p>
+
+<p>The wood train was again attacked on December
+21. About eleven o'clock that morning the pickets
+reported the train "corralled and threatened by
+Indians on Sullivant Hills, a mile and a half from the
+fort." The usual relief party was at once organized
+and sent out under Fetterman, who claimed the right
+to command it by seniority, and who was not highest
+in the confidence of Colonel Carrington. He had
+but recently joined the command, was full of enthusiasm
+and desire to hunt Indians, and needed the
+admonition with which he left the fort: that he
+was "fighting brave and desperate enemies who
+sought to make up by cunning and deceit all the
+advantage which the white man gains by intelligence
+and better arms." He was ordered to support and
+bring in the wood train, this being all Carrington
+believed himself strong enough to do and keep on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">280</a></span>
+doing. Any one could have had a fight at any time,
+and Carrington was wise to issue the "peremptory
+and explicit" orders to avoid pursuit beyond the
+summit of Lodge Trail Ridge, as needless and unduly
+dangerous. Three times this order was given to
+Fetterman; and after that, "fearing still that the
+spirit of ambition might override prudence," says
+Carrington, "I crossed the parade and from a sentry
+platform halted the cavalry and again repeated my
+precise orders."</p>
+
+<p>With these admonitions, Fetterman started for
+the relief, leading a party of eighty-one officers and
+men, picked and all well armed. He crossed the
+Lodge Trail Ridge as soon as he was out of sight of
+the fort and disappeared. No one of his command
+came back alive. The wood train, before twelve
+o'clock, broke corral and moved on in safety, while
+shots were heard beyond the ridge. For half an
+hour there was a constant volleying; then all was
+still. Meanwhile Carrington, nervous at the lack of
+news from Fetterman, had sent a second column, and
+two wagons to relieve him, under Captain Ten Eyck.
+The latter, moving along cautiously, with large bands
+of Sioux retreating before him, came finally upon
+forty-nine bodies, including that of Fetterman. The
+evidence of arrows, spears, and the position of bodies
+was that they had been surrounded, surprised, and
+overwhelmed in their defeat. The next day the rest
+of the bodies were reached and brought back. Naked,
+dismembered, slashed, visited with indescribable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span>
+indignities, they were buried in two great graves;
+seventy-nine soldiers and two civilians.</p>
+
+<p>The Fetterman massacre raised a storm in the East
+similar in volume to that following Sand Creek, two
+years before. Who was at fault, and why, were the
+questions indignantly asked. Judicious persons were
+well aware, wrote the <i>Nation</i>, that "our whole Indian
+policy is a system of mismanagement, and in many
+parts one of gigantic abuse." The military authorities
+tried to place the blame on Carrington, as plausible,
+energetic, and industrious, but unable to maintain
+discipline or inspire his officers with confidence.
+Unquestionably a part of this was true, yet the letter
+which made the charge admitted that often the Indians
+were better armed than the troops, and the
+critic himself, General Cooke, had ordered Carrington:
+"You can only defend yourself and trains,
+and emigrants, the best you can." The Indian Commissioner
+charged it on the bad disposition of the
+troops, always anxious to fight.</p>
+
+<p>The issue broke over the number of Indians involved.
+Current reports from Fort Philip Kearney
+indicated from 3000 to 5000 hostile warriors, chiefly
+Sioux and led by Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe.
+The Commissioner pointed out that such a force
+must imply from 21,000 to 35,000 Indians in all&mdash;a
+number that could not possibly have been in the
+Powder River country. It is reasonable to believe
+that Fetterman was not overwhelmed by any multitude
+like this, but that his own rash disobedience led<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">282</a></span>
+to ambush and defeat by a force well below 3000.
+Upon him fell the immediate responsibility; above
+him, the War Department was negligent in detailing
+so few men for so large a task; and ultimately
+there was the impossibility of expecting savage Sioux
+to give up their best hunting-grounds as a result of
+a treaty signed by others than themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of
+transition in Indian warfare. Even here the Indians
+were mostly armed with bows and arrows, and were
+relying upon their superior numbers for victory.
+Yet a change in Indian armament was under way,
+which in a few years was to convert the Indian from
+a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in
+the world." He was being armed with rifles. As
+the game diminished the tribes found that the old
+methods of hunting were inadequate and began the
+pressure upon the Indian Department for better
+weapons. The department justified itself in issuing
+rifles and ammunition, on the ground that the laws
+of the United States expected the Indians to live
+chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure
+by the older means. Hence came the anomalous
+situation in which one department of the
+United States armed and equipped the tribes for
+warfare against another. If arms were cut down,
+the tribes were in danger of extinction; if they
+were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the
+Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that
+the hostile Sioux were merely hungry, because the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">283</a></span>
+War Department had caused the issuing of guns to
+be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with
+bad temper and suspicion on both sides.</p>
+
+<p>A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud
+tried again to wreck a wood train near Fort Philip
+Kearney. But this time the escort erected a barricade
+with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety
+of army wagon, and though deserted by most of
+his men, Major James Powell, with one other officer,
+twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind
+their fortification and repelled charge after charge
+from some 800 Sioux and Cheyenne. With little
+loss to himself he inflicted upon the savages a lesson
+that lasted many years.</p>
+
+<p>The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the
+chain of Indian outbreaks that stretched across the
+path of the westward movement, the overland traffic
+and the continental railways. The Pacific railways
+had been chartered just as the overland telegraph
+had been opened to the Pacific coast. With this last,
+perhaps from reverence for the nearly supernatural,
+the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway
+advanced, increasing compression and repression
+stirred the tribes to a series of hostilities. The first
+treaties which granted transit&mdash;meaning chiefly
+wagon transit&mdash;broke down. A new series of conferences
+and a new policy were the direct result of
+these wars.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">284</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY</span></h2>
+
+<p>The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great
+plains may fairly be said to have been reached about
+the time of the slaughter of Fetterman and his men
+at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous fifteen
+years the causes had been shaping through the development
+of the use of the trails, the opening of the
+mining territories, and the agitation for a continental
+railway. Now the railway was not only authorized
+and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon
+its completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted
+the Union Pacific to build west and the
+Central Pacific to build east until the two lines should
+meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the
+roads were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis
+of the Indian problem was speedily reached. In the
+fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of the overland
+freighting and sold out. In November the
+terminus of the overland mail route was moved west
+to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither the Union Pacific
+had now arrived in its course of construction. No
+wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke
+out in protest.</p>
+
+<p>As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">285</a></span>
+among those who must handle the tribes became
+apparent. The question of the management by the
+War Department or the Interior was in the air, and
+was raised again and again in Congress. More
+fundamental was the question of policy, upon which
+the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as any.
+"I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William,
+in 1867, "that Indian wars will not cease until all the
+Indian tribes are absorbed in our population, and
+can be controlled by constables instead of soldiers."
+Upon another phase of management Francis A.
+Walker wrote a little later: "There can be no question
+of national dignity involved in the treatment of
+savages by a civilized power. The proudest Anglo-Saxon
+will climb a tree with a bear behind him....
+With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question
+whether to fight, coax, or run is a question merely
+of what is safest or easiest in the situation given."
+That responsibility for some decided action lay
+heavily upon the whites may be implied from the
+admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the
+frontier well&mdash;"that, during more than a third of a
+century passed on the plains and in the mountains, he
+has never known of a war with the hostile tribes that
+was not caused by broken faith on the part of the
+United States or its agents." A professional Indian
+fighter, like Kit Carson, declared on oath that "as
+a general thing, the difficulties arise from aggressions
+on the part of the whites."</p>
+
+<p>In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">286</a></span>
+problem found spokesmen. The War and Interior
+departments had ample representation; the Western
+members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of
+the frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian
+sentiment that saw much good in the Indian
+and much evil in his treatment. But withal, when it
+came to special action upon any situation, Congress
+felt its lack of information. The departments best
+informed were partisan and antagonistic. Even
+to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship to
+determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and
+responsibility in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak,
+and the Chivington or the Fetterman massacre.
+To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness in the midst
+of interested parties Congress raised a committee
+of seven, three of the Senate and four of the House,
+in March, 1865, to investigate and report on the
+condition of the Indian tribes. The joint committee
+was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed
+debate on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne
+war ended and the Sioux broke out; the committee
+reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its investigation
+it divided itself into three groups to visit the
+Pacific Slope, the southern plains, and the northern
+plains. Its report, with the accompanying testimony,
+fills over five hundred pages. In all the storm centres
+of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and
+questioned.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes</i>
+gave a doleful view of the future from the Indians'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">287</a></span>
+standpoint. General Pope was quoted to the effect
+that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars,
+cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration,
+"and by steady and resistless encroachments
+of the white emigration towards the west, which
+is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits,
+and driving off or killing the game, their only means
+of subsistence." To this catalogue of causes General
+Carleton, who must have believed his war of Apache
+and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of
+providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty
+originates, when in their appointed time He wills
+that one race of man&mdash;as in races of lower animals&mdash;shall
+disappear off the face of the earth and give place
+to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced
+out by Himself, which may be seen, but has reasons
+too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of mammoths
+and mastodons, and the great sloths, came
+and passed away; the red man of America is passing
+away!"</p>
+
+<p>The committee believed that the wars with their
+incidents of slaughter and extermination by both sides,
+as occasion offered, were generally the result of white
+encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing
+opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed
+over to the War Department, but recommended instead
+a system of visiting boards, each including a
+civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner,
+for the regular inspection of the tribes. The
+recommendation of the committee came to naught<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">288</a></span>
+in Congress, but the information it gathered, supplementing
+the annual reports of the Commissioner
+of Indian Affairs and the special investigations of
+single wars, gave much additional weight to the
+belief that a crisis was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne
+and Sioux wars dragged on. The Powder River
+country continued to be a field of battle, with
+Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867.
+In the spring of 1867 General Hancock destroyed
+a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern
+opinion came to demand more forcefully that this
+fighting should stop. Western opinion was equally
+insistent that the Indian must go, while General
+Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand
+was due to a desire for "the profit resulting
+from military occupation." Certain it was that war
+had lasted for several years with no definite results,
+save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of
+the Indians, and the philanthropy of the East. The
+army had had its chance. Now the time had come
+for general, real attempts at peace.</p>
+
+<p>The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March
+4, 1867, actually began its session at that time. Ordinarily
+it would have waited until December, but
+the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his
+reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early
+as the law allowed. Among the most significant of its
+measures in this extra session was "Mr. Henderson's
+bill for establishing peace with certain Indian tribes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">289</a></span>
+now at war with the United States," which, in the view
+of the <i>Nation</i>, was a "practical measure for the security
+of travel through the territories and for the selection
+of a new area sufficient to contain all the unsettled
+tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator
+Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect
+of this law, and the General had replied: "The fact
+is, this contact of the two races has caused universal
+hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered
+bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and
+hitting little parties who are off their guard. I have
+a much heavier force on the plains, but they are so
+large that it is impossible to guard at all points, and
+the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented
+our being able to collect a large force to go into the
+country where we believe the Indians have hid their
+families; viz. up on the Yellowstone and down on the
+Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than
+in treating at this time, yet he went on the commission
+erected by the act of July 20, 1867. By this law
+four civilians, including the Indian Commissioner, and
+three generals of the army, were appointed to collect
+and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects
+in view: to remove the existing causes of complaint,
+to secure the safety of the various continental
+railways and the overland routes, and to work out
+some means for promoting Indian civilization without
+impeding the advance of the United States. To
+this last end they were to hunt for permanent homes
+for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">290</a></span>
+the railways then chartered,&mdash;the Union Pacific,
+the Northern Pacific, and the Atlantic and Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for
+fifteen months. When it rose at last, it had opened
+the way for the railways, so far as treaties could avail.
+It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and more
+remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations
+the breach between military and civil control had
+widened, so that the Commission was at the end
+divided against itself.</p>
+
+<p>On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at
+St. Louis and discussed plans for getting into touch
+with the tribes with whom it had to treat. "The
+first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview
+with the chiefs and leading warriors of these
+hostile tribes. They were roaming over an immense
+country, thousands of miles in extent, and much of it
+unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white
+race. Small war parties constantly emerging from
+this vast extent of unexplored country would suddenly
+strike the border settlements, killing the men
+and carrying off into captivity the women and children.
+Companies of workmen on the railroads, at
+points hundreds of miles from each other, would be
+attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour.
+Overland mail coaches could not be run without
+military escort, and railroad and mail stations unguarded
+by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All
+safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without
+soldiers was hazardous in the extreme; to go with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">291</a></span>
+them forbade reasonable hope of securing peaceful
+interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace
+Commission contained within itself the most useful
+of assistants. General Sherman and Commissioner
+Taylor sent out word to the Indians through the
+military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the
+tribes that the Commissioners desired to confer with
+them near Fort Laramie in September and Fort
+Larned in October.</p>
+
+<p>The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during
+the summer of 1867. After inspecting conditions on
+the upper Missouri the Commissioners proceeded to
+Omaha in September and thence to North Platte
+station on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they
+met Swift Bear of the BrulĂŠ Sioux and learned
+that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them
+until November. The Powder River War was still
+being fought by chiefs who could not be reached
+easily and whose delegations must be delayed.
+When the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie
+in November, they found matters little better. Red
+Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the Oglala
+and BrulĂŠ Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne,
+refused even to see the envoys, and sent them word:
+"that his war against the whites was to save the valley
+of the Powder River, the only hunting ground left
+to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us
+that whenever the military garrisons at Fort Philip
+Kearney and Fort C.&nbsp;F. Smith were withdrawn, the
+war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">292</a></span>
+Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no
+savages except a few non-hostile Crows, and having
+summoned Red Cloud to meet them during the following
+summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of
+hostilities until the council could be held."</p>
+
+<p>The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine
+Lodge Creek some eighty miles south of the Arkansas
+River. Before the Commissioners arrived here
+General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his
+place being taken by General C.&nbsp;C. Augur, whose
+name makes the eighth signature to the published
+report. For some time after the Commissioners
+arrived the Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained
+in their camp forty miles away from Medicine
+Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and
+Apache came to an agreement, while the others
+held off. On the 21st of October these ceded all
+their rights to occupy their great claims in the
+Southwest, the whole of the two panhandles of
+Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to confine themselves
+to a new reserve in the southwestern part of
+Indian Territory, between the Red River and the
+Washita, on lands taken from the Choctaw and
+Chickasaw in 1866.</p>
+
+<p>The Commissioners could not greatly blame the
+Arapaho and Cheyenne for their reluctance to
+treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular
+Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been
+massacred by Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly
+or not, they believed themselves betrayed, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">293</a></span>
+Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand
+Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in
+Kansas and Indian Territory, which was amended
+to nothingness when the Senate added to the treaty
+the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within
+the state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve;
+the new one had not been given them; yet
+for two years after 1865 they had generally kept the
+peace. Sherman travelled through this country in
+the autumn of 1866 and "met no trouble whatever,"
+although he heard rumors of Indian wars. In 1867,
+General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages
+on the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation,
+the Indians believed. After this there had
+been admitted war. The Indians had been on the
+war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and
+dodging the military parties, and were unable for
+some weeks to realize that the Peace Commissioners
+offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded
+to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October
+28, a treaty at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve
+was a bit of barren land nearly destitute of
+wood and water, and containing many streams that
+were either brackish or dry during most of the year.
+It was in the Cherokee Outlet, between the Arkansas
+and Cimarron rivers.</p>
+
+<p>The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of
+the summer's negotiations. The Peace Commission
+returned to Fort Laramie in the following spring to
+meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">294</a></span>
+Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were
+allied with them, made peace after the Commissioners
+had assented to the terms laid down by Red Cloud in
+1867. They had convinced themselves that the
+occupation of the Powder River Valley was both
+illegal and unjust, and accordingly the garrisons had
+been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger
+of Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic
+pusillanimity," wrote one of the pioneers, years
+later, denouncing the act, "the government ordered
+all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel."
+In the new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868,
+it was specifically agreed that the country east of the
+Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as unceded
+Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves
+to occupy as their permanent home the lands west of
+the Missouri, between the parallels of 43° and 46°, and
+east of the 104th meridian&mdash;an area coinciding to-day
+with the western end of South Dakota. Thus
+was begun the actual compression of the Sioux of
+the plains.</p>
+
+<p>The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners
+were the most important, but were not the only
+treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the relinquishment
+by the Indians of lands along the railroad's
+right of way. It had been found that rights
+of transit through the Indian Country, such as those
+secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient. The
+Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of
+travel, for peace and his own good.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">295</a></span>
+Most important of the other tribes shoved away
+from the route were the Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock,
+whose country lay across the great trail just
+west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their
+name to the territory of Utah, were to be found
+south of the trail, between it and the lower waters
+of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest
+in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most
+important being on the Uintah River in northeast
+Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute began to treat
+in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until 1868,
+when the southwestern third of Colorado was set
+apart for them. Active life in Colorado territory
+was at the start confined to the mountains in the
+vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were
+pushed down the slopes of the range on both sides.
+But as the eastern Sand Creek reserve soon had to be
+abolished, so Colorado began to growl at the western
+Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages
+were given better treatment than white citizens.
+The Shoshoni and Bannock ranged from Fort Hall
+to the north and were visited by General Augur
+at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results
+of his gifts and diplomacy the former were
+pushed up to the Wind River reserve in Wyoming
+territory, while the latter were granted a home
+around Fort Hall.</p>
+
+<p>The friction with the Indians was heaviest near
+the line of the old Indian frontier and tended to be
+lighter towards the west. It was natural enough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">296</a></span>
+that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the
+tribes had been colonized and where Indian population
+was most dense, the difficulties should be
+greatest. Indeed the only wars which were sufficiently
+important to count as resistance to the westward
+movement were those of the plains tribes and
+were fought east of the continental divide. The
+mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated
+from the main movements. Yet these great plains
+that now had to be abandoned had been set aside
+as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of
+Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners
+all agreed that the time had come to
+change it.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of the humanitarians dominated
+the report of the Commissioners, which was signed in
+January, 1868. Wherever possible, the side of the
+Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was
+an "indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled
+in the "records of the Indian barbarity"; General
+Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the Cheyenne
+at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to
+the existence of a war: Fetterman had been killed
+because "the civil and military departments of our
+government cannot, or will not, understand each
+other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility,
+and the "revolting" history of the removal policy
+was described. It had been the result of this policy
+to promote barbarism rather than civilization.
+"But one thing then remains to be done with honor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">297</a></span>
+to the nation, and that is to select a district, or districts
+of country, as indicated by Congress, on which
+all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be
+gathered. For each district let a territorial government
+be established, with powers adapted to the
+ends designed. The governor should be a man of
+unquestioned integrity and purity of character;
+he should be paid such salary as to place him
+above temptation." He should be given adequate
+powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of
+progressive civilization. The belief that under
+American conditions the Indian problem was insoluble
+was confirmed by this report of the Peace
+Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as
+they were. After their condemnation of an existing
+removal policy, the only remedy which they could
+offer was another policy of concentration and
+removal.</p>
+
+<p>The Commissioners recommended that the Indians
+should be colonized on two reserves, north and
+south of the railway lines respectively. The southern
+reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized
+tribes, known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners
+thought a total of 86,000 could be settled
+within a few years. A northern district might be
+located north of Nebraska, within the area which
+they later allotted to the Sioux; 54,000 could be
+colonized here. Individual savages might be allowed
+to own land and be incorporated among the citizens
+of the Western states, but most of the tribes ought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">298</a></span>
+to be settled in the two Indian territories, while this
+removal policy should be the last.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the vexed question of civilian or military
+control the Commissioners were divided. They
+believed that both War and Interior departments
+were too busy to give proper attention to the wards,
+and recommended an independent department for
+the Indians. In October, 1868, they reversed this
+report and, under military influence, spoke strongly
+for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the War
+Department. "We have now selected and provided
+reservations for all, off the great roads," wrote
+General Sherman to his brother in September, 1868.
+"All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are
+hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will
+have a sort of predatory war for years, every now
+and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder
+of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large,
+and the advantage of the Indians so great, that
+we cannot make a single war and end it. From
+the nature of things we must take chances and clean
+out Indians as we encounter them." Although it
+was the tendency of military control to provoke Indian
+wars, the army was near the truth in its notion
+that Indians and whites could not live together.</p>
+
+<p>The way across the continent was opened by these
+treaties of 1867 and 1868, and the Union Pacific
+hurried to take advantage of it. The other Pacific
+railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific,
+were so slow in using their charters that hope in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">299</a></span>
+construction was nearly abandoned, but the chief
+enterprise neared completion before the inauguration
+of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming,
+rather than the statue of Columbus which Benton
+had foreseen, was perched upon the summit of the
+Rockies as its monument.</p>
+
+<p>Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping
+pace with western development during the decade
+of the Civil War. The United States itself had made
+no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and
+allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered
+through a thousand volumes of government documents.
+Even Indian agents and army officers were
+often as ignorant of the facts as was the general
+public. "All Americans have some knowledge of
+the country west of the Mississippi," lamented the
+<i>Nation</i> in 1868, but "there is no book of travel relating
+to those regions which does more than add to a
+mass of very desultory information. Few men have
+more than the most unconnected and unmethodical
+knowledge of the vast expanse of territory which
+lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth
+must have ceased to be in the West; probably,
+as we write, Denver has become an Eastern city,
+and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the
+marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life....
+A man talks to us of the country west of the Rocky
+Mountains, and while he is talking, the Territory
+of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor
+his auditors have before heard."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">300</a></span></p>
+
+<div id="ip_300" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-326.jpg" width="600" height="448" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The West in 1863</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the Southwest.
+In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming followed in 1868.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>In that division of the plains which was sketched
+out in the fifties, the great amorphous eastern territories
+of Kansas and Nebraska met on the summit
+of the Rockies the great western territories of
+Washington, Utah, and New Mexico. The gold
+booms had broken up all of these. Arizona, Nevada,
+Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found
+their excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada
+entered the Union, with Nebraska following
+in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first
+parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">301</a></span>
+To the north, in the region of the great river valleys,&mdash;Green,
+Big Horn, Powder, Platte, and Sweetwater,&mdash;the
+precious metals were not found in
+quantities which justified exploitation earlier than
+1867. But in that year moderate discoveries on
+the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal
+camps of the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a
+scheme for a new territory.</p>
+
+<p>The Sweetwater mines, without causing any
+great excitement, brought a few hundred men to the
+vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was
+established, a county was organized, a newspaper
+was brought into life at Fort Bridger. If the railway
+had not appeared at the same time, the foundation
+for a territory would probably have been too slight.
+But the Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg
+early in 1867, extended its terminus to a new town,
+Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in
+the spring of 1868.</p>
+
+<p>Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the
+Union Pacific advanced to its site. It had a better
+prospect of life than had most of the mushroom
+cities that accompanied the westward course of the
+railroad, because it was the natural junction point
+for Denver trade. Colorado had been much disappointed
+at its own failure to induce the Union Pacific
+managers to put Denver City on the main line of
+the road, and felt injured when compelled to do its
+business through Cheyenne. But just because of
+this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">302</a></span>
+rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an
+orderly or reputable population that it had during
+the first months of its existence, but, to its good
+fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off
+the worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868.
+Cheyenne was left with an overlarge town site,
+but with some real excuse for existence. Most of
+the terminal towns vanished completely when the
+railroad moved on.</p>
+
+<p>A new territory for the country north of Colorado
+had been talked about as early as 1861. Since the creation
+of Montana territory in 1864, this area had been
+attached, obviously only temporarily, to Dakota.
+Now, with the mining and railway influences at work,
+the population made appeal to the Dakota legislature
+and to Congress for independence. "Without opposition
+or prolonged discussion," as Bancroft puts it,
+the new territory was created by Congress in July,
+1868. It was called Wyoming, just escaping the
+names of Lincoln and Cheyenne, and received as
+bounds the parallels of 41° and 45°, and the meridians
+of 27° and 34°, west of Washington.</p>
+
+<p>For several years after the Sioux treaties of 1868
+and the erection of Wyoming territory, the Indians
+of the northern plains kept the peace. The routes of
+travel had been opened, the white claim to the
+Powder River Valley had been surrendered, and a
+great northern reserve had been created in the
+Black Hills country of southern Dakota. All
+these, by lessening contact, removed the danger of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">303</a></span>
+Indian friction. But the southern tribes were
+still uneasy,&mdash;treacherous or ill-treated, according
+as the sources vary,&mdash;and one more war was needed
+before they could be compelled to settle down.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">304</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID</span></h2>
+
+<p>Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations
+determined the condition of the frontier, none
+admitted that it desired to provoke Indian wars.
+The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish
+to be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian
+agents lost their authority and many of their perquisites
+during war time. The army and the frontiersmen
+denied that they were belligerent. "I assert,"
+wrote Custer, "and all candid persons familiar
+with the subject will sustain the assertion, that of all
+classes of our population the army and the people
+living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of
+an Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest
+sacrifices to avoid its horrors." To fix the responsibility
+for the wars which repeatedly occurred, despite
+the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls for
+the examination of individual episodes in large number.
+It is easier to acquit the first two classes than
+the last two. There are enough instances in which
+the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep the
+peace to establish the belief that a policy combining
+benevolence, equity, and relentless firmness in punishing
+wrong-doers, white or red, could have maintained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">305</a></span>
+friendly relations with ease. The Indian
+agents were hampered most by their inability to
+enforce the laws intrusted to them for execution,
+and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying agreements
+and of Congress in voting supplies. The
+frontiersmen, with their isolated homesteads lying
+open to surprise and destruction, would seem to be
+sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly they
+thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted
+Indian title, while their personal relations
+with the red men were commonly marked by fear
+and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and
+better administration than the Indian Bureau,
+overdid its work, being unable to think of the Indians
+as anything but public enemies and treating
+them with an arbitrary curtness that would have
+been dangerous even among intelligent whites. The
+history of the southwest Indians, after the Sand
+Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially
+ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances
+which led to their destruction.</p>
+
+<p>After the battle at Sand Creek, the southwest
+tribes agreed to a series of treaties in 1865 by which
+new reserves were promised them on the borderland
+of Kansas and Indian Territory. These treaties
+were so amended by the Senate that for a time
+the tribes had no admitted homes or rights save the
+guaranteed hunting privileges on the plains south of
+the Platte. They seem generally to have been peaceful
+during 1866, in spite of the rather shabby treatment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">306</a></span>
+which the neglect of Congress procured for
+them. In 1867 uneasiness became apparent. Agent
+E.&nbsp;W. Wynkoop, of Sand Creek fame, was now in
+charge of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache tribes
+in the vicinity of Fort Larned, on the Santa FĂŠ trail
+in Kansas. In 1866 they had "complained of the
+government not having fulfilled its promises to them,
+and of numerous impositions practised upon them
+by the whites." Some of their younger braves had
+gone on the war-path. But Wynkoop claimed to
+have quieted them, and by March, 1867, thought
+that they were "well satisfied and quiet, and anxious
+to retain the peaceful relations now existing."</p>
+
+<p>The military authorities at Fort Dodge, farther
+up the Arkansas and near the old Santa FĂŠ crossing,
+were less certain than Wynkoop that the Indians
+meant well. Little Raven, of the Arapaho, and
+Satanta, "principal chief" of the Kiowa, were reported
+as sending in insulting messages to the troops,
+ordering them to cut no more wood, to leave the
+country, to keep wagons off the Santa FĂŠ trail.
+Occasional thefts of stock and forays were reported
+along the trail. Custer thought that there was
+"positive evidence from the agents themselves"
+that the Indians were guilty, the trouble only being
+that Wynkoop charged the guilt on the Kiowa
+and Comanche, while J.&nbsp;H. Leavenworth, agent
+for these tribes, asserted their innocence and accused
+the wards of Wynkoop.</p>
+
+<p>The Department of the Missouri, in which these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">307</a></span>
+tribes resided, was under the command of Major-general
+Winfield Scott Hancock in the spring of 1867.
+With a desire to promote the tranquillity of his command,
+Hancock prepared for an expedition on the
+plains as early as the roads would permit. He wrote
+of this intention to both of the agents, asking them
+to accompany him, "to show that the officers of the
+government are acting in harmony." His object
+was not necessarily war, but to impress upon the
+Indians his ability "to chastise any tribes who may
+molest people who are travelling across the plains."
+In each of the letters he listed the complaints against
+the respective tribes&mdash;failure to deliver murderers,
+outrages on the Smoky Hill route in 1866, alliances
+with the Sioux, hostile incursions into Texas, and
+the specially barbarous Box murder. In this last
+affair one James Box had been murdered by the
+Kiowas, and his wife and five daughters carried off.
+The youngest of these, a baby, died in a few days, the
+mother stated, and they "took her from me and
+threw her into a ravine." Ultimately the mother
+and three of the children were ransomed from the
+Kiowas after Mrs. Box and her eldest daughter,
+Margaret, had been passed around from chief to chief
+for more than two months. Custer wrote up this
+outrage with much exaggeration, but the facts were
+bad enough.</p>
+
+<p>With both agents present, Hancock advanced to
+Fort Larned. "It is uncertain whether war will
+be the result of the expedition or not," he declared<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">308</a></span>
+in general orders of March 26, 1867, thus admitting
+that a state of war did not at that time exist. "It
+will depend upon the temper and behavior of the
+Indians with whom we may come in contact. We go
+prepared for war and will make it if a proper occasion
+presents." The tribes which he proposed to visit
+were roaming indiscriminately over the country
+traversed by the Santa FĂŠ trail, in accordance with
+the treaties of 1865, which permitted them, until they
+should be settled upon their reserves, to hunt at
+will over the plains south of the Platte, subject only
+to the restriction that they must not camp within ten
+miles of the main roads and trails. It was Hancock's
+intention to enforce this last provision, and more,
+to insist "upon their keeping off the main lines of
+travel, where their presence is calculated to bring
+about collisions with the whites."</p>
+
+<p>The first conference with the Indians was held at
+Fort Larned, where the "principal chiefs of the Dog
+Soldiers of the Cheyennes" had been assembled by
+Agent Wynkoop. Leavenworth thought that the
+chiefs here had been very friendly, but Wynkoop
+criticised the council as being held after sunset,
+which was contrary to Indian custom and calculated
+"to make them feel suspicious." At this council
+General Hancock reprimanded the chiefs and told
+them that he would visit their village, occupied by
+themselves and an almost equal number of Sioux;
+which village, said Wynkoop, "was 35 miles from
+any travelled road." "Why don't he confine the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">309</a></span>
+troops to the great line of travel?" demanded Leavenworth,
+whose wards had the same privilege of hunting
+south of the Arkansas that those of Wynkoop
+had between the Arkansas and the Platte. So long
+as they camped ten miles from the roads, this was
+their right.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to Wynkoop's urgings, Hancock led his
+command from Fort Larned on April 13, 1867,
+moving for the main Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux
+village on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles west of the
+post. With cavalry, infantry, artillery, and a pontoon
+train, it was hard for him to assume any
+other appearance than that of war. Even the
+General's particular assurance, as Custer puts it,
+"that he was not there to make war, but to promote
+peace," failed to convince the chiefs who had attended
+the night council. It was not a pleasant
+march. The snow was nearly a foot deep, fodder was
+scarce, and the Indian disposition was uncertain.
+Only a few had come in to the Fort Larned conference,
+and none appeared at camp after the first day's
+march. After this refusal to meet him, Hancock
+marched on to the village, in front of which he
+found some three hundred Indians drawn up in
+battle array. Fighting seemed imminent, but at
+last Roman Nose, Bull Bear, and other chiefs met
+Hancock between the lines and agreed upon an evening
+conference. It developed that the men alone
+were left at the Indian camp. Women and children,
+with all the movables they could handle, had fled out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">310</a></span>
+upon the snowy plains at the approach of the troops.
+Fear of another Sand Creek had caused it, said
+Wynkoop. But Hancock chose to regard this as
+evidence of a treacherous disposition, demanded that
+the fugitives return at once, and insisted upon encamping
+near the village against the protest of the
+chiefs. Instead of bringing back their people, the
+men themselves abandoned the village that evening,
+while Hancock, learning of the flight, surrounded
+and took possession of it. The next morning,
+April 15, Custer was sent with cavalry in pursuit
+of the flying bands. Depredations occurring to the
+north of Pawnee Fork within a day or two, Hancock
+burned the village in retaliation and proceeded to
+Fort Dodge. Wynkoop insisted that the Cheyenne
+and Arapaho had been entirely innocent and that
+these injuries had been committed by the Sioux. "I
+have no doubt," he wrote, "but that they think that
+war has been forced upon them."</p>
+
+<p>When Hancock started upon the plains, there was
+no war, but there was no doubt about its existence
+as the spring advanced. When the Peace Commissioners
+of this year came with their protestations
+of benevolence for the Great Father, it was small
+wonder that the Cheyenne and Arapaho had to be
+coaxed into the camp on the Medicine Lodge Creek.
+And when the treaties there made failed of prompt
+execution by the United States, the war naturally
+dragged on in a desultory way during 1868 and 1869.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1868 General Sheridan, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">311</a></span>
+had succeeded Hancock in command of the Department
+of the Missouri, visited the posts at Fort Larned
+and Fort Dodge. Here on Pawnee and Walnut
+creeks most of the southwest Indians were congregated.
+Wynkoop, in February and April, reported
+them as happy and quiet. They were destitute,
+to be sure, and complained that the Commissioners
+at Medicine Lodge had promised them arms and
+ammunition which had not been delivered. Indeed,
+the treaty framed there had not yet been ratified.
+But he believed it possible to keep them contented
+and wean them from their old habits. To Sheridan
+the situation seemed less happy. He declined to
+hold a council with the complaining chiefs on the
+ground that the whole matter was yet in the hands
+of the Peace Commission, but he saw that the young
+men were chafing and turbulent and that frontier
+hostilities would accompany the summer buffalo hunt.</p>
+
+<p>There is little doubt of the destitution which prevailed
+among the plains tribes at this time. The
+rapid diminution of game was everywhere observable.
+The annuities at best afforded only partial
+relief, while Congress was irregular in providing
+funds. Three times during the spring the Commissioner
+prodded the Secretary of the Interior, who
+in turn prodded Congress, with the result that
+instead of the $1,000,000 asked for $500,000 were,
+in July, 1868, granted to be spent not by the Indian
+Office, but by the War Department. Three weeks
+later General Sherman created an organization for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">312</a></span>
+distributing this charity, placing the district south
+of Kansas in command of General Hazen. Meanwhile,
+the time for making the spring issues of
+annuity goods had come. It was ordered in June
+that no arms or ammunition should be given to the
+Cheyenne and Arapaho because of their recent
+bad conduct; but in July the Commissioner, influenced
+by the great dissatisfaction on the part of the
+tribes, and fearing "that these Indians, by reason of
+such non-delivery of arms, ammunition, and goods,
+will commence hostilities against the whites in their
+vicinity, modified the order and telegraphed Agent
+Wynkoop that he might use his own discretion in the
+matter: "If you are satisfied that the issue of the
+arms and ammunition is necessary to preserve the
+peace, and that no evil will result from their delivery,
+let the Indians have them." A few days previously
+on July 20, Wynkoop had issued the ordinary supplies
+to his Arapaho and Apache, his Cheyenne
+refusing to take anything until they could have the
+guns as well. "They felt much disappointed, but
+gave no evidence of being angry ... and would
+wait with patience for the Great Father to take pity
+upon them." The permission from the Commissioner
+was welcomed by the agent, and approved
+by Thomas Murphy, his superintendent. Murphy
+had been ordered to Fort Larned to reĂŤnforce Wynkoop's
+judgment. He held a council on August 1
+with Little Raven and the Arapaho and Apache,
+and issued them their arms. "Raven and the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">313</a></span>
+chiefs then promised that these arms should never
+be used against the whites, and Agent Wynkoop
+then delivered to the Arapahoes 160 pistols, 80
+Lancaster rifles, 12 kegs of powder, 1½ keg of lead,
+and 15,000 caps; and to the Apaches he gave 40
+pistols, 20 Lancaster rifles, 3 kegs of powder,
+½ keg of lead, and 5000 caps." The Cheyenne
+came in a few days later for their share, which
+Wynkoop handed over on the 9th. "They were
+delighted at receiving the goods," he reported,
+"particularly the arms and ammunition, and
+never before have I known them to be better
+satisfied and express themselves as being so well
+contented." The fact that within three days murders
+were committed by the Cheyenne on the Solomon
+and Saline forks throws doubt upon the sincerity
+of their protestations.</p>
+
+<p>The war party which commenced the active hostilities
+of 1868 at a time so well calculated to throw
+discredit upon the wisdom of the Indian Office,
+had left the Cheyenne village early in August,
+"smarting under their <i>supposed</i> wrongs," as Wynkoop
+puts it. They were mostly Cheyenne, with
+a small number of Arapaho and a few visiting
+Sioux, about 200 in all. Little Raven's son and
+a brother of White Antelope, who died at Sand
+Creek, were with them; Black Kettle is said to have
+been their leader. On August 7 some of them
+spent the evening at Fort Hays, where they held a
+powwow at the post. "Black Kettle loves his white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">314</a></span>
+soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he
+meets them and shakes their hands in friendship,"
+is the way the post-trader, Hill P. Wilson, reported
+his speech. "The white soldiers ought to be glad
+all the time, because their ponies are so big and so
+strong, and because they have so many guns and
+so much to eat.... All other Indians may take
+the war trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep
+friendship with his white brothers." Three nights
+later they began to kill on Saline River, and on the
+11th they crossed to the Solomon. Some fifteen
+settlers were killed, and five women were carried off.
+Here this particular raid stopped, for the news
+had got abroad, and the frontier was instantly in
+arms. Various isolated forays occurred, so that
+Sheridan was sure he had a general war upon his
+hands. He believed nearly all the young men of
+the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche to
+be in the war parties, the old women, men, and
+children remaining around the posts and professing
+solicitous friendship. There were 6000 potential
+warriors in all, and that he might better devote
+himself to suppressing them, Sheridan followed the
+Kansas Pacific to its terminus at Fort Hays and there
+established his headquarters in the field.</p>
+
+<p>The war of 1868 ranged over the whole frontier
+south of the Platte trail. It influenced the Peace
+Commission, at its final meeting in October, 1868,
+to repudiate many of the pacific theories of January
+and recommend that the Indians be handed over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">315</a></span>
+to the War Department. Sheridan, who had led
+the Commission to this conclusion, was in the field
+directing the movement. His policy embraced a
+concentration of the peaceful bands south of the
+Arkansas, and a relentless war against the rest. It
+is fairly clear that the war need not have come, had
+it not been for the cross-purposes ever apparent between
+the Indian Office and the War Department,
+and even within the War Department itself.</p>
+
+<p>At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared for war. He had,
+at the start, about 2600 men, nearly equally divided
+among cavalry and infantry. Believing his force
+too small to cover the whole plains between Fort
+Hays and Denver, he called for reĂŤnforcements,
+receiving a part of the Fifth Cavalry and a regiment
+of Kansas volunteers. With enthusiasm this last
+addition was raised among the frontiersmen, where
+Indian fighting was popular; the governor of the
+state resigned his office to become its colonel.
+September and October were occupied in getting the
+troops together, keeping the trails open for traffic,
+and establishing, about a hundred miles south of
+Fort Dodge, a rendezvous which was known as
+Camp Supply. It was the intention to protect
+the frontier during the autumn, and to follow up
+the Indian villages after winter had fallen, catching
+the tribes when they would be concentrated and at a
+disadvantage.</p>
+
+<p>On October 15, 1868, Sherman, just from the
+Chicago meeting of the Peace Commissioners<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">316</a></span>
+and angry because he had there been told that the
+army wanted war, gave Sheridan a free hand for the
+winter campaign. "As to 'extermination,' it is
+for the Indians themselves to determine. We don't
+want to exterminate or even to fight them....
+The present war ... was begun and carried on by
+the Indians in spite of our entreaties and in spite
+of our warnings, and the only question to us is,
+whether we shall allow the progress of our western
+settlements to be checked, and leave the Indians
+free to pursue their bloody career, or accept their
+war and fight them.... We ... accept the war
+... and hereby resolve to make its end final....
+I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our
+troops from doing what they deem proper on the
+spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges
+of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but
+will use all the powers confided to me to the end
+that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our
+civilization, shall not again be able to begin and
+carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext
+that they may choose to allege."</p>
+
+<p>The plan of campaign provided that the main
+column, Custer in immediate command, should
+march from Fort Hays directly against the Indians,
+by way of Camp Supply; two smaller columns
+were to supplement this, one marching in on Indian
+Territory from New Mexico, and the other from
+Fort Lyon on the old Sand Creek reserve. Detachments
+of the chief column began to move in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">317</a></span>
+middle of November, Custer reaching the depot at
+Camp Supply ahead of the rest, while the Kansas
+volunteers lost themselves in heavy snow-storms.
+On November 23 Custer was ordered out of Camp
+Supply, on the north fork of the Canadian, to follow
+a fresh trail which led southwest towards the Washita
+River, near the eastern line of Texas. He pushed on
+as rapidly as twelve inches of snow would allow,
+discovering in the early morning of November 27 a
+large camp in the valley of the Washita.</p>
+
+<p>It was Black Kettle's camp of Cheyenne and
+Arapaho that they had found in a strip of heavy
+timber along the river. After reconnoitring Custer
+divided his force into four columns for simultaneous
+attacks upon the sleeping village. At daybreak
+"my men charged the village and reached the lodges
+before the Indians were aware of our presence. The
+moment the charge was ordered the band struck
+up 'Garry Owen,' and with cheers that strongly
+reminded me of scenes during the war, every trooper,
+led by his officer, rushed towards the village." For
+several hours a promiscuous fight raged up and down
+the ravine, with Indians everywhere taking to cover,
+only to be prodded out again. Fifty-one lodges in all
+fell into Custer's hands; 103 dead Indians, including
+Black Kettle himself, were found later. "We
+captured in good condition 875 horses, ponies, and
+mules; 241 saddles, some of very fine and costly
+workmanship; 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins
+for lodges, 160 untanned robes, 210 axes, 140<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">318</a></span>
+hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535 pounds of
+powder, 1050 pounds of lead, 4000 arrows and arrowheads,
+75 spears, 90 bullet moulds, 35 bows and
+quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds of bullets, 775
+lariats, 940 buckskin saddle-bags, 470 blankets,
+93 coats, 700 pounds of tobacco."</p>
+
+<p>As the day advanced, Custer's triumph seemed
+likely to turn into defeat. The Cheyenne village
+proved to be only the last of a long string of villages
+that extended down the Washita for fifteen miles or
+more, and whose braves rode up by hundreds to see
+the fight. A general engagement was avoided, however,
+and with better luck and more discretion than
+he was one day to have, Custer marched back to
+Camp Supply on December 3, his band playing
+gayly the tune of battle, "Garry Owen." The
+commander in his triumphal procession was followed
+by his scouts and trailers, and the captives of his
+prowess&mdash;a long train of Indian widows and orphans.</p>
+
+<p>The decisive blow which broke the power of the
+southwest tribes had been struck, and Black Kettle
+had carried on his last raid,&mdash;if indeed he had carried
+on this one at all&mdash;but as the reports came in it
+became evident that the merits of the triumph were
+in doubt. The Eastern humanitarians were shocked
+at the cold-blooded attack upon a camp of sleeping
+men, women, and children, forgetting that if Indians
+were to be fought this was the most successful way to
+do it, and was no shock to the Indians' own ideals
+of warfare and attack. The deeper question was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">319</a></span>
+whether this camp was actually hostile, whether the
+tribes had not abandoned the war-path in good faith,
+whether it was fair to crush a tribe that with apparent
+earnestness begged peace because it could not control
+the excesses of some of its own braves. It became
+certain, at least, that the War Department itself
+had fallen victim to that vice with which it had so
+often reproached the Indian Office&mdash;failure to
+produce a harmony of action among several branches
+of the service.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian Office had no responsibility for the
+battle of the Washita. It had indeed issued arms
+to the Cheyenne in August, but only with the approval
+of the military officer commanding Forts
+Larned and Dodge, General Alfred Sully, "an
+officer of long experience in Indian affairs." In the
+early summer all the tribes had been near these forts
+and along the Santa FĂŠ trail. After Congress had
+voted its half million to feed the hungry, Sherman
+had ordered that the peaceful hungry among the
+southern tribes should be moved from this locality
+to the vicinity of old Fort Cobb, in the west end of
+Indian Territory on the Washita River.</p>
+
+<p>During September, while Sheridan was gathering
+his armament at Fort Hays, Sherman was ordering
+the agents to take their peaceful charges to Fort
+Cobb. With the major portion of the tribes at war
+it would be impossible for the troops to make any
+discrimination unless there should be an absolute
+separation between the well-disposed and the warlike.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">320</a></span>
+He proposed to allow the former a reasonable
+time to get to their new abode and then beg the
+President for an order "declaring all Indians who
+remain outside of their lawful reservations" to be
+outlaws. He believed that by going to war these
+tribes had violated their hunting rights. Superintendent
+Murphy thought he saw another Sand
+Creek in these preparations. Here were the tribes
+ordered to Fort Cobb; their fall annuity goods were
+on the way thither for distribution; and now the
+military column was marching in the same direction.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime General W.&nbsp;B. Hazen had arrived
+at Fort Cobb on November 7 and had immediately
+voiced his fear that "General Sheridan, acting under
+the impression of hostiles, may attack bands of Comanche
+and Kiowa before they reach this point."
+He found, however, most of these tribes, who had not
+gone to war this season, encamped within reach on
+the Canadian and Washita rivers,&mdash;5000 of the Comanche
+and 1500 of the Kiowa. Within a few days
+Cheyenne and Arapaho began to join the settlements
+in the district, Black Kettle bringing in his
+band to the Washita, forty miles east of Antelope
+Hills, and coming in person to Fort Cobb for an
+interview with General Hazen on November 20.</p>
+
+<p>"I have always done my best," he protested, "to
+keep my young men quiet, but some will not listen,
+and since the fighting began I have not been able to
+keep them all at home. But we all want peace."
+To which added Big Mouth, of the Arapaho: "I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">321</a></span>
+came to you because I wish to do right.... I do not
+want war, and my people do not, but although we
+have come back south of the Arkansas, the soldiers
+follow us and continue fighting, and we want you to
+send out and stop these soldiers from coming against
+us."</p>
+
+<p>To these, General Hazen, fearful as he was of an
+unjust attack, responded with caution. Sherman
+had spoken of Fort Cobb in his orders to Sheridan, as
+"aimed to hold out the olive branch with one hand
+and the sword in the other. But it is not thereby
+intended that any hostile Indians shall make use
+of that establishment as a refuge from just punishment
+for acts already done. Your military control
+over that reservation is as perfect as over Kansas, and
+if hostile Indians retreat within that reservation, ...
+they may be followed even to Fort Cobb, captured,
+and punished." It is difficult to see what could
+constitute the fact of peaceful intent if coming in
+to Fort Cobb did not. But Hazen gave to Black
+Kettle cold comfort: "I am sent here as a peace
+chief; all here is to be peace; but north of the
+Arkansas is General Sheridan, the great war chief, and
+I do not control him; and he has all the soldiers who
+are fighting the Arapahoes and Cheyennes.... If
+the soldiers come to fight, you must remember they
+are not from me, but from that great war chief, and
+with him you must make peace.... I cannot stop
+the war.... You must not come in again unless I
+send for you, and you must keep well out beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">322</a></span>
+the friendly Kiowas and Comanches." So he sent
+the suitors away and wrote, on November 22, to
+Sherman for more specific instructions covering these
+cases. He believed that Black Kettle and Big Mouth
+were themselves sincere, but doubted their control
+over their bands. These were the bands which
+Custer destroyed before the week was out, and it is
+probable that during the fight they were reĂŤnforced
+by braves from the friendly lodges of Satanta's
+Kiowa and Little Raven's Arapaho.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever might have been a wise policy in treating
+semi-hostile Indian tribes, this one was certainly unsatisfactory.
+It is doubtful whether the war was ever
+so great as Sherman imagined it. The injured tribes
+were unquestionably drawn to Fort Cobb by a desire
+for safety; the army was in the position of seeming
+to use the olive branch to assemble the Indians in order
+that the sword might the better disperse them.
+There is reasonable doubt whether Black Kettle
+had anything to do with the forays. Murphy believed
+in him and cited many evidences of his friendly
+disposition, while Wynkoop asserted positively that
+he had been encamped on Pawnee Fork all through
+the time when he was alleged to have been committing
+depredations on the Saline. The army alone had
+been no more successful in producing obvious justice
+than the army and Indian Office together had been.
+Yet whatever the merits of the case, the power of the
+Cheyenne and their neighbors was permanently gone.</p>
+
+<p>During the winter of 1868&ndash;1869 Sheridan's army<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">323</a></span>
+remained in the vicinity of Fort Cobb, gathering the
+remnants of the shattered tribes in upon their reservation.
+The Kiowa and Comanche were placed at
+last on the lands awarded them at the Medicine Lodge
+treaties, while the Arapaho and Cheyenne once
+more had their abiding-place changed in August, 1869,
+and were settled down along the upper waters of the
+Washita, around the valley of their late defeat.</p>
+
+<p>The long controversy between the War and Interior
+departments over the management of the tribes entered
+upon a new stage with the inauguration of
+Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his
+administration was a bill erecting a board of civilian
+Indian commissioners to advise the Indian Department
+and promote the civilization of the tribes.
+A generous grant of two millions accompanied the
+act. More care was used in the appointment of
+agents than had hitherto been taken, and the immediate
+results seemed good when the Commissioner
+wrote his annual report in December, 1869. But the
+worst of the troubles with the Indians of the plains
+was over, so that without special effort peace could
+now have been the result.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">324</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS</span></h2>
+
+<p>Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains
+made their last stand in front of the invading white
+man overland travel had begun; ten years before,
+Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic
+Whitney and the leadership of more practical men,
+had provided for a survey of railroad routes along
+the trails; on the eve of the struggle the earliest continental
+railway had received its charter; and the
+struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in
+1867, sent out its Peace Commission to prepare an
+open way. That the tribes must yield was as inevitable
+as it was that their yielding must be ungracious
+and destructive to them. Too weak to compel their
+enemy to respect their rights, and uncertain what their
+rights were, they were too low in intelligence to realize
+that the more they struggled, the worse would be their
+suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in
+which the iron band was put across the continent.
+Its completion and their subjection came in 1869.</p>
+
+<p>After years of tedious debate the earliest of the
+Pacific railways was chartered in 1862. The withdrawal
+of southern claims had made possible an
+agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">325</a></span>
+engendered by the Civil War gave to the project its
+final impetus. Under the management of the Central
+Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and two
+or three border railways, provision was made for a
+road from the Iowa border to California. Land grants
+and bond subsidies were for two years dangled
+before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt
+to entice them to construct it. Only after these
+were increased in 1864 did active organization begin,
+while at the end of 1865 but forty miles of the Union
+Pacific had been built.</p>
+
+<p>Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the
+Pacific Ocean was easily the greatest engineering feat
+that America had undertaken. In their day the
+Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania
+Portage Railway had ranked among the
+American wonders, but none of these had been accompanied
+by the difficult problems that bristled
+along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must
+be laid across plain and desert, through hostile Indian
+country and over mountains. Worse yet, the road
+could hope for little aid from the country through
+which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson,
+Salt Lake, and Denver, the last of which it missed by
+a hundred miles, its course lay through unsettled
+wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the
+trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected
+themselves across the continent, relying, up to the
+moment of joining, upon the firm anchorage of the
+termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">326</a></span>
+Equally trying, though different in variety, were the
+difficulties attendant upon construction at either end.</p>
+
+<p>The impetus which Judah had given to the Central
+Pacific had started the western end of the system
+two years ahead of the eastern, but had not produced
+great results at first. It was hard work building east
+into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging,
+tunnelling, filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade
+down and the curvature out. Twenty miles a year
+only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865, thirty
+in 1866, and forty-six in 1867&mdash;one hundred and
+thirty-six miles during the first five years of work.
+Nature had done her best to impede the progress of
+the road by thrusting mountains and valleys across
+its route. But she had covered the mountains with
+timber and filled them with stone, so that materials of
+construction were easily accessible along all of the
+costliest part of the line. Bridges and trestles could
+be built anywhere with local material. The labor
+problem vexed the Central Pacific managers at the
+start. It was a scanty and inefficient supply of
+workmen that existed in California when construction
+began. Like all new countries, California possessed
+more work than workmen. Economic independence
+was to be had almost for the asking. Free land and
+fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work for
+hire. The slight results of the first five years were
+due as much to lack of labor as to refractory roadway
+or political opposition. But by 1865 the employment
+of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">327</a></span>
+the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker,
+who was the most active constructor, brought
+a new rapidity into construction. "I used to go
+up and down that road in my car like a mad
+bull," Crocker dictated to Bancroft's stenographer,
+"stopping along wherever there was anything amiss,
+and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not up
+to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles
+began. California could manufacture no iron. Rolling
+stock and rails had to be imported from Europe
+or the East, and came to San Francisco after the
+costly sea voyage, <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">via</i> Panama or the Horn. But
+the men directing the Central Pacific&mdash;Stanford,
+Crocker, Huntington, and the rest&mdash;rose to the difficulties,
+and once they had passed the mountains, fairly
+romped across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.</p>
+
+<p>The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies
+than did the California terminus, yet until 1867 no
+railroad from the East reached Council Bluffs, where
+the President had determined that the Union Pacific
+should begin. There had been railway connection
+to the Missouri River at St. Joseph since 1859, and
+various lines were hurrying across Iowa in the sixties,
+but for more than two years of construction the Union
+Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the
+Missouri steamers or the laborious prairie schooners.
+Until its railway connection was established its
+difficulty in this respect was only less great than that
+of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">328</a></span>
+Union Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following
+the old Platte trail, flat and smooth as the
+best highways, its construction gangs could do the light
+grading as rapidly as the finished single track could
+deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful
+culverts and trestles there was little material at
+hand. The willows and Cottonwood lining the river
+would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its
+wood as it needed it, often within sight of its track.
+The Union Pacific had to haul much of its wood and
+stone, like its iron, from its eastern terminus.</p>
+
+<p>The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately
+connected with the solution of its Indian
+problem. The Central Pacific had almost no trouble
+with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but
+the Union Pacific was built during the very years
+when the great plains were most disturbed and hostile
+forays were most frequent. Its employees contained
+large elements of the newly arrived Irish and
+of the recently discharged veterans of the Civil War.
+General Dodge, who was its chief engineer, has described
+not only the military guards who "stacked
+their arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's
+warning to fall in and fight," but the military capacity
+of the construction gangs themselves. The "track
+train could arm a thousand men at a word," and
+from chief constructor down to chief spiker "could
+be commanded by experienced officers of every rank,
+from general to a captain. They had served five
+years at the front, and over half of the men had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">329</a></span>
+shouldered a musket in many battles. An illustration
+of this came to me after our track had passed
+Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River.
+The Indians had captured a freight train and were
+in possession of it and its crews." Dodge came to
+the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal," with
+twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to
+him; yet "when I called upon them to fall in, to go
+forward and retake the train, every man on the train
+went into line, and by his position showed that he
+was a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as
+skirmishers, and at the command they went forward
+as steadily and in as good order as we had seen the
+old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."</p>
+
+<p>By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much
+to accelerate the construction of the road. Heretofore
+the junction point had been in the Nevada Desert,
+a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line.
+It was now provided that each road might build until
+it met the other. Since the mountain section, with
+the highest accompanying subsidies, was at hand,
+each of the companies was spurred on by its desire
+to get as much land and as many bonds as possible.
+The race which began in the autumn of 1866 ended
+only with the completion of the track in 1869. A
+mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start;
+seven or eight a day were laid before the end.</p>
+
+<p>The English traveller, Bell, who published his
+<i>New Tracks in North America</i> in 1869, found somewhere
+an enthusiastic quotation admirably descriptive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">330</a></span>
+of the process. "Track-laying on the Union
+Pacific is a science," it read, "and we pundits of the
+Far East stood upon that embankment, only about
+a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed
+westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives
+with mingled feelings of amusement, curiosity,
+and profound respect. On they came. A light car,
+drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with
+its load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and
+start forward, the rest of the gang taking hold by twos
+until it is clear of the car. They come forward at a
+run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in
+its place, right side up, with care, while the same
+process goes on at the other side of the car. Less
+than thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four
+rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say,
+but the fellows on the U.&nbsp;P. are tremendously in
+earnest. The moment the car is empty it is tipped
+over on the side of the track to let the next loaded car
+pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a
+sight to see it go flying back for another load, propelled
+by a horse at full gallop at the end of 60
+or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu, who
+drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come
+the gaugers, spikers, and bolters, and a lively time
+they make of it. It is a grand Anvil Chorus that
+these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.
+It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike.
+There are ten spikes to a rail, four hundred rails to
+a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San Francisco.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">331</a></span>
+That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one
+million times are those sledges to be swung&mdash;twenty-one
+million times are they to come down
+with their sharp punctuation, before the great work
+of modern America is complete!"</p>
+
+<p>Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of
+laborers who built the road was no mean problem.
+Ten years earlier the builders of the Illinois Central
+had complained because their road from Galena and
+Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited
+country upon which they could not live as
+they went along. Much more the continental railways,
+building rapidly away from the settlements,
+were forced to carry their dwellings with them.
+Their commissariat was as important as their general
+offices.</p>
+
+<p>An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where
+Cheyenne now is and seeing a long freight train
+arrive "laden with frame houses, boards, furniture,
+palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom
+city. "The guard jumped off his van, and seeing
+some friends on the platform, called out with a
+flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head
+of the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder
+than the horn that was blown around the walls of
+Jericho," was the terminal town; its tongue was the
+stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the
+head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head
+followed, leaving across the plains a series of scars,
+marking the spots where it had rested for a time.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">332</a></span>
+Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight
+train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end
+of the track. Its vagrant population followed it. It
+was at Julesburg early in 1867; at Cheyenne in the
+end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring.
+Always it was the most disreputably picturesque
+spot on the anatomy of the railroad.</p>
+
+<p>In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel
+Bowles, editor of the <i>Springfield Republican</i>, appropriately
+designated the terminal town, was at Benton,
+Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles
+from Omaha and near the military reservation
+at Fort Steele. In the very midst of the gray desert,
+with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the town
+stood dusty white&mdash;"a new arrival with black
+clothes looked like nothing so much as a cockroach
+struggling through a flour barrel." A less promising
+location could hardly have been found, yet within
+two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand
+people with ordinances and government suited
+to its size, and facilities for vice ample for all. The
+needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the
+road was operating for passengers and freight; to
+the west it was yet constructing track. Here was
+the end of rail travel and the beginning of the stage
+routes to the coast and the mines. Two years
+earlier the similar point had been at Fort Kearney,
+Nebraska.</p>
+
+<p>The city of tents and shacks contained, according
+to the count of John H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">333</a></span>
+twenty-three saloons and five dance houses. It
+had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling
+and rowdyism were the order of day and night.
+Its great institution was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes,
+with equal truth but less politeness, called
+the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred
+feet long by forty wide, well floored, and given over
+to drinking, dancing, and gambling. The sumptuous
+bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry
+alkali country; all the games known to the professional
+gambler were in full blast; women, often fair
+and well-dressed, were there to gather in what the
+bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came
+these people, and how they learned their trade, was
+a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would appear to have
+been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they
+must have naturally returned after graduating here,
+fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service."</p>
+
+<p>Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments,
+like beads, were strung along the cord of
+rails. In advance of the construction gangs land
+companies would commonly survey town sites in
+preparation for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner
+lots was a form of gambling in which real money was
+often lost and honest hopes were regularly shattered.
+Each town had its advocates who believed it was to
+be the great emporium of the West. Yet generally,
+as the railroad moved on, the town relapsed into a
+condition of deserted prairie, with only the street<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">334</a></span>
+lines and dĂŠbris to remind it of its past. Omaha,
+though Beadle thought in 1868 that no other "place
+in America had been so well lied about," and Council
+Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of their
+strategic position at the commencement of the main
+line. Tied together in 1872 by the great iron bridge
+of the Union Pacific, their relations were as harmonious
+as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they
+quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real
+terminus. But the future of both was assured when
+the eastern roads began to run in to get connections
+with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city
+of some consequence because the Denver Pacific
+branched off at this point to serve the Pike's Peak
+region. But the names of most of the other one-time
+terminal towns were writ in sand.</p>
+
+<p>The progress of construction of the road after
+1866 was rapid enough. At the end of 1865, though
+the Central Pacific had started two years before the
+Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of
+track, to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central
+Pacific built thirty laborious miles over the mountains,
+and in 1867, forty-six miles, while in the same
+two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In
+1868, the western road, now past its worst troubles,
+added more than 360 to its mileage; the Union
+Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide, making
+a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line
+was done, 1776 miles from Omaha to Sacramento.
+For the last sixteen months of the continental race<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">335</a></span>
+the two roads together had built more than two and
+a half miles for every working day. Never before
+had construction been systematized so highly or the
+rewards for speed been so great.</p>
+
+<p>Whether regarded as an economic achievement or
+a national work, the building of the road deserved
+the attention it received; yet it was scarcely finished
+before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had
+written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary
+notices" of the men who had made possible the feat,
+but before he went to press their reputations were
+blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention no
+names." "Never praise a man," he declared in
+disgust, "or name your children after him, till he
+is dead." Before the end of Grant's first administration
+the <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">CrĂŠdit Mobilier</i> scandal proved that men,
+high in the national government, had speculated in
+the project whose success depended on their votes.
+That many of them had been guilty of indiscretion,
+was perfectly clear, but they had done only what
+many of their greatest predecessors had done. Their
+real fault was made more prominent by their misfortune
+in being caught by an aroused national conscience
+which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it
+had ever disregarded in the past.</p>
+
+<p>The junction point for the Union Pacific and
+Central Pacific had been variously fixed by the
+acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open to
+fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened
+in 1869 it might never have existed. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">336</a></span>
+their rush for the land grants the two rivals hurried
+on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake,
+where their advancing ends began to overlap, and
+continued parallel for scores of miles. Congress,
+noticing their indisposition to agree upon a junction,
+intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to
+bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a
+few miles northwest of Ogden on the shore of the
+lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was celebrated
+in due form.</p>
+
+<p>Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton
+from Buffalo to the Atlantic in 1825, it has been the
+custom to make the completion of a new road an
+occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of
+May, 1869, the whole United States stood still to
+signalize the junction of the tracks. The date had
+been agreed upon by the railways on short notice,
+and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford
+for the Central Pacific and President Dillon for the
+Union Pacific, had come to the scene of activities.
+The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last Spike"
+for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling
+how General Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying
+his final section, and how at noon on the appointed
+day the last two rails were spiked to a tie of California
+laurel. The immediate audience was small, including
+few beyond the railway officials, but within hearing
+of the telegraphic taps that told of the last blows
+of the sledge-hammer was much of the United States.
+President Dillon told the story as it was given in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">337</a></span>
+leading paragraph of the <i>Nation</i> of the Thursday
+after. "So far as we have seen them," wrote Godkin's
+censor of American morals, "the speeches,
+prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke
+down under the weight of the occasion, and it is a
+relief to turn from them to the telegrams which passed
+between the various operators, and to get their
+flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the
+Omaha man says, when the operators all over the
+Union begin to pester him with questions. 'When
+the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we
+will say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word,
+'Hats off! Prayer is being offered.' Then at the
+end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with a
+sense of having at last come to business: 'We have
+got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.' ...
+Before sunset the event was celebrated, not
+very noisily but very heartily, throughout the
+country. Chicago made a procession seven miles
+long; New York hung out bunting, fired a hundred
+guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity;
+Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo
+sang the 'Star-spangled Banner'; and many towns
+burnt powder in honor of the consummation of a
+work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a
+road to the Indies, a means of making the United
+States a halfway house between the East and West,
+and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the perpetuity
+of the Union as it is."</p>
+
+<p>No single event in the struggle for the last frontier<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">338</a></span>
+had a greater significance for the immediate audience,
+or for posterity, than this act of completion. Bret
+Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question that
+all were <span class="locked">framing:&mdash;</span></p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">"What was it the Engines said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pilots touching, head to head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Facing on the single track,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Half a world behind each back?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="in0">But he was able to answer only a part of it. His
+western engine retorted to the <span class="locked">eastern:&mdash;</span></p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">"'You brag of the East! <i>You</i> do?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why, <i>I</i> bring the East to <i>you</i>!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the Orient, all Cathay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Find through me the shortest way;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the sun you follow here<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rises in my hemisphere.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Really,&mdash;if one must be rude,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet
+dazzled the eyes of the men who built the road, blinding
+them to the prosaic millions lying beneath their
+feet. The East and West were indeed united; but,
+more important, the intervening frontier was ceasing
+to divide. When the road was undertaken, men
+thought naturally of the East and the Pacific Coast,
+unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains
+and the desert and the Indian Country. The mining
+flurries of the early sixties raised a hope that this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">339</a></span>
+intervening land might not all be waste. As the
+railway had advanced, settlement had marched with
+it, the two treading upon the heels of the Peace
+Commissioners sent out to lure away the Indians.
+With the opening of the road the new period of
+national assimilation of the continent had begun.
+In fifteen years more, as other roads followed, there
+had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap between the
+East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">340</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE NEW INDIAN POLICY</span></h2>
+
+<p>Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners
+of 1867 and 1868, and the opening of the
+Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the plains
+had been cleanly split into two main groups which
+had their centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest
+Dakota and the old Indian Territory. The advance
+of a new wave of population had followed along the
+road thus opened, pushing settlements into central
+Nebraska and Kansas. Through the latter state the
+Union Pacific, Eastern Division, better known as the
+Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver,
+where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this
+advance of civilized life upon the plains it became
+clear that the old Indian policy was gone for good,
+and that the idea of a permanent country, where the
+tribes, free from white contact, could continue their
+nomadic existence, had broken down. The old Indian
+policy had been based upon the permanence
+of this condition, but with the white advance troops
+for police had been added, while the loud bickerings
+between the military authorities, thus superimposed,
+and the Indian Office, which regarded itself as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">341</a></span>
+rightful custodian of the problem, proved to be the
+overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first
+annual message in 1869: "No matter what ought to
+be the relations between such [civilized] settlements
+and the aborigines, the fact is they do not harmonize
+well, and one or the other has to give way in the end.
+A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is
+too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing
+upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering
+in the citizen a disregard for human life
+and the rights of others, dangerous to society.
+I see no substitute for such a system, except in placing
+all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly
+as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection
+there."</p>
+
+<p>The vexed question of civilian or military control
+had reached the bitterest stage of its discussion when
+Grant became President. For five years there had
+been general wars in which both departments seemed
+to be badly involved and for which responsibility
+was hard to place. There were many things to be
+said in favor of either method of control. Beginning
+with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian
+Affairs in 1832, the office had been run by the War
+Department for seventeen years. In this period
+the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been
+carried out; the frontier had been established in an
+unbroken line of reserves from Texas to Green Bay;
+and the migration across the plains had begun.
+But with the creation of the Interior Department<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">342</a></span>
+in 1849 the Indian Bureau had been transferred
+to civilian hands. As yet the Indian war was so
+exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments
+in favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly
+too, though the results make this conviction
+hard to hold, to treat the Indian well, to keep the
+peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they
+would permit it. However the government failed
+in practice and in controlling the men of the frontier,
+there is no doubt about the sincerity of its general
+intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California,
+no mines and no railways, and no mixture of slavery
+and politics, the hope might not have failed of realization.
+Even as it was, the civilian bureau had little
+trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years
+after its organization. In general the military
+power was called upon when disorder passed beyond
+the control of the agent; short of that time the agent
+remained in authority.</p>
+
+<p>As a means of introducing civilization among the
+tribes the agents were more effective than army
+officers could be. They were, indeed, underpaid, appointed
+for political reasons, and often too weak to
+resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty;
+but they were civilians. Their ideals were those of
+industry and peace. Their terms of service were
+often too short for them to learn the business, but
+they were not subject to the rapid shifting and
+transfer which made up a large part of army life.
+Army officers were better picked and trained than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">343</a></span>
+the agents, but their ambitions were military, and
+they were frequently unable to understand why
+breaches of formal discipline were not always matters
+of importance.</p>
+
+<p>The strong arguments in favor of military control
+were founded largely on the permanency of tenure in
+the army. Political appointments were fewer, the
+average of personal character and devotion was
+higher. Army administration had fewer scandals
+than had that of the Indian Bureau. The partisan
+on either side in the sixties was prone to believe
+that his favorite branch of the service was honest
+and wise, while the other was inefficient, foolish,
+and corrupt. He failed to see that in the earliest
+phase of the policy, when there was no friction,
+and consequently little fighting, the problem was
+essentially civilian; that in the next period, when
+constant friction was provoking wars, it had become
+military; and that finally, when emigration and
+transportation had changed friction into overwhelming
+pressure, the wars would again cease. A large
+share of the disputes were due to the misunderstandings
+as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes
+should be under the bureau or the army. On the
+whole, even when the tribes were hostile, army
+control tended to increase the cost of management
+and the chance of injustice. There never was a time
+when a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals
+of police rather than those of soldiers, could not have
+done better than the army did. But the student,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">344</a></span>
+attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve
+it fully and justly as were its immediate custodians.
+He can at most steer in between the badly biassed
+"Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson, and the
+outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier,
+that the Indian must go.</p>
+
+<p>The demand of the army for the control of the
+Indians was never gratified. Around 1870 its friends
+were insistent that since the army had to bear the
+knocks of the Indian policy,&mdash;knocks, they claimed,
+generally due to mistakes of the bureau,&mdash;it ought to
+have the whole responsibility and the whole credit.
+The inertia which attaches to federal reforms held
+this one back, while the Indian problem itself
+changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary.
+Once the great wars of the sixties were done
+the tribes subsided into general peace. Their vigorous
+resistance was confined to the years when the
+last great wave of the white advance was surging
+over them. Then, confined to their reservations,
+they resumed the march to civilization.</p>
+
+<p>From the commencement of his term, Grant was
+willing to aid in at once reducing the abuses of the
+Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy on the
+plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done
+good work, which would have been more effective
+had coĂśperation between the army and the bureau
+been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted
+two millions to be used in maintaining peace on the
+plains, "among and with the several tribes ...<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">345</a></span>
+to promote civilization among said Indians, bring
+them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve
+their necessities, and encourage their efforts at self-support."
+The President was authorized at the same
+time to erect a board of not more than ten men,
+"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy,"
+who should, with the Secretary of the Interior,
+and without salary, exercise joint control over the
+expenditures of this or any money voted for the use
+of the Indian Department.</p>
+
+<p>The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed
+to give greater wisdom to the administration of the
+Indian policy and to minimize peculation in the
+bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of
+the peace party over the army. "The gentlemen
+who wrote the reports of the Commissioners revelled
+in riotous imaginations and discarded facts," sneered
+a friend of military control; but there was, more or
+less, a distinct improvement in the management of
+the reservation tribes after 1869; although, as the
+exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption was
+by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners
+and Grant sought to elevate the tone of
+agency control was through the religious, charitable,
+and missionary societies. These organizations,
+many of which had long maintained missionary
+schools among the more civilized tribes, were invited
+to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians
+for appointment by the bureau. On the whole
+these appointments were an improvement over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">346</a></span>
+men whom political influence had heretofore brought
+to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner
+and the board were again complaining of the character
+of the agents; but there was an increasing standard
+of criticism.</p>
+
+<p>In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the
+Interior in 1869, and since, the board gave much
+credit to the new peace policy. In 1869 it looked
+forward with confidence "to success in the effort to
+civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described
+"the remarkable spectacle seen this fall, on the plains
+of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado,
+of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of Dakota,
+Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo
+without occasioning any serious alarm among
+the thousands of white settlers whose cabins skirt
+the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872,
+"the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and
+Christianity has been rapid, the temper and inclination
+of all of them has greatly improved.... They
+show a more positive intention to comply with their
+own obligations, and to accept the advice of those
+in authority over them, and are in many cases disproving
+the assertion, that adult Indians cannot
+be induced to work." In 1906, in its <i>38th Annual
+Report</i>, there was still most marked improvement,
+"and for the last thirty years the legislation of
+Congress concerning Indians, their education, their
+allotment and settlement on lands of their own,
+their admission to citizenship, and the protection of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">347</a></span>
+their rights makes, upon the whole, a chapter of
+political history of which Americans may justly be
+proud."</p>
+
+<p>The board of Indian Commissioners believed that
+most of the obvious improvement in the Indian condition
+was due to the substitution of a peace policy for
+a policy of something else. It made a mistake in
+assuming that there had ever been a policy of war.
+So far as the United States government had been concerned
+the aim had always been peace and humanity,
+and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the
+Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy
+been administered. Even then it was distinctly
+temporary. The events of the sixties had involved
+such continuous friction and necessitated such severe
+repression that contemporaries might be pardoned
+for thinking that war was the policy rather than the
+cure. But the resistance of the tribes would generally
+have ceased by 1870, even without the new
+peace policy. Every mile of western railway lessened
+the Indians' capacity for resistance by increasing
+the government's ability to repress it. The Union
+Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific,
+Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, to say nothing
+of a multitude of private roads like the Chicago,
+Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio
+Grande, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ, and
+the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, were the real
+forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet
+the board was right in that its influence in bringing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">348</a></span>
+closer harmony between public opinion and the Indian
+Bureau, and in improving the tone of the bureau, had
+made the transformation of the savage into the citizen
+farmer more rapid.</p>
+
+<p>Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian
+Commissioners Congress took another long step
+towards a better condition by ordering that no more
+treaties with the Indian tribes should be made by
+President and Senate. For more than two years before
+1871 no treaty had been made and ratified, and
+now the policy was definitely changed. For ninety
+years the Indians had been treated as independent
+nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had
+been concluded with various tribes, the United States
+only once repudiating any of them. In 1863, after
+the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the
+tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had
+not applied to Indian relations the rule of international
+law that war terminates all existing treaties. The
+relation implied by the treaty had been anomalous.
+The tribes were at once independent and dependent.
+No foreign nation could treat with them; hence
+they were not free. No state could treat with them,
+and the Indian could not sue in United States courts;
+hence they were not Americans. The Supreme
+Court in the Cherokee cases had tried to define
+their unique status, but without great success. It
+was unfortunate for the Indians that the United
+States took their tribal existence seriously. The
+agreements had always a greater sanctity in appearance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">349</a></span>
+than in fact. Indians honestly unable to
+comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and
+often denying that they were in any wise bound
+by it, were held to fulfilment by the power
+of the United States. The United States often
+believed that treaty violation represented deliberate
+hostility of the tribes, when it signified only the
+unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to
+follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce
+treaties thus violated led constantly to wars
+whose justification the Indian could not see.</p>
+
+<p>The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making
+of any Indian treaty in the future. Hereafter when
+agreements became necessary, they were to be made,
+much as they had been in the past, but Congress
+was the ratifying power and not the Senate. The
+fiction of an independence which had held the Indians
+to a standard which they could not understand was
+here abandoned; and quite as much to the point,
+perhaps, the predominance of the Senate in Indian
+affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a
+whole. In no other branch of internal administration
+would the Senate have been permitted to make
+binding agreements, but here the fiction had given
+it a dominance ever since the organization of the
+government.</p>
+
+<p>In the thirty-five years following the abandonment
+of the Indian treaties the problems of management
+changed with the ascending civilization of the national
+wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian Commissioner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">350</a></span>
+in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day
+of deliverance from the fear of Indian hostilities,"
+while his successors in office saw his prophecy fulfilled.
+Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary of the
+Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement
+of management and the drafting of a positive policy.
+His application of the merit system to Indian
+appointments, which was a startling innovation in
+national politics, worked a great change after the
+petty thievery which had flourished in the presidency
+of General Grant. Grant had indeed desired to do
+well, and conditions had appreciably bettered,
+yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians
+to continue their peculations in instances which
+ranged from humble agents up to the Cabinet itself.
+Schurz not only corrected much of this, but the
+first report of his Commissioner, E.&nbsp;A. Hayt, outlined
+the preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides
+the continuance of concentration and education
+there were four policies which stood out in this report&mdash;economy
+in the administration of rations, that the
+Indians might not be pauperized; a special code
+of law for the Indian reserves; a well-organized
+Indian police to enforce the laws; and a division of
+reserve lands into farms which should be assigned
+to individual Indians in severalty. The administration
+of Secretary Schurz gave substance to all these
+policies.</p>
+
+<p>The progress of Indian education and civilization
+began to be a real thing during Hayes's presidency.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">351</a></span>
+Most of the wars were over, permanency in residence
+could be relied on to a considerable degree, the Indians
+could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In
+1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department,
+the Indian Office reported an Indian population
+of 256,127 for the United States, excluding
+Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing
+citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read.
+Among them had been erected both boarding and day
+schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the latter.
+"Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement,
+showing an increased and more regular
+attendance of pupils and a growing interest in education
+on the part of parents." Interest in the
+problem of Indian education had been aroused in
+the East as well as among the tribes during the preceding
+year or two, because of the experiment with
+which the name of R.&nbsp;H. Pratt was closely connected.
+The non-resident boarding school, where the children
+could be taken away from the tribe and educated
+among whites, had become a factor in Carlisle,
+Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt
+had opened the first of these with 147 students in
+November, 1879. His design had been to give to
+the boys and girls the rudiments of education and
+training in farming and mechanic arts. His experience
+had already, in 1880, shown this to be entirely
+practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled as
+soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals,
+marched to the music of their own band. Both sexes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">352</a></span>
+had exhibited at the Cumberland County Agricultural
+Fair, where prizes were awarded to many
+of them for quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness,
+tinware, and penmanship. Many of the students
+had increased their knowledge of white customs
+by going out in the summers to work in the fields or
+kitchens of farmers in the East. Here, too, they
+had shown the capacity for education and development
+which their bitterest frontier enemies had
+denied. In 1906 there were twenty-five of these
+schools with more than 9000 students in attendance.</p>
+
+<p>It was one thing, however, to take the brighter
+Indian children away from home and teach them
+the ways of white men, and quite another to persuade
+the main tribe to support itself by regular
+labor. The ration system was a pauperizing influence
+that removed the incentive to work. Trained
+mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton,
+or Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers
+for their trade, and no occupation but to sit around
+with their relatives and wait for rations. Too much
+can be made of the success of Indian education, but
+the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana
+Crows, for instance, were, in 1904, encouraged
+into agricultural rivalry by a county fair. Their
+congenital love for gambling was converted into competition
+over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906
+they had not been drawing rations for nearly two
+years. While their settling down was but a single
+incident in tribal education and not a general reform,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">353</a></span>
+it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian
+conditions since the warlike sixties. The brilliant
+green placard which announced their county fair for
+1906 bears witness to <span class="locked">this:&mdash;</span></p>
+
+<div class="poem-container"><div class="poem">
+<p class="p1 center">
+"CROWS, WAKE UP!</p>
+
+<p class="p1 center smaller">
+"Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.<br />
+"Begin Planting for it Now.<br />
+"Plant a Good Garden.<br />
+"Put in Wheat and Oats.<br />
+Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to the Fair.<br />
+Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best Exhibits.<br />
+"Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.</p>
+
+<p class="p0 in0 sigright">"<i>Committee.</i>"</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="p1">A great practical obstruction in the road of economic
+independence for the Indians was the absence of a
+legal system governing their relations, and more
+particularly securing to them individual ownership
+of land. Treated as independent nations by the
+United States, no attempt had been made to pass
+civil or even criminal laws for them, while the tribal
+organizations had been too primitive to do much
+of this on their own account. Individual attempts
+at progress were often checked by the fact that crime
+went unpunished in the Indian Country. An Indian
+police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in
+1880, but the law respecting trespassers on Indian
+lands was inadequate, and Congress was slow in
+providing codes and courts for the reservations.
+The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts
+on his own authority in 1883; Congress extended
+certain laws over the tribes in 1885; and a little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">354</a></span>
+later provided salaries for the officials of the agency
+courts.</p>
+
+<p>An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in
+severalty by Indians marked a great step towards
+solidifying Indian civilization. There had been no
+greater obstacle to this civilization than communal
+ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of
+hunting, with agriculture as an incidental and rather
+degrading feature. Few of the tribes had any recognition
+of individual ownership. The educated Indian
+and the savage alike were forced into economic
+stagnation by the system. Education could accomplish
+little in face of it. The changes of the seventies
+brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated
+requests that Congress begin the breaking down of
+the tribal system through the substitution of Indian
+ownership.</p>
+
+<p>In isolated cases and by special treaty provisions
+a few of the Indians had been permitted to acquire
+lands and be blended in the body of American citizens.
+But no general statute existed until the passage
+of the Dawes bill in February, 1887. In this year
+the Commissioner estimated that there were 243,299
+Indians in the United States, occupying a total of
+213,117 square miles of land, nearly a section apiece.
+By the Dawes bill the President was given authority
+to divide the reserves among the Indians located on
+them, distributing the lands on the basis of a quarter
+section or 160 acres to each head of a family, an eighth
+section to single adults and orphans, and a sixteenth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">355</a></span>
+to each dependent child. It was provided also that
+when the allotments had been made, tribal ownership
+should cease, and the title to each farm should
+rest in the individual Indian or his heirs. But to
+forestall the improvident sale of this land the owner
+was to be denied the power to mortgage or dispose
+of it for at least twenty-five years. The United
+States was to hold it in trust for him for this time.</p>
+
+<p>Besides allowing the Indian to own his farm and
+thus take his step toward economic independence, the
+Dawes bill admitted him to citizenship. Once the
+lands had been allotted, the owners came within the
+full jurisdiction of the states or territories where
+they lived, and became amenable to and protected
+by the law as citizens of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>The policy which had been recommended since
+the time of Schurz became the accepted policy of the
+United States in 1887. "I fail to comprehend the
+full import of the allotment act if it was not the purpose
+of the Congress which passed it and the Executive
+whose signature made it a law ultimately to
+dissolve all tribal relations and to place each adult
+Indian on the broad platform of American citizenship,"
+wrote the Commissioner in 1887. For the
+next twenty years the reports of the office were filled
+with details of subdivision of reserves and the adjustment
+of the legal problems arising from the process.
+And in the twenty-first year the old Indian Country
+ceased to exist as such, coming into the Union as the
+state of Oklahoma.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">356</a></span>
+The progress of allotment under the Dawes bill
+steadily broke down the reserves of the so-called
+Indian Territory. Except the five civilized tribes,
+Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles,
+the inhabitants who had been colonized there
+since the Civil War wanted to take advantage of the
+act. The civilized tribes preferred a different and
+more independent system for themselves, and retained
+their tribal identity until 1906. In the transition
+it was found that granting citizenship to the
+Indian in a way increased his danger by opening him
+to the attack of the liquor dealer and depriving him
+of some of the special protection of the Indian Office.
+To meet this danger, as the period of tribal extinction
+drew near, the Burke act of 1906 modified and continued
+the provisions of the Dawes bill. The new
+statute postponed citizenship until the expiration
+of the twenty-five-year period of trust, while giving
+complete jurisdiction over the allottee to the United
+States in the interim. In special cases the Secretary
+of the Interior was allowed to release from the period
+of guardianship and trusteeship individual Indians
+who were competent to manage their own affairs, but
+for the generality the period of twenty-five years
+was considered "not too long a time for most Indians
+to serve their apprenticeship in civic responsibilities."</p>
+
+<p>Already the opening up to legal white settlement
+had begun. In the Dawes bill it was provided that
+after the lands had been allotted in severalty the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">357</a></span>
+undivided surplus might be bought by the United
+States and turned into the public domain for entry
+and settlement. Following this, large areas were
+purchased in 1888 and 1889, to be settled in 1890.
+The territory of Oklahoma, created in this year in
+the western end of Indian Territory, and "No Man's
+Land," north of Texas, marked the political beginning
+of the end of Indian Territory. It took nearly
+twenty years to complete it, through delays in the
+process of allotment and sale; but in these two decades
+the work was done thoroughly, the five civilized
+tribes divided their own lands and abandoned tribal
+government, and in November, 1908, the state of
+Oklahoma was admitted by President Roosevelt.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian relations, which were most belligerent
+in the sixties, had changed completely in the ensuing
+forty years. In part the change was due to a greater
+and more definite desire at Washington for peace,
+but chiefly it was environmental, due to the progress
+of settlement and transportation which overwhelmed
+the tribes, destroying their capacity to resist and
+embedding them firmly in the white population.
+Oklahoma marked the total abandonment of Monroe's
+policy of an Indian Country.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">358</a></span></p>
+
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">THE LAST STAND OF CHIEF JOSEPH AND
+SITTING BULL</span></h2>
+
+<p>The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians
+ceased with the termination of the Indian wars of
+the sixties. Here the resistance had most closely
+resembled a general war with the tribes in close
+alliance against the invader. With this obstacle overcome,
+the work left to be done in the conquest of the
+continent fell into two main classes: terminating
+Indian resistance by the suppression of sporadic
+outbreaks in remote byways and letting in the
+population. The new course of the Indian problem
+after 1869 led it speedily away from the part it had
+played in frontier advance until it became merely
+one of many social or race problems in the United
+States. It lost its special place as the great illustration
+of the difficulties of frontier life. But although
+the new course tended toward chronic peace, there
+were frequent relapses, here and there, which produced
+a series of Indian flurries after 1869. Never
+again do these episodes resemble, however remotely,
+a general Indian war.</p>
+
+<p>Human nature did not change with the adoption
+of the so-called peace policy. The government had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">359</a></span>
+constantly to be on guard against the dishonest agent,
+while improved facilities in communication increased
+the squatters' ability to intrude upon valuable lands.
+The Sioux treaty of 1868, whereby the United States
+abandoned the Powder River route and erected the
+great reserve in Dakota, west of the Missouri River,
+was scarcely dry before rumors of the discovery of
+gold in the Black Hills turned the eyes of prospectors
+thither.</p>
+
+<p>Early in 1870 citizens of Cheyenne and the territory
+of Wyoming organized a mining and prospecting
+company that professed an intention to explore the
+Big Horn country in northern Wyoming, but was
+believed by the Sioux to contemplate a visit to the
+Black Hills within their reserve. The local Sioux
+agent remonstrated against this, and General C.&nbsp;C.
+Augur was sent to Cheyenne to confer with the leaders
+of the expedition. He found Wyoming in a state of
+irritation against the Sioux treaty, which left the
+Indians in control of their Powder River country&mdash;the
+best third of the territory. He sympathized with
+the frontiersmen, but finally was forced by orders
+from Washington to prevent the expedition from
+starting into the field. Four years later this deferred
+reconnoissance took place as an official expedition
+under General Custer, with "great excitement among
+the whole Sioux." The approach from the northeast
+of the Northern Pacific, which had reached a
+landing at Bismarck on the Missouri before the panic
+of 1873, still further increased the apprehension of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">360</a></span>
+the tribes that they were to be dispossessed. The
+Indian Commissioner, in the end of 1874, believed
+that no harm would come of the expedition since no
+great gold finds had been made, but the Montana
+historian was nearer the truth when he wrote:
+"The whole Sioux nation was successfully defied."
+It was a clear violation of the tribal right, and necessarily
+emboldened the frontiersmen to prospect on
+their own account.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_360" class="figcenter" style="width: 541px;">
+  <img src="images/i-387.jpg" width="541" height="353" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Position of Reno on the Little Big Horn</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionc"><p>From a photograph made by Mr. W.&nbsp;R. Bowlin, of Chicago, and reproduced by his permission</p></div></div>
+
+<p>Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give
+countenance to the disgruntled warrior bands that
+resented the treaties already made, came the mismanagement
+of the Red Cloud agency. Professor
+O.&nbsp;C. Marsh, of Yale College, was stopped by Red
+Cloud, while on a geological visit to the Black Hills,
+in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the
+Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington
+samples of decayed flour and inferior rations which
+the Indian agent was issuing to the Oglala Sioux.
+With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded
+to study the new problem thus brought to his
+notice, and accumulated a mass of evidence which
+seemed to him to prove the existence of big plots to
+defraud the government, and mismanagement extending
+even to the Secretary of the Interior. He
+published his charges in pamphlet form, and wrote
+letters of protest to the President, in which he
+maintained that the Indian officials were trying
+harder to suppress his evidence than to correct the
+grievances of the Sioux. He managed to stir up so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">361</a></span>
+much interest in the East that the Board of Indian
+Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate
+the affairs of the Red Cloud agency. The
+report of the committee in October, 1875, whitewashed
+many of the individuals attacked by Professor
+Marsh, and exonerated others of guilt at the expense
+of their intelligence, but revealed abuses in the
+Indian Office which might fully justify uneasiness
+among the Sioux.</p>
+
+<p>To these tribes, already discontented because of
+their compression and sullen because of mismanagement,
+the entry of miners into the Black Hills country
+was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners were
+there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating
+disturbances and exaggerating in the Indian mind
+the value of the reserve, so that an attempt by the
+Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn
+came to nothing. The natural tendency of these
+forces was to drive the younger braves off the
+reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty bands
+that roamed at will and were scornful of those that
+lived in peace. Most important of the leaders
+of these bands was Sitting Bull.</p>
+
+<p>In December the Indian Commissioner, despite
+the Sioux privilege to pursue the chase, ordered all
+the Sioux to return to their reserves before February
+1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile.
+As yet the mutterings had not broken out in war,
+and the evidence does not show that conflict was
+inevitable. The tribes could not have got back on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">362</a></span>
+time had they wanted to; but their failure to return
+led the Indian Office to turn the Sioux over to the
+War Department. The army began by destroying
+a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested
+not by an enemy of the army, but by General
+H.&nbsp;H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who himself had fought
+the Sioux with marked success in 1862.</p>
+
+<p>With war now actually begun, three columns were
+sent into the field to arrest and restrain the hostile
+Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook, Gibbon,
+and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic
+of fighters. He was already well known for his
+Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier book. Sherman
+had described him in 1867 as "young, <i>very</i>
+brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry
+officer," and as "ready and willing now to fight the
+Indians." La Barge, who had carried some of
+Custer's regiment on his steamer <i>De Smet</i>, in
+1873, saw him as "an officer ... clad in buckskin
+trousers from the seams of which a large fringe was
+fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large
+gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited
+animal." His showy vanity and his admitted courage
+had already got him into more than one difficulty;
+now on June 25, 1876, his whole column
+of five companies, excepting only his battle horse,
+Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was destroyed in a
+battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had
+lived, he might perhaps have been cleared of the
+charge of disobedience, as Fetterman might ten years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">363</a></span>
+before, but, as it turned out, there were many to
+lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended
+before 1876 was over, though Sitting Bull with a
+small band escaped to Canada, where he worried
+the Dominion Government for several years. "I
+know of no instance in history," wrote Bishop
+Whipple of Minnesota, "where a great nation has so
+shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux
+were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the
+disappointed tribes settled down to another decade
+of quiescence.</p>
+
+<p>In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull
+a hero in the Centennial year was transferred to
+Chief Joseph, leader of the non-treaty Nez PercĂŠs, in
+the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been a
+friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since
+the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Living in the
+valleys of the Snake and its tributaries, it could
+easily have hindered the course of travel along the
+Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was
+always good. In 1855 it had begun to treat with
+the United States and had ceded considerable territory
+at the conference held by Governor Stevens
+with Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.</p>
+
+<p>The exigencies of the Civil War, failure of Congress
+to fulfil treaty stipulations, and the discovery of
+gold along the Snake served to change the character
+of the Nez PercĂŠs. Lawyer's annuity of five hundred
+dollars, as Principal Chief, was at best not royal,
+and when its vouchers had to be cashed in greenbacks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">364</a></span>
+at from forty-five to fifty cents on the dollar,
+he complained of hardship. It was difficult to persuade
+the savage that a depreciated greenback was
+as good as money. Congress was slow with the annuities
+promised in 1855. In 1861, only one Indian
+in six could have a blanket, while the 4393 yards of
+calico issued allowed under two yards to each Indian.
+The Commissioner commented mildly upon this, to
+the effect that "Giving a blanket to one Indian works
+no satisfaction to the other five, who receive none."
+The gold boom, with the resulting rise of Lewiston, in
+the heart of the reserve, brought in so many lawless
+miners that the treaty of 1855 was soon out of date.</p>
+
+<p>In 1863 a new treaty was held with Chief Lawyer
+and fifty other headmen, by which certain valleys
+were surrendered and the bounds of the Lapwai
+reserve agreed upon. Most of the Nez PercĂŠs accepted
+this, but Chief Joseph refused to sign and
+gathered about him a band of unreconciled, non-treaty
+braves who continued to hunt at will over the
+Wallowa Valley, which Lawyer and his followers had
+professed to cede. It was an interesting legal point
+as to the right of a non-treaty chief to claim to own
+lands ceded by the rest of his tribe. But Joseph,
+though discontented, was not dangerous, and there
+was little friction until settlers began to penetrate
+into his hunting-grounds. In 1873, President Grant
+created a Wallowa reserve for Joseph's Nez PercĂŠs,
+since they claimed this chiefly as their home. But
+when they showed no disposition to confine themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">365</a></span>
+to its limits, he revoked the order in 1875. The
+next year a commission, headed by the Secretary of
+the Interior, Zachary Chandler, was sent to persuade
+Joseph to settle down, but returned without success.
+Joseph stood upon his right to continue to occupy
+at pleasure the lands which had always belonged
+to the Nez PercĂŠs, and which he and his followers
+had never ceded. The commission recommended
+the segregation of the medicine-men and dreamers,
+especially Smohalla, who seemed to provide the
+inspiration for Joseph, and the military occupation
+of the Wallowa Valley in anticipation of an outbreak
+by the tribe against the incoming white settlers.
+These things were done in part, but in the spring of
+1877, "it becoming evident to Agent Monteith that
+all negotiations for the peaceful removal of Joseph
+and his band, with other non-treaty Nez PercĂŠ
+Indians, to the Lapwai Indian reservation in Idaho
+must fail of a satisfactory adjustment," the Indian
+Office gave it up, and turned the affair over to
+General O.&nbsp;O. Howard and the War Department.</p>
+
+<p>The conferences held by Howard with the leaders,
+in May, made it clear to them that their alternatives
+were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight. At first
+Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass
+and White Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater
+to which the tribe agreed to remove at once; but
+just before the day fixed for the removal, the murder
+of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge
+directed against the whites and the massacre of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">366</a></span>
+several. War immediately followed, for the next
+two months covering the borderland of Idaho and
+Montana with confusion. A whole volume by
+General Howard has been devoted to its details.
+Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the <i>North
+American Review</i> in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically
+in his <i>Massacres of the Mountains</i>, and the
+Montana Historical Society has published many
+articles concerning it. Considerably less is known of
+the more important wars which preceded it than of
+this struggle of the Nez PercĂŠs. In August the fighting
+turned to flight, Chief Joseph abandoning the
+Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone
+Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased
+him 1321 miles, across the Yellowstone Park toward
+the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve. Along
+the swift flight there were running battles from time
+to time, while the fugitives replenished their stores
+and stock from the country through which they
+passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front
+Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them
+off. Miles caught their trail in the end of September
+after they had crossed the Missouri River and
+had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting
+Bull had found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised
+the Nez PercĂŠ camp on Snake Creek, capturing six
+hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's
+band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later
+the stubborn chief surrendered to Colonel Miles.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">367</a></span>
+Hayt asked at the end of 1877. For once an
+Indian band had conducted a war on white principles,
+obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation
+and torture. Joseph had by his sheer military
+skill won the admiration and respect of his military
+opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated
+the war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho.
+To exile they were sent, and Joseph's uprising ended
+as all such resistances must. The forcible invasion
+of the territory by the whites was maintained; the
+tribe was sent in punishment to malarial lands in
+Indian Territory, where they rapidly dwindled in
+number. There has been no adequate defence of the
+policy of the United States from first to last.</p>
+
+<p>The Modoc of northern California, and the
+Apache of Arizona and New Mexico fought against
+the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez PercĂŠs.
+The former broke out in resistance in the winter of
+1872&ndash;1873, after they had long been proscribed by
+California opinion. In March of 1873 they made
+their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General
+E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent
+to confer with them. In the war which resulted the
+Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced Charley,
+were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava
+beds of the Modoc country until regular soldiers
+finally corralled them all. Jack was hanged for
+murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley
+lived to settle down and reform with a portion of the
+tribe in Indian Territory.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">368</a></span>
+The Apache had always been a thorn in the
+flesh of the trifling population of Arizona and New
+Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and Indian
+Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard
+decade with Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had
+quieted down during the seventies and advanced
+towards economic independence. But the Apache
+were long in learning the virtues of non-resistance.
+Bell had found in Arizona a young girl whose adventures
+as a fifteen-year-old child served to explain the
+attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by
+Indians who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped
+her naked, knocked her senseless with a tomahawk,
+pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg with
+one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon
+her. The child had come to, and without food,
+clothes, or water, had found her way home over
+thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily
+inspired the white population with fear and
+hatred, while the continued residence of the sufferers
+in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the persistence of
+the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes
+in the end. Tucson had retaliated against such
+excesses of the red men by equal excesses of the
+whites. Without any immediate provocation, fourscore
+Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated
+under military supervision at Camp Grant, were
+massacred in cold blood.</p>
+
+<p>General George Crook alone was able to bring
+order into the Arizona frontier. From 1871 to 1875<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">369</a></span>
+he was there in command,&mdash;"the beau-ideal Indian
+fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged
+in constant campaigns against the "incorrigibly
+hostile," but before 1873 was over he had most
+of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police
+supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a
+brass identification check, so that it might be easier
+for his police to watch them. The tribes were passed
+back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook was
+transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately
+the Indian Commissioner commenced to concentrate
+the scattered tribes, but was hindered by
+hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as
+bitter as their hatred for the whites. First Victorio,
+and then Geronimo was the centre of the resistance
+to the concentration which placed hereditary enemies
+side by side. They protested against the sites assigned
+them, and successfully defied the Commissioner
+to carry out his orders. Crook was brought
+back to the department in 1882, and after another
+long war gradually established peace.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876,
+returned to Dakota in the early eighties in time to
+witness the rapid settlement of the northern plains
+and the growth of the territories towards statehood.
+After his revolt the Black Hills had been taken away
+from the tribe, as had been the vague hunting rights
+over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood advanced
+in the later eighties, and as population piled
+up around the edges of the reserve, the time was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">370</a></span>
+ripe for the medicine-men to preach the coming
+of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his
+personal following. Bad crops which in these years
+produced populism in Kansas and Nebraska, had even
+greater menace for the half-civilized Indians. Agents
+and army officers became aware of the undercurrent
+of danger some months before trouble broke out.</p>
+
+<p>The state of South Dakota was admitted in November,
+1889. Just a year later the Bureau turned the
+Sioux country over to the army, and General Nelson
+A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in
+the vicinity of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies.
+The arrest of Sitting Bull, who claimed miraculous
+powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts" were
+supposed to give invulnerability to his followers,
+was attempted in December. The troops sent out
+were resisted, however, and in the mĂŞlĂŠe the prophet
+was killed. The war which followed was much
+noticed, but of little consequence. General Miles
+had plenty of troops and Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph
+stations conveyed news easily and safely.
+But when orders were issued two weeks after the
+death of Sitting Bull to disarm the camp at Wounded
+Knee, the savages resisted. The troops within
+reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their
+rapid-fire guns, regardless of age or sex, with such
+effect that more than two hundred Indian bodies,
+mostly women and children, were found dead upon
+the field.</p>
+
+<p>With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">371</a></span>
+the Indians, important enough to be called resistance,
+came to an end. There had been many other isolated
+cases of outbreak since the adoption of the
+peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and
+individual murders long after 1890. But there were,
+and could be, no more Indian wars. Many of the
+tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while
+lands in severalty had changed the point of view of
+many tribesmen. The relative strength of the two
+races was overwhelmingly in favor of the whites.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">372</a></span></p>
+
+<div>
+<h2 title="CHAPTER XXII LETTING IN THE POPULATION" class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a><br />
+
+<span class="subhead">LETTING IN THE POPULATION<a name="FNanchor_3" id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">3</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="fnanchor">3</a> This chapter follows, in part, F.&nbsp;L. Paxson, "The Pacific Railroads
+and the Disappearance of the Frontier in America," in Ann.
+Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol. I, pp. 105&ndash;118.</p></div>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">"Veil them, cover them, wall them round&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Blossom, and creeper, and weed&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let us forget the sight and the sound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The smell and the touch of the breed!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p1">Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle,"
+upon the Indian village. The forces of nature were
+turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled at the
+growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and
+the wild pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the
+thatched huts dissolved in the torrents, and "by the
+end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle in full blast
+on the spot that had been under plough not six months
+before." The white man worked the opposite of this
+on what remained of the American desert in the last
+fifteen years of the history of the old frontier. In a
+decade and a half a greater change came over it than
+the previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890,
+it is fair to say that the frontier was no more.</p>
+
+<p>The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary
+line separating the farm lands and the unused West,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">373</a></span>had become nearly a circle before the compromise
+of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks
+it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the
+last generation. The flanks had widened out in the
+thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri, and Iowa had
+received their population. In the next ten years
+Texas and the Pacific settlements had carried the
+line further west until the circular shape of the
+frontier was clearly apparent by the middle of the
+century. And thus it stood, with changes only in
+detail, for a generation more. In whatever sense
+the word "frontier" is used, the fact is the same. If
+it be taken as the dividing line, as the area enclosed,
+or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the
+frontier of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier
+of 1850.</p>
+
+<p>The pressure on the frontier line had increased
+steadily during these thirty years. Population
+moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War. The
+agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in
+size and wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that
+became clearer as more citizens settled along it.
+East and south, it was close to the rainfall line which
+divides easy farming country from the semi-arid
+plains; west, it was a mountain range. In either
+case the country enclosed was too refractory to yield
+to the piecemeal process which had conquered the
+wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to
+expansion and hindrance to communication became
+of increasing consequence as population grew.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">374</a></span>
+Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural
+frontier was pressing against it. By 1860 the railway
+frontier had reached it. The former could not
+cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture
+offered by the lands beyond; the latter was
+restrained by the prohibitive cost of building railways
+through an entirely unsettled district. Private
+initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the continent;
+the one remaining task called for direct national
+aid.</p>
+
+<p>The influences operating upon this frontier of the
+Far West, though not making it less of a barrier, made
+it better known than any of the earlier frontiers. In
+the first place, the trails crossed it, with the result
+that its geography became well known throughout
+the country. No other frontier had been the site
+of a thoroughfare for many years before its actual
+settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the
+later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge
+of the West, and scattered groups of inhabitants here
+and there, without populating it in any sense. Finally
+the Indian friction produced the series of Indian
+wars which again called the wild West to the centre
+of the stage for many years.</p>
+
+<p>All of these forces served to advertise the existence
+of this frontier and its barrier character. They
+had coĂśperated to enlarge the railway movement,
+as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union
+Pacific was authorized to meet the new demand;
+and while the Union Pacific was under construction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">375</a></span>
+other roads to meet the same demands were chartered
+and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled
+the final barrier.</p>
+
+<p>Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation
+of the entire frontier between 1862 and 1871.
+The charter acts of the Northern Pacific, the Atlantic
+and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern
+Pacific at once opened the way for some five new
+continental lines and closed the period of direct federal
+aid to railway construction. The Northern Pacific
+received its charter on the same day that the
+Union Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864.
+It was authorized to join the waters of Lake Superior
+and Puget Sound, and was to receive a land grant of
+twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in
+the territories through which it should run. In the
+summer of 1866 a third continental route was provided
+for in the South along the line of the thirty-fifth
+parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific,
+was to build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque,
+New Mexico, to the Pacific, and to connect,
+near the eastern line of California, with the Southern
+Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised
+twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the
+territories. The Texas Pacific was chartered March
+3, 1871, as the last of the land grant railways. It
+received the usual grant, which was applicable only
+west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana
+and El Paso, it could receive no federal aid since in
+Texas there were no public lands. Its charter called<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">376</a></span>
+for construction to San Diego, but the Southern
+Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico,
+headed it off at El Paso, and it got no farther.</p>
+
+<p>To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways,
+Congress added others in the form of local
+or state grants in the same years, so that by 1871 all
+that the companies could ask for the future was
+lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the
+first time the federal government had taken an active
+initiative in providing for the destruction of a
+frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no longer
+with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence
+of a realization of the approaching frontier
+change.</p>
+
+<p>The new Pacific railways began to build just as the
+Union Pacific was completed and opened to traffic.
+In the cases of all, the development was slow, since
+the investing public had little confidence in the existence
+of a business large enough to maintain four
+systems, or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert.
+The first period of construction of all these roads terminated
+in 1873, when panic brought transportation
+projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of
+five years.</p>
+
+<p>Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done
+much to establish public credit during the war and
+had created a market of small buyers for investment
+securities on the strength of United States
+bonds, popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869
+and 1870. Within two years he is said to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">377</a></span>
+raised thirty millions for the construction of the road,
+making its building a financial possibility. And
+although he may have distorted the isotherm several
+degrees in order to picture his farm lands as semi-tropical
+in their luxuriance, as General Hazen charged,
+he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul
+her opportunity, and had run the main line of track
+through Fargo, on the Red, to Bismarck, on the
+Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty miles
+from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought
+expansion to an end.</p>
+
+<p>For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern
+Pacific was of fundamental importance. The
+railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota, Dakota, and
+much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential
+grain fields of the Red River region were virgin forest,
+and on the main line of the new road, for two thousand
+miles, hardly a trace of settled habitation existed.
+The panic of 1873 caught the Union Pacific
+at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable
+track extending in advance of the railroad
+frontier. The Atlantic and Pacific and Texas Pacific
+were less seriously overbuilt, but not less effectively
+checked. The former, starting from Springfield, had
+constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita,
+in Indian Territory, where it arrived in the fall of
+1871. It had meanwhile acquired some of the old
+Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track into
+St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita
+remained its terminus for several years, and when it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">378</a></span>
+emerged from the receiver's hands, it bore the new
+name of St. Louis and San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of
+local lines which expected, through federal incorporation,
+to reach the dignity of a continental railroad.
+It began its construction towards El Paso from
+Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state
+line, and reached the vicinity of Dallas and Fort
+Worth before the panic. It planned to get into St.
+Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and
+Southern, and into New Orleans over the New
+Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas, Arkansas,
+and Missouri became through these lines a
+centre of railway development, while in the near-by
+grazing country the meat-packing industries shortly
+found their sources of supply.</p>
+
+<p>The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated
+in 1873 could scarcely have been deferred for
+many years. The waste of the Civil War period, and
+the enthusiasm for economic development which
+followed it, invited the retribution that usually
+follows continued and widespread inflation. Already
+the completion of a national railway system was
+foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had
+been for railways at any cost, but the Granger
+activities following the panic gave warning of an
+approaching period when this should be changed
+into a demand for regulation of railroads. But
+as yet the frontier remained substantially intact,
+and until its railway system should be completed the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">379</a></span>
+Granger demand could not be translated into an
+effective movement for federal control. It was not
+until 1879 that the United States recovered from the
+depression following the crisis. In that year resumption
+marked the readjustment of national currency,
+reconstruction was over, and the railways entered
+upon the last five years of the culminating period in
+the history of the frontier. When the five years were
+over, five new continental routes were available
+for transportation.</p>
+
+<p>The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress
+across Texas when checked by the panic in the
+vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived, it pushed
+its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by
+a land grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never
+built. Corporations of California, Arizona, and
+New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern Pacific,
+constructed the line across the Colorado River
+and along the Gila, through lands acquired by the
+Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains were running over
+its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to New
+Orleans by the following October. In the course of
+this Southern Pacific construction, connection had
+been made with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ
+at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but through
+lack of harmony between the roads their junction
+was of little consequence.</p>
+
+<div id="ip_379" class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+  <img class="nobdr" src="images/i-408.jpg" width="600" height="374" alt="" />
+  <div class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">The Pacific Railroads, 1884</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="captionl"><p>This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads
+which existed everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower Missouri valleys.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an
+additional line through southern Texas in the beginning
+of 1883. Around the Galveston, Harrisburg,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">381</a></span>
+and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other
+lines and begun double construction from San
+Antonio west, and from El Paso, or more accurately
+Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra
+Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new
+line and the Texas and Pacific used the same track.
+In later years the line through San Antonio and
+Houston became the main line of the Southern
+Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>A third connection of the Southern Pacific across
+Texas was operated before the end of 1883 over its
+Mojave extension in California and the Atlantic and
+Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic
+and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership,
+and come out as St. Louis and San Francisco.
+But its land grant had remained unused, while the
+Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ had reached Albuquerque
+and had exhausted its own land grant,
+received through the state of Kansas and ceasing
+at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter
+had passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch
+along the old Santa FĂŠ trail to Santa FĂŠ and Albuquerque.
+Here it came to an agreement with the St.
+Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were
+to build jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise,
+from Albuquerque into California. They
+built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not relishing
+a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege
+to meet the new road on the eastern boundary
+of California. Hence its Mojave branch was waiting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">382</a></span>
+at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific arrived
+there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the
+completion of bridges over the Colorado and Rio
+Grande this third eastern connection of the Southern
+Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were
+running through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.</p>
+
+<p>The names of Billings and Villard are most closely
+connected with the renascence of the Northern
+Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at the
+Missouri River, although it had built a few miles
+in Washington territory, around its new terminal
+city of Tacoma. The illumination of crisis times
+had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay
+Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in
+his palmy days. The existence of various land grant
+railways in Washington and Oregon made the revival
+difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer
+competition by both water and rail along the Columbia
+River, below Walla Walla. Under the presidency
+of Frederick Billings construction revived about
+1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri,
+and from Wallula, at the junction of the
+Columbia and Snake. From these points lines
+were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri
+divisions towards the continental divide. Below
+Wallula, the Columbia Valley traffic was shared by
+agreement with the Oregon Railway and Navigation
+Company, which, under the presidency of Henry
+Villard, owned the steamship and railway lines of
+Oregon. As the time for opening the through lines<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">383</a></span>
+approached, the question of Columbia River competition
+increased in serious aspect. Villard solved
+the problem through the agency of his famous
+blind pool, which still stands remarkable in railway
+finance. With the proceeds of the pool he
+organized the Oregon and Transcontinental as a
+holding company, and purchased a controlling interest
+in the rival roads. With harmony of plan
+thus insured, he assumed the presidency of the
+Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to complete and
+celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His
+celebration was elaborate, yet the <i>Nation</i> remarked
+that the "mere achievement of laying a continuous
+rail across the continent has long since been taken
+out of the realm of marvels, and the country can
+never feel again the thrill which the joining of the
+Central and Union Pacific lines gave it."</p>
+
+<p>The land grant railways completed these four
+eastern connections across the frontier in the period
+of culmination. Private capital added a fifth in the
+new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled
+by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the
+Denver and Rio Grande. The Burlington, built
+along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had
+competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of
+that point since June, 1882. West of Denver the
+narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio Grande had
+been advancing since 1870.</p>
+
+<p>General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia
+capitalists had, in 1870, secured a Colorado<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">384</a></span>
+charter for their Denver and Rio Grande. Started
+in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at
+Colorado Springs that autumn, and had continued
+south in later years. Like other roads it had progressed
+slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had
+been met at Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and
+Santa FĂŠ. From Pueblo it contested successfully
+with this rival for the grand caĂąon of the Arkansas,
+and built up that valley through the Gunnison
+country and across the old Ute reserve, to Grand
+Junction. From the Utah line it had been continued
+to Ogden by an allied corporation. A
+through service to Ogden, inaugurated in the summer
+of 1883, brought competition to the Union Pacific
+throughout its whole extent.</p>
+
+<p>The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union
+Pacific had threatened in 1869, was easily accessible
+by 1884. Along six different lines between New
+Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to
+cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific
+states. No longer could any portion of the republic
+be considered as beyond the reach of civilization.
+Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in its
+presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for
+colonists, and through lines of railway iron bound
+the nation into an economic and political unit. "As
+the railroads overtook the successive lines of isolated
+frontier posts, and settlements spread out over
+country no longer requiring military protection,"
+wrote General P.&nbsp;H. Sheridan in 1882, "the army<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">385</a></span>
+vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into
+remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue
+its pioneer work. In rear of the advancing line
+of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and cabins of the
+frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful
+houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy
+towns of a people who knew how best to employ the
+vast resources of the great West. The civilization
+from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that
+rapidly approaching it from the direction of the
+Pacific, the long intervening strip of territory, extending
+from the British possessions to Old Mexico,
+yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines
+will entirely disappear and the mingling settlements
+absorb the remnants of the once powerful Indian
+nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly attempted to
+forbid the destined progress of the age." The
+deluge of population realized by Sheridan, and let in
+by the railways, had, by 1890, blotted the uninhabited
+frontier off the map. Local spots yet remained unpeopled,
+but the census of 1890 revealed no clear
+division between the unsettled West and the rest of
+the United States.</p>
+
+<p>New states in plains and mountains marked the
+abolition of the last frontier as they had the earlier.
+In less than ten years the gap between Minnesota
+and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and
+South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and
+Washington. In 1890, for the first time, a solid band
+of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific. Farther<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">386</a></span>
+south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new
+pressure. The Dawes bill released a fertile acreage
+to be distributed to the land hungry who had banked
+up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and
+Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890,
+while in eighteen more years, swallowing up the
+whole Indian Country, it had taken its place as a
+member of the Union. Between the northern tier
+of states and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown
+as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, the
+last creating eleven new counties in its eastern
+third in 1889, had seen their population densify under
+the stimulus of easy transportation. Much of the
+settlement had been premature, inviting failure,
+as populism later showed, but it left no area in the
+United States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large
+enough to be regarded as a national frontier. The
+last frontier, the same that Long had described as
+the American Desert in 1820, had been won.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">387</a></span></p>
+
+<div id="sources">
+<h2 class="vspace"><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII">NOTE ON THE SOURCES</a></h2>
+
+<p>The fundamental ideas upon which all recent careful work in
+western history has been based were first stated by Frederick J.
+Turner, in his paper on <i>The Significance of the Frontier in American
+History</i>, in the <i>Annual Report of the Am. Hist. Assn.</i>, 1893.
+No comprehensive history of the trans-Mississippi West has yet
+appeared; Randall Parrish, <i>The Great Plains</i> (2d ed., Chicago,
+1907), is at best only a brief and superficial sketch; the histories
+of the several far western states by Hubert Howe Bancroft remain
+the most useful collection of secondary materials upon the
+subject. R.&nbsp;G. Thwaites, <i>Rocky Mountain Exploration</i> (N.Y.,
+1904); O.&nbsp;P. Austin, <i>Steps in the Expansion of our Territory</i>
+(N.Y., 1903); H. Gannett, <i>Boundaries of the United States and
+of the Several States and Territories</i> (<i>Bulletin of the U.S. Geological
+Survey</i>, No. 226, 1904); and <i>Organic Acts for the Territories of the
+United States with Notes thereon</i> (56th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc.
+148), are also of use.</p>
+
+<p>The local history of the West must yet be collected from many
+varieties of sources. The state historical societies have been
+active for many years, their more important collections comprising:
+<i>Publications of the Arkansas Hist. Assn.</i>, <i>Annals of Iowa</i>,
+<i>Iowa Hist. Record</i>, <i>Iowa Journal of Hist. and Politics</i>, <i>Collections
+of the Minnesota Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Trans. of the Kansas State Hist.
+Soc.</i>, <i>Trans. and Rep. of the Nebraska Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Proceedings of
+the Missouri Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Contrib. to the Hist. Soc. of Montana</i>,
+<i>Quart. of the Oregon Hist. Soc.</i>, <i>Quart. of the Texas State Hist.
+Assn.</i>, <i>Collections of the Wisconsin State Hist. Soc.</i> The scattered
+but valuable fragments to be found in these files are to be supplemented
+by the narratives contained in the histories of the
+single states or sections, the more important of these being:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">388</a></span>
+T.&nbsp;H. Hittell, <i>California</i>; F. Hall, <i>Colorado</i>; J.&nbsp;C. Smiley, <i>Denver</i>
+(an unusually accurate and full piece of local history); W. Upham,
+<i>Minnesota in Three Centuries</i>; G.&nbsp;P. Garrison, <i>Texas</i>; E.&nbsp;H. Meany,
+<i>Washington</i>; J. Schafer, <i>Hist. of the Pacific Northwest</i>; R.&nbsp;G.
+Thwaites, <i>Wisconsin</i>, and the <i>Works</i> of H.&nbsp;H. Bancroft.</p>
+
+<p>The comprehensive collection of geographic data for the West
+is the <i>Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad from the
+Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean</i>, made by the War Department
+and published by Congress in twelve huge volumes, 1855&ndash;.
+The most important official predecessors of this survey left the
+following reports: E. James, <i>Account of an Expedition from
+Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains, performed in the Years 1819,
+1820, ... under the Command of Maj. S.&nbsp;H. Long</i> (Phila.,
+1823); J.&nbsp;C. FrĂŠmont, <i>Report of the Exploring Expeditions to the
+Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North
+California in the Years 1843&ndash;'44</i> (28th Cong., 2d sess., Sen. Doc.
+174); W.&nbsp;H. Emory, <i>Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Ft.
+Leavenworth ... to San Diego ...</i> (30th Cong., 1st sess., Ex.
+Doc. 41); H. Stansbury, <i>Exploration and Survey of the Valley of
+the Great Salt Lake of Utah ...</i> (32d Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Ex.
+Doc. 3). From the great number of personal narratives of
+western trips, those of James O. Pattie, John B. Wyeth, John K.
+Townsend, and Joel Palmer may be selected as typical and
+useful. All of these, as well as the James narrative of the Long
+expedition, are reprinted in the monumental R.&nbsp;G. Thwaites,
+<i>Early Western Travels</i>, which does not, however, give any aid for
+the period after 1850. Later travels of importance are J.&nbsp;I.
+Thornton, <i>Oregon and California in 1848 ...</i> (N.Y., 1849);
+Horace Greeley, <i>An Overland Journey from New York to San
+Francisco in the Summer of 1859</i> (N.Y., 1860); R.&nbsp;F. Burton,
+<i>The City of the Saints, and across the Rocky Mountains to California</i>
+(N.Y., 1862); R.&nbsp;B. Marcy, <i>The Prairie Traveller, a Handbook
+for Overland Expeditions</i> (edited by R.&nbsp;F. Burton, London,
+1863); F.&nbsp;C. Young, <i>Across the Plains in '65</i> (Denver, 1905);
+Samuel Bowles, <i>Across the Continent</i> (Springfield, 1861); Samuel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">389</a></span>
+Bowles, <i>Our New West, Records of Travels between the Mississippi
+River and the Pacific Ocean</i> (Hartford, 1869); W.&nbsp;A. Bell, <i>New
+Tracks in North America</i> (2d ed., London, 1870); J.&nbsp;H. Beadle,
+<i>The Undeveloped West, or Five Years in the Territories</i> (Phila.,
+1873).</p>
+
+<p>The classic account of traffic on the plains is Josiah Gregg,
+<i>Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa FĂŠ Trader</i>
+(many editions, and reprinted in Thwaites); H.&nbsp;M. Chittenden,
+<i>History of Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River</i> (N.Y.,
+1903), and <i>The American Fur Trade of the Far West</i> (N.Y.,
+1902), are the best modern accounts. A brilliant sketch is C.&nbsp;F.
+Lummis, <i>Pioneer Transportation in America, Its Curiosities and
+Romance</i> (<i>McClure's Magazine</i>, 1905). Other works of use are
+Henry Inman, <i>The Old Santa FĂŠ Trail</i> (N.Y., 1898); Henry
+Inman and William F. Cody, <i>The Great Salt Lake Trail</i> (N.Y.,
+1898); F.&nbsp;A. Root and W.&nbsp;E. Connelley, <i>The Overland Stage to
+California</i> (Topeka, 1901); F.&nbsp;G. Young, <i>The Oregon Trail</i>, in
+<i>Oregon Hist. Soc. Quarterly</i>, Vol. I; F. Parkman, <i>The Oregon
+Trail</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Railway transportation in the Far West yet awaits its historian.
+Some useful antiquarian data are to be found in C.&nbsp;F. Carter,
+<i>When Railroads were New</i> (N.Y., 1909), and there are a few
+histories of single roads, the most valuable being J.&nbsp;P. Davis,
+<i>The Union Pacific Railway</i> (Chicago, 1894), and E.&nbsp;V. Smalley,
+<i>History of the Northern Pacific Railroad</i> (N.Y., 1883). L.&nbsp;H.
+Haney, <i>A Congressional History of Railways in the United States
+to 1850</i>; J.&nbsp;B. Sanborn, <i>Congressional Grants of Lands in Aid of
+Railways</i>, and B.&nbsp;H. Meyer, <i>The Northern Securities Case</i>, all in
+the <i>Bulletins</i> of the University of Wisconsin, contain much information
+and useful bibliographies. The local historical societies
+have published many brief articles on single lines. There
+is a bibliography of the continental railways in F.&nbsp;L. Paxson,
+<i>The Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in
+America</i>, in <i>Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn.</i>, 1907. Their social
+and political aspects may be traced in J.&nbsp;B. Crawford, <i>The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">390</a></span>
+CrĂŠdit Mobilier of America</i> (Boston, 1880) and E.&nbsp;W. Martin,
+<i>History of the Granger Movement</i> (1874). The sources, which
+are as yet uncollected, are largely in the government documents
+and the files of the economic and railroad periodicals.</p>
+
+<p>For half a century, during which the Indian problem reached
+and passed its most difficult places, the United States was negligent
+in publishing compilations of Indian laws and treaties.
+In 1837 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs published in Washington,
+<i>Treaties between the United States of America and the Several
+Indian Tribes, from 1778 to 1837: with a copious Table of Contents</i>.
+After this date, documents and correspondence were to
+be found only in the intricate sessional papers and the <i>Annual
+Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs</i>, which accompanied
+the reports of the Secretary of War, 1832&ndash;1849, and those
+of the Secretary of the Interior after 1849. In 1902 Congress
+published C.&nbsp;J. Kappler, <i>Indian Affairs, Laws, and Treaties</i>
+(57th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc. 452). Few historians have made
+serious use of these compilations or reports. Two other government
+documents of great value in the history of Indian negotiations
+are, Thomas Donaldson, <i>The Public Domain</i> (47th Cong., 2d
+sess., H. Misc. Doc. 45, Pt. 4), and C.&nbsp;C. Royce, <i>Indian Land
+Cessions in the United States</i> (with many charts, in 18th <i>Ann.
+Rep. of the Bureau of Am. Ethnology</i>, Pt. 2, 1896&ndash;1897). Most
+special works on the Indians are partisan, spectacular, or ill
+informed; occasionally they have all these qualities. A few of
+the most accessible are: A.&nbsp;H. Abel, <i>History of the Events
+resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi</i> (in <i>Ann.
+Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn.</i>, 1906, an elaborate and scholarly
+work); J.&nbsp;P. Dunn, <i>Massacres of the Mountains, a History of the
+Indian Wars of the Far West</i> (N.Y., 1886; a relatively critical
+work, with some bibliography); R.&nbsp;I. Dodge, <i>Our Wild Indians ...</i>
+(Hartford, 1883); G.&nbsp;E. Edwards, <i>The Red Man and the White
+Man in North America from its Discovery to the Present Time</i>
+(Boston, 1882; a series of Lowell Institute lectures, by no means
+so valuable as the pretentious title would indicate); I.&nbsp;V.&nbsp;D.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">391</a></span>
+Heard, <i>History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863</i>
+(N.Y., 1863; a contemporary and useful narrative); O.&nbsp;O. Howard,
+<i>Nez Perce Joseph, an Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his
+Confederates, his Enemies, his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and
+Capture</i> (Boston, 1881; this is General Howard's personal vindication);
+Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson, <i>A Century of Dishonor, a
+Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of
+the Indian Tribes</i> (N.Y., 1881; highly colored and partisan);
+G.&nbsp;W. Manypenny, <i>Our Indian Wards</i> (Cincinnati, 1880; by a
+former Indian Commissioner); L.&nbsp;E. Textor, <i>Official Relations
+between the United States and the Sioux Indians</i> (Palo Alto, 1896;
+one of the few scholarly and dispassionate works on the Indians);
+F.&nbsp;A. Walker, <i>The Indian Question</i> (Boston, 1874; three essays by
+a former Indian Commissioner); C.&nbsp;T. Brady, <i>Indian Fights and
+Fighters</i> and <i>Northwestern Fights and Fighters</i> (N.Y., 1907; two
+volumes in his series of <i>American Fights and Fighters</i>, prepared
+for consumers of popular sensational literature, but containing
+much valuable detail, and some critical judgments).</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every incident in the history of Indian relations has
+been made the subject of investigations by the War and Interior
+departments. The resulting collections of papers are to be found
+in the congressional documents, through the indexes. They are
+too numerous to be listed here. The searcher should look for reports
+from the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Interior,
+or the Postmaster-general, for court-martial proceedings, and
+for reports of special committees of Congress. Dunn gives some
+classified lists in his <i>Massacres of the Mountains</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There is a rapidly increasing mass of individual biography and
+reminiscence for the West during this period. Some works of
+this class which have been found useful here are: W.&nbsp;M. Meigs,
+<i>Thomas Hart Benton</i> (Phila., 1904); C.&nbsp;W. Upham, <i>Life, Explorations,
+and Public Services of John Charles FrĂŠmont</i> (40th thousand,
+Boston, 1856); S.&nbsp;B. Harding, <i>Life of George B. Smith, Founder of
+Sedalia, Missouri</i> (Sedalia, 1907); P.&nbsp;H. Burnett, <i>Recollections and
+Opinions of an Old Pioneer</i> (N.Y., 1880; by one who had followed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">392</a></span>
+the Oregon trail and had later become governor of California);
+A. Johnson, <i>S.&nbsp;A. Douglas</i> (N.Y., 1908; one of the most significant
+biographies of recent years); H. Stevens, <i>Life of Isaac
+Ingalls Stevens</i> (Boston, 1900); R.&nbsp;S. Thorndike, <i>The Sherman
+Letters</i> (N.Y., 1894; full of references to frontier conditions in the
+sixties); P.&nbsp;H. Sheridan, <i>Personal Memoirs</i> (London, 1888; with
+a good map of the Indian war of 1867&ndash;1868, which the later
+edition has dropped); E.&nbsp;P. Oberholtzer, <i>Jay Cooke, Financier
+of the Civil War</i> (Phila., 1907; with details of Northern Pacific
+railway finance); H. Villard, <i>Memoirs</i> (Boston, 1904; the life of
+an active railway financier); Alexander Majors, <i>Seventy Years on
+the Frontier</i> (N.Y., 1893; the reminiscences of one who had belonged
+to the great firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell); G.&nbsp;R.
+Brown, <i>Reminiscences of William M. Stewart of Nevada</i> (1908).</p>
+
+<p>Miscellaneous works indicating various types of materials
+which have been drawn upon are: O.&nbsp;J. Hollister, <i>The Mines of
+Colorado</i> (Springfield, 1867; a miners' handbook); S. Mowry,
+<i>Arizona and Sonora</i> (3d ed., 1864; written in the spirit of a mining
+prospectus); T.&nbsp;B.&nbsp;H. Stenhouse, <i>The Rocky Mountain Saints</i>
+(London, 1874; a credible account from a Mormon missionary
+who had recanted without bitterness); W.&nbsp;A. Linn, <i>The Story
+of the Mormons</i> (N.Y., 1902; the only critical history of the
+Mormons, but having a strong Gentile bias); T.&nbsp;J. Dimsdale, <i>The
+Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains</i>
+(2d ed., Virginia City, 1882; a good description of the
+social order of the mining camp).</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">393</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="newpage p4 index">
+<h2 class="nobreak"><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX">INDEX</a></h2>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Acton, Minnesota, Sioux massacre at, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Alder Gulch mines, Idaho, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Anthony, Major Scott J., <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Apache Indians, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>treaty of 1853 with, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</li>
+  <li>troubles with, in Arizona, <a href="#Page_162">162&ndash;163</a>;</li>
+  <li>last struggles of, against whites, <a href="#Page_368">368&ndash;369</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Arapaho Indians, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a> ff., <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>Medicine Lodge treaty with, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>
+  <li>issue of arms to, <a href="#Page_312">312&ndash;313</a>;</li>
+  <li>join in war of 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313&ndash;318</a>;</li>
+  <li>Custer's defeat of, <a href="#Page_317">317&ndash;318</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Arapahoe, county of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Arickara Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Arizona, beginnings of, <a href="#Page_158">158</a> ff.;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>erection of territory of, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Arkansas, boundaries of, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>admission as a state, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Army, question of control of Indian affairs by, <a href="#Page_324">324&ndash;344</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Assiniboin Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Atchison, Senator, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FĂŠ Railway, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Atlantic and Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>becomes the St. Louis and San Francisco, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Augur, General C.&nbsp;C., <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Auraria settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Bannack City, mining centre, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bannock Indians, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Beadle, John H., on western railways and their builders, <a href="#Page_332">332&ndash;333</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bear Flag Republic, the, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Becknell, William, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Beckwith, Lieut. E.&nbsp;G., Pacific railway survey by, <a href="#Page_203">203&ndash;206</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bell, English traveller, on railway building in the West, <a href="#Page_329">329&ndash;331</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Benton, Thomas Hart, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>interest of, in railways, <a href="#Page_193">193&ndash;194</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Bent's Fort, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Billings, Frederick, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Blackfoot Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Black Hawk, Colorado, village of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Black Hawk, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Black Hawk War, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25&ndash;26</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Black Hills, discovery of gold in, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>troubles with Indians resulting from discovery, <a href="#Page_361">361</a> ff.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Black Kettle, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_255">255&ndash;261</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>leads war party in 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+  <li>death of, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Blind pool, Villard's, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>BoisĂŠ mines, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Boulder, Colorado, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bowles, Samuel, on railway terminal towns, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Box family outrage, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bridge across the Mississippi, the first, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bridger, "Jim," <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Brown, John, murder of Kansans by, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>BrulĂŠ Sioux Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bull Bear, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bureau of Indian Affairs, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Burlington, capital of Iowa territory, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>description of, in 1840, <a href="#Page_47">47&ndash;48</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Burnett, governor of California, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Bushwhacking in Kansas during Civil War, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">394</a></span><br /></li>
+<li>Butterfield, John, mail and express route of, <a href="#Page_177">177</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Byers, Denver editor, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Caddo Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>California, early American designs on, <a href="#Page_104">104&ndash;105</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>becomes American possession, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li>
+  <li>discovery of gold in, and results, <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;113</a>;</li>
+  <li>population in 1850, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>
+  <li>local railways constructed in, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+  <li>Central Pacific Railway in, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Camels, experiment with, in Texas, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Camp Grant massacre, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Canals, land grants in aid of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Canby, E.&nbsp;R.&nbsp;S., <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>murder of, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Carleton, Colonel J.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Carlyle, George H., <a href="#Page_250">250&ndash;251</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Carrington, Colonel Henry B., <a href="#Page_274">274&ndash;275</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Carson, Kit, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Carson City, <a href="#Page_157">157&ndash;158</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Carson County, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cass, Lewis, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Census of Indians, in 1880, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Central City, Colorado, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Central Overland, California, and Pike's Peak Express, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Central Pacific of California Railway, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>description of construction of, <a href="#Page_325">325&ndash;335</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Cherokee Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cherokee Neutral Strip, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cheyenne, founding of, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>consequence of, as a railway junction, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Cheyenne Indians, massacre of, at Sand Creek, <a href="#Page_260">260&ndash;261</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>assigned lands in Indian Territory, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;</li>
+  <li>Medicine Lodge treaty with, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>
+  <li>issue of arms to, <a href="#Page_312">312&ndash;313</a>;</li>
+  <li>begin war against whites in 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+  <li>Custer's defeat of, <a href="#Page_317">317&ndash;318</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Chickasaw Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Chief Joseph, leader of Nez PercĂŠ Indians, <a href="#Page_363">363&ndash;365</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>military skill shown by, in retreat of Nez PercĂŠs, <a href="#Page_366">366&ndash;367</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Chief Lawyer, <a href="#Page_363">363&ndash;364</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Chinese labor for railway building, <a href="#Page_326">326&ndash;327</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Chippewa Indians, <a href="#Page_26">26&ndash;27</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Chittenden, Hiram Martin, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;71</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Chivington, J.&nbsp;M., <a href="#Page_229">229&ndash;230</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>massacre of Indians at Sand Creek by, <a href="#Page_260">260&ndash;261</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Civil War, the West during the, <a href="#Page_225">225</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Claims associations, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Clark, Governor, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Clemens, S.&nbsp;L., quoted, <a href="#Page_186">186&ndash;187</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cody, William F., <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Colley, Major, Indian agent, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Colorado, first settlements in, <a href="#Page_142">142&ndash;145</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>movement for separate government for, <a href="#Page_146">146</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>Senate bill for erection of territory of, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</li>
+  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</li>
+  <li>admission of, and first governor, <a href="#Page_154">154&ndash;155</a>;</li>
+  <li>during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_228">228&ndash;230</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Colorado-Idaho plan, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Comanche Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Comstock lode, the, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Conestoga wagons, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Connor, General Patrick E., <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cooke, Jay, railway promotion and later failure of, <a href="#Page_376">376&ndash;377</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cooper, Colonel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Council Bluffs, importance of, as a railway terminus, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Council Grove, rendezvous of Santa FĂŠ traders, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63&ndash;64</a>.<br /></li>
+<li><i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">CrĂŠdit Mobilier</i>, the, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Creek Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Crocker, Charles, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">395</a></span><br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>activity of, as a railway builder, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Crook, General George, <a href="#Page_368">368&ndash;369</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Crow Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Culbertson, Alexander, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Cumberland Road, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Custer, General, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a> ff., <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>commands in attack on Cheyenne, <a href="#Page_316">316&ndash;318</a>;</li>
+  <li>romantic character of, and death in Sioux war, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Dakota, erection and growth of territory of, <a href="#Page_166">166&ndash;167</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>Idaho created from a part of, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Dawes bill of 1887, for division of lands among Indians, <a href="#Page_354">354&ndash;355</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>effect of, on Indian reserves, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Delaware Indians, settlement of, in the West, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Demoine County created, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Denver, settlement of, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>early caucuses and conventions at, <a href="#Page_147">147&ndash;149</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Denver and Rio Grande Railway, <a href="#Page_383">383&ndash;384</a>.<br /></li>
+<li><a id="Desert"></a>Desert, tradition of a great American, <a href="#Page_11">11&ndash;13</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>disappearance of tradition, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</li>
+  <li>Kansas formed out of a portion of, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
+  <li>final conquest by railways of region known as, <a href="#Page_384">384&ndash;386</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Digger Indians, <a href="#Page_203">203&ndash;204</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Dillon, President, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Dodge, Henry, <a href="#Page_35">35&ndash;36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37&ndash;38</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328&ndash;329</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Dole, W.&nbsp;P., Indian Commissioner, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Donnelly, Ignatius, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Douglas, Stephen A., <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213&ndash;214</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Downing, Major Jacob, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Dubuque, lead mines at, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>as a mining camp, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Dubuque County created, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Education of Indians, <a href="#Page_351">351&ndash;352</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Emigrant Aid Society, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Emory, Lieut.-Col., survey by, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Erie Canal, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Evans, Governor, war against Indians conducted by, <a href="#Page_253">253</a> ff.;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Ewbank Station massacre, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Fairs, agricultural, for Indians, <a href="#Page_352">352&ndash;353</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Falls line, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Far West, Mormon headquarters at, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fetterman, Captain W.&nbsp;J., <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277&ndash;278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>slaughter of, by Indians, <a href="#Page_280">280&ndash;281</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Fiske, Captain James L., <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fitzpatrick, Indian agent, <a href="#Page_122">122&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Armstrong, purchase at, of Indian lands, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Benton, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Bridger, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort C.&nbsp;F. Smith, <a href="#Page_275">275&ndash;277</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Hall, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Kearney, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Laramie, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>treaties with Indians signed at, in 1851, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>;</li>
+  <li>conference of Peace Commission with Indians held at (1867), <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Fort Larned, conference with Indians at, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Leavenworth, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Philip Kearney, Indian fight at (1866), <a href="#Page_274">274&ndash;275</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>extermination of Fetterman's party at, <a href="#Page_280">280&ndash;282</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Fort Pierre, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Ridgely, Sioux attack on, <a href="#Page_235">235&ndash;236</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Snelling, <a href="#Page_33">33&ndash;34</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Sully conference, <a href="#Page_271">271&ndash;272</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Whipple, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Winnebago, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fort Wise, treaty with Indians signed at, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Forty-niners, <a href="#Page_109">109&ndash;118</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Fox Indians, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Flandrau, Judge Charles E., <a href="#Page_236">236&ndash;237</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">396</a></span><br /></li>
+<li>Franklin, town of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Freighting on the plains, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>FrĂŠmont, John C., <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>explorations of, beyond the Rockies, <a href="#Page_73">73&ndash;75</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>;</li>
+  <li>senator from California, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Fur traders, pioneer western, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;71</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Galbraith, Thomas J., Indian agent, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Geary, John W., <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Georgetown, Colorado, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Geronimo, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Gilpin, William, first governor of Colorado Territory, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</li>
+  <li>responsibility assumed by, during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_228">228&ndash;229</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Gold, discovery of, in California, <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;113</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>in Pike's Peak region, <a href="#Page_141">141&ndash;142</a>;</li>
+  <li>in the Black Hills, <a href="#Page_359">359&ndash;361</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Grattan, Lieutenant, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Great American desert. <i>See</i> <a href="#Desert">Desert</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Great Salt Lake. <i>See</i> <a href="#Salt_Lake">Salt Lake</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Greeley, Horace, western adventures of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Gregg, Josiah, <a href="#Page_61">61&ndash;62</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Grosventre Indians, treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Guerrilla conflicts during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_230">230&ndash;233</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Gunnison, Captain J.&nbsp;W., <a href="#Page_204">204&ndash;205</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Hancock, General W.&nbsp;S., <a href="#Page_306">306&ndash;311</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Hand-cart incident in Mormon emigration, <a href="#Page_100">100&ndash;101</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Harney, General, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Harte, Bret, verses by, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Hayt, E.&nbsp;A., Indian Commissioner, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Hazen, General W.&nbsp;B., <a href="#Page_320">320&ndash;321</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Helena, growth of city of, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Highland settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Holladay, Ben, <a href="#Page_186">186&ndash;190</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>losses from Indians by, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Hopkins, Mark, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Howard, General O.&nbsp;O., <a href="#Page_365">365&ndash;366</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Hungate family, murder of, by Indians, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Hunkpapa Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Hunter, General, in charge of Department of Kansas during Civil War, <a href="#Page_230">230&ndash;231</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Huntington, Collis P., <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Idaho, proposed name for Colorado, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>establishment of territory of, <a href="#Page_166">166&ndash;167</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Idaho Springs, settlement of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Illinois, opening of, to whites, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Illinois Central Railroad, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216&ndash;218</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Independence, town of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>outfitting post of traders, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>
+  <li>Mormons at, <a href="#Page_89">89&ndash;90</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Indian agents, position of, in regard to Indian affairs, <a href="#Page_304">304&ndash;305</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>question regarding, as opposed to military control of Indians, <a href="#Page_342">342&ndash;343</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Indian Bureau, creation of, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>transference from War Department to the Interior, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</li>
+  <li>history of the, <a href="#Page_341">341</a> ff.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Indian Commissioners, Board of, created in 1869, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Indian Intercourse Act, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Indian Territory, position of Indians in, during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_240">240&ndash;241</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>breaking up of, following allotment of lands to individual Indians, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li><a id="Indians"></a>Indians, numbers of, in United States, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>governmental policy regarding, <a href="#Page_16">16</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>Monroe's policy of removal of, to western lands, <a href="#Page_18">18&ndash;19</a>;</li>
+  <li>treaties of 1825 with, <a href="#Page_19">19&ndash;20</a>;</li>
+  <li>allotment of territory among, on western frontier, <a href="#Page_20">20&ndash;30</a>;</li>
+  <li>troubles with, resulting from Oregon, California, and Mormon emigrations, <a href="#Page_119">119&ndash;123</a>;</li>
+  <li>fresh treaties with at Upper Platte agency in 1851, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">397</a></span></li>
+  <li>further cession of lands in Indian Country by, in 1854, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>
+  <li>treatment of, by Arizona settlers, <a href="#Page_162">162&ndash;163</a>;</li>
+  <li>danger to overland mail and express business from, <a href="#Page_187">187&ndash;188</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>;</li>
+  <li>Digger Indians, <a href="#Page_203">203&ndash;204</a>;</li>
+  <li>the Sioux war in Minnesota, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>effect of the Civil War on, <a href="#Page_240">240&ndash;242</a>;</li>
+  <li>causes of restlessness of, during Civil War, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>antagonism of, aroused by advance westward of whites, <a href="#Page_244">244&ndash;252</a>;</li>
+  <li>conditions leading to Sioux war, <a href="#Page_264">264</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>war with plains Sioux (1866), <a href="#Page_273">273&ndash;283</a>;</li>
+  <li>the discussion as to proper treatment of, <a href="#Page_284">284&ndash;288</a>;</li>
+  <li>appointment of Peace Commissioner of 1867 to end Cheyenne and Sioux troubles, <a href="#Page_289">289&ndash;290</a>;</li>
+  <li>Medicine Lodge treaties concluded with, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>
+  <li>report and recommendations of Peace Commission, <a href="#Page_296">296&ndash;298</a>;</li>
+  <li>interval of peace with, <a href="#Page_302">302&ndash;303</a>;</li>
+  <li>continued troubles with, and causes, <a href="#Page_304">304</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>war begun by Arapahoes and Cheyenne in 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+  <li>war of 1868, <a href="#Page_313">313&ndash;318</a>;</li>
+  <li>President Grant appoints board of civilian Indian commissioners, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>railway builders' troubles with, <a href="#Page_328">328&ndash;329</a>;</li>
+  <li>question of civilian or military control of, <a href="#Page_342">342&ndash;344</a>;</li>
+  <li>Board of Commissioners, appointed for (1869), <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</li>
+  <li>Congress decides to make no more treaties with, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>;</li>
+  <li>mistaken policy of treaties, <a href="#Page_348">348&ndash;349</a>;</li>
+  <li>census of, in 1880, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
+  <li>agricultural fairs for, <a href="#Page_352">352&ndash;353</a>;</li>
+  <li>individual ownership of land by, <a href="#Page_354">354&ndash;357</a>;</li>
+  <li>effect of allotment of lands among, on Indian reserves, <a href="#Page_356">356&ndash;357</a>;</li>
+  <li>end of Monroe's policy, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>;</li>
+  <li>last struggles of the Sioux, Nez PercĂŠs, and Apaches, <a href="#Page_361">361&ndash;371</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Inkpaduta's massacre, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Inman, Colonel Henry, quoted, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Iowa, Indian lands out of which formed, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Iowa Indians, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Jackson, Helen Hunt, work by, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Jefferson, early name of state of Colorado, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Johnston, Albert Sidney, commands army against Mormons, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>escapes to the South, on opening of the Civil War, <a href="#Page_226">226&ndash;227</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Jones and Russell, firm of, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Judah, Theodore D., <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Julesburg, station on overland mail route, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Kanesville, Iowa, founding of, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br /></li>
+<li><a id="Kansa_Indians"></a>Kansa Indians, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kansas, reasons for settlement of, <a href="#Page_124">124&ndash;125</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>
+  <li>the slavery struggle in, <a href="#Page_129">129&ndash;131</a>;</li>
+  <li>squatters on Indian lands in, <a href="#Page_131">131&ndash;132</a>;</li>
+  <li>further contests between abolition and pro-slave parties, <a href="#Page_132">132&ndash;136</a>;</li>
+  <li>admission to the union in 1861, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</li>
+  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;</li>
+  <li>during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_230">230&ndash;233</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Kansas-Nebraska bill, <a href="#Page_128">128&ndash;129</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kansas Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kaskaskia Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kaw Indians. <i>See</i> <a href="#Kansa_Indians">Kansa Indians</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kearny, Stephen W., <a href="#Page_65">65&ndash;66</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kendall, Superintendent of Indian department, quoted, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Keokuk, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kickapoo Indians, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kiowa Indians, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Kirtland, Ohio, temporary headquarters of Mormons, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Labor question in railway construction, <a href="#Page_326">326&ndash;327</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">398</a></span><br /></li>
+<li>Lake-to-Gulf railway scheme, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Land, allotment of, to Indians as individuals, <a href="#Page_354">354&ndash;357</a>.<br /></li>
+<li><a id="Land_grants"></a>Land grants in aid of railways, <a href="#Page_215">215&ndash;218</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Land titles, pioneers' difficulties over, <a href="#Page_46">46&ndash;47</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Larimer, William, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Last Chance Gulch, Idaho, mining district, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Lawrence, Amos A., <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Lawrence, Kansas, settlement of, <a href="#Page_130">130&ndash;131</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>visit of Missouri mob to, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>
+  <li>Quantrill's raid on, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Lead mines about Dubuque, <a href="#Page_34">34&ndash;35</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Leavenworth, J.&nbsp;H., Indian agent, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308&ndash;309</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Leavenworth constitution, <a href="#Page_135">135&ndash;136</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Lecompton constitution, <a href="#Page_135">135&ndash;136</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Lewiston, Washington, founding of, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Linn, Senator, <a href="#Page_72">72&ndash;73</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Liquor question in Oregon, <a href="#Page_81">81&ndash;82</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Little Big Horn, battle of the, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Little Blue Water, defeat of BrulĂŠ Sioux at, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Little Crow, Sioux chief, <a href="#Page_235">235&ndash;239</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Little Raven, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Long, Major Stephen H., <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">McClellan, George B., survey for Pacific railway by, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Madison, Wisconsin, development of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mails, carriage of, to frontier points, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Manypenny, George W., <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Marsh, O.&nbsp;C., bad treatment of Indians revealed by, <a href="#Page_360">360&ndash;361</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Marshall, James W., <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;109</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Medicine Lodge Creek, conference with Indians at, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Menominee Indians, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Methodist missionaries to western Indians, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mexican War, Army of the West in the, <a href="#Page_65">65&ndash;66</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Miami Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Michigan, territory and state of, <a href="#Page_39">39&ndash;40</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Miles, General Nelson A., as an Indian fighter, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Milwaukee, founding of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mines, trails leading to, <a href="#Page_169">169&ndash;170</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Miniconjou Indians, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mining, lead, <a href="#Page_34">34&ndash;35</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>gold, <a href="#Page_108">108&ndash;113</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141&ndash;142</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156&ndash;157</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359&ndash;361</a>;</li>
+  <li>silver, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Mining camps, description of, <a href="#Page_170">170&ndash;173</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Minnesota, organization of, as a territory, <a href="#Page_48">48&ndash;49</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>Sioux war in, in 1862, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Missionaries, pioneer, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>civilization and education of Indians by, <a href="#Page_345">345&ndash;346</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Missoula County, Washington Territory, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Missouri Indians, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Modoc Indians, last war of the, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Modoc Jack, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mojave branch of Southern Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_381">381&ndash;382</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Monroe's policy toward Indians, <a href="#Page_18">18&ndash;19</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>end of, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Montana, creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Montana settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Monteith, Indian Agent, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mormons, the, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> ff., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mowry, Sylvester, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Mullan Road, the, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Murphy, Thomas, Indian superintendent, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Nauvoo, Mormon settlement of, <a href="#Page_91">91&ndash;94</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Navaho Indians, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Nebraska, movement for a territory of, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">399</a></span><br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>
+  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Neutral Line, the, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Nevada, beginnings of, <a href="#Page_156">156&ndash;158</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>New Mexico, the early trade to, <a href="#Page_53">53&ndash;69</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>boundaries of, in 1854, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>
+  <li>during the Civil War, <a href="#Page_229">229&ndash;230</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>New Ulm, Minnesota, fight with Sioux Indians at, <a href="#Page_236">236&ndash;237</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Nez PercĂŠ Indians, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363&ndash;365</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>precipitation of war with, in 1877, <a href="#Page_365">365&ndash;366</a>;</li>
+  <li>defeat and disposal of tribe, <a href="#Page_366">366&ndash;367</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Niles, Hezekiah, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Noland, Fent, <a href="#Page_42">42&ndash;43</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>No Man's Land, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Northern Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Oglala Sioux, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Oklahoma, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Omaha, cause of growth of, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Omaha Indians, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Oregon, fur traders and early pioneers, in, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;72</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>emigration to, in 1844&ndash;1847, <a href="#Page_75">75&ndash;76</a>;</li>
+  <li>provisional government organized by settlers in, <a href="#Page_79">79&ndash;80</a>;</li>
+  <li>region included under name, <a href="#Page_83">83&ndash;84</a>;</li>
+  <li>territory of, organized (1848), <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+  <li>population in 1850, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>
+  <li>boundaries of, in 1854, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>
+  <li>territory of Washington cut from, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
+  <li>railway lines in, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Oregon trail, <a href="#Page_70">70&ndash;85</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>course of the, <a href="#Page_78">78&ndash;79</a>;</li>
+  <li>the Mormons on the, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> ff.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Osage Indians, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Oto Indians, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Ottawa Indians, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Overland mail, the, <a href="#Page_174">174</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Owyhee mining district, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Paiute Indians, murder of Captain Gunnison by, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Palmer, General William J., <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Panic, of 1837, <a href="#Page_43">43&ndash;44</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>of 1857, <a href="#Page_51">51&ndash;52</a>;</li>
+  <li>of 1873, <a href="#Page_377">377&ndash;379</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Parke, Lieut. J.&nbsp;G., survey for Pacific railway by, <a href="#Page_207">207&ndash;208</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Peace Commission of 1867, to conclude Cheyenne and Sioux wars, <a href="#Page_289">289&ndash;290</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>Medicine Lodge treaties concluded by, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;</li>
+  <li>report of, quoted, <a href="#Page_296">296&ndash;298</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Pennsylvania Portage Railway, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Peoria Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Piankashaw Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Pike, Zebulon M., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Pike's Peak, discovery of gold about, <a href="#Page_141">141&ndash;142</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>the rush to, <a href="#Page_142">142&ndash;145</a>;</li>
+  <li>reaction from boom, <a href="#Page_145">145&ndash;146</a>;</li>
+  <li>origin of Colorado Territory in the Pike's Peak boom, <a href="#Page_146">146&ndash;155</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>"Pike's Peak Guide," the, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Plum Creek massacre, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Pony express, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182&ndash;185</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Pope, Captain John, survey by, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Popular sovereignty, doctrine of, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Poston, Charles D., <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Potawatomi Indians, <a href="#Page_26">26&ndash;27</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Powder River expedition, <a href="#Page_273">273&ndash;274</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Powder River war with Indians, <a href="#Page_276">276&ndash;283</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Powell, Major James, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Prairie du Chien, treaty made with Indians at, <a href="#Page_20">20&ndash;21</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>second treaty of (1830), <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Prairie schooners, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Pratt, R.&nbsp;H., education of Indians attempted by, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Price's Missouri expedition, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Quantrill's raid into Kansas, <a href="#Page_231">231&ndash;232</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Quapaw Indians, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Railways, early craze for building, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>advance of, in the fifties, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</li>
+  <li>first thoughts about a Pacific road, <a href="#Page_192">192</a> ff.;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">400</a></span></li>
+  <li>surveys for Pacific, <a href="#Page_192">192</a> ff., <a href="#Page_197">197&ndash;203</a>;</li>
+  <li>bearing of slavery question on transcontinental, <a href="#Page_211">211&ndash;214</a>;</li>
+  <li>Senator Douglas's bill, <a href="#Page_213">213&ndash;214</a>;</li>
+  <li>land grants in aid of, <a href="#Page_215">215&ndash;218</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>
+  <li>Indian hostilities caused by advance of the, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>;</li>
+  <li>description of construction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific roads, <a href="#Page_325">325&ndash;335</a>;</li>
+  <li>scandals connected with building of roads, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+  <li>description of formal junction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific, <a href="#Page_336">336&ndash;337</a>;</li>
+  <li>effect of roads in bringing peace upon the plains, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;</li>
+  <li>charter acts of the Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>
+  <li>slow development of the later Pacific roads, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</li>
+  <li>the five new continental routes and their connections, <a href="#Page_379">379&ndash;382</a>;</li>
+  <li>Northern Pacific, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>;</li>
+  <li>Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>;</li>
+  <li>Denver and Rio Grande, <a href="#Page_383">383&ndash;384</a>;</li>
+  <li>disappearance of frontier through extension of lines of, and conquest of Great American Desert, <a href="#Page_384">384&ndash;386</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Ration system, pauperization of Indians by, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Real estate speculation along western railways, <a href="#Page_333">333&ndash;334</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Red Cloud, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291&ndash;292</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Reeder, Andrew H., governor of Kansas Territory, <a href="#Page_131">131&ndash;133</a>.<br /></li>
+<li><i>Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes</i>, <a href="#Page_286">286&ndash;287</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Rhodes, James Ford, cited, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Riggs, Rev. S.&nbsp;R., <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Riley, Major, <a href="#Page_59">59&ndash;60</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Rio Grande, struggle for the, in Civil War, <a href="#Page_228">228&ndash;230</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Robinson, Dr. Charles, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>elected governor of Kansas, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li><i>Rocky Mountain News</i>, the, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Roman Nose, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Ross, John, Cherokee chief, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Russell, William H., <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Russell, Majors, and Waddell, firm of, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">St. Charles settlement, Colorado, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>merged into Denver, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>St. Paul, Sioux Indian reserve at, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>early fort near site of, <a href="#Page_33">33&ndash;34</a>;</li>
+  <li>first settlement at, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Saline River raid by Indians, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br /></li>
+<li><a id="Salt_Lake"></a>Salt Lake, FrĂŠmont's visit to, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>settlement of Mormons at, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</li>
+  <li>population of, in 1850, <a href="#Page_117">117&ndash;118</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Sand Creek, massacre of Cheyenne Indians at, <a href="#Page_260">260&ndash;261</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sans Arcs Indians, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Santa FĂŠ, trade with, <a href="#Page_53">53&ndash;69</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Santa FĂŠ trail, Indians along the, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>beginnings of the (1822), <a href="#Page_56">56&ndash;58</a>;</li>
+  <li>course of the, <a href="#Page_64">64&ndash;65</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Satanta, Kiowa Indian chief, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sauk Indians, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Saxton, Lieutenant, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Scandals, railway-building, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Scar-faced Charley, Modoc Indian leader, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Schofield, General John M., <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Schools for Indians, <a href="#Page_351">351&ndash;352</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Schurz, Carl, policy of, toward Indians, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Seminole Indians, <a href="#Page_28">28&ndash;29</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Seneca Indians, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Shannon, Wilson, governor of Kansas, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Shawnee Indians, <a href="#Page_23">23&ndash;24</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sheridan, General, in command against Indians, <a href="#Page_310">310&ndash;323</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_384">384&ndash;385</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Sherman, John, quoted on Indian matters, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sherman, W.&nbsp;T., quoted, <a href="#Page_143">143&ndash;144</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>instructions issued to Sheridan by, in Indian war of 1868, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Shoshoni Indians, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sibley, General H.&nbsp;H., <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237&ndash;238</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">401</a></span><br /></li>
+<li>Silver mining, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Sioux Indians, treaty of 1825 affecting the, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>location of, in 1837, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</li>
+  <li>surrender of lands in Minnesota by, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</li>
+  <li>treaties of 1851 with, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>;</li>
+  <li>war with, in Minnesota, in 1862, <a href="#Page_234">234</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>trial and punishment of, for Minnesota outrages, <a href="#Page_239">239&ndash;240</a>;</li>
+  <li>bands composing the plains Sioux, <a href="#Page_264">264&ndash;265</a>;</li>
+  <li>war with the plains Sioux in 1866, <a href="#Page_264">264&ndash;283</a>;</li>
+  <li>lands assigned to, by Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</li>
+  <li>sources of irritation between white settlers and, in 1870, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+  <li>disturbance of, by discovery of gold in the Black Hills, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+  <li>war with, in 1876, <a href="#Page_362">362&ndash;363</a>;</li>
+  <li>crushing of, by United States forces, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Sitting Bull, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>career of, as leader of insurgent Sioux, <a href="#Page_362">362&ndash;363</a>;</li>
+  <li>settles in Canada, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>;</li>
+  <li>returns to United States, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>
+  <li>death of, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Slade, Jack, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Slavery question, in territories, <a href="#Page_128">128</a> ff.;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>bearing of, on transcontinental railway question, <a href="#Page_211">211&ndash;214</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Slough, Colonel John P., <a href="#Page_229">229&ndash;230</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Smith, Joseph, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90&ndash;93</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Smohalla, medicine-man, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sod breaking, Iowa, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Solomon River raid, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Southern Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375&ndash;376</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>South Pass, the gateway to Oregon, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Southport, founding of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Spirit Lake massacre, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Stanford, Leland, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Stansbury, Lieutenant, survey by, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>quoted, <a href="#Page_114">114&ndash;115</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Steamboats as factors in emigration, <a href="#Page_40">40&ndash;41</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Steele, Robert W., governor of Jefferson Territory (Colorado), <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Stevens, Isaac I., <a href="#Page_197">197&ndash;203</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Stuart, Granville and James, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Subsidies to railways, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li><i>See</i> <a href="#Land_grants">Land grants</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Sully, General Alfred, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Surveys for Pacific railway, <a href="#Page_192">192</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Sutter, John A., <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107&ndash;109</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Sweetwater mines, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Telegraph system, inauguration of transcontinental, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>freedom of, from Indian interference, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Ten Eyck, Captain, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Texas, railway building in, <a href="#Page_375">375&ndash;376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a> ff.<br /></li>
+<li>Texas Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_375">375&ndash;376</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Thayer, Eli, <a href="#Page_129">129&ndash;130</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Tippecanoe, battle of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Topeka constitution, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Traders, wrongs done to Indians by, <a href="#Page_234">234&ndash;235</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Treaties with Indians, <a href="#Page_19">19&ndash;20</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123&ndash;124</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292&ndash;293</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>fallacy of, <a href="#Page_348">348&ndash;349</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>See</i> <a href="#Indians">Indians</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Tucson, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Union Pacific Railway, the, <a href="#Page_211">211</a> ff.;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>reason for name, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
+  <li>incorporation of company, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
+  <li>route of, <a href="#Page_221">221&ndash;222</a>;</li>
+  <li>land grants in aid of, <a href="#Page_222">222</a> (<i>see</i> <a href="#Land_grants">Land grants</a>);</li>
+  <li>financing of project, <a href="#Page_222">222&ndash;223</a>;</li>
+  <li>progress in construction of, <a href="#Page_298">298&ndash;299</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;</li>
+  <li>description of construction of, <a href="#Page_325">325&ndash;335</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Utah, territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_101">101&ndash;102</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>boundaries of, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>
+  <li>partition of Nevada from, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> ff.;</li>
+  <li>derivation of name from Ute Indians, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Victorio, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Vigilance committees in mining camps, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Villard, Henry, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382&ndash;383</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">402</a></span><br /></li>
+<li>Vinita, terminus of Atlantic and Pacific road, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Virginia City, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168&ndash;169</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Wagons, Conestoga, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>overland mail coaches, <a href="#Page_178">178&ndash;179</a>;</li>
+  <li>numbers employed in overland freight business, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Wakarusa War, <a href="#Page_133">133&ndash;134</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Walker, General Francis A., <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Walker, Robert J., <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Washington, creation of territory of, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>mining in, <a href="#Page_164">164&ndash;166</a>;</li>
+  <li>a part of Idaho formed from, <a href="#Page_166">166&ndash;167</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Washita, battle of the, <a href="#Page_317">317&ndash;318</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wayne, Anthony, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wea Indians, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wells, Fargo, and Company, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Whipple, Lieut. A.&nbsp;W., survey for Pacific railway by, <a href="#Page_206">206&ndash;207</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>White, Dr. Elijah, <a href="#Page_75">75&ndash;76</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>White Antelope, Indian chief, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Whitman, Marcus, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80&ndash;81</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Whitney, Asa, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Willamette provisional government, <a href="#Page_79">79&ndash;80</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Williams, Beverly D., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Williamson, Lieut. R.&nbsp;S., survey by, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wilson, Hill P., Indian trader, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Winnebago Indians, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wisconsin, opening of, to whites, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>territory of, organized, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+<li>Wounded Knee, Indian fight at, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wyeth, Nathaniel J., <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wynkoop, E.&nbsp;W., <a href="#Page_255">255&ndash;259</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312&ndash;313</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Wyoming, territory of, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br /></li>
+
+<li class="p1">Yankton Sioux, the, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Yerba Buena, village of, later San Francisco, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.<br /></li>
+<li>Young, Brigham, <a href="#Page_93">93&ndash;94</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a> ff., <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;<br />
+  <ul>
+  <li>made governor of Utah Territory, <a href="#Page_101">101&ndash;102</a>.</li>
+  </ul></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<div class="newpage p4 transnote">
+<h2 class="nobreak"><a name="Transcribers_Notes" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcribers' Note</a></h2>
+
+<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
+preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.</p>
+
+<p>Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unpaired
+quotation marks were retained. For example, the paragraph beginning on page
+<a href="#Page_311">311</a> with "There is little doubt" and ending on
+page <a href="#Page_313">313</a> with "sincerity of their protestations"
+contains an unpaired quotation mark.</p>
+
+<p>Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.</p>
+
+<p>Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.</p>
+
+<p>Text uses both "reconnaissance" and "reconnoissance"; both retained.</p>
+
+<p>Text mostly uses "Santa FĂŠ", so three occurrences of "Sante FĂŠ" have
+been changed.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45699 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Last American Frontier, by Frederic L.

-(Frederic Logan) Paxson

-

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

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-Title: The Last American Frontier

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-Author: Frederic L. (Frederic Logan) Paxson

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-

-THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

-

-Stories from American History

-

-

-      *      *      *      *      *      *

-

-[Illustration]

-

-  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

-  NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO

-  ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

-

-  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

-  LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA

-  MELBOURNE

-

-  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

-  TORONTO

-

-      *      *      *      *      *      *

-

-

-[Illustration]

-

-

-THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

-

-by

-

-FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON

-

-Junior Professor of American History in the University of Michigan

-

-Illustrated

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-New York

-The Macmillan Company

-1910

-

-All rights reserved

-

-Copyright, 1910,

-By the Macmillan Company.

-

-Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.

-

-Norwood Press

-J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.

-Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

-

-

-

-

-PREFACE

-

-

-I have told here the story of the last frontier within the United

-States, trying at once to preserve the picturesque atmosphere which

-has given to the "Far West" a definite and well-understood meaning,

-and to indicate those forces which have shaped the history of the

-country beyond the Mississippi. In doing it I have had to rely largely

-upon my own investigations among sources little used and relatively

-inaccessible. The exact citations of authority, with which I might have

-crowded my pages, would have been out of place in a book not primarily

-intended for the use of scholars. But I hope, before many years, to

-exploit in a larger and more elaborate form the mass of detailed

-information upon which this sketch is based.

-

-My greatest debts are to the owners of the originals from which the

-illustrations for this book have been made; to Claude H. Van Tyne, who

-has repeatedly aided me with his friendly criticism; and to my wife,

-whose careful readings have saved me from many blunders in my text.

-

-              FREDERIC L. PAXSON.

-

-ANN ARBOR, August 7, 1909.

-

-

-

-

-CONTENTS

-

-

-  CHAPTER I

-                                                              PAGE

-  THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT                                          1

-

-

-  CHAPTER II

-

-  THE INDIAN FRONTIER                                           14

-

-

-  CHAPTER III

-

-  IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST                                    33

-

-

-  CHAPTER IV

-

-  THE SANTA FE TRAIL                                            53

-

-

-  CHAPTER V

-

-  THE OREGON TRAIL                                              70

-

-

-  CHAPTER VI

-

-  OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS                                     86

-

-

-  CHAPTER VII

-

-  CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS                              104

-

-

-  CHAPTER VIII

-

-  KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER                               119

-

-

-  CHAPTER IX

-

-  "PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST!"                                       138

-

-

-  CHAPTER X

-

-  FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA                                      156

-

-

-  CHAPTER XI

-

-  THE OVERLAND MAIL                                            174

-

-

-  CHAPTER XII

-

-  THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER                                      192

-

-

-  CHAPTER XIII

-

-  THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD                                   211

-

-

-  CHAPTER XIV

-

-  THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR                                  225

-

-

-  CHAPTER XV

-

-  THE CHEYENNE WAR                                             243

-

-

-  CHAPTER XVI

-

-  THE SIOUX WAR                                                264

-

-

-  CHAPTER XVII

-

-  THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY                        284

-

-

-  CHAPTER XVIII

-

-  BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID                                     304

-

-

-  CHAPTER XIX

-

-  THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS                                    324

-

-

-  CHAPTER XX

-

-  THE NEW INDIAN POLICY                                        340

-

-

-  CHAPTER XXI

-

-  THE LAST STAND: CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL                358

-

-

-  CHAPTER XXII

-

-  LETTING IN THE POPULATION                                    372

-

-

-  CHAPTER XXIII

-

-  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                                         387

-

-

-

-

-LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

-

-

-  THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER                              _Frontispiece_

-

-                                                              PAGE

-  MAP: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841      22

-

-  CHIEF KEOKUK                                        _facing_  30

-

-  IOWA SOD PLOW. (From a Cut belonging to the Historical

-  Department of Iowa.)                                          46

-

-  MAP: OVERLAND TRAILS                                          57

-

-  FORT LARAMIE, 1842                                  _facing_  78

-

-  MAP: THE WEST IN 1849                                        120

-

-  MAP: THE WEST IN 1854                                        140

-

-  "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"                          _facing_  144

-

-  THE MINING CAMP                                        "     158

-

-  FORT SNELLING                                          "     204

-

-  RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH                          "     274

-

-  MAP: THE WEST IN 1863                                        300

-

-  POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN            _facing_  360

-

-  MAP: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884                             380

-

-

-

-

-THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER I

-

-THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

-

-

-The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which

-the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which

-courage and foresight have gradually transformed from desert waste to

-virile commonwealth. It is the story of one long struggle, fought over

-different lands and by different generations, yet ever repeating the

-conditions and episodes of the last period in the next. The winning of

-the first frontier established in America its first white settlements.

-Later struggles added the frontiers of the Alleghanies and the Ohio,

-of the Mississippi and the Missouri. The winning of the last frontier

-completed the conquest of the continent.

-

-The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West.

-For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas

-of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to

-migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness

-stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.

-Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails

-and clearing in the valleys. The advance line of the farmsteads was

-never far behind it. And out of this shifting frontier between man and

-nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American

-governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved

-them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has

-always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled

-the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic

-development and social organization, have in most instances originated

-near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier

-interest.

-

-The controlling influence of the frontier in shaping American problems

-has been possible because of the construction of civilized governments

-in a new area, unhampered by institutions of the past or conservative

-prejudices of the present. Each commonwealth has built from the

-foundation. An institution, to exist, has had to justify itself again

-and again. No force of tradition has kept the outlawed fact alive. The

-settled lands behind have in each generation been forced to remodel

-their older selves upon the newer growths beyond.

-

-Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the

-frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with

-the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have

-counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive

-courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings

-or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a

-picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements,

-but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad

-man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both

-have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and

-initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted

-an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their

-strength in numbers.

-

-The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor

-in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the

-earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century,

-when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous

-in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose

-characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New

-England were not too early for its shaping.

-

-The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier,

-separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness

-in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the

-successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations

-and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended.

-The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at

-once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and

-translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments

-of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious

-and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a

-melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a

-generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made

-a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which

-by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the

-middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking

-distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always,

-determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line

-of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating

-link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along

-its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The

-extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the

-contour of the seaboard along which it lay.

-

-Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic

-rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems

-in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the

-neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the

-settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on

-the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the

-various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river

-mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into

-the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.

-

-For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are

-navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge

-upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the

-foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a

-line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once

-the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second

-frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was

-reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.

-

-Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began.

-English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in

-growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the

-needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English

-in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of

-Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly

-to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the

-similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier.

-Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached,

-the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism

-plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.

-

-The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an

-end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing,

-up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they

-approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind,

-the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the

-combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley

-routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run

-parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge

-among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every

-reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the

-pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and

-meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause

-against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where

-the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the

-Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have

-common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in

-which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with

-talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was

-already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union

-than had been known before.

-

-The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700.

-By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing

-down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping

-backward to north and south. The French war of 1756-1763 saw the

-apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the

-Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and

-Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river

-valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and

-population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both

-sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested

-the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian

-strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was

-the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by

-all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the

-three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.

-

-The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started

-down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed

-by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the

-boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed

-it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi

-itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The

-new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations

-which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties

-felt the frontier pressure from the start.

-

-Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states

-appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its

-advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony

-Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge

-to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio

-entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet

-the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to

-till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern

-communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation;

-but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines

-were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or

-interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes,

-through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as

-state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war

-with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.

-

-The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad

-investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military

-reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was

-signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern

-population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt

-too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result

-of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was

-the western accompaniment.

-

-The westward movement has been continuous in America since the

-beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have

-never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession

-of pioneers has marched up the slopes of the Appalachians, across

-the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the

-Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream

-has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed

-the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever

-before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years

-following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in

-the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.

-

-Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement

-down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its

-junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with

-states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north

-and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more

-apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended

-the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including

-New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north.

-The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as

-yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than

-to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the

-convenience of the natural route.

-

-For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit

-of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio

-facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred

-and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to

-afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the

-Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and

-it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend

-an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas

-all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The

-emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed

-by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission

-of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend

-of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease.

-Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was

-simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out

-to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge

-began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of

-population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up.

-The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the

-northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and

-Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the

-apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in

-1821.

-

-There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri

-than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers

-were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major

-of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a

-tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty,

-steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew

-longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.

-

-Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from

-the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American

-desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their

-maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara

-or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded

-upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the slopes approach

-the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who

-traversed the country in 1819-1820. Long reported that it could never

-support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of

-the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc."

-A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber,

-the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point

-the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are

-annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no

-farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many

-years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from

-Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy

-desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the

-states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the

-western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had

-reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.

-

-By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward

-march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the

-Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn.

-Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached

-nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the

-nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert

-and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which

-had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War,

-even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier

-scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of

-life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired

-an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its

-doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,

-threatened to become a constant quantity.

-

-From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for

-the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard

-continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are

-filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains

-in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear

-the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian

-tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility

-of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once.

-A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of

-the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the

-continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and

-intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the

-control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out

-the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian

-policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period,

-the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating

-the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is

-larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such,

-before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American

-history has been closed.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER II

-

-THE INDIAN FRONTIER

-

-

-A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly

-relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the

-continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its

-advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands,

-concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating

-their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed

-had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly

-enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements

-and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every

-twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never

-more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it

-until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt

-that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual

-members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable

-as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the

-part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and

-contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the

-danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not

-responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries,

-real or imaginary,--and too often they were real,--made him the most

-dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier.

-The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and

-endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached

-a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but

-never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had

-been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.

-

-The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have

-ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful

-of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade

-among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land,

-possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase,

-could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a

-higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against

-the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against

-self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian

-must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with

-progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever

-have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for

-him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss

-of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that

-invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national

-honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed

-maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older

-ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all

-these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government

-has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to

-administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade,

-punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct

-not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.

-

-The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its

-responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In

-theory the disposition of the government was generally benevolent, but

-the scheme was badly conceived, while human frailty among officers of

-the law and citizens as well rendered execution short of such ideal as

-there was.

-

-For thirty years the government under the Constitution had no Indian

-policy. In these years it acquired the habit of dealing with the tribes

-as independent--"domestic dependent nations," Justice Marshall later

-called them--by means of formal treaties. Europe thought of chiefs as

-kings and tribes as nations. The practice of making treaties was based

-on this delusion. After a century of practice it was finally learned

-that nomadic savages have no idea of sovereign government or legal

-obligation, and that the assumption of the existence of such knowledge

-can lead only to misconception and disappointment.

-

-As the frontier moved down the Ohio, individual wars were fought and

-individual treaties were made as occasion offered. At times the tribes

-yielded readily to white occupation; occasionally they struggled

-bitterly to save their lands; but the result was always the same. The

-right bank of the river, long known as the Indian Shore, was contested

-in a series of wars lasting nearly until 1800, and became available for

-white colonization only after John Jay had, through his treaty of 1794,

-removed the British encouragement to the Indians, and General Wayne had

-administered to them a decisive defeat. Isolated attacks were frequent,

-but Tecumseh's war of 1811 was the next serious conflict, while, after

-General Harrison brought this war to an end at Tippecanoe, there was

-comparative peace along the northwest frontier until the time of Black

-Hawk and his uprising of 1832.

-

-The left bank of the river was opened with less formal resistance,

-admitting Kentucky and Tennessee before the Indian Shore was a safe

-habitation for whites. South of Tennessee lay the great southern

-confederacies, somewhat out of the line of early western progress, and

-hence not plunged into struggles until the War of 1812 was over. But

-as Wayne and Harrison had opened the Northwest, so Jackson cleared

-the way for white advance into Alabama and Mississippi. By 1821 new

-states touched the Mississippi River along its whole course between New

-Orleans and the lead mines of upper Illinois.

-

-In the advance of the frontier to the bend of the Missouri some of the

-tribes were pushed back, while others were passed and swallowed up by

-the invading population. Experience showed that the two races could

-not well live in adjacent lands. The conditions which made for Indian

-welfare could not be kept up in the neighborhood of white settlements,

-for the more lawless of the whites were ever ready, through illicit

-trade, deceit, and worse, to provoke the most dangerous excesses of

-the savage. The Indian was demoralized, the white became steadily more

-intolerant.

-

-Although the ingenious Jefferson had anticipated him in the idea,

-the first positive policy which looked toward giving to the Indian

-a permanent home and the sort of guardianship which he needed until

-he could become reconciled to civilized life was the suggestion of

-President Monroe. At the end of his presidency, Georgia was angrily

-demanding the removal of the Cherokee from her limits, and was ready to

-violate law and the Constitution in her desire to accomplish her end.

-Monroe was prepared to meet the demand. He submitted to Congress, on

-January 27, 1825, a report from Calhoun, then Secretary of War, upon

-the numbers of the tribes, the area of their lands, and the area of

-available destinations for them. He recommended that as rapidly as

-agreements could be made with them they be removed to country lying

-westward and northwestward,--to the further limits of the Louisiana

-Purchase, which lay beyond the line of the western frontier.

-

-Already, when this message was sent to Congress, individual steps

-had been taken in the direction which it pointed out. A few tribes

-had agreed to cross the Mississippi, and had been allotted lands in

-Missouri and Arkansas. But Missouri, just admitted, and Arkansas, now

-opening up, were no more hospitable to Indian wards than Georgia and

-Ohio had been. The Indian frontier must be at some point still farther

-west, towards the vast plains overrun by the Osage[1] and Kansa tribes,

-the Pawnee and the Sioux. There had been few dealings with the Indians

-beyond the Mississippi before Monroe advanced his policy. Lieutenant

-Pike had visited the head of the Mississippi in 1805 and had treated

-with the Sioux for a reserve at St. Paul. Subsequent agreements farther

-south brought the Osage tribes within the treaty arrangements. The year

-1825 saw the notable treaties which prepared the way for peace among

-the western tribes, and the reception by these tribes of the eastern

-nations.

-

-    [1] My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed

-        upon by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American

-        Ethnology, and printed in C. J. Kappler, Indian Affairs,

-        Laws and Treaties, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452,

-        Serial 4253, p. 1021.

-

-Five weeks after the special message Congress authorized a negotiation

-with the Kansa and Osage nations. These tribes roamed over a vast

-country extending from the Platte River to the Red, and west as far as

-the lower slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Their limits had never been

-definitely stated, although the Osage had already surrendered claim to

-lands fronting on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Missouri

-and the Arkansas. Not only was it now desirable to limit them more

-closely in order to make room for Indian immigrants, but these tribes

-had already begun to worry traders going overland to the Southwest. As

-soon as the frontier reached the bend of the Missouri, the profits of

-the Santa Fe trade had begun to tempt caravans up the Arkansas valley

-and across the plains. To preserve peace along the Santa Fe 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 Fe, and gave the United States title to ample lands west of the

-frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.

-

-The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien the first step

-towards peace and condensation along the northern frontier. The Erie

-Canal, not yet opened, had not begun to drain the population of the

-East into the Northwest, and Indians were in peaceful possession of

-the lake shores nearly to Fort Wayne. West of Lake Michigan were

-constant tribal wars. The Potawatomi, Menominee, and Chippewa, first,

-then Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes, and finally the various bands of

-Sioux around the Mississippi and upper Missouri, enjoyed still their

-traditional hostility and the chase. Governor Clark again, and Lewis

-Cass, met the tribes at the old trading post on the Mississippi to

-persuade them to bury the tomahawk among themselves. The treaty, signed

-August 19, 1825, defined the boundaries of the different nations by

-lines of which the most important was between the Sioux and Sauk and

-Foxes, which was later to be known as the Neutral Line, across northern

-Iowa. The basis of this treaty of Prairie du Chien was temporary at

-best. Before it was much more than ratified the white influx began,

-Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake Michigan blossomed out into Chicago,

-and squatters penetrating to Rock Island in the Mississippi had

-provoked the war of 1832, in which Black Hawk made the last stand of

-the Indians in the old Northwest. In the thirties the policy of removal

-completed the opening of Illinois and Wisconsin to the whites.

-

-[Illustration: INDIAN COUNTRY AND AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER, 1840-1841

-

-Showing the solid line of reservation lands extending from the Red

-River to Green Bay, and the agricultural frontier of more than six

-inhabitants per square mile.]

-

-The policy of removal and colonization urged by Monroe and Calhoun was

-supported by Congress and succeeding Presidents, and carried out during

-the next fifteen years. It required two transactions, the acquisition

-by the United States of western titles, and the persuasion of eastern

-tribes to accept the new lands thus available. It was based upon an

-assumption that the frontier had reached its final resting place.

-Beyond Missouri, which had been admitted in 1821, lay a narrow strip of

-good lands, merging soon into the American desert. Few sane Americans

-thought of converting this land into states as had been the process

-farther east. At the bend of the Missouri the frontier had arrived;

-there it was to stay, and along the lines of its receding flanks the

-Indians could be settled with pledges of permanent security and growth.

-Here they could never again impede the western movement in its creation

-of new communities and states. Here it would be possible, in the words

-of Lewis Cass, to "leave their fate to the common God of the white man

-and the Indian."

-

-The five years following the treaty of Prairie du Chien were filled

-with active negotiation and migration in the lands beyond the Missouri.

-First came the Shawnee to what was promised as a final residence.

-From Pennsylvania, into Ohio, and on into Missouri, this tribe had

-already been pushed by the advancing frontier. Now its ever shrinking

-lands were cut down to a strip with a twenty-five-mile frontage on the

-Missouri line and an extension west for one hundred and twenty-five

-miles along the south bank of the Kansas River and the south line of

-the Kaw reserve. Its old neighbors, the Delawares, became its new

-neighbors in 1829, accepting the north bank of the Kansas, with a

-Missouri River frontage as far north as the new Fort Leavenworth, and a

-ten-mile outlet to the buffalo country, along the northern line of the

-Kaw reserve. Later the Kickapoo and other minor tribes were colonized

-yet farther to the north. The chase was still to be the chief reliance

-of the Indian population. Unlimited supplies of game along the plains

-were to supply his larder, with only occasional aid from presents of

-other food supplies. In the long run agriculture was to be encouraged.

-Farmers and blacksmiths and teachers were to be provided in various

-ways, but until the longed-for civilization should arrive, the red man

-must hunt to live. The new Indian frontier was thus started by the

-colonization of the Shawnee and Delawares just beyond the bend of the

-Missouri on the old possessions of the Kaw.

-

-The northern flank of the Indian frontier, as it came to be

-established, ran along the line of the frontier of white settlements,

-from the bend of the Missouri, northeasterly towards the upper lakes.

-Before the final line of the reservations could be determined the

-Erie Canal had begun to shape the Northwest. Its stream of population

-was filling the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and

-working up into Michigan and Wisconsin. Black Hawk's War marked the

-last struggle for the fertile plains of upper Illinois, and made

-possible an Indian line which should leave most of Wisconsin and part

-of Iowa open to the whites.

-

-Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie

-du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same

-place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reenforced the

-guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the

-Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto

-and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the

-Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became

-a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the

-Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had

-threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the

-frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along

-the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond

-the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had

-clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might

-have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois,

-and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the

-pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike

-promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought

-over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the

-frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger

-threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from

-eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a

-campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a

-new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their

-resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the

-Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to

-the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west

-bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and

-Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this

-time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the

-Neutral Strip.

-

-The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work

-of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the

-line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west

-line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black

-Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter

-acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the

-Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established

-a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others

-forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more

-correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the

-tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these

-three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago

-to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to

-cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and

-east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors

-to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River,

-gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live

-on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of

-the Wisconsin River.

-

-The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies,

-they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the

-old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made

-further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion

-of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future

-eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the

-Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St.

-Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country.

-With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had

-been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white

-occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to

-Green Bay.

-

-While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established

-beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was

-extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the

-Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine

-River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of

-the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians

-roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo,

-in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into

-Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the

-country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way

-for the colonizing policy.

-

-The southern part of the Indian Country was early set aside as the new

-home of the eastern confederacies lying near the Gulf of Mexico. The

-Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had in the twenties

-begun to feel the pressure of the southern states. Jackson's campaigns

-had weakened them even before the cession of Florida to the United

-States removed their place of refuge. Georgia was demanding their

-removal when Monroe announced his policy.

-

-A new home for the Choctaw was provided in the extreme Southwest in

-1830. Ten years before, this nation had been given a home in Arkansas

-territory, but now, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, it received a new eastern

-limit in a line drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas due south to the

-Red River. Arkansas had originally reached from the Mississippi to the

-hundredth meridian, but it was, after this Choctaw cession, cut down

-to the new Choctaw line, which remains its boundary to-day. From Fort

-Smith the new boundary was run northerly to the southwest corner of

-Missouri.

-

-The Creeks and Cherokee promised in 1833 to go into the Indian Country,

-west of Arkansas and north of the Choctaw. The Creeks became the

-neighbors of the Choctaw, separated from them by the Canadian River,

-while the Cherokee adjoined the Creeks on the north and east. With

-small exceptions the whole of the present state of Oklahoma was thus

-assigned to these three nations. The migrations from their old homes

-came deliberately in the thirties and forties. The Chickasaw in 1837

-purchased from the Choctaw the right to occupy the western end of their

-strip between the Red and Canadian. The Seminole had acquired similar

-rights among the Creeks, but were so reluctant to keep the pledge to

-emigrate that their removal taxed the ability of the United States army

-for several years.

-

-Between the southern portion of the Indian Country and the Missouri

-bend minor tribes were colonized in profusion. The Quapaw and United

-Seneca and Shawnee nations were put into the triangle between the

-Neosho and Missouri. The Cherokee received an extra grant in the

-"Cherokee Neutral Strip," between the Osage line of 1825 and the

-Missouri line. Next to the north was made a reserve for the New York

-Indians, which they refused to occupy. The new Miami home came next,

-along the Missouri line; while north of this were little reserves for

-individual bands of Ottawa and Chippewa, for the Piankashaw and Wea,

-the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the last of which adjoined the Shawnee line

-of 1825 upon the south.

-

-The Indian frontier, determined upon in 1825, had by 1840 been carried

-into fact, and existed unbroken from the Red River and Texas to the

-Lakes. The exodus from the old homes to the new had in many instances

-been nearly completed. The tribes were more easily persuaded to promise

-than to act, and the wrench was often hard enough to produce sullenness

-or even war when the moment of departure arrived. A few isolated bands

-had not even agreed to go. But the figures of the migrations, published

-from year to year during the thirties, show that all of the more

-important nations east of the new frontier had ceded their lands, and

-that by 1840 the migration was substantially over.

-

-[Illustration: CHIEF KEOKUK

-

-From a photograph of a contemporary oil painting owned by Judge C. F.

-Davis. Reproduced by permission of the Historical Department of Iowa.]

-

-President Monroe had urged as an essential part of the removal policy

-that when the Indians had been transferred and colonized they should be

-carefully educated into civilization, and guarded from contamination by

-the whites. Congress, in various laws, tried to do these things. The

-policy of removal, which had been only administrative at the start,

-was confirmed by law in 1830. A formal Bureau of Indian Affairs was

-created in 1832, under the supervision of a commissioner. In 1834 was

-passed the Indian Intercourse Act, which remained the fundamental law

-for half a century.

-

-The various treaties of migration had contained the pledge that never

-again should the Indians be removed without their consent, that

-whites should be excluded from the Indian Country, and that their

-lands should never be included within the limits of any organized

-territory or state. To these guarantees the Intercourse Act attempted

-to give force. The Indian Country was divided into superintendencies,

-agencies, and sub-agencies, into which white entry, without license,

-was prohibited by law. As the tribes were colonized, agents and schools

-and blacksmiths were furnished to them in what was a real attempt to

-fulfil the terms of the pledge. The tribes had gone beyond the limits

-of probable extension of the United States, and there they were to

-settle down and stay. By 1835 it was possible for President Jackson to

-announce to Congress that the plan approached its consummation: "All

-preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians" had failed;

-but now "no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the

-United States to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the

-scattered remnants of this race which are left within our borders....

-The pledge of the United States," he continued, "has been given by

-Congress that the country destined for the residence of this people

-shall be forever 'secured and guaranteed to them.' ... No political

-communities can be formed in that extensive region.... A barrier has

-thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of

-our citizens." And now, he concluded, "they ought to be left to the

-progress of events."

-

-The policy of the United States towards the wards was generally

-benevolent. Here, it was sincere, whether wise or not. As it turned

-out, however, the new Indian frontier had to contend with movements

-of population, resistless and unforeseen. No Joshua, no Canute, could

-hold it back. The result was inevitable. The Indian, wrote one of the

-frontiersmen in a later day, speaking in the language of the West, "is

-a savage, noxious animal, and his actions are those of a ferocious

-beast of prey, unsoftened by any touch of pity or mercy. For them he

-is to be blamed exactly as the wolf or tiger is blamed." But by 1840

-an Indian frontier had been erected, coterminous with the agricultural

-frontier, and beyond what was believed to be the limit of expansion.

-The American desert and the Indian frontier, beyond the bend of the

-Missouri, were forever to be the western boundary of the United States.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER III

-

-IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST

-

-

-In the end of the thirties the "right wing" of the frontier, as a

-colonel of dragoons described it, extended northeasterly from the bend

-of the Missouri to Green Bay. It was an irregular line beyond which

-lay the Indian tribes, and behind which was a population constantly

-becoming more restless and aggressive. That it should have been a

-permanent boundary is not conceivable; yet Congress professed to regard

-it as such, and had in 1836 ordered the survey and construction of

-a military road from the mouth of the St. Peter's to the Red River.

-The maintenance of the southern half of the frontier was perhaps

-practicable, since the tradition of the American desert was long to

-block migration beyond the limits of Missouri and Arkansas, but north

-and east of Fort Leavenworth were lands too alluring to be safe in the

-control of the new Indian Bureau. And already before the thirties were

-over the upper Mississippi country had become a factor in the westward

-movement.

-

-A few years after the English war the United States had erected a

-fort at the junction of the St. Peter's and the Mississippi, near the

-present city of St. Paul. In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike had treated

-with the Sioux tribes at this point, and by 1824 the new post had

-received the name Fort Snelling, which it was to retain until after the

-admission of Minnesota as a state. Pike and his followers had worked

-their way up the Mississippi from St. Louis or Prairie du Chien in

-skiffs or keelboats, and had found little of consequence in the way of

-white occupation save a few fur-trading posts and the lead mines of

-Du Buque. Until after the English war, indeed, and the admission of

-Illinois, there had been little interest in the country up the river;

-but during the early twenties the lead deposits around Du Buque's

-old claim became the centre of a business that soon made new treaty

-negotiations with the northern Indians necessary.

-

-On both sides of the Mississippi, between the mouths of the Wisconsin

-and the Rock, lie the extensive lead fields which attracted Du Buque

-in the days of the Spanish rule, and which now in the twenties induced

-an American immigration. The ease with which these diggings could

-be worked and the demand of a growing frontier population for lead,

-brought miners into the borderland of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa

-long before either of the last states had acquired name or boundary

-or the Indian possessors of the soil had been satisfied and removed.

-The nations of Winnebago, Sauk and Foxes, and Potawatomi were most

-interested in this new white invasion, while all were reluctant to

-yield the lands to the incoming pioneers. The Sauk and Foxes had given

-up their claim to nearly all the lead country in 1804; the Potawatomi

-ceded portions of it in 1829; and the Winnebago in the same year made

-agreements covering the mines within the present state of Wisconsin.

-

-Gradually in the later twenties the pioneer miners came in, one

-by one. From St. Louis they came up the great river, or from Lake

-Michigan they crossed the old portage of the Fox and Wisconsin. The

-southern reenforcements looked much to Fort Armstrong on Rock Island

-for protection. The northern, after they had left Fort Howard at Green

-Bay, were out of touch until they arrived near the old trading post at

-Prairie du Chien. War with the Winnebago in 1827 was followed in 1828

-by the erection of another United States fort,--at the portage, and

-known as Fort Winnebago. Thus the United States built forts to defend a

-colonization which it prohibited by law and treaty.

-

-The individual pioneers differed much in their morals and their

-cultural antecedents, but were uniform in their determination to enjoy

-the profits for which they had risked the dangers of the wilderness.

-Notable among them, and typical of their highest virtues, was Henry

-Dodge, later governor of Wisconsin, and representative and senator for

-his state in Congress, but now merely one of the first in the frontier

-movement. It is related of him that in 1806 he had been interested in

-the filibustering expedition of Aaron Burr, and had gone as far as

-New Madrid, to join the party, before he learned that it was called

-treason. He turned back in disgust. "On reaching St. Genevieve," his

-chronicler continues, "they found themselves indicted for treason by

-the grand jury then in session. Dodge surrendered himself, and gave

-bail for his appearance; but feeling outraged by the action of the

-grand jury he pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and whipt

-nine of the jurors; and would have whipt the rest, if they had not run

-away." With such men to deal with, it was always difficult to enforce

-unpopular laws upon the frontier. Dodge had no hesitation in settling

-upon his lead diggings in the mineral country and in defying the Indian

-agents, who did their best to persuade him to leave the forbidden

-country. On the west bank of the Mississippi federal authority was

-successful in holding off the miners, but the east bank was settled

-between Galena and Mineral Point before either the Indian title had

-been fully quieted, or the lands had been surveyed and opened to

-purchase by the United States.

-

-The Indian war of 1827, the erection of Fort Winnebago in 1828, the

-cession of their mineral lands by the Winnebago Indians in 1829, are

-the events most important in the development of the first settlements

-in the new Northwest. In 1829 and 1830 pioneers came up the Mississippi

-to the diggings in increasing numbers, while farmers began to cast

-covetous eyes upon the prairies lying between Lake Michigan and the

-Mississippi. These were the lands which the Sauk and Fox tribes had

-surrendered in 1804, but over which they still retained rights of

-occupation and the chase until Congress should sell them. The entry of

-every American farmer was a violation of good faith and law, and so

-the Indians regarded it. Their largest city and the graves of their

-ancestors were in the peninsula between the Rock and the Mississippi,

-and as the invaders seized the lands, their resentment passed beyond

-control. The Black Hawk War was the forlorn attempt to save the lands.

-When it ended in crushing defeat, the United States exercised its

-rights of conquest to compel a revision of the treaty limits.

-

-The great treaties of 1832 and 1833 not only removed all Indian

-obstruction from Illinois, but prepared the way for further settlement

-in both Wisconsin and Iowa. The Winnebago agreed to migrate to the

-Neutral Strip in Iowa, the Potawatomi accepted a reserve near the

-Missouri River, while the Black Hawk purchase from the offending Sauk

-and Foxes opened a strip some forty miles wide along the west bank of

-the Mississippi. These Indian movements were a part of the general

-concentrating policy made in the belief that a permanent Indian

-frontier could be established. After the Black Hawk War came the

-creation of the Indian Bureau, the ordering of the great western road,

-and the erection of a frontier police. Henry Dodge was one of the few

-individuals to emerge from the war with real glory. His reward came

-when Congress formed a regiment of dragoons for frontier police, and

-made him its colonel. In his regiment he operated up and down the long

-frontier for three years, making expeditions beyond the line to hold

-Pawnee conferences and meetings with the tribes of the great plains,

-and resigning his command only in time to be the first governor of the

-new territory of Wisconsin, in 1836. He knew how little dependence

-could be placed on the permanency of the right wing of the frontier.

-"Nor let gentlemen forget," he reminded his colleagues in Congress a

-few years later, "that we are to have continually the same course of

-settlements going on upon our border. They are perpetually advancing

-westward. They will reach, they will cross, the Rocky Mountains, and

-never stop till they have reached the shores of the Pacific. Distance

-is nothing to our people.... [They will] turn the whole region into the

-happy dwellings of a free and enlightened people."

-

-The Black Hawk War and its resulting treaties at once quieted the

-Indian title and gave ample advertisement to the new Northwest. As yet

-there had been no large migration to the West beyond Lake Michigan.

-The pioneers who had provoked the war had been few in number and far

-from their base upon the frontier. Mere access to the country had been

-difficult until after the opening of the Erie Canal, and even then

-steamships did not run regularly on Lake Michigan until after 1832.

-But notoriety now tempted an increasing wave of settlers. Congress woke

-up to the need of some territorial adjustment for the new country.

-

-Ever since Illinois had been admitted in 1818, Michigan had been the

-one remaining territory of the old Northwest, including the whole area

-north of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and extending from Lake Huron

-to the Mississippi River. Her huge size was admittedly temporary, but

-as no large centre of population existed outside of Detroit, it was

-convenient to simplify the federal jurisdiction in this fashion. The

-lead mines on the Mississippi produced a secondary centre of population

-in the late twenties and pointed to an early division of Michigan. But

-before this could be accomplished the Black Hawk purchase had carried

-the Mississippi centre of population to the right bank of the river.

-The American possessions on this bank, west of the river, had been cast

-adrift without political organization on the admission of Missouri in

-1821. Now the appearance of a vigorous population in an unorganized

-region compelled Congress to take some action, and thus, for temporary

-purposes, Michigan was enlarged in 1834. Her new boundary extended

-west to the Missouri River, between the state of Missouri and Canada.

-The new Northwest, which may be held to include Iowa, Wisconsin, and

-Minnesota, started its political history as a remote settlement in a

-vast territory of Michigan, with its seat of government at Detroit.

-Before it was cut off as the territory of Wisconsin in 1836 much had

-been done in the way of populating it.

-

-The boom of the thirties brought Arkansas and Michigan into the Union

-as states, and started the growth of the new Northwest. The industrial

-activity of the period was based on speculation in public lands and

-routes of transportation. America was transportation mad. New railways

-were building in the East and being projected West. Canals were

-turning the western portage paths into water highways. The speculative

-excitement touched the field of religion as well as economics,

-producing new sects by the dozen, and bringing schisms into the old.

-And population moving already in its inherent restlessness was made

-more active in migration by the hard times of the East in 1833 and 1834.

-

-The immigrants brought to the Black Hawk purchase and its vicinity,

-in the boom of the thirties, came chiefly by the river route. The

-lake route was just beginning to be used; not until the Civil War did

-the traffic of the upper Mississippi naturally and generally seek its

-outlet by Lake Michigan. The Mississippi now carried more than its

-share of the home seekers.

-

-Steamboats had been plying on western waters in increasing numbers

-since 1811. By 1823, one had gone as far north on the Mississippi as

-Fort Snelling, while by 1832 the Missouri had been ascended to Fort

-Union. In the thirties an extensive packet service gathered its

-passengers and freight at Pittsburg and other points on the Ohio,

-carrying them by a devious voyage of 1400 miles to Keokuk, near the

-southeast corner of the new Black Hawk lands. Wagons and cattle,

-children and furniture, crowded the decks of the boats. The aristocrats

-of emigration rode in the cabins provided for them, but the great

-majority of home seekers lived on deck and braved the elements upon the

-voyage. Explosions, groundings, and collisions enlivened the reckless

-river traffic. But in 1836 Governor Dodge found more than 22,000

-inhabitants in his new territory of Wisconsin, most of whom had reached

-the promised land by way of the river.

-

-For those whom the long river journey did not please, or who lived

-inland in Ohio or Indiana, the national road was a help. In 1825 the

-continuation of the Cumberland Road through Ohio had been begun. By

-1836 enough of it was done to direct the overland course of migration

-through Indianapolis towards central Illinois. The Conestoga wagon,

-which had already done its share in crossing the Alleghanies, now

-carried a second generation to the Mississippi. At Dubuque and Buffalo

-and Burlington ferries were established before 1836 to take the

-immigrants across the Mississippi into the new West.

-

-By the terms of its treaty, the Black Hawk purchase was to be vacated

-by the Indians in the summer of 1833. Before that year closed, its

-settlement had begun, despite the fact that the government surveys had

-not yet been made. Here, as elsewhere, the frontier farmer paid little

-regard to the legal basis of his life. He settled upon unoccupied lands

-as he needed them, trusting to the public opinion of the future to

-secure his title.

-

-The legislature of Michigan watched the migration of 1833 and 1834, and

-in the latter year created the two counties of Dubuque and Demoine,

-beyond the Mississippi, embracing these settlements. At the old claim

-a town of miners appeared by magic, able shortly to boast "that the

-first white man hung in Iowa in a Christian-like manner was Patrick

-O'Conner, at Dubuque, in June, 1834." Dubuque was a mining camp,

-differing from the other villages in possessing a larger proportion

-of the lawless element. Generally, however, this Iowa frontier was

-peaceful in comparison with other frontiers. Life and property were

-safe, and except for its dealings with the Indians and the United

-States government, in which frontiers have rarely recognized a law,

-the community was law-abiding. It stands in some contrast with another

-frontier building at the same time up the valley of the Arkansas. "Fent

-Noland of Batesville," wrote a contemporary of one of the heroes of

-this frontier, "is in every way one of the most remarkable men of the

-West; for such is the versatility of his genius that he seems equally

-adapted to every species of effort, intellectual or physical. With

-a like unerring aim he shoots a bullet or a _bon mot_; and wields

-the pen or the Bowie knife with the same thought, swift rapidity

-of motion, and energetic fury of manner. Sunday he will write an

-eloquent dissertation on religion; Monday he rawhides a rogue; Tuesday

-he composes a sonnet, set in silver stars and breathing the perfume

-of roses to some fair maid's eyebrows; Wednesday he fights a duel;

-Thursday he does up brown the personal character of Senators Sevier

-and Ashley; Friday he goes to the ball dressed in the most finical

-superfluity of fashion and shines the soul of wit and the sun of merry

-badinage among all the gay gentlemen; and to close the triumphs of the

-week, on Saturday night he is off thirty miles to a country dance in

-the Ozark Mountains, where they trip it on the light fantastic toe in

-the famous jig of the double-shuffle around a roaring log heap fire in

-the woods all night long, while between the dances Fent Noland sings

-some beautiful wild song, as 'Lucy Neal' or 'Juliana Johnson.' Thus

-Fent is a myriad-minded Proteus of contradictory characters, many-hued

-as the chameleon fed on the dews and suckled at the breast of the

-rainbow." Much of this luxuriant imagery was lacking farther north.

-

-The first phase of this development of the new Northwest was ended

-in 1837, when the general panic brought confusion to speculation

-throughout the United States. For four years the sanguine hopes of the

-frontier had led to large purchases of public lands, to banking schemes

-of wildest extravagance, and to railroad promotion without reason or

-demand. The specie circular of 1836 so deranged the currency of the

-whole United States that the effort to distribute the surplus in 1837

-was fatal to the speculative boom. The new communities suffered for

-their hopeful attempts. When the panic broke, the line of agricultural

-settlement had been pushed considerably beyond the northern and western

-limits of Illinois. The new line ran near to the Fox and Wisconsin

-portage route and the west line of the Black Hawk purchase. Milwaukee

-and Southport had been founded on the lake shore, hopeful of a great

-commerce that might rival the possessions of Chicago. Madison and its

-vicinity had been developed. The lead country in Wisconsin had grown

-in population. Across the river, Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington

-gave evidence of a growing community in the country still farther west.

-Nearly the whole area intended for white occupation by the Indian

-policy had been settled, so that any further extension must be at the

-expense of the Indians' guaranteed lands.

-

-On the eve of the panic, which depopulated many of the villages of the

-new strip, Michigan had been admitted. Her possessions west of Lake

-Michigan had been reorganized as a new territory of Wisconsin, with

-a capital temporarily at Belmont, where Henry Dodge, first governor,

-took possession in the fall of 1836. A territorial census showed that

-Wisconsin had a population of 22,214 in 1836, divided nearly equally by

-the Mississippi. Most of the population was on the banks of the great

-river, near the lead mines and the Black Hawk purchase, while only a

-fourth could be found near the new cities along the lake. The outlying

-settlements were already pressing against the Indian neighbors, so that

-the new governor soon was obliged to conduct negotiations for further

-cessions. The Chippewa, Menominee, and Sioux all came into council

-within two years, the Sioux agreeing to retire west of the Mississippi,

-while the others receded far into the north, leaving most of the

-present Wisconsin open to development. These treaties completed the

-line of the Indian frontier as it was established in the thirties.

-

-The Mississippi divided the population of Wisconsin nearly equally in

-1836, but subsequent years witnessed greater growth upon her western

-bank. Never in the westward movement had more attractive farms been

-made available than those on the right bank now reached by the river

-steamers and the ferries from northern Illinois. Two years after the

-erection of Wisconsin the western towns received their independent

-establishment, when in 1838 Iowa Territory was organized by Congress,

-including everything between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and

-north of the state of Missouri. Burlington, a village of log houses

-with perhaps five hundred inhabitants, became the seat of government

-of the new territory, while Wisconsin retired east of the river to a

-new capital at Madison. At Burlington a first legislature met in the

-autumn, to choose for a capital Iowa City, and to do what it could for

-a community still suffering from the results of the panic.

-

-The only Iowa lands open to lawful settlement were those of the Black

-Hawk purchase, many of which were themselves not surveyed and on the

-market. But the pioneers paid little heed to this. Leaving titles to

-the future, they cleared their farms, broke the sod, and built their

-houses.

-

-[Illustration: IOWA SOD PLOW]

-

-The heavy sod of the Iowa prairies was beyond the strength of the

-individual settler. In the years of first development the professional

-sod breaker was on hand, a most important member of his community, with

-his great plough, and large teams of from six to twelve oxen, making

-the ground ready for the first crop. In the frontier mind the land

-belonged to him who broke it, regardless of mere title. The quarrel

-between the squatter and the speculator was perennial. Congress in its

-laws sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest bidder,--a

-scheme through which the sturdy impecunious farmer saw his clearing

-in danger of being bought over his modest bid by an undeserving

-speculator. Accordingly the history of Iowa and Wisconsin is full of

-the claims associations by which the squatters endeavored to protect

-their rights and succeeded well. By voluntary association they agreed

-upon their claims and bounds. Transfers and sales were recorded on

-their books. When at last the advertised day came for the formal sale

-of the township by the federal land officer the population attended the

-auction in a body, while their chosen delegate bid off the whole area

-for them at the minimum price, and without competition. At times it

-happened that the speculator or the casual purchaser tried to bid, but

-the squatters present with their cudgels and air of anticipation were

-usually able to prevent what they believed to be unfair interference

-with their rights. The claims associations were entirely illegal; yet

-they reveal, as few American institutions do, the orderly tendencies

-of an American community even when its organization is in defiance of

-existing law.

-

-The development of the new territories of Iowa and Wisconsin in the

-decade after their erection carried both far towards statehood.

-Burlington, the earliest capital of Iowa, was in 1840 "the largest,

-wealthiest, most business-doing and most fashionable city, on or in

-the neighborhood of the Upper Mississippi.... We have three or four

-churches," said one of its papers, "a theatre, and a dancing school in

-full blast." As early as 1843 the Black Hawk purchase was overrun. The

-Sauk and Foxes had ceded provisionally all their Iowa lands and the

-Potawatomi were in danger. "Although it is but ten years to-day," said

-their agent, speaking of their Chicago treaty of 1833, "the tide of

-emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until the whites are now

-crowded closely along the southern side of these lands, and will soon

-swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the very worst traits of the

-white man's character, and destroy, by fraud and illicit intercourse,

-the remnant of a powerful people, now exposed to their influence." Iowa

-was admitted to the Union in 1846, after bickering over her northern

-boundary; Wisconsin followed in 1848; the remnant of both, now known as

-Minnesota, was erected as a territory in its own right in the next year.

-

-Fort Snelling was nearly twenty years old before it came to be more

-than a distant military outpost. Until the treaties of 1837 it was

-in the midst of the Sioux with no white neighbors save the agents of

-the fur companies, a few refugees from the Red River country, and a

-group of more or less disreputable hangers-on. An enlargement of the

-military reserve in 1837 led to the eviction by the troops of its

-near-by squatters, with the result that one of these took up his grog

-shop, left the peninsula between the Mississippi and St. Peter's, and

-erected the first permanent settlement across the former, where St.

-Paul now stands. Iowa had desired a northern boundary which should

-touch the St. Peter's River, but when she was admitted without it and

-Wisconsin followed with the St. Croix as her western limit, Minnesota

-was temporarily without a government.

-

-The Minnesota territorial act of 1849 preceded the active colonization

-of the country around St. Paul. Mendota, Fort Snelling, St. Anthony's,

-and Stillwater all came into active being, while the most enterprising

-settlers began to push up the Minnesota River, as the St. Peter's now

-came to be called. As usual the Indians were in the way. As usual the

-claims associations were resorted to. And finally, as usual the Indians

-yielded. At Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, in the autumn of 1851, the

-magnates of the young territory witnessed great treaties by which the

-Sioux, surrendering their portion of the permanent Indian frontier,

-gave up most of their vast hunting grounds to accept valley reserves

-along the Minnesota. And still more rapidly population came in after

-the cession.

-

-The new Northwest was settled after the great day of the keelboat on

-western waters. Iowa and the lead country had been reached by the

-steamboats of the Mississippi. The Milwaukee district was reached by

-the steamboats from the lakes. The upper Mississippi frontier was

-now even more thoroughly dependent on the river navigation than its

-neighbors had been, while its first period was over before any railroad

-played an immediate part in its development.

-

-The boom period between the panics of 1837 and 1857 thus added another

-concentric band along the northwest border, disregarding the Indian

-frontier and introducing a large population where the prophet of the

-early thirties had declared that civilization could never go. The

-Potawatomi of Iowa had yielded in 1846, the Sioux in 1851. The future

-of the other tribes in their so-called permanent homes was in grave

-question by the middle of the decade. The new frontier by 1857 touched

-the tip of Lake Superior, included St. Paul and the lower Minnesota

-valley, passed around Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, and reached the

-Missouri near Sioux City. In a few more years the right wing of the

-frontier would run due north from the bend of the Missouri.

-

-The hopeful life of the fifties surpassed that of the thirties in

-its speculative zeal. The home seeker had to struggle against the

-occasional Indian and the unscrupulous land agent as well as his own

-too sanguine disposition. Fictitious town sites had to be distinguished

-from the real. Fraudulent dealers more than once sold imaginary lots

-and farms from beautifully lithographed maps to eastern investors.

-Occasionally whole colonies of migrants would appear on the steamboat

-wharves bound for non-existent towns. And when the settler had escaped

-fraud, and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever or

-cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.

-

-Iowa had advanced her northwest frontier up the Des Moines River, past

-the old frontier fort, until in 1856 a couple of trading houses and a

-few families had reached the vicinity of Spirit Lake. Here, in March,

-1857, one of the settlers quarrelled with a wandering Indian over a

-dog. The Indian belonged to Inkpaduta's band of Sioux, one not included

-in the treaty of 1851. Forty-seven dead settlers slaughtered by the

-band were found a few days later by a visitor to the village. A hard

-winter campaign by regulars from Fort Ridgely resulted in the rescue

-of some of the captives, but the indignant demand of the frontier for

-retaliation was never granted.

-

-In spite of fraud and danger the population grew. For the first time

-the railroad played a material part in its advance. The great eastern

-trunk lines had crossed the Alleghanies into the Ohio valley. Chicago

-had received connection with the East in 1852. The Mississippi had been

-reached by 1854. In the spring of 1856 all Iowa celebrated the opening

-of a railway bridge at Davenport.

-

-The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own

-ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837.

-Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development

-that chartered railways and even built them between points that

-scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild

-with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money

-finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about

-to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the

-railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer,

-who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town

-lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating

-population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak

-gold.

-

-But a new Northwest had come into life in spite of the vicissitudes of

-1837 and 1857. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa had in 1860 ten times

-the population of Illinois at the opening of the Black Hawk War. More

-than a million and a half of pioneers had settled within these three

-new states, building their towns and churches and schools, pushing back

-the right flank of the Indian frontier, and reiterating their perennial

-demand that the Indian must go. This was the first departure from the

-policy laid down by Monroe and carried out by Adams and Jackson. Before

-this movement had ended, that policy had been attacked from another

-side, and was once more shown to be impracticable. The Indian had too

-little strength to compel adherence to the contract, and hence suffered

-from this encroachment by the new Northwest. His final destruction

-came from the overland traffic, which already by 1857 had destroyed

-the fiction of the American desert, and introduced into his domain

-thousands of pioneers lured by the call of the West and the lust for

-gold.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER IV

-

-THE SANTA FE TRAIL

-

-

-England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior

-provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio

-Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred miles above Vera

-Cruz. Before the English seaboard had received its earliest colonists,

-the hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters of the Rio

-Grande, where her outposts had been planted around the little adobe

-village of Santa Fe. For more than two hundred years this life had gone

-on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened by contact with

-the world or admixture of foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility

-characteristic of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions and

-restrictions of the law, communication with these villages of Chihuahua

-and New Mexico had been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills

-by the pack-trains of the king.

-

-It was no stately procession that wound up into the hills yearly to

-supply the Mexican frontier. From Vera Cruz the port of entry, through

-Mexico City, and thence north along the highlands through San Luis

-Potosi and Zacatecas to Durango, and thence to Chihuahua, and up the

-valley of the Rio Grande to Santa Fe climbed the long pack-trains and

-the clumsy ox-carts that carried into the provinces their whole supply

-from outside. The civilization of the provincial life might fairly be

-measured by the length, breadth, and capacity of this transportation

-route. Nearly two thousand miles, as the road meandered, of river,

-mountain gorge, and arid desert had to be overcome by the mule-drivers

-of the caravans. What their pack-animals could not carry, could not go.

-What had large bulk in proportion to its value must stay behind. The

-ancient commerce of the Orient, carried on camels across the Arabian

-desert, could afford to deal in gold and silver, silks, spices, and

-precious drugs; in like manner, though in less degree, the world's

-contribution to these remote towns was confined largely to textiles,

-drugs, and trinkets of adornment. Yet the Creole and Mestizo population

-of New Mexico bore with these meagre supplies for more than two

-centuries without an effort to improve upon them. Their resignation

-gives some credit to the rigors of the Spanish colonial system which

-restricted their importation to the defined route and the single port.

-It is due as much, however, to the hard geographic fact which made Vera

-Cruz and Mexico, distant as they were, their nearest neighbors, until

-in the nineteenth century another civilization came within hailing

-distance, at its frontier in the bend of the Missouri.

-

-The Spanish provincials were at once willing to endure the rigors of

-the commercial system and to smuggle when they had a chance. So long as

-it was cheaper to buy the product of the annual caravan than to develop

-other sources of supply the caravans flourished without competition.

-It was not until after the expulsion of Spain and the independence

-of Mexico that a rival supply became important, but there are enough

-isolated events before this time to show what had to occur just so soon

-as the United States frontier came within range.

-

-The narrative of Pike after his return from Spanish captivity did

-something to reveal the existence of a possible market in Santa Fe.

-He had been engaged in exploring the western limits of the Louisiana

-purchase, and had wandered into the valley of the Rio Grande while

-searching for the head waters of the Red River. Here he was arrested,

-in 1807, by Spanish troops, and taken to Chihuahua for examination.

-After a short detention he was escorted to the limits of the United

-States, where he was released. He carried home the news of high prices

-and profitable markets existing among the Mexicans.

-

-In 1811 an organized expedition set out to verify the statements of

-Pike. Rumor had come to the States of an insurrection in upper Mexico,

-which might easily abolish the trade restriction. But the revolt had

-been suppressed before the dozen or so of reckless Americans who

-crossed the plains had arrived at their destination. The Spanish

-authorities, restored to power and renewed vigor, received them with

-open prisons. In jail they were kept at Chihuahua, some for ten years,

-while the traffic which they had hoped to inaugurate remained still in

-the future. Their release came only with the independence of Mexico,

-which quickly broke down the barrier against importation and the

-foreigner.

-

-The Santa Fe trade commenced when the news of the Mexican revolution

-reached the border. Late in the fall of 1821 one William Becknell,

-chancing a favorable reception from Iturbide's officials, took a

-small train from the Missouri to New Mexico, in what proved to be a

-profitable speculation. He returned to the States in time to lead

-out a large party in the following summer. So long as the United

-States frontier lay east of the Missouri River there could have been

-no western traffic, but now that settlement had reached the Indian

-Country, and river steamers had made easy freighting from Pittsburg

-to Franklin or Independence, Santa Fe was nearer to the United States

-seaboard markets than to Vera Cruz. Hence the breach in the American

-desert and the Indian frontier made by this earliest of the overland

-trails.

-

-[Illustration: OVERLAND TRAILS

-

-The main trail to Oregon was opened before 1840; that to California

-appeared about 1845; the Santa Fe trail had been used since 1821. The

-overland mail of 1858 followed the southern route.]

-

-The year 1822 was not only the earliest in the Santa Fe trade, but it

-saw the first wagons taken across the plains. The freight capacity

-of the mule-train placed a narrow limit upon the profits and extent

-of trade. Whether a wagon could be hauled over the rough trails was

-a matter of considerable doubt when Becknell and Colonel Cooper

-attempted it in this year. The experiment was so successful that within

-two years the pack-train was generally abandoned for the wagons by the

-Santa Fe traders. The wagons carried a miscellaneous freight. "Cotton

-goods, consisting of coarse and fine cambrics, calicoes, domestic,

-shawls, handkerchiefs, steam-loom shirtings, and cotton hose," were in

-high demand. There were also "a few woollen goods, consisting of super

-blues, stroudings, pelisse cloths, and shawls, crapes, bombazettes,

-some light articles of cutlery, silk shawls, and looking-glasses."

-Backward bound their freights were lighter. Many of the wagons, indeed,

-were sold as part of the cargo. The returning merchants brought some

-beaver skins and mules, but their Spanish-milled dollars and gold and

-silver bullion made up the bulk of the return freight.

-

-Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings, could not escape the

-public eye. The patron of the West came early to its aid. Senator

-Thomas Hart Benton had taken his seat from the new state of Missouri

-just in time to notice and report upon the traffic. No public man was

-more confirmed in his friendship for the frontier trade than Senator

-Benton. The fur companies found him always on hand to get them favors

-or to "turn aside the whip of calamity." Because of his influence his

-son-in-law, Fremont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness. Now,

-in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement. A large policy in the

-building of public roads had been accepted by Congress in this year.

-In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided $30,000 to mark

-and build a wagon road from Missouri to the United States border on the

-Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road reported some annoyance

-from the Indians, whose hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around

-their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and Kansa treaties of 1825

-these tribes agreed to let the traders traverse the country in peace.

-

-Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the Santa Fe trade.

-The long journey from the fringe of settlement to the Spanish towns

-eight hundred miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican

-soil, crossing the international boundary on the Arkansas near the

-hundredth meridian. The Indians of the route knew no national lines,

-and found a convenient refuge against pursuers from either nation in

-crossing the border. There was no military protection to the frontier

-at the American end of the trail until in 1827 the war department

-erected a new post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it Fort

-Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were stationed to guard the

-border and protect the traders. The post was due as much to the new

-Indian concentration policy as to the Santa Fe trade. Its significance

-was double. Yet no one seems to have foreseen that the development of

-the trade through the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment

-of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.

-

-From Fort Leavenworth occasional escorts of regulars convoyed the

-caravans to the Southwest. In 1829 four companies of the sixth

-infantry, under Major Riley, were on duty. They joined the caravan at

-the usual place of organization, Council Grove, a few days west of

-the Missouri line, and marched with it to the confines of the United

-States. Along the march there had been some worry from the Indians.

-After the caravan and escort had separated at the Arkansas the former,

-going on alone into Mexico, was scarcely out of sight of its guard

-before it was dangerously attacked. Major Riley rose promptly to the

-occasion. He immediately crossed the Arkansas into Mexico, risking the

-consequences of an invasion of friendly territory, and chastised the

-Indians. As the caravan returned, the Mexican authorities furnished an

-escort of troops which marched to the crossing. Here Major Riley, who

-had been waiting for them at Chouteau's Island all summer, met them. He

-entertained the Mexican officers with drill while they responded with

-a parade, chocolate, and "other refreshments," as his report declares,

-and then he brought the traders back to the States by the beginning of

-November.

-

-There was some criticism in the United States of this costly use of

-troops to protect a private trade. Hezekiah Niles, who was always

-pleading for high protection to manufactures and receiving less than

-he wanted, complained that the use of four companies during a whole

-season was extravagant protection for a trade whose annual profits

-were not over $120,000. The special convoy was rarely repeated after

-1829. Fort Leavenworth and the troops gave moral rather than direct

-support. Colonel Dodge, with his dragoons,--for infantry were soon

-seen to be ridiculous in Indian campaigning,--made long expeditions

-and demonstrations in the thirties, reaching even to the slopes of

-the Rockies. And the Santa Fe caravans continued until the forties in

-relative safety.

-

-Two years after Major Riley's escort occurred an event of great

-consequence in the history of the Santa Fe trail. Josiah Gregg,

-impelled by ill health to seek a change of climate, made his first trip

-to Santa Fe in 1831. As an individual trader Gregg would call for no

-more comment than would any one who crossed the plains eight times in a

-single decade. But Gregg was no mere frontier merchant. He was watching

-and thinking during his entire career, examining into the details of

-Mexican life and history and tabulating the figures of the traffic.

-When he finally retired from the plains life which he had come to love

-so well, he produced, in two small volumes, the great classic of the

-trade: "The Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fe

-Trader." It is still possible to check up details and add small bits

-of fact to supplement the history and description of this commerce

-given by Gregg, but his book remains, and is likely to remain, the

-fullest and best source of information. Gregg had power of scientific

-observation and historical imagination, which, added to unusual

-literary ability, produced a masterpiece.

-

-The Santa Fe trade, begun in 1822, continued with moderate growth until

-1843. This was its period of pioneer development. After the Mexican War

-the commerce grew to a vastly larger size, reaching its greatest volume

-in the sixties, just before the construction of the Pacific railways.

-But in its later years it was a matter of greater routine and less

-general interest than in those years of commencement during which it

-was educating the United States to a more complete knowledge of the

-southern portion of the American desert. Gregg gives a table in which

-he shows the approximate value of the trade for its first twenty-two

-years. To-day it seems strange that so trifling a commerce should have

-been national in its character and influence. In only one year, 1843,

-does he find that the eastern value of the goods sent to Santa Fe was

-above a quarter of a million dollars; in that year it reached $450,000,

-but in only two other years did it rise to the quarter million mark. In

-nine years it was under $100,000. The men involved were a mere handful.

-At the start nearly every one of the seventy men in the caravan was

-himself a proprietor. The total number increased more rapidly than the

-number of independent owners. Three hundred and fifty were the most

-employed in any one year. The twenty-six wagons of 1824 became two

-hundred and thirty in 1843, but only four times in the interval were

-there so many as a hundred.

-

-Yet the Santa Fe trade was national in its importance. Its romance

-contained a constant appeal to a public that was reading the Indian

-tales of James Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship

-and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country with quaint people

-and strange habitations. The American desert, not much more than a

-chartless sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must have

-confirmation of the truth that frontier causes have produced results

-far beyond their normal measure, such confirmation may be found here.

-

-The traders to Santa Fe commonly travelled together in a single

-caravan for safety. In the earlier years they started overland from

-some Missouri town--Franklin most often--to a rendezvous at Council

-Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth and an increasing navigation

-of the Missouri River made possible a starting-point further west than

-Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the Missouri in 1828

-its place was taken by the new settlement of Independence, further

-up the river and only twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at

-Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties.

-For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few

-weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the

-frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and

-oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening

-drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the

-Southwest,--all these gave to Independence its name and place. From

-Independence to Council Grove, some one hundred and fifty miles, across

-the border, the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove they

-halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a general company for

-self-defence. Here in ordinary years the assembled traders elected

-a captain whose responsibility was complete, and whose authority

-was as great as he could make it by his own force. Under him were

-lieutenants, and under the command of these the whole company was

-organized in guards and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company

-was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal vigilance was the

-price of safety.

-

-The unit of the caravan was the wagon,--the same Pittsburg or Conestoga

-wagon that moved frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to

-travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve mules or oxen,

-and carried from three to five thousand pounds of cargo. Over the

-wagon were large arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn water

-and protect the contents. The careful freighter used two thicknesses

-of sheetings, while the canny one slipped in between them a pair of

-blankets, which might thus increase his comfort outward bound, and

-be in an inconspicuous place to elude the vigilance of the customs

-officials at Santa Fe. Arms, mounts, and general equipment were

-innumerable in variation, but the prairie schooner, as its white canopy

-soon named it, survived through its own superiority.

-

-At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey now became one

-across a treeless prairie, with water all too rare, and habitations

-entirely lacking. The first stage of the trail crossed the country,

-nearly west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two hundred

-and seventy miles from Independence. Up the Arkansas it ran on, past

-Chouteau's Island, to Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur

-traders had established a post. Water was most scarce. Whether the

-caravan crossed the river at the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's

-Fort to follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader and on

-stock. His oxen often reached Santa Fe with scarcely enough strength

-left to stand alone. But with reasonable success and skilful guidance

-the caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties and at last

-enter Santa Fe, seven hundred and eighty miles away, in from six to

-seven weeks from Independence.

-

-When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri frontier was familiar

-with all of the long trail to Santa Fe. Even in the East there had come

-to be some real interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert

-and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the

-war was the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth,

-with orders to march overland against Mexico and Upper California.

-

-Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command of the invading army, which

-he recruited largely from the frontier and into which he incorporated a

-battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the summer of 1846, near

-Council Bluffs, on their way to the Rocky Mountains and the country

-beyond. Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken him in

-1845 all the way to the mountains and back in the interest of policing

-the trails. By the end of June he was ready to begin the march towards

-Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was to be a common

-rendezvous. To this point the army marched in separate columns, far

-enough apart to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder

-from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was little more than a

-pleasure jaunt. The trail was well known, and Indians, never likely

-to run heedlessly into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's Fort

-the advance assumed more of a military aspect, for the enemy's country

-had been entered and resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the

-mountain passes north of Santa Fe. But the resistance came to naught,

-while the army, footsore and hot, marched easily into Santa Fe on

-August 18, 1846. In the palace of the governor the conquering officers

-were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the provinces would

-permit. "We were too thirsty to judge of its merits," wrote one of

-them of the native wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything

-liquid and cool was palatable." With little more than the formality of

-taking possession New Mexico thus fell into the hands of the United

-States, while the war of conquest advanced further to the West. In the

-end of September Kearny started out from Santa Fe for California, where

-he arrived early in the following January.

-

-The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary of the United

-States to the Gila and the Pacific, broadening the area of the desert

-within the United States and raising new problems of long-distance

-government in connection with the populations of New Mexico and

-California. The Santa Fe trail, with its continuance west of the Rio

-Grande, became the attenuated bond between the East and the West. From

-the Missouri frontier to California the way was through the desert and

-the Indian Country, with regular settlements in only one region along

-the route. The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit trade

-disappeared with the conquest, so that the traffic with the Southwest

-and California boomed during the fifties.

-

-The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions which had never been

-dreamed of before the conquest. Kearny's baggage-trains started a new

-era in plains freighting. The armies had continuously to be supplied.

-Regular communication had to be maintained for the new Southwest.

-But the freighting was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the

-Santa Fe traders. It became a matter of business, running smoothly

-along familiar channels. It ceased to have to do with the extension

-of geographic knowledge and came to have significance chiefly in

-connection with the organization of overland commerce. Between the

-Mexican and Civil wars was its new period of life. Finally, in the

-seventies, it gradually receded into history as the tentacles of the

-continental railway system advanced into the desert.

-

-The Santa Fe trail was the first beaten path thrust in advance of the

-western frontier. Even to-day its course may be followed by the wheel

-ruts for much of the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa

-Fe. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind it at the start,

-not touching it again until the end was reached. For nearly fifty

-years after the trade began, this character of the desert remained

-substantially unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which had rushed

-west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped at the bend, and though the

-trail continued, settlement would not follow it. The Indian country

-and the American desert remained intact, while the Santa Fe trail, in

-advance of settlement, pointed the way of manifest destiny, as no one

-of the eastern trails had ever done. When the new states grew up on the

-Pacific, the desert became as an ocean traversed only by the prairie

-schooners in their beaten paths. Islands of settlement served but to

-accentuate the unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain West.

-

-The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the statesmen of the

-twenties as the limit of American advance. It might have continued thus

-had there really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of the trade

-to Santa Fe created a new interest and a connecting road. In nearly

-the same years the call of the fur trade led to the tracing of another

-path in the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and the fur trade

-had stirred up so much interest beyond the Rockies that before Kearny

-marched his army into Santa Fe another trail of importance equal to his

-had been run to Oregon.

-

-The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended upon the ability of

-the United States to keep whites out of the Indian Country. But with

-Oregon and Santa Fe beyond, this could never be. The trails had already

-shown the fallacy of the frontier policy before it had become a fact in

-1840.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER V

-

-THE OREGON TRAIL

-

-

-The Santa Fe trade had just been started upon its long career when

-trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the

-forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy

-crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper

-Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage

-through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon.

-As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the

-Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over

-the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for

-new states. The Santa Fe trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The

-Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.

-

-In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those

-nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of

-every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the

-surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded

-facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden,

-has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that

-carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they

-first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the

-period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of

-Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That

-they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite

-as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were

-generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence

-upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history

-is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the

-thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean

-at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat

-earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the

-fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct

-the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted,

-they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the

-century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the

-British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so

-confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up

-the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and

-allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.

-

-In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of

-the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading

-prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies.

-Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated

-the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a

-body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter

-year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable

-Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had

-become a household word through the combined reports of traders and

-missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the

-lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden

-might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an

-added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was

-approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when

-Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The

-thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis

-of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided

-an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the

-farthest West.

-

-A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government

-to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were

-in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the

-trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been

-ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task

-of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the

-father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the

-mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new

-son-in-law, John C. Fremont, a detail in command of an exploring party

-to the South Pass.

-

-The career of Fremont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great

-publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of

-this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from

-Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He

-shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte,

-and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in

-northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's

-he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the

-Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8,

-just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at

-Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially

-over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range,

-climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was

-back in St. Louis with his party.

-

-In the spring of 1843, Fremont started upon a second and more extended

-governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail

-along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence

-he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the

-Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon

-for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending

-part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while

-he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine

-Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before

-reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another

-detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked

-upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18,

-he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles

-of the Columbia.

-

-Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia

-and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with

-the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the

-trappers, had not yet received scientific record when Fremont started

-south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His

-march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under

-difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a

-stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento

-Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march

-carried him into southern California and around the sources of the

-Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of

-the country between the mountains and the Pacific.

-

-In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two

-expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of

-resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work

-turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems

-far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his

-earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English

-traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed

-over by Colonel Fremont was perfectly well known to the old trappers

-and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese

-pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man

-who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through

-these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the

-American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the _Platte

-(Missouri) Eagle_ in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser

-[_sic_] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific.

-Destiny has willed it."

-

-The year in which Fremont made his first expedition to the mountains

-was also the year of the first formal, conducted emigration to

-Oregon. Missionaries beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress

-the appointment of an American representative and magistrate for

-the country, with such effect that Dr. Elijah White, who had some

-acquaintance with Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the

-spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration of homeseekers

-that peopled Oregon during the next ten years. His emigration was not

-large, perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons; but it

-seems to have been larger than he expected, and large enough to raise

-doubt as to the practicability of taking so many persons across the

-plains at once. In the decade following, every May, when pasturage was

-fresh and green, saw pioneers gathering, with or without premeditation,

-at the bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence and its

-neighbor villages continued to be the posts of outfit. How many in

-the aggregate crossed the plains can never be determined, in spite of

-the efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record their names.

-The distinguishing feature of the emigration was its spontaneous

-individualistic character. Small parties, too late for the caravan,

-frequently set forth alone. Single families tried it often enough to

-have their wanderings recorded in the border papers. In the spring

-following the crossing of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds

-at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand in all is

-probably not too high. In 1844 the tide subsided a little, but in

-1845 it established a new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and

-in 1847 ran between four and five thousand. These were the highest

-figures, yet throughout the decade the current flowed unceasingly.

-

-The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years, may be taken as

-typical of the Oregon movement. Early in the year faces turned toward

-the Missouri rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and young, with

-wagons and cattle, household equipment, primitive sawmills, and all

-the impedimenta of civilization were to be found in the hopeful crowd.

-For some days after departure the unwieldy party, a thousand strong,

-with twice as many cattle and beasts of burden, held together under

-Burnett, their chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control soon

-split the company. In addition to the general fear that the number was

-dangerously high, the poorer emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some

-of the latter had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score,

-and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian thieves during his

-long night watches he felt the injustice which compelled him to protect

-the property of another. Hence the party broke early in June. A "cow

-column" was formed of those who had many cattle and heavy belongings;

-the lighter body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting

-distance; and under two captains the procession moved on. The way was

-tedious rather than difficult, but habit soon developed in the trains

-a life that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the migrants of 1842

-had written, was a "great country for unmarried gals." Courtship and

-marriage began almost before the States were out of sight. Death and

-burial, crime and punishment, filled out the round of human experience,

-while Dr. Whitman was more than once called upon in his professional

-capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.

-

-[Illustration: FORT LARAMIE IN 1842

-

-From a sketch made to illustrate Fremont's report.]

-

-The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed in the

-United States. It started from the Missouri River anywhere between

-Independence and Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence was

-the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural frontier advanced

-through Iowa in the forties numerous new crossings and ferries were

-made further up the stream. From the various ferries the start began,

-as did the Santa Fe trade, sometime in May. By many roads the wagons

-moved westward towards the point from which the single trail extended

-to the mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte River reaches

-its most southerly point, these routes from the border were nearly

-as numerous as the caravans, but here began the single highway along

-the river valley, on its southern side. At this point, in the years

-immediately after the Mexican War, the United States founded a military

-post to protect the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W. Kearny,

-commander of the Army of the West. From Fort Kearney (custom soon

-changed the spelling of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie

-Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork. Fort Laramie

-itself was bought from the fur company and converted into a military

-post which became a second great stopping-place for the emigrants.

-Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the trail to South Pass,

-where, through a gap twenty miles in width, the main commerce between

-the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go. Beyond

-South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the next post of importance on

-the road. From Fort Hall to Fort Boise the trail continued down the

-Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to meet the Columbia

-near Walla Walla.

-

-The journey to Oregon took about five months. Its deliberate,

-domesticated progress was as different as might be from the commercial

-rush to Santa Fe. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily get

-caught in the early mountain winter, but with a prompt start and a wise

-guide, or pilot, winter always found the homeseeker in his promised

-land. "This is the right manner to settle the Oregon question," wrote

-Niles, after he had counted over the emigrants of 1844.

-

-Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already

-there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional

-government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under

-the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable

-uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for

-future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed

-to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the

-British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early

-migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful

-also lest future American emigration might carry political control out

-of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance

-among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In

-May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon

-blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary

-association for government and adopted a code of laws.

-

-Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this

-newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White,

-"at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of

-Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of

-any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of

-Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events.

-"During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened,

-and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves

-during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost

-all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the

-measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts,

-securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse

-among the whites."

-

-A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension

-of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His

-journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman,

-who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from

-abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called

-the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost,

-however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government

-settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws

-were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order

-prevailed.

-

-Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and

-annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners

-of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink

-was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier.

-"A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread,

-sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as

-corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present

-at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches,

-corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where

-two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent

-intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of

-the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of

-the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal

-right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to

-crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass

-meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of

-his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the

-distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock

-P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus

-well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were

-standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses.

-No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having

-resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset

-the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my

-measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the

-kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and

-every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and

-utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where

-our presence and report gave general joy."

-

-The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair

-degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional

-governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its

-courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was

-long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title

-to the country and could pass laws for it.

-

-The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly

-in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with

-deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with

-absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The

-stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the

-erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an

-intimate study of the Oregon trail.

-

-In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in

-practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the

-annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of

-slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern

-senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and

-Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive

-under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to

-cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern

-states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape

-with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could

-emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers,

-and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence,

-in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people,

-of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With

-a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was

-closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.

-

-Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish

-Mexico at 42 deg. and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54 deg.

-40'. Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in

-British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of

-1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great

-Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should

-justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting

-countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim

-for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was

-entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness

-that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party

-was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with

-respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders

-of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the

-Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a

-westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with

-his British adversary quickly.

-

-Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's

-notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more

-pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of

-State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division

-instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the

-change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty

-which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49 deg. from

-the Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater

-part of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to

-such legislation as Congress should prescribe.

-

-A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the

-establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All

-that the United States had secured in the division was given the

-popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all,

-popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached

-American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country.

-The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined

-by wheel ruts and debris along the sides that even the blind could

-scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient

-for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way

-for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and

-morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were

-prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A

-second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American

-desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that

-was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VI

-

-OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS

-

-

-The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon is but a small

-portion of the whole history of the Oregon trail. The trail was

-not only the road to Oregon, but it was the chief road across the

-continent. Santa Fe dominated a southern route that was important in

-commerce and conquest, and that could be extended west to the Pacific.

-But the deep ravine of the Colorado River splits the United States into

-sections with little chance of intercourse below the fortieth parallel.

-To-day, in only two places south of Colorado do railroads bridge it;

-only one stage route of importance ever crossed it. The southern trail

-could not be compared in its traffic or significance with the great

-middle highway by South Pass which led by easy grades from the Missouri

-River and the Platte, not only to Oregon but to California and Great

-Salt Lake.

-

-Of the waves of influence that drew population along the trail, the

-Oregon fever came first; but while it was still raging, there came

-the Mormon trek that is without any parallel in American history.

-Throughout the lifetime of the trails the American desert extended

-almost unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to California and

-Oregon. The Mormon settlement in Utah became at once the most

-considerable colony within this area, and by its own fertility

-emphasized the barren nature of the rest.

-

-Of the Mormons, Joseph Smith was the prophet, but it would be fair to

-ascribe the parentage of the sect to that emotional upheaval of the

-twenties and thirties which broke down barriers of caste and politics,

-ruptured many of the ordinary Christian churches, and produced new

-revelations and new prophets by the score. Joseph Smith was merely

-one of these, more astute perhaps than the others, having much of

-the wisdom of leadership, as Mohammed had had before him, and able

-to direct and hold together the enthusiasm that any prophet might

-have been able to arouse. History teaches that it is easy to provoke

-religious enthusiasm, however improbable or fraudulent the guides or

-revelations may be; but that the founding of a church upon it is a task

-for greatest statesmanship.

-

-The discovery of the golden plates and the magic spectacles, and

-the building upon them of a militant church has little part in the

-conquest of the frontier save as a motive force. It is difficult for

-the gentile mind to treat the Book of Mormon other than as a joke,

-and its perpetrator as a successful charlatan. Mormon apologists and

-their enemies have gone over the details of its production without

-establishing much sure evidence on either side. The theological

-teaching of the church seems to put less stress upon it than its

-supposed miraculous origin would dictate. It is, wrote Mark Twain,

-with his light-hearted penetration, "rather stupid and tiresome to

-read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of

-morals is unobjectionable--it is 'smouched' from the New Testament

-and no credit given." Converts came slowly to the new prophet at the

-start, for he was but one of many teachers crying in the wilderness,

-and those who had known him best in his youth were least ready to

-see in him a custodian of divinity. Yet by the spring of 1830 it was

-possible to organize, in western New York, the body which Rigdon was

-later to christen the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

-By the spring of 1831 headquarters had moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where

-proselyting had proved to be successful in both religion and finance.

-

-Kirtland was but a temporary abode for the new sect. Revelations came

-in upon the prophet rapidly, pointing out the details of organization

-and administration, the duty of missionary activity among the Indians

-and gentiles, and the future home further to the west. Scouts were sent

-to the Indian Country at an early date, leaving behind at Kirtland

-the leaders to build their temple and gather in the converts who, by

-1833 and 1834, had begun to appear in hopeful numbers. The frontier of

-this decade was equally willing to speculate in religion, agriculture,

-banking, or railways, while Smith and his intimates possessed the germ

-of leadership to take advantage of every chance. Until the panic

-of 1837 they flourished, apparently not always beyond reproach in

-financial affairs, but with few neighbors who had the right to throw

-the stone. Antagonism, already appearing against the church, was due

-partly to an essential intolerance among their frontier neighbors

-and partly to the whole-souled union between church and life which

-distinguished the Mormons from the other sects. Their political

-complexion was identical with their religion,--a combination which

-always has aroused resentment in America.

-

-For a western home, the leaders fell upon a tract in Missouri, not far

-from Independence, close to the Indians whose conversion was a part of

-the Mormon duty. In the years when Oregon and Santa Fe were by-words

-along the Missouri, the Mormons were getting a precarious foothold near

-the commencement of the trails. The population around Independence was

-distinctly inhospitable, with the result that petty violence appeared,

-in which it is hard to place the blame. There was a calm assurance

-among the Saints that they and they alone were to inherit the earth.

-Their neighbors maintained that poultry and stock were unsafe in their

-vicinity because of this belief. The Mormons retaliated with charges of

-well-spoiling, incendiarism, and violence. In all the bickerings the

-sources of information are partisan and cloudy with prejudice, so that

-it is easier to see the disgraceful scuffle than to find the culprit.

-From the south side of the Missouri around Independence the Saints

-were finally driven across the river by armed mobs; a transaction in

-which the Missourians spoke of a sheriff's posse and maintaining the

-peace. North of the river the unsettled frontier was reached in a few

-miles, and there at Far West, in Caldwell County, they settled down at

-last, to build their tabernacle and found their Zion. In the summer of

-1838 their corner-stone was laid.

-

-Far West remained their goal in belief longer than in fact. Before

-1838 ended they had been forced to agree to leave Missouri; yet they

-returned in secret to relay the corner-stone of the tabernacle and

-continued to dream of this as their future home. Up to the time of

-their expulsion from Missouri in 1838 they are not proved to have been

-guilty of any crime that could extenuate the gross intolerance which

-turned them out. As individuals they could live among Gentiles in

-peace. It seems to have been the collective soul of the church that

-was unbearable to the frontiersmen. The same intolerance which had

-facilitated their departure from Ohio and compelled it from Missouri,

-in a few more years drove them again on their migrations. The cohesion

-of the church in politics, economics, and religion explains the

-opposition which it cannot well excuse.

-

-In Hancock County, Illinois, not far from the old Fort Madison ferry

-which led into the half-breed country of Iowa, the Mormons discovered

-a village of Commerce, once founded by a communistic settlement

-from which the business genius of Smith now purchased it on easy

-terms. It was occupied in 1839, renamed Nauvoo in 1840, and in it a

-new tabernacle was begun in 1841. From the poverty-stricken young

-clairvoyant of fifteen years before, the prophet had now developed

-into a successful man of affairs, with ambitions that reached even to

-the presidency at Washington. With a strong sect behind him, money at

-his disposal, and supernatural powers in which all faithful saints

-believed, Joseph could go far. Nauvoo had a population of about fifteen

-thousand by the end of 1840.

-

-Coming into Illinois upon the eve of a closely contested presidential

-election, at a time when the state feared to lose its population in

-an emigration to avoid taxation, and with a vote that was certain to

-be cast for one candidate or another as a unit, the Mormons insured

-for themselves a hearty welcome from both Democrats and Whigs. A

-complaisant legislature gave to the new Zion a charter full of

-privilege in the making and enforcing of laws, so that the ideal

-of the Mormons of a state within the state was fully realized. The

-town council was emancipated from state control, its courts were

-independent, and its militia was substantially at the beck of Smith.

-Proselyting and good management built up the town rapidly. To an

-importunate creditor Smith described it as a "deathly sickly hole," but

-to the possible convert it was advertised as a land of milk and honey.

-Here it began to be noticed that desertions from the church were not

-uncommon; that conversion alone kept full and swelled its ranks. It

-was noised about that the wealthy convert had the warmest reception,

-but was led on to let his religious passion work his impoverishment for

-the good of the cause.

-

-Here in Nauvoo it was that the leaders of the church took the decisive

-step that carried Mormonism beyond the pale of the ordinary, tolerable,

-religious sects. Rumors of immorality circulated among the Gentile

-neighbors. It was bad enough, they thought, to have the Mormons chronic

-petty thieves, but the license that was believed to prevail among the

-leaders was more than could be endured by a community that did not

-count this form of iniquity among its own excesses. The Mormons were in

-general of the same stamp as their fellow frontiersmen until they took

-to this. At the time, all immorality was denounced and denied by the

-prophet and his friends, but in later years the church made public a

-revelation concerning celestial or plural marriage, with the admission

-that Joseph Smith had received it in the summer of 1843. Never does

-Mormon polygamy seem to have been as prevalent as its enemies have

-charged. But no church countenancing the practice could hope to be

-endured by an American community. The odium of practising it was

-increased by the hypocrisy which denied it. It was only a matter of

-time until the Mormons should resume their march.

-

-The end of Mormon rule at Nauvoo was precipitated by the murder of

-Joseph Smith, and Hyrum his brother, by a mob at Carthage jail in the

-summer of 1844. Growing intolerance had provoked an attack upon the

-Saints similar to that in Missouri. Under promise of protection the

-Smiths had surrendered themselves. Their martyrdom at once disgraced

-the state in which it could be possible, and gave to Mormonism in a

-murdered prophet a mighty bond of union. The reins of government fell

-into hands not unworthy of them when Brigham Young succeeded Joseph

-Smith.

-

-Not until December, 1847, did Brigham become in a formal way president

-of the church, but his authority was complete in fact after the death

-of Joseph. A hard-headed Missouri River steamboat captain knew him, and

-has left an estimate of him which must be close to truth. He was "a man

-of great ability. Apparently deficient in education and refinement,

-he was fair and honest in his dealings, and seemed extremely liberal

-in conversation upon religious subjects. He impressed La Barge," so

-Chittenden, the biographer of the latter relates, "as anything but a

-religious fanatic or even enthusiast; but he knew how to make use of

-the fanaticism of others and direct it to great ends." Shortly after

-the murder of Joseph it became clear that Nauvoo must be abandoned, and

-Brigham began to consider an exodus across the plains so familiar by

-hearsay to every one by 1845, to the Rocky Mountains beyond the limits

-of the United States. Persecution, for the persecuted can never see

-two sides, had soured the Mormons. The threatened eviction came in the

-autumn of 1845. In 1846 the last great trek began.

-

-The van of the army crossed the Mississippi at Nauvoo as early as

-February, 1846. By the hundred, in the spring of the year, the wagons

-of the persecuted sect were ferried across the river. Five hundred and

-thirty-nine teams within a single week in May is the report of one

-observer. Property which could be commuted into the outfit for the

-march was carefully preserved and used. The rest, the tidy houses, the

-simple furniture, the careful farms (for the backbone of the church was

-its well-to-do middle class), were abandoned or sold at forced sale

-to the speculative purchaser. Nauvoo was full of real estate vultures

-hoping to thrive upon the Mormon wreckage. Sixteen thousand or more

-abandoned the city and its nearly finished temple within the year.

-

-Across southern Iowa the "Camp of Israel," as Brigham Young liked to

-call his headquarters, advanced by easy stages, as spring and summer

-allowed. To-day, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railway follows

-the Mormon road for many miles, but in 1846 the western half of Iowa

-territory was Indian Country, the land of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and

-Potawatomi, who sold out before the year was over, but who were in

-possession at this time. Along the line of march camps were built by

-advance parties to be used in succession by the following thousands.

-The extreme advance hurried on to the Missouri River, near Council

-Bluffs, where as yet no city stood, to plant a crop of grain, since

-manna could not be relied upon in this migration. By autumn much of the

-population of Nauvoo had settled down in winter quarters not far above

-the present site of Omaha, preserving the orderly life of the society,

-and enduring hardships which the leaders sought to mitigate by gaiety

-and social gatherings. In the Potawatomi country of Iowa, opposite

-their winter quarters, Kanesville sprang into existence; while all the

-way from Kanesville to Grand Island in the Platte Mormon detachments

-were scattered along the roads. The destination was yet in doubt.

-Westward it surely was, but it is improbable that even Brigham knew

-just where.

-

-The Indians received the Mormons, persecuted and driven westward

-like themselves, kindly at first, but discontent came as the winter

-residence was prolonged. From the country of the Omaha, west of the

-Missouri, it was necessary soon to prohibit Mormon settlement, but

-east, in the abandoned Potawatomi lands, they were allowed to maintain

-Kanesville and other outfitting stations for several years. A permanent

-residence here was not desired even by the Mormons themselves. Spring

-in 1847 found them preparing to resume the march.

-

-In April, 1847, an advance party under the guidance of no less a person

-than Brigham Young started out the Platte trail in search of Zion.

-One hundred and forty-three men, seventy-two wagons, one hundred and

-seventy-five horses, and six months' rations, they took along, if

-the figures of one of their historians may be accepted. Under strict

-military order, the detachment proceeded to the mountains. It is one of

-the ironies of fate that the Mormons had no sooner selected their abode

-beyond the line of the United States in their flight from persecution

-than conquest from Mexico extended the United States beyond them to the

-Pacific. They themselves aided in this defeat of their plan, since from

-among them Kearny had recruited in 1846 a battalion for his army of

-invasion.

-

-Up the Platte, by Fort Laramie, to South Pass and beyond, the

-prospectors followed the well-beaten trail. Oregon homeseekers had been

-cutting it deep in the prairie sod for five years. West of South Pass

-they bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and on the 24th of July, 1847,

-Brigham gazed upon the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Without serious

-premeditation, so far as is known, and against the advice of one of the

-most experienced of mountain guides, this valley by a later-day Dead

-Sea was chosen for the future capital. Fields were staked out, ground

-was broken by initial furrows, irrigation ditches were commenced at

-once, and within a month the town site was baptized the City of the

-Great Salt Lake.

-

-Behind the advance guard the main body remained in winter quarters,

-making ready for their difficult search for the promised land; moving

-at last in the late spring in full confidence that a Zion somewhere

-would be prepared for them. The successor of Joseph relied but little

-upon supernatural aid in keeping his flock under control. Commonly he

-depended upon human wisdom and executive direction. But upon the eve

-of his own departure from winter quarters he had made public, for the

-direction of the main body, a written revelation: "The Word and Will

-of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their Journeyings to the

-West." Such revelations as this, had they been repeated, might well

-have created or renewed popular confidence in the real inspiration of

-the leader. The order given was such as a wise source of inspiration

-might have formed after constant intercourse with emigrants and traders

-upon the difficulties of overland migration and the dangers of the way.

-

-"Let all the people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

-Saints, and those who journey with them," read the revelation, "be

-organized into companies, with a covenant and a promise to keep all

-the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God. Let the companies

-be organized with captains of hundreds, and captains of fifties, and

-captains of tens, with a president and counsellor at their head, under

-direction of the Twelve Apostles: and this shall be our covenant, that

-we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord.

-

-"Let each company provide itself with all the teams, wagons,

-provisions, and all other necessaries for the journey that they can.

-When the companies are organized, let them go with all their might,

-to prepare for those who are to tarry. Let each company, with their

-captains and presidents, decide how many can go next spring; then

-choose out a sufficient number of able-bodied and expert men to take

-teams, seed, and farming utensils to go as pioneers to prepare for

-putting in the spring crops. Let each company bear an equal proportion,

-according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the

-widows, and the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone

-with the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not

-up into the ears of the Lord against his people.

-

-"Let each company prepare houses and fields for raising grain for those

-who are to remain behind this season; and this is the will of the Lord

-concerning this people.

-

-"Let every man use all his influence and property to remove this people

-to the place where the Lord shall locate a stake of Zion: and if ye do

-this with a pure heart, with all faithfulness, ye shall be blessed in

-your flocks, and in your herds, and in your fields, and in your houses,

-and in your families...."

-

-The rendezvous for the main party was the Elk Horn River, whence the

-head of the procession moved late in June and early in July. In careful

-organization, with camps under guard and wagons always in corral at

-night, detachments moved on in quick succession. Kanesville and a

-large body remained behind for another year or longer, but before

-Brigham had laid out his city and started east the emigration of

-1847 was well upon its way. The foremost began to come into the city

-by September. By October the new city in the desert had nearly four

-thousand inhabitants. The march had been made with little suffering and

-slight mortality. No better pioneer leadership had been seen upon the

-trail.

-

-The valley of the Great Salt Lake, destined to become an oasis in the

-American desert, supporting the only agricultural community existing

-therein during nearly twenty years, discouraged many of the Mormons at

-the start. In Illinois and Missouri they were used to wood and water;

-here they found neither. In a treeless valley they were forced to

-carry their water to their crops in a way in which their leader had

-more confidence than themselves. The urgency of Brigham in setting his

-first detachment to work on fields and crops was not unwise, since for

-two years there was a real question of food to keep the colony alive.

-Inexperience in irrigating agriculture and plagues of crickets kept

-down the early crops. By 1850 the colony was safe, but its maintenance

-does still more credit to its skilful leadership. Its people, apart

-from foreign converts who came in later years, were of the stuff that

-had colonized the middle West and won a foothold in Oregon; but nowhere

-did an emigration so nearly create a land which it enjoyed as here.

-A paternal government dictated every effort, outlined the streets and

-farms, detailed parties to explore the vicinity and start new centres

-of life. Little was left to chance or unguided enthusiasm. Practical

-success and a high state of general welfare rewarded the Saints for

-their implicit obedience to authority.

-

-Mormon emigration along the Platte trail became as common as that to

-Oregon in the years following 1847, but, except in the disastrous

-hand-cart episode of 1856, contains less of novelty than of substantial

-increase to the colony. Even to-day men are living in the West, who,

-walking all the way, with their own hands pushed and pulled two-wheeled

-carts from the Missouri to the mountains in the fifties. To bad

-management in handling proselytes the hand-cart catastrophe was chiefly

-due. From the beginning missionary activity had been pressed throughout

-the United States and even in Europe. In England and Scandinavia the

-lower classes took kindly to the promises, too often impracticable, it

-must be believed, of enthusiasts whose standing at home depended upon

-success abroad. The convert with property could pay his way to the

-Missouri border and join the ordinary annual procession. But the poor,

-whose wealth was not equal to the moderately costly emigration, were

-a problem until the emigration society determined to cut expenses by

-reducing equipment and substituting pushcarts and human power for the

-prairie schooner with its long train of oxen.

-

-In 1856 well over one thousand poor emigrants left Liverpool, at

-contract rates, for Iowa City, where the parties were to be organized

-and ample equipment in handcarts and provisions were promised

-to be ready. On arrival in Iowa City it was found that slovenly

-management had not built enough of the carts. Delayed by the necessary

-construction of these carts, some of the bands could not get on the

-trail until late in the summer,--too late for a successful trip, as a

-few of their more cautious advisers had said. The earliest company got

-through to Salt Lake City in September with considerable success. It

-was hard and toilsome to push the carts; women and children suffered

-badly, but the task was possible. Snow and starvation in the mountains

-broke down the last company. A friendly historian speaks of a loss of

-sixty-seven out of a party of four hundred and twenty. Throughout the

-United States the picture of these poor deluded immigrants, toiling

-against their carts through mountain pass and river-bottom, with

-clothing going and food quite gone, increased the conviction that the

-Mormon hierarchy was misleading and abusing the confidence of thousands.

-

-That the hierarchy was endangering the peace of the whole United States

-came to be believed as well. In 1850, with the Salt Lake settlement

-three years old, Congress had organized a territory of Utah, extending

-from the Rockies to California, between 37 deg. and 42 deg., and the

-President had made Brigham Young its governor. The close association of

-the Mormon church and politics had prevented peaceful relations from

-existing between its people and the federal officers of the territory,

-while Washington prejudiced a situation already difficult by sending

-to Utah officers and judges, some of whom could not have commanded

-respect even where the sway of United States authority was complete.

-The vicious influence of politics in territorial appointments, which

-the territories always resented, was specially dangerous in the case

-of a territory already feeling itself persecuted for conscience' sake.

-Yet it was not impossible for a tactful and respectable federal officer

-to do business in Utah. For several years relations increased in bad

-temper, both sides appealing constantly to President and Congress,

-until it appeared, as was the fact, that the United States authority

-had become as nothing in Utah and with the church. Among the earliest

-of President Buchanan's acts was the preparation of an army which

-should reestablish United States prestige among the Mormons. Large

-wagon trains were sent out from Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1857,

-with an army under Albert Sidney Johnston following close behind, and

-again the old Platte trail came before the public eye.

-

-The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base, and operating in a

-desert against plainsmen of remarkable skill, the army was helpless.

-At will, the Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply trains,

-confining their attacks to property rather than to armed forces. When

-the army reached Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his

-people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned. With difficulty

-could the army of invasion have lived through the winter without aid.

-In the spring of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons, being

-invulnerable, were forgiven. The army marched down the trail again.

-

-The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the

-heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence.

-What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd

-leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving

-population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as

-the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold

-followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then

-in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West.

-The Mormons would have fared much worse had their leader not located

-his stake of Zion near the point where the trail to the Southwest

-deviated from the Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay

-tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through his oasis on

-their way to California.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VII

-

-CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS

-

-

-On his second exploring trip, John C. Fremont had worked his way south

-over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found

-himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in 1844 a small group

-of Americans had already been established for several years. Mexican

-California was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient

-central government that the province had almost fallen away of its

-own weight. John A. Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was

-the magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed a liberal

-hospitality to the Pathfinder's party.

-

-In 1845, Fremont started on his third trip, this time entering

-California by a southern route and finding himself at Sutter's early in

-1846. In some respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance

-of a filibustering party from the start. When it crossed the Rockies,

-it began to trespass upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with

-whom the United States was yet at peace. Whether the explorer was

-actually instructed to detach California from Mexico, or whether he

-only imagined that such action would be approved at home, is likely

-never to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were already under

-orders in the event of war to seize California at once; and Polk was

-from the start ambitious to round out the American territory on the

-Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were at variance with their

-Mexican neighbors, who resented the steady influx of foreign blood.

-Between 1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased. And in June,

-1846, certain of them, professing to believe that they were to be

-attacked, seized the Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors

-of what they called their Bear Flag Republic. Fremont, near at hand,

-countenanced and supported their act, if he did not suggest it.

-

-The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly after the American

-population in California had begun its little revolution. Fremont was

-in his glory for a time as the responsible head of American power

-in the province. Naval commanders under their own orders cooperated

-along the coast so effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West,

-learned that the conquest was substantially complete, soon after

-he left Santa Fe, and was able to send most of his own force back.

-California fell into American hands almost without a struggle, leaving

-the invaders in possession early in 1847. In January of that year the

-little village of Yerba Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the

-American occupants began the sale of lots along the water front and the

-construction of a great seaport.

-

-The relations of Oregon and California to the occupation of the West

-were much the same in 1847. Both had been coveted by the United States.

-Both had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come first because

-it was most easily reached by the great trail, and because it had

-no considerable body of foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It

-was, under the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field for

-colonization. But California had been the territory of Mexico and was

-occupied by a strange population. In the early forties there were from

-4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province, living the easy

-agricultural life of the Spanish colonist. The missions and the Indians

-had decayed during the past generation. The population was light

-hearted and generous. It quarrelled loudly, but had the Latin-American

-knack for bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized by long

-association with those trappers who had visited it since the twenties,

-and the settlers who had begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied

-foreign territory it had not invited American colonization as Oregon

-had done. Hence the Oregon movement had been going on three or four

-years before any considerable bodies of emigrants broke away from the

-trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out homes in California. If war had

-not come, American immigration into California would have progressed

-after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities would have

-allowed. As it was, the actual conquest removed the barrier, so that

-California migration in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon under

-the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement. The settlement of the

-Mormons at Salt Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at the

-head of the most perilous section of the California trail. Both Mormons

-and Californians profited by its traffic.

-

-With respect to California, the treaty which closed the Mexican War

-merely recognized an accomplished fact. By right of conquest California

-had changed hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid the penalty

-under that organic law of politics which forbids a nation to sit still

-when others are moving. In no conceivable way could the occupation

-of California have been prevented, and if the war over Texas had not

-come in 1846, a war over California must shortly have occurred. By the

-treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory which she

-had never been able to develop, and made way for the erection of the

-new America on the Pacific.

-

-Most notable among the ante-bellum pioneers in California was John

-A. Sutter, whose establishment on the Sacramento had been a centre

-of the new life. Upon a large grant from the Mexican government he

-had erected his adobe buildings in the usual semi-fortified style

-that distinguished the isolated ranch. He was ready for trade, or

-agriculture, or war if need be, possessing within his own domain

-equipment for the ordinary simple manufactures and supplies. As his

-ranch prospered, and as Americans increased in San Francisco and on the

-Sacramento, the prospects of Sutter steadily improved. In 1847 he made

-ready to reap an additional share of profit from the boom by building a

-sawmill on his estate. Among his men there had been for some months a

-shiftless jack-of-all-trades, James W. Marshall, who had been chiefly

-carpenter while in Sutter's employ. In the summer of 1847 Marshall was

-sent out to find a place where timber and water-power should be near

-enough together to make a profitable mill site. He found his spot on

-the south bank of the American, which is a tributary of the Sacramento,

-some forty-five miles northeast of Sacramento.

-

-In the autumn of the year Sutter and Marshall came to their agreement

-by which the former was to furnish all supplies and the latter was to

-build the mill and operate it on shares. Construction was begun before

-the year ended, and was substantially completed in January, 1848.

-Experience showed the amateur constructor that his mill-race was too

-shallow. To remedy this he started the practice of turning the river

-into it by night to wash out earth and deepen the channel. Here it was

-that after one of these flushings, toward the end of January, he picked

-up glittering flakes which looked to him like gold.

-

-With his first find, Marshall hurried off to Sutter, at the ranch.

-Together they tested the flakes in the apothecary's shop, proving the

-reality of the discovery before returning to the mill to prospect more

-fully.

-

-For Sutter the discovery was a calamity. None could tell how large the

-field might be, but he saw clearly that once the news of the find got

-abroad, the whole population would rush madly to the diggings. His

-ranch, the mill, and a new mill which was under way, all needed labor.

-But none would work for hire with free gold to be had for the taking.

-The discoverers agreed to keep their secret for six weeks, but the news

-leaked out, carried off all Sutter's hands in a few days, and reached

-even to San Francisco in the form of rumor before February was over. A

-new force had appeared to change the balance of the West and to excite

-the whole United States.

-

-The rush to the gold fields falls naturally into two parts: the earlier

-including the population of California, near enough to hear of the find

-and get to the diggings in 1848. The later came from all the world, but

-could not start until the news had percolated by devious and tedious

-courses to centres of population thousands of miles away. The movement

-within California started in March and April.

-

-Further prospecting showed that over large areas around the American

-and Sacramento rivers free gold could be obtained by the simple

-processes of placer mining. A wooden cradle operated by six or eight

-men was the most profitable tool, but a tin dishpan would do in an

-emergency. San Francisco was sceptical when the rumor reached it, and

-was not excited even by the first of April, but as nuggets and bags

-of dust appeared in quantity, the doubters turned to enthusiasts.

-Farms were abandoned, town houses were deserted, stores were closed,

-while every able-bodied man tramped off to the north to try his luck.

-The city which had flourished and expanded since the beginning of

-1847 became an empty shell before May was over. Its newspaper is mute

-witness of the desertion, lapsing into silence for a month after May

-29th because its hands had disappeared. Farther south in California

-the news spread as spring advanced, turning by June nearly every face

-toward Sacramento.

-

-The public authorities took cognizance of the find during the summer.

-It was forced upon them by the wholesale desertions of troops who

-could not stand the strain. Both Consul Larkin and Governor Mason, who

-represented the sovereignty of the United States, visited the scenes in

-person and described the situation in their official letters home. The

-former got his news off to the Secretary of State by the 1st of June;

-the latter wrote on August 17; together they became the authoritative

-messengers that confirmed the rumors to the world, when Polk published

-some of their documents in his message to Congress in December, 1848.

-The rumors had reached the East as early as September, but now, writes

-Bancroft, "delirium seized upon the community."

-

-How to get to California became a great popular question in the winter

-of 1848-1849. The public mind was well prepared for long migrations

-through the news of Pacific pioneers which had filled the journals

-for at least six years. Route, time, method, and cost were all to be

-considered. Migration, of a sort, began at once.

-

-Land and water offered a choice of ways to California. The former

-route was now closed for the winter and could not be used until spring

-should produce her crop of necessary pasturage. But the impetuous and

-the well-to-do could start immediately by sea. All along the seaboard

-enterprising ship-owners announced sailings for California, by the Horn

-or by the shorter Isthmian route. Retired hulks were called again into

-commission for the purpose. Fares were extortionate, but many were

-willing to pay for speed. Before the discovery, Congress had arranged

-for a postal service, _via_ Panama, and the Pacific Mail Steamship

-Company had been organized to work the contracts. The _California_

-had left New York in the fall of 1848 to run on the western end of

-the route. It had sailed without passengers, but, meeting the news

-of gold on the South American coast, had begun to load up at Latin

-ports. When it reached Panama, a crowd of clamorous emigrants, many

-times beyond its capacity, awaited its coming and quarrelled over its

-accommodations. On February 28, 1849, it reached San Francisco at last,

-starting the influx from the world at large.

-

-The water route was too costly for most of the gold-seekers, who were

-forced to wait for spring, when the trails would be open. Various

-routes then guided them, through Mexico and Texas, but most of all they

-crowded once more the great Platte trail. Oregon migration and the

-Mormon flight had familiarized this route to all the world. For its

-first stages it was "already broad and well beaten as any turnpike in

-our country."

-

-The usual crowd, which every May for several years had brought to

-the Missouri River crossings around Fort Leavenworth, was reenforced

-in 1849 and swollen almost beyond recognition. A rifle regiment of

-regulars was there, bound for Forts Laramie and Hall to erect new

-frontier posts. Lieutenant Stansbury was there, gathering his surveying

-party which was to prospect for a railway route to Salt Lake. By

-thousands and tens of thousands others came, tempted by the call of

-gold. This was the cheap and popular route. Every western farmer was

-ready to start, with his own wagons and his own stock. The townsman

-could easily buy the simple equipment of the plains. The poor could

-work their way, driving cattle for the better-off. Through inexperience

-and congestion the journey was likely to be hard, but any one might

-undertake it. Niles reported in June that up to May 18, 2850 wagons

-had crossed the river at St. Joseph, and 1500 more at the other ferries.

-

-Familiarity had done much to divest the overland journey of its

-terrors. We hear in this, and even in earlier years, of a sort of

-plains travel de luxe, of wagons "fitted up so as to be secure from

-the weather and ... the women knitting and sewing, for all the world

-as if in their ordinary farm-houses." Stansbury, hurrying out in June

-and overtaking the trains, was impressed with the picturesque character

-of the emigrants and their equipment. "We have been in company with

-multitudes of emigrants the whole day," he wrote on June 12. "The road

-has been lined to a long extent with their wagons, whose white covers,

-glittering in the sunlight, resembled, at a distance, ships upon the

-ocean.... We passed also an old Dutchman, with an immense wagon, drawn

-by six yoke of cattle, and loaded with household furniture. Behind

-followed a covered cart containing the wife, driving herself, and a

-host of babies--the whole bound to the land of promise, of the distance

-to which, however, they seemed to have not the most remote idea. To the

-tail of the cart was attached a large chicken-coop, full of fowls; two

-milch-cows followed, and next came an old mare, upon the back of which

-was perched a little, brown-faced, barefooted girl, not more than seven

-years old, while a small sucking colt brought up the rear." Travellers

-eastward bound, meeting the procession, reported the hundreds and

-thousands whom they met.

-

-The organization of the trains was not unlike that of the Oregonians

-and the Mormons, though generally less formal than either of these.

-The wagons were commonly grouped in companies for protection, little

-needed, since the Indians were at peace during most of 1849. At

-nightfall the long columns came to rest and worked their wagons into

-the corral which was the typical plains encampment. To form this the

-wagons were ranged in a large circle, each with its tongue overlapping

-the vehicle ahead, and each fastened to the next with the brake or yoke

-chains. An opening at one end allowed for driving in the stock, which

-could here be protected from stampede or Indian theft. In emergency

-the circle of wagons formed a fortress strong enough to turn aside

-ordinary Indian attacks. When the companies had been on the road for a

-few weeks the forming of the corral became an easy military manoeuvre.

-The itinerant circus is to-day the thing most like the fleet of prairie

-schooners.

-

-The emigration of the forty-niners was attended by worse sufferings

-than the trail had yet known. Cholera broke out among the trains at the

-start. It stayed by them, lining the road with nearly five thousand

-graves, until they reached the hills beyond Fort Laramie. The price

-of inexperience, too, had to be paid. Wagons broke down and stock

-died. The wreckage along the trail bore witness to this. On July 27,

-Stansbury observed: "To-day we find additional and melancholy evidence

-of the difficulties encountered by those who are ahead of us. Before

-halting at noon, we passed eleven wagons that had been broken up, the

-spokes of the wheels taken to make pack-saddles, and the rest burned or

-otherwise destroyed. The road has been literally strewn with articles

-that have been thrown away. Bar-iron and steel, large blacksmiths'

-anvils and bellows, crowbars, drills, augers, gold-washers, chisels,

-axes, lead, trunks, spades, ploughs, large grindstones, baking-ovens,

-cooking-stoves without number, kegs, barrels, harness, clothing, bacon,

-and beans, were found along the road in pretty much the order in which

-they have been here enumerated. The carcasses of eight oxen, lying

-in one heap by the roadside, this morning, explained a part of the

-trouble." In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and

-twenty-seven dead oxen.

-

-Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In

-the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away,

-so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were

-forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.

-

-The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy.

-Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian

-who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached

-the gold fields.

-

-It was a mixed multitude that found itself in California after July,

-1849, when the overland folk began to arrive. All countries and all

-stations in society had contributed to fill the ranks of the 100,000

-or more whites who were there in the end of the year. The farmer, the

-amateur prospector, and the professional gambler mingled in the crowd.

-Loose women plied their trade without rebuke. Those who had come by

-sea contained an over-share of the undesirable element that proposed

-to live upon the recklessness and vices of the miners. The overland

-emigrants were largely of farmer stock; whether they had possessed

-frontier experience or not before the start, the 3000-mile journey

-toughened and seasoned all who reached California. Nearly all possessed

-the essential virtues of strength, boldness, and initiative.

-

-The experience of Oregon might point to the future of California when

-its strenuous population arrived upon the unprepared community. The

-Mexican government had been ejected by war. A military government

-erected by the United States still held its temporary sway, but

-felt out of place as the controlling power over a civilian American

-population. The new inhabitants were much in need of law, and had

-the American dislike for military authority. Immediately Congress

-was petitioned to form a territorial government for the new El

-Dorado. But Congress was preoccupied with the relations of slavery

-and freedom in the Southwest during its session of 1848-1849. It

-adjourned with nothing done for California. The mining population was

-irritated but not deeply troubled by this neglect. It had already

-organized its miners' courts and begun to execute summary justice in

-emergencies. It was quite able and willing to act upon the suggestion

-of its administrative officers and erect its state government without

-the consent of Congress. The military governor called the popular

-convention; the constitution framed during September, 1849, was

-ratified by popular vote on November 13; a few days later Governor

-Riley surrendered his authority into the hands of the elected governor,

-Burnett, and the officials of the new state. All this was done

-spontaneously and easily. There was no sanction in law for California

-until Congress admitted it in September, 1850, receiving as one of its

-first senators, John C. Fremont.

-

-The year 1850 saw the great compromise upon slavery in the Southwest,

-a compromise made necessary by the appearance on the Pacific of a new

-America. The "call of the West and the lust for gold" had done their

-work in creating a new centre of life beyond the quondam desert.

-

-The census of 1850 revealed something of the nature of this population.

-Probably 125,000 whites, though it was difficult to count them and

-impossible to secure absolute accuracy, were found in Oregon and

-California. Nine-tenths of these were in the latter colony. More than

-11,000 were found in the settlements around Great Salt Lake. Not many

-more than 3000 Americans were scattered among the Mexican population

-along the Rio Grande. The great trails had seen most of these

-home-seekers marching westward over the desert and across the Indian

-frontier which in the blindness of statecraft had been completed for

-all time in 1840.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VIII

-

-KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER

-

-

-The long line separating the Indian and agricultural frontiers was

-in 1850 but little farther west than the point which it had reached

-by 1820. Then it had arrived at the bend of the Missouri, where it

-remained for thirty years. Its flanks had swung out during this

-generation, including Arkansas on the south and Iowa, Minnesota, and

-Wisconsin on the north, so that now at the close of the Mexican War the

-line was nearly a true meridian crossing the Missouri at its bend. West

-of this spot it had been kept from going by the tradition of the desert

-and the pressure of the Indian tribes. The country behind had filled up

-with population, Oregon and California had appeared across the desert,

-but the barrier had not been pushed away.

-

-Through the great trails which penetrated the desert accurate knowledge

-of the Far West had begun to come. By 1850 the tradition which Pike

-and Long had helped to found had well-nigh disappeared, and covetous

-eyes had been cast upon the Indian lands across the border,--lands from

-which the tribes were never to be removed without their consent, and

-which were never to be included in any organized territory or state.

-Most of the traffic over the trails and through this country had been

-in defiance of treaty obligations. Some of the tribes had granted

-rights of transit, but such privileges as were needed and used by the

-Oregon, and California, and Utah hordes were far in excess of these.

-Most of the emigrants were technically trespassers upon Indian lands as

-well as violators of treaty provisions. Trouble with the Indians had

-begun early in the migrations.

-

-[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1849

-

-Texas still claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary. The

-Southwest acquired in 1848 was yet unorganized.]

-

-At the very beginning of the Oregon movement the Indian office had

-foreseen trouble: "Frequent difficulties have occurred during the

-spring of the last and present year [1845] from the passing of

-emigrants for Oregon at various points into the Indian Country. Large

-companies have frequently rendezvoused on the Indian lands for months

-previous to the period of their starting. The emigrants have two

-advantages in crossing into the Indian Country at an early period of

-the spring; one, the facility of grazing their stock on the rushes with

-which the lands abound; and the other, that they cross the Missouri

-River at their leisure. In one instance a large party had to be forced

-by the military to put back. This passing of the emigrants through

-the Indian Country without their permission must, I fear, result in

-an unpleasant collision, if not bloodshed. The Indians say that the

-whites have no right to be in their country without their consent;

-and the upper tribes, who subsist on game, complain that the buffalo

-are wantonly killed and scared off, which renders their only means of

-subsistence every year more precarious." Fremont had seen, in 1842,

-that this invasion of the Indian Country could not be kept up safely

-without a show of military force, and had recommended a post at the

-point where Fort Laramie was finally placed.

-

-The years of the great migrations steadily aggravated the relations

-with the tribes, while the Indian agents continually called upon

-Congress to redress or stop the wrongs being done as often by

-panic-stricken emigrants as by vicious ones. "By alternate persuasion

-and force," wrote the Commissioner in 1854, "some of these tribes have

-been removed, step by step, from mountain to valley, and from river

-to plain, until they have been pushed halfway across the continent.

-They can go no further; on the ground they now occupy the crisis must

-be met, and their future determined.... [There] they are, and as they

-are, with outstanding obligations in their behalf of the most solemn

-and imperative character, voluntarily assumed by the government." But a

-relentless westward movement that had no regard for rights of Mexico in

-either Texas or California could not be expected to notice the rights

-of savages even less powerful. It demanded for its own citizens rights

-not inferior to those conceded by the government "to wandering nations

-of savages." A shrewd and experienced Indian agent, Fitzpatrick, who

-had the confidence of both races, voiced this demand in 1853. "But

-one course remains," he wrote, "which promises any permanent relief

-to them, or any lasting benefit to the country in which they dwell.

-That is simply to make such modifications in the 'intercourse laws' as

-will invite the residence of traders amongst them, and _open the whole

-Indian territory to settlement_. In this manner will be introduced

-amongst them those who will set the example of developing the resources

-of the soil, of which the Indians have not now the most distant idea;

-who will afford to them employment in pursuits congenial to their

-nature; and who will accustom them, imperceptibly, to those modes

-of life which can alone secure them from the miseries of penury.

-Trade is the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor

-of all civilization heretofore, and it will be of all hereafter....

-The present 'intercourse laws' too, so far as they are calculated to

-protect the Indians from the evils of civilized life--from the sale of

-ardent spirits and the prostitution of morals--are nothing more than a

-dead letter; while, so far as they contribute to exclude the benefits

-of civilization from amongst them, they can be, and are, strictly

-enforced."

-

-In 1849 the Indian Office was transferred by Congress from the War

-Department to the Interior, with the idea that the Indians would be

-better off under civilian than military control, and shortly after

-this negotiations were begun looking towards new settlements with the

-tribes. The Sioux were persuaded in the summer of 1851 to make way for

-increasing population in Minnesota, while in the autumn of the same

-year the tribes of the western plains were induced to make concessions.

-

-The great treaties signed at the Upper Platte agency at Fort Laramie in

-1851 were in the interest of the migrating thousands. Fitzpatrick had

-spent the summer of 1850 in summoning the bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho

-to the conference. Shoshoni were brought in from the West. From the

-north of the Platte came Sioux and Assiniboin, Arickara, Grosventres,

-and Crows. The treaties here concluded were never ratified in full,

-but for fifteen years Congress paid various annuities provided by

-them, and in general the tribes adhered to them. The right of the

-United States to make roads across the plains and to fortify them

-with military posts was fully agreed to, while the Indians pledged

-themselves to commit no depredations upon emigrants. Two years later,

-at Fort Atkinson, Fitzpatrick had a conference with the plains Indians

-of the south, Comanche and Apache, making "a renewal of faith, which

-the Indians did not have in the Government, nor the Government in them."

-

-Overland traffic was made more safe for several years by these

-treaties. Such friction and fighting as occurred in the fifties were

-due chiefly to the excesses and the fears of the emigrants themselves.

-But in these treaties there was nothing for the eastern tribes

-along the Iowa and Missouri border, who were in constant danger of

-dispossession by the advance of the frontier itself.

-

-The settlement of Kansas, becoming probable in the early fifties,

-was the impending danger threatening the peace of the border. There

-was not as yet any special need to extend colonization across the

-Missouri, since Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota were but

-sparsely inhabited. Settlers for years might be accommodated farther

-to the east. But the slavery debate of 1850 had revealed and aroused

-passions in both North and South. Motives were so thoroughly mixed

-that participants were rarely able to give satisfactory accounts of

-themselves. Love of struggle, desire for revenge, political ambition,

-all mingled with pure philanthropy and a reasonable fear of outside

-interference with domestic institutions. The compromise had settled

-the future of the new lands, but between Missouri and the mountains

-lay the residue of the Louisiana purchase, divided truly by the

-Missouri compromise line of 36 deg. 30', but not yet settled. Ambition

-to possess it, to convert it to slavery, or to retain it for freedom

-was stimulated by the debate and the fears of outside interference. The

-nearest part of the unorganized West was adjacent to Missouri. Hence it

-was that Kansas came within the public vision first.

-

-It is possible to trace a movement for territorial organization in

-the Indian Country back to 1850 or even earlier. Certain of the more

-intelligent of the Indian colonists had been able to read the signs

-of the times, with the result that organized effort for a territory

-of Nebraska had emanated from the Wyandot country and had besieged

-Congress between 1851 and 1853. The obstacles in the road of fulfilment

-were the Indians and the laws. Experience had long demonstrated the

-unwisdom of permitting Indians and emigrants to live in the same

-districts. The removal and intercourse acts, and the treaties based

-upon them, had guaranteed in particular that no territory or state

-should ever be organized in this country. Good faith and the physical

-presence of the tribes had to be overcome before a new territory could

-appear.

-

-The guarantee of permanency was based upon treaty, and in the eye of

-Congress was not so sacred that it could not be modified by treaty.

-As it became clear that the demand for the opening of these lands

-would soon have to be granted, Congress prepared for the inevitable

-by ordering, in March, 1853, a series of negotiations with the tribes

-west of Missouri with a view to the cession of more country. The

-Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, who later wrote a

-book on "Our Indian Wards," spent the next summer in breaking to the

-Indians the hard news that they were expected once more to vacate. He

-found the tribes uneasy and sullen. Occasional prospectors, wandering

-over their lands, had set them thinking. There had been no actual white

-settlement up to October, 1853, so Manypenny declared, but the chiefs

-feared that he was contemplating a seizure of their lands. The Indian

-mind had some difficulty in comprehending the difference between ceding

-their land by treaty and losing it by force.

-

-At a long series of council fires the Commissioner soothed away some of

-the apprehensions, but found a stubborn resistance when he came to talk

-of ceding all the reserves and moving to new homes. The tribes, under

-pressure, were ready to part with some of their lands, but wanted to

-retain enough to live on. When he talked to them of the Great Father

-in Washington, Manypenny himself felt the irony of the situation; the

-guarantee of permanency had been simple and explicit. Yet he arranged

-for a series of treaties in the following year.

-

-In the spring of 1854 treaties were concluded with most of the tribes

-fronting on Missouri between 37 deg. and 42 deg. 40'. Some of these had

-been persuaded to move into the Missouri Valley in the negotiations of

-the thirties. Others, always resident there, had accepted curtailed

-reserves. The Omaha faced the Missouri, north of the Platte. South of

-the Platte were the Oto and Missouri, the Sauk and Foxes of Missouri,

-the Iowa, and the Kickapoo. The Delaware reserve, north of the Kansas,

-and around Fort Leavenworth, was the seat of Indian civilization of a

-high order. The Shawnee, immediately south of the Kansas, were also

-well advanced in agriculture in the permanent home they had accepted.

-The confederated Kaskaskia and Peoria, and Wea and Piankashaw, and the

-Miami were further south. From those tribes more than thirteen million

-acres of land were bought in the treaties of 1854. In scattered and

-reduced reserves the Indians retained for themselves about one-tenth

-of what they ceded. Generally, when the final signing came, under

-the persuasion of the Indian Office, and often amid the strange

-surroundings of Washington, the chiefs surrendered the lands outright

-and with no condition.

-

-Certain of the tribes resisted all importunities to give title at once

-and held out for conditions of sale. The Iowa, the confederated minor

-tribes, and notably the Delawares, ceded their lands in trust to the

-United States, with the treaty pledge that the lands so yielded should

-be sold at public auction to the highest bidder, the remainders should

-then be offered privately for three years at $1.25 per acre, and the

-final remnants should be disposed of by the United States, the accruing

-funds being held in trust by the United States for the Indians. By

-the end of May the treaties were nearly all concluded. In July, 1854,

-Congress provided a land office for the territory of Kansas.

-

-While the Indian negotiations were in progress, Senator Douglas was

-forcing his Kansas-Nebraska bill at Washington. The bill had failed in

-1853, partly because the Senate had felt the sanctity of the Indian

-agreement; but in 1854 the leader of the Democratic party carried it

-along relentlessly. With words of highest patriotism upon his lips, as

-Rhodes has told it, he secured the passage of a bill not needed by the

-westward movement, subversive of the national pledge, and, blind as he

-was, destructive as well of his party and his own political future.

-The support of President Pierce and the cooperation of Jefferson Davis

-were his in the struggle. It was not his intent, he declared, to

-legislate slavery into or out of the territories; he proposed to leave

-that to the people themselves. To this principle he gave the name of

-"popular sovereignty," "and the name was a far greater invention than

-the doctrine." With rising opposition all about him, he repealed the

-Missouri compromise which in 1820 had divided the Indian Country by

-the line of 36 deg. 30' into free and slave areas, and created within

-these limits the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska. His bill was

-signed by the President on May 30, 1854. In later years this day has

-been observed as a memorial to those who lost their lives in fighting

-the battle which he provoked.

-

-With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri compromise repealed,

-eager partisans prepared in the spring of 1854 to colonize the new

-territories in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the slavery

-side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the

-leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves

-and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these

-for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the

-future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of

-voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas,

-and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing

-the erection of a free state on her western boundary. The northern

-states had been stirred by the act as deeply as the South. In New

-England the bill was not yet passed when leaders of the abolition

-movement prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer, of Worcester, urged

-during the spring that friends of freedom could do no better work than

-aid in the colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own state, in

-April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, through

-which he proposed to aid suitable men to move into the debatable

-land. Churches and schools were to be provided for them. A stern New

-England abolition spirit was to be fostered by them. And they were

-not to be left without the usual border means of defence. Amos A.

-Lawrence, of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made Thayer's scheme

-financially possible. Dr. Charles Robinson was their choice for leader

-of emigration and local representative in Kansas.

-

-The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated little by the

-ordinary westward impulse but greatly by political ambition and

-sectional rivalry. As late as October, 1853, there had been almost no

-whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they began to come in,

-in increasing numbers. The Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at

-once, before the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before

-land offices had been opened. The approach was by the Missouri River

-steamers to Kansas City and Westport, near the bend of the river, where

-was the gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north of the Kansas

-River, was not yet open to legal occupation, but the Shawnee lands

-had been ceded completely and would soon be ready. So the New England

-companies worked their way on foot, or in hired wagons, up the right

-bank of the Kansas, hunting for eligible sites. About thirty miles west

-of the Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they picked their

-spot late in July. The town of Lawrence grew out of their cluster of

-tents and cabins.

-

-It was more than two months after the arrival of the squatters at

-Lawrence before the first governor of the new territory, Andrew H.

-Reeder, made his appearance at Fort Leavenworth and established civil

-government in Kansas. One of his first experiences was with the attempt

-of United States officers at the post to secure for themselves pieces

-of the Delaware lands which surrounded it. "While lying at the fort,"

-wrote a surveyor who left early in September to run the Nebraska

-boundary line, "we heard a great deal about those d--d squatters who

-were trying to steal the Leavenworth site." None of the Delaware lands

-were open to settlement, since the United States had pledged itself to

-sell them all at public auction for the Indians' benefit. But certain

-speculators, including officers of the regular army, organized a town

-company to preempt a site near the fort, where they thought they

-foresaw the great city of the West. They relied on the immunity which

-usually saved pilferers on the Indian lands, and seem even to have

-used United States soldiers to build their shanties. They had begun to

-dispose of their building lots "in this discreditable business" four

-weeks before the first of the Delaware trust lands were put on sale.

-

-However bitter toward each other, the settlers were agreed in their

-attitude toward the Indians, and squatted regardless of Indian

-rights or United States laws. Governor Reeder himself convened his

-legislature, first at Pawnee, whence troops from Fort Riley ejected it;

-then at the Shawnee mission, close to Kansas City, where his presence

-and its were equally without authority of law. He established election

-precincts in unceded lands, and voting places at spots where no white

-man could go without violating the law. The legal snarl into which the

-settlers plunged reveals the inconsistencies in the Indian policy. It

-is even intimated that Governor Reeder was interested in a land scheme

-at Pawnee similar to that at Fort Leavenworth.

-

-The fight for Kansas began immediately after the arrival of Governor

-Reeder and the earliest immigrants. The settlers actually in residence

-at the commencement of 1855 seem to have been about 8500. Propinquity

-gave Missouri an advantage at the start, when the North was not yet

-fully aroused. At an election for territorial legislature held on

-March 30, 1855, the threat of Senator Atchison was revealed in all

-its fulness when more than 6000 votes were counted among a population

-which had under 3000 qualified voters. Missouri men had ridden over

-in organized bands to colonize the precincts and carry the election.

-The whole area of settlement was within an easy two days' ride of the

-Missouri border. The fraud was so crude that Governor Reeder disavowed

-certain of the results, yet the resulting legislature, meeting in July,

-1855, was able to expel some of its anti-slavery members, while the

-rest resigned. It adopted the Missouri code of law, thus laying the

-foundations for a slave state.

-

-The political struggle over Kansas became more intense on the border

-and more absorbing in the nation in the next four years. The free-state

-men, as the settlers around Lawrence came to be known, disavowed the

-first legislature on the ground of its fraudulent election, while

-President Pierce steadily supported it from Washington. Governor

-Reeder was removed during its session, seemingly because he had thrown

-doubts upon its validity. Protesting against it, the northerners held

-a series of meetings in the autumn, around Lawrence, and Topeka, some

-twenty-five miles further up the Kansas River, and crystallized their

-opposition under Dr. Robinson. Their efforts culminated at Topeka

-in October in a spontaneous, but in this instance revolutionary,

-convention which framed a free-state constitution for Kansas and

-provided for erecting a rival administration. Dr. Robinson became its

-governor.

-

-Before the first legislature under the Topeka constitution assembled,

-Kansas had still further trouble. Private violence and mob attacks

-began during the fall of 1855. What is known as the Wakarusa War

-occurred in November, when Sheriff Jones of Douglas County tried to

-arrest some free-state men at Lecompton, and met with strong resistance

-reenforced with Sharpe rifles from New England. Governor Wilson

-Shannon, who had succeeded Reeder, patched up peace, but hostility

-continued through the winter. Lawrence was increasingly the centre of

-northern settlement and the object of pro-slave aggression. A Missouri

-mob visited it on May 21, 1856, and in the approving presence, it is

-said, of Sheriff Jones, sacked its hotel and printing shop, and burned

-the residence of Dr. Robinson.

-

-In the fall a free-state crowd marched up the river and attacked

-Lecompton, but within a week of the sacking of Lawrence retribution

-was visited upon the pro-slave settlers. In cold blood, five men were

-murdered at a settlement on Potawatomi Creek, by a group of fanatical

-free-state men. Just what provocation John Brown and his family had

-received which may excuse his revenge is not certain. In many instances

-individual anti-slavery men retaliated lawlessly upon their enemies.

-But the leaders of the Lawrence party have led also in censuring Brown

-and in disclaiming responsibility for his acts. It is certain that

-in this struggle the free-state party, in general, wanted peaceful

-settlement of the country, and were staking their fortunes and families

-upon it. They were ready for defence, but criminal aggression was no

-part of their platform.

-

-The course of Governor Shannon reached its end in the summer of 1856.

-He was disliked by the free-state faction, while his personal habits

-gave no respectability to the pro-slave cause. At the end of his

-regime the extra-legal legislature under the Topeka constitution was

-prevented by federal troops from convening in session at Topeka. A few

-weeks later Governor John W. Geary superseded him and established his

-seat of government in Lecompton, by this time a village of some twenty

-houses. It took Geary, an honest, well-meaning man, only six weeks to

-fall out with the pro-slave element and the federal land officers. He

-resigned in March, 1857.

-

-Under Governor Robert J. Walker, who followed Geary, the first official

-attempt at a constitution was entered upon. The legislature had already

-summoned a convention which sat at Lecompton during September and

-October. Its constitution, which was essentially pro-slavery, however

-it was read, was ratified before the end of the year and submitted to

-Congress. But meanwhile the legislature which called the convention had

-fallen into free-state hands, disavowed the constitution, and summoned

-another convention. At Leavenworth this convention framed a free-state

-constitution in March, which was ratified by popular vote in May,

-1858. Governor Walker had already resigned in December, 1857. Through

-holding an honest election and purging the returns of slave-state

-frauds he had enabled the free-state party to secure the legislature.

-Southerner though he was, he choked at the political dishonesty of the

-administration in Kansas. He had yielded to the evidence of his eyes,

-that the population of Kansas possessed a large free-state majority.

-But so yielding he had lost the confidence of Washington. Even Senator

-Douglas, the patron of the popular sovereignty doctrine, had now broken

-with President Buchanan, recognizing the right of the people to form

-their own institutions. No attention was ever paid by Congress to

-this Leavenworth constitution, but when the Lecompton constitution

-was finally submitted to the people by Congress, in August, 1858, it

-was defeated by more than 11,000 votes in a total of 13,000. Kansas

-was henceforth in the hands of the actual settlers. A year later,

-at Wyandotte, it made a fourth constitution, under which it at last

-entered the union on January 29, 1861. "In the Wyandotte Convention,"

-says one of the local historians, "there were a few Democrats and one

-or two cranks, and probably both were of some use in their way."

-

-There had been no white population in Kansas in 1853, and no special

-desire to create one. But the political struggle had advertised

-the territory on a large scale, while the whole West was under the

-influence of the agricultural boom that was extending settlement into

-Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found

-that about 8500 had come in since the erection of the territory. The

-rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles and the stories of

-Lawrence and Potawatomi, instead of frightening settlers away, drew

-them there in increasing thousands. Some few came from the South, but

-the northern majority was overwhelming before the panic of 1857 laid

-its heavy hand upon expansion. There was a white population of 106,390

-in 1860.

-

-The westward movement, under its normal influences, had extended the

-range of prosperous agricultural settlement into the Northwest in this

-past decade. It had cooperated in the extension into that part of the

-old desert now known as Kansas. But chiefly politics, and secondly the

-call of the West, is the order of causes which must explain the first

-westward advance of the agricultural frontier since 1820. Even in 1860

-the population of Kansas was almost exclusively within a three days'

-journey of the Missouri bend.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER IX

-

-"PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"[2]

-

-    [2] This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The

-        Territory of Colorado" which was published in _The

-        American Historical Review_ in October, 1906.

-

-

-The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of

-the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land

-beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without any semblance of

-organization or law. Indeed within the area whites had been forbidden

-to enter, since here was the final abode of the Indians. But with the

-Kansas-Nebraska act all this was changed. In five years a series of

-amorphous territories had been provided for by law.

-

-Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct divisions.

-From the Canadian border to the fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended.

-Kansas lay between 40 deg. and 37 deg. Lying west of Arkansas, the old

-Indian Country, now much reduced by partition, embraced the rest. The

-whole plains country, east of the mountains, was covered by these

-territorial projects. Indian Territory was without the government which

-its name implied, but popular parlance regarded it as the others and

-refused to see any difference among them.

-

-Beyond the mountain wall which formed the western boundary of Kansas

-and Nebraska lay four other territories equally without particular

-reason for their shape and bounds. Oregon, acquired in 1846, had been

-divided in 1853 by a line starting at the mouth of the Columbia and

-running east to the Rockies, cutting off Washington territory on its

-northern side. The Utah territory which figured in the compromise

-of 1850, and which Mormon migration had made necessary, extended

-between California and the Rockies, from Oregon at 42 deg. to New Mexico

-at 37 deg. New Mexico, also of the compromise year, reached from Texas

-to California, south of 37 deg., and possessed at its northeast corner

-a panhandle which carried it north to 38 deg. in order to leave in it

-certain old Mexican settlements.

-

-These divisions of the West embraced in 1854 the whole of the country

-between California and the states. As yet their boundaries were

-arbitrary and temporary, but they presaged movements of population

-which during the next quarter century should break them up still

-further and provide real colonies in place of the desert and the Indian

-Country. Congress had no formative part in the work. Population broke

-down barriers and showed the way, while laws followed and legalized

-what had been done. The map of 1854 reveals an intent to let the

-mountain summit remain a boundary, and contains no prophecy of the four

-states which were shortly to appear.

-

-[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1854

-

-Great amorphous territories now covered all the plains, and the Rocky

-Mountains were recognized only as a dividing line.]

-

-For several decades the area of Kansas territory, and the southern

-part of Nebraska, had been well known as the range of the plains

-Indians,--Pawnee and Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche

-and Apache. Through this range the caravans had gone. Here had been

-constant military expeditions as well. It was a common summer's

-campaign for a dragoon regiment to go out from Fort Leavenworth to

-the mountains by either the Arkansas or Platte route, to skirt the

-eastern slopes along the southern fork of the Platte, and return home

-by the other trail. Those military demonstrations, which were believed

-to be needed to impress the tribes, had made this march a regular

-performance. Colonel Dodge had done it in the thirties, Sumner and

-Sedgwick did it in 1857, and there had been numerous others in between.

-A well-known trail had been worn in this wise from Fort Laramie, on

-the north, through St. Vrain's, crossing the South Platte at Cherry

-Creek, past the Fontaine qui Bouille, and on to Bent's Fort and the

-New Mexican towns. Yet Kansas had slight interest in its western end.

-Along the Missouri the sections were quarrelling over slavery, but they

-had scarcely scratched the soil for one-fourth of the length of the

-territory.

-

-The crest of the continent, lying at the extreme west of Kansas, lay

-between the great trails, so that it was off the course of the chief

-migrations, and none visited it for its own sake. The deviating trails,

-which commenced at the Missouri bend, were some 250 miles apart at the

-one hundred and third meridian. Here was the land which Kansas baptized

-in 1855 as the county of Arapahoe, and whence arose the hills around

-Pike's Peak, which rumor came in three years more to tip with gold.

-

-The discovery of gold in California prepared the public for similar

-finds in other parts of the West. With many of the emigrants

-prospecting had become a habit that sent small bands into the mountain

-valleys from Washington to New Mexico. Stories of success in various

-regions arose repeatedly during the fifties and are so reasonable that

-it is not possible to determine with certainty the first finds in many

-localities. Any mountain stream in the whole system might be expected

-to contain some gold, but deposits large enough to justify a boom were

-slow in coming.

-

-In January, 1859, six quills of gold, brought in to Omaha from the

-mountains, confirmed the rumors of a new discovery that had been

-persistent for several months. The previous summer had seen organized

-attempts to locate in the Pike's Peak region the deposits whose

-existence had been believed in, more or less, since 1850. Parties from

-the gold fields of Georgia, from Lawrence, and from Lecompton are

-known to have been in the field and to have started various mushroom

-settlements. El Paso, near the present site of Colorado Springs,

-appeared, as well as a group of villages at the confluence of the South

-Platte and the half-dry bottom of Cherry Creek,--Montana, Auraria,

-Highland, and St. Charles. Most of the gold-seekers returned to the

-States before winter set in, but a few, encouraged by trifling finds,

-remained to occupy their flimsy cabins or to jump the claims of the

-absentees. In the sands of Cherry Creek enough gold was found to hold

-the finders and to start a small migration thither in the autumn. In

-the early winter the groups on Cherry Creek coalesced and assumed the

-name of Denver City.

-

-The news of Pike's Peak gold reached the Missouri Valley at the

-strategic moment when the newness of Kansas had worn off, and the

-depression of 1857 had brought bankruptcy to much of the frontier.

-The adventurous pioneers, who were always ready to move, had been

-reenforced by individuals down on their luck and reduced to any sort of

-extremity. The way had been prepared for a heavy emigration to the new

-diggings which started in the fall of 1858 and assumed great volume in

-the spring of 1859.

-

-The edge of the border for these emigrants was not much farther west

-than it had been for emigrants of the preceding decade. A few miles

-from the Missouri River all traces of Kansas or Nebraska disappeared,

-whether one advanced by the Platte or the Arkansas, or by the

-intermediate routes of the Smoky Hill and Republican. The destination

-was less than half as far away as California had been. No mountains and

-no terrible deserts were to be crossed. The costs and hardships of the

-journey were less than any that had heretofore separated the frontier

-from a western goal. There is a glimpse of the bustling life around the

-head of the trails in a letter which General W. T. Sherman wrote to his

-brother John from Leavenworth City, on April 30, 1859: "At this moment

-we are in the midst of a rush to Pike's Peak. Steamboats arrive in twos

-and threes each day, loaded with people for the new gold region. The

-streets are full of people buying flour, bacon, and groceries, with

-wagons and outfits, and all around the town are little camps preparing

-to go west. A daily stage goes west to Fort Riley, 135 miles, and every

-morning two spring wagons, drawn by four mules and capable of carrying

-six passengers, start for the Peak, distance six hundred miles, the

-journey to be made in twelve days. As yet the stages all go out and

-don't return, according to the plan for distributing the carriages;

-but as soon as they are distributed, there will be two going and two

-returning, making a good line of stages to Pike's Peak. Strange to say,

-even yet, although probably 25,000 people have actually gone, we are

-without authentic advices of gold. Accounts are generally favorable

-as to words and descriptions, but no positive physical evidence comes

-in the shape of gold, and I will be incredulous until I know some

-considerable quantity comes in in way of trade."

-

-[Illustration: "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"

-

-Reproduced by permission of the Montana Historical Society, from the

-original handbill in its possession.]

-

-Throughout the United States newspapers gave full notice to the new

-boom, while a "Pike's Peak Guide," based on a journal kept by one of

-the early parties, found a ready sale. No single movement had ever

-carried so heavy a migration upon the plains as this, which in one

-year must have taken nearly 100,000 pioneers to the mountains. "Pike's

-Peak or Bust!" was a common motto blazoned on their wagon covers. The

-sawmill, the press, and the stage-coach were all early on the field.

-Byers, long a great editor in Denver, arrived in April to distribute

-an edition of his _Rocky Mountain News_, which he had printed on one

-side before leaving Omaha. Thenceforth the diggings were consistently

-advertised by a resident enthusiast. Early in May the first coach of

-the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company brought Henry Villard

-into Denver. In June came no less a personage than Horace Greeley to

-see for himself the new wonder. "Mine eyes have never yet been blessed

-with the sight of any floor whatever in either Denver or Auraria,"

-he could write of the village of huts which he inspected. The seal

-of approval which his letters set upon the enterprise did much to

-encourage it.

-

-With the rush of prospectors to the hills, numerous new camps quickly

-appeared. Thirty miles north along the foothills and mesas Boulder

-marked the exit of a mountain creek upon the plains. Behind Denver,

-in Clear Creek Valley, were Golden, at the mouth, and Black Hawk and

-Central City upon the north fork of the stream. Idaho Springs and

-Georgetown were on its south fork. Here in the Gregory district was the

-active life of the diggings. The great extent of the gold belt to the

-southwest was not yet fully known. Farther south was Pueblo, on the

-Arkansas, and a line of little settlements working up the valley, by

-Canyon City to Oro, where Leadville now stands.

-

-Reaction followed close upon the heels of the boom, beginning its work

-before the last of the outward bound had reached the diggings. Gold

-was to be found in trifling quantities in many places, but the mob of

-inexperienced miners had little chance for fortune. The great deposits,

-which were some months in being discovered, were in refractory quartz

-lodes, calling for heavy stamp mills, chemical processes, and, above

-all, great capital for their working. Even for laborers there was no

-demand commensurate with the number of the fifty-niners. Hence, more

-than half of these found their way back to the border before the year

-was over, bitter, disgusted, and poor, scrawling on deserted wagons, in

-answer to the outward motto, "Busted! By Gosh!"

-

-The problem of government was born when the first squatters ran the

-lines of Denver City. Here was a new settlement far away from the seat

-of territorial government, while the government itself was impotent.

-Kansas had no legislature competent to administer law at home--far less

-in outlying colonies. But spontaneous self-government came easily to

-the new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers in his diary,

-"that within two weeks of the arrival of a few dozen Americans in a

-wilderness, they set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States

-Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory! But we are of

-a fast race and in a fast age and must prod along." An early snow in

-November, 1858, had confined the miners to their cabins and started

-politics. The result had been the election of two delegates, one to

-Congress and one to Kansas legislature, both to ask for governmental

-direction. Kansas responded in a few weeks, creating five new counties

-west of 104 deg., and chartering a city of St. Charles, long after St.

-Charles had been merged into Denver. Congress did nothing.

-

-The prospective immigration of 1859 inspired further and more

-comprehensive attempts at local government. It was well understood

-that the news of gold would send in upon Denver a wave of population

-and perhaps a reign of lawlessness. The adjournment of Congress

-without action in their behalf made it certain that there could

-be no aid from this quarter for at least a year, and became the

-occasion for a caucus in Denver over which William Larimer presided

-on April 11, 1859. As a result of this caucus, a call was issued for

-a convention of representatives of the neighboring mining camps to

-meet in the same place four days later. On April 15, six camps met

-through their delegates, "being fully impressed with the belief, from

-early and recent precedents, of the power and benefits and duty of

-self-government," and feeling an imperative necessity "for an immediate

-and adequate government, for the large population now here and soon to

-be among us ... and also believing that a territorial government is not

-such as our large and peculiarly situated population demands."

-

-The deliberations thus informally started ended in a formal call for

-a constitutional convention to meet in Denver on the first Monday in

-June, for the purpose, as an address to the people stated, of framing

-a constitution for a new "state of Jefferson." "Shall it be," the

-address demanded, "the government of the knife and the revolver, or

-shall we unite in forming here in our golden country, among the ravines

-and gulches of the Rocky Mountains, and the fertile valleys of the

-Arkansas and the Platte, a new and independent State?" The boundaries

-of the prospective state were named in the call as the one hundred

-and second and one hundred and tenth meridians of longitude, and the

-thirty-seventh and forty-third parallels of north latitude--including

-with true frontier amplitude large portions of Utah and Nebraska and

-nearly half of Wyoming, in addition to the present state of Colorado.

-

-When the statehood convention met in Denver on June 6, the time was

-inopportune for concluding the movement, since the reaction had set in.

-The height of the gold boom was over, and the return migration left it

-somewhat doubtful whether any permanent population would remain in the

-country to need a state. So the convention met on the 6th, appointed

-some eight drafting committees, and adjourned, to await developments,

-until August 1. By this later date, the line had been drawn between

-the confident and the discouraged elements in the population, and for

-six days the convention worked upon the question of statehood. As to

-permanency there was now no doubt; but the body divided into two nearly

-equal groups, one advocating immediate statehood, the other shrinking

-from the heavy taxation incident to a state establishment and so

-preferring a territorial government with a federal treasury behind it.

-The body, too badly split to reach a conclusion itself, compromised by

-preparing the way for either development and leaving the choice to

-a public vote. A state constitution was drawn up on one hand; on the

-other, was prepared a memorial to Congress praying for a territorial

-government, and both documents were submitted to a vote on September

-5. Pursuant to the memorial, which was adopted, another election was

-held on October 3, at which the local agent of the new Leavenworth

-and Pike's Peak Express Company, Beverly D. Williams, was chosen as

-delegate to Congress.

-

-The adoption of the territorial memorial failed to meet the need for

-immediate government or to prevent the advocates of such government

-from working out a provisional arrangement pending the action of

-Congress. On the day that Williams was elected, these advocates chose

-delegates for a preliminary territorial constitutional convention

-which met a week later. "Here we go," commented Byers, "a regular

-triple-headed government machine; south of 40 deg. we hang on to the

-skirts of Kansas; north of 40 deg. to those of Nebraska; straddling

-the line, we have just elected a Delegate to the United States

-Congress from the 'Territory of Jefferson,' and ere long we will have

-in full blast a provisional government of Rocky Mountain growth and

-manufacture." In this convention of October 10, 1859, the name of

-Jefferson was retained for the new territory; the boundaries of April

-15 were retained, and a government similar to the highest type of

-territorial establishment was provided for. If the convention had met

-on the authority of an enabling act, its career could not have been

-more dignified. Its constitution was readily adopted, while officers

-under it were chosen in an orderly election on October 24. Robert

-W. Steele, of Ohio, became its governor. On November 7 he met his

-legislature and delivered his first inaugural address.

-

-The territory of Jefferson which thus came into existence in the Pike's

-Peak region illustrates well the spirit of the American frontier. The

-fundamental principle of American government which Byers expressed in

-connection with it is applicable at all times in similar situations.

-"We claim," he wrote in his _Rocky Mountain News_, "that any body,

-or community of American citizens, which from any cause or under

-any circumstance is cut off from, or from isolation is so situated

-as not to be under, any active and protecting branch of the central

-government, have a right, if on American soil, to frame a government,

-and enact such laws and regulations as may be necessary for their own

-safety, protection, and happiness, always with the condition precedent,

-that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central government

-shall extend an _effective_ organization and laws over them, give it

-their unqualified support and obedience." The life of the spontaneous

-commonwealth thus called into existence is a creditable witness to the

-American instinct for orderly government.

-

-When Congress met in December, 1859, the provisional territory of

-Jefferson was in operation, while its delegates in Washington were

-urging the need for governmental action. To their influence, President

-Buchanan added, on February 20, 1860, a message transmitting the

-petition from the Pike's Peak country. The Senate, upon April 3,

-received a report from the Committee on Territories introducing Senate

-Bill No. 366, for the erection of Colorado territory, while Grow of

-Pennsylvania reported to the House on May 10 a bill to erect in the

-same region a territory of Idaho. The name of Jefferson disappeared

-from the project in the spring of 1860, its place being taken by sundry

-other names for the same mountain area. Several weeks were given,

-in part, to debate over this Colorado-Idaho scheme, though as usual

-the debate turned less upon the need for this territorial government

-than upon the attitude which the bill should take toward the slavery

-issue. The slavery controversy prevented territorial legislation in

-this session, but the reasonableness of the Colorado demand was well

-established.

-

-The territory of Jefferson, as organized in November, 1859, had

-been from the first recognized as merely a temporary expedient. The

-movement for it had gained weight in the summer of that year from

-the probability that it need not be maintained for many months. When

-Congress, however, failed in the ensuing session of 1859-1860 to grant

-the relief for which the pioneers had prayed, the wisdom of continuing

-for a second year the life of a government admitted to be illegal came

-into question. The first session of its legislature had lasted from

-November 7, 1859, to January 25, 1860. It had passed comprehensive

-laws for the regulation of titles in lands, water, and mines, and had

-adopted civil and criminal codes. Its courts had been established

-and had operated with some show of authority. But the service and

-obedience to the government had been voluntary, no funds being on

-hand for the payment of salaries and expenses. One of the pioneers

-from Vermont wrote home, "There is no hopes [_sic_] of perfect quiet

-in our governmental matters until we are securely under the wing of

-our National Eagle." In his proclamation calling the second election

-Governor Steele announced that "all persons who expect to be elected

-to any of the above offices should bear in mind that there will be no

-salaries or per diem allowed from this territory, but that the General

-Government will be memorialized to aid us in our adversity."

-

-Upon this question of revenue the territory of Jefferson was wrecked.

-Taxes could not be collected, since citizens had only to plead grave

-doubts as to the legality in order to evade payment. "We have tried a

-Provisional Government, and how has it worked," asked William Larimer

-in announcing his candidacy for the office of territorial delegate.

-"It did well enough until an attempt was made to tax the people to

-support it." More than this, the real need for the government became

-less apparent as 1860 advanced, for the scattered communities learned

-how to obtain a reasonable peace without it. American mining camps

-are peculiarly free from the need for superimposed government. The

-new camp at once organizes itself on a democratic basis, and in mass

-meeting registers claims, hears and decides suits, and administers

-summary justice. Since the Pike's Peak country was only a group of

-mining camps, there proved to be little immediate need for a central

-government, for in the local mining-district organizations all of

-the most pressing needs of the communities could be satisfied. So

-loyalty to the territory of Jefferson, in the districts outside

-of Denver, waned during 1860, and in the summer of that year had

-virtually disappeared. Its administration, however, held together.

-Governor Steele made efforts to rehabilitate its authority, was himself

-reelected, and met another legislature in November.

-

-When the thirty-sixth Congress met for its second session in December,

-1860, the Jefferson organization was in the second year of its life,

-yet in Congress there was no better prospect of quick action than there

-had been since 1857. Indeed the election of Lincoln brought out the

-eloquence of the slavery question with a renewed vigor that monopolized

-the time and strength of Congress until the end of January. Had not

-the departure of the southern members to their states cleared the way

-for action, it is highly improbable that even this session would have

-produced results of importance.

-

-Grow had announced in the beginning of the session a territorial

-platform similar to that which had been under debate for three

-years. Until the close of January the southern valedictories held

-the floor, but at last the admission of Kansas, on January 29, 1861,

-revealed the fact that pro-slavery opposition had departed and that

-the long-deferred territorial scheme could have a fair chance. On the

-very day that Kansas was admitted, with its western boundary at the

-twenty-fifth meridian from Washington, the Senate revived its bill No.

-366 of the last session and took up its deliberation upon a territory

-for Pike's Peak. Only by chance did the name Colorado remain attached

-to the bill. Idaho was at one time adopted, but was amended out in

-favor of the original name when the bill at last passed the Senate. The

-boundaries were cut down from those which the territory had provided

-for itself. Two degrees were taken from the north of the territory, and

-three from the west. In this shape, between 37 deg. and 41 deg. north

-latitude, and 25 deg. and 32 deg. of longitude west of Washington, the

-bill received the signature of President Buchanan on February 28. The

-absence of serious debate in the passage of this Colorado act is

-excellent evidence of the merit of the scheme and the reasons for its

-being so long deferred.

-

-President Buchanan, content with approving the bill, left the

-appointment of the first officials for Colorado to his successor. In

-the multitude of greater problems facing President Lincoln, this

-was neglected for several weeks, but he finally commissioned General

-William Gilpin as the first governor of the territory. Gilpin had long

-known the mountain frontier; he had commanded a detachment on the

-Santa Fe trail in the forties, and he had written prophetic books upon

-the future of the country to which he was now sent. His loyalty was

-unquestioned and his readiness to assume responsibility went so far as

-perhaps to cease to be a virtue. He arrived in Denver on May 29, 1861,

-and within a few days was ready to take charge of the government and to

-receive from the hands of Governor Steele such authority as remained in

-the provisional territory of Jefferson.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER X

-

-FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA

-

-

-The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of mining episodes which,

-within fifteen years of the discoveries in California, let in the

-light of exploration and settlement upon hundreds of valleys scattered

-over the whole of the Rocky Mountain West. The men who exploited

-California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by

-bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class,

-mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which

-permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced

-before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for

-gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana.

-Activity was constant during these years all along the continental

-divide. New camps were being born overnight, old ones were abandoned by

-magic. Here and there cities rose and remained to mark success in the

-search. Abandoned huts and half-worked diggings were scars covering a

-fourth of the continent.

-

-Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the largest of migrations,

-but while Denver was being settled there began, farther west, a boom

-which for the present outdid it in significance. The old California

-trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada desert and entered California

-by various passes through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts had

-been planted along this trail by Mormons and others during the fifties,

-until in 1854 the legislature of Utah had created a Carson County in

-the west end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements along

-the river of the same name. Small discoveries of gold were enough to

-draw to this district a floating population which founded a Carson City

-as early as 1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement

-until after the finding of a marvellously rich vein of silver near Gold

-Hill in the spring of 1859. Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a

-few miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the famous Comstock

-lode, upon which it was possible within five years to build a state.

-

-The California population, already rushing about from one boom to

-another in perpetual prospecting, seized eagerly upon this new district

-in western Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and Placerville

-was crowded beyond capacity, while hundreds marched over the mountains

-on foot. "There was no difficulty in reaching the newly discovered

-region of boundless wealth," asserted a journalistic visitor. "It lay

-on the public highway to California, on the borders of the state. From

-Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake,

-the tide of emigration poured in. Transportation from San Francisco was

-easy. I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead of winter, when

-the mountains were covered with snow." Carson City had existed before

-the great discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade southerner,

-nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed it, while the typical population of

-the mining camps piled in around the two.

-

-In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The new pony express ran

-through the heart of the fields and aided in advertising them east and

-west. Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye. Both camps

-obtained their territorial acts within the same week, that of Nevada

-receiving Buchanan's signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west of

-the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became the new territory

-which, through the need of the union for loyal votes, gained its

-admission as a state in three more years.

-

-[Illustration: THE MINING CAMP

-

-From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the

-Montana Historical Society.]

-

-The rush to Carson valley drew attention away from another mining

-enterprise further south. In the western half of New Mexico, between

-the Rio Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful mining ever

-since the acquisition of the territory. The southwest boundary of the

-United States after the Mexican War was defined in words that could

-not possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This fact, together

-with knowledge that an easy railway grade ran south of the Gila River,

-had led in 1853 to the purchase of additional land from Mexico and

-the definition of a better boundary in the Gadsden treaty. In these

-lands of the Gadsden purchase old mines came to light in the years

-immediately following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles D. Poston were most

-active in promoting the mining companies which revived abandoned claims

-and developed new ones near the old Spanish towns of Tubac and Tucson.

-The region was too remote and life too hard for the individual miner

-to have much chance. Organized mining companies here took the place of

-the detached prospector of Colorado and Nevada. Disappointed miners

-from California came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee of San

-Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines.

-Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.... It

-was literally a paradise of devils." Excessive dryness, long distances,

-and Apache depredation discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys of the

-early fifties and the passage of the overland mail through the camps in

-1858 advertised the Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.

-

-The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the time the Mowry

-mines and others in the Santa Cruz Valley, holding them in check till

-a second mineral area in western New Mexico should be found. United

-States army posts were abandoned, confederate agents moved in, and

-Indians became bold. The federal authority was not reestablished until

-Colonel J. H. Carleton led his California column across the Colorado

-and through New Mexico to Tucson early in 1862. During the next two

-years he maintained his headquarters at Santa Fe, carried on punitive

-campaigns against the Navaho and the Apache, and encouraged mining.

-

-The Indian campaigns of Carleton and his aides in New Mexico have

-aroused much controversy. There were no treaty rights by which the

-United States had privileges of colonization and development. It

-was forcible entry and retention, maintained in the face of bitter

-opposition. Carleton, with Kit Carson's assistance, waged a war

-of scarcely concealed extermination. They understood, he reported

-to Washington, "the direct application of force as a law. If its

-application be removed, that moment they become lawless. This has been

-tried over and over and over again, and at great expense. The purpose

-now is never to relax the application of force with a people that can

-no more be trusted than you can trust the wolves that run through

-their mountains; to gather them together little by little, on to a

-reservation, away from the haunts, and hills, and hiding-places of

-their country, and then to be kind to them; there teach their children

-how to read and write, teach them the arts of peace; teach them the

-truths of Christianity. Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas,

-new modes of life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them

-all the latent longings for murdering and robbing; the young ones will

-take their places without these longings; and thus, little by little,

-they will become a happy and contented people."

-

-Mowry's mines had been seized by Carleton at the start, as tainted with

-treason. The whole Tucson district was believed to be so thoroughly

-in sympathy with the confederacy that the commanding officer was much

-relieved when rumors came of a new placer gold field along the left

-bank of the Colorado River, around Bill Williams Creek. Thither the

-population of the territory moved as fast as it could. Teamsters and

-other army employees deserted freely. Carleton deliberately encouraged

-surveying and prospecting, and wrote personally to General Halleck and

-Postmaster-general Blair, congratulating them because his California

-column had found the gold with which to suppress the confederacy. "One

-of the richest gold countries in the world," he described it to be,

-destined to be the centre of a new territorial life, and to throw into

-the shade "the insignificant village of Tucson."

-

-The population of the silver camp had begun to urge Congress to

-provide a territory independent of New Mexico, immediately after the

-development of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had been sent

-to Washington in the usual style. But congressional indifference to

-new territories had blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened the

-case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian wards and their rights,

-the Superintendent of Indian Affairs had told of the sad peril of the

-"unprotected miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear title.

-They would offer to the "numerous and warlike tribes" an irresistible

-opportunity. The territorial act was finally passed on February 24,

-1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart of the new gold

-field, at Fort Whipple, near which the city of Prescott soon appeared.

-

-The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by the erection of a

-territorial government. There never came in a population large enough

-to intimidate the tribes, while bad management from the start provoked

-needless wars. Most serious were the Apache troubles which began in

-1861 and ceased only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies.

-In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp Grant in 1871, when

-citizens of Tucson, with careful premeditation, murdered in cold

-blood more than eighty Apache, men, women, and children. The degree

-of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry

-has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice

-of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache.

-A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their

-haunts--hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be

-surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled--by white

-flags, or any other method, human or divine--and then put to death.

-If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual who thinks himself

-a philanthropist, I can only say that I pity without respecting his

-mistaken sympathy. A man might as well have sympathy for a rattlesnake

-or a tiger."

-

-The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by climate and

-inaccessibility, brought life into the extreme Southwest. Those of

-Nevada worked the partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old

-Oregon country gave out its gold in these same years as miners opened

-up the valleys of the Snake and the head waters of the Missouri River.

-Right on the crest of the continental divide appeared the northern

-group of mining camps.

-

-The territory of Washington had been cut away from Oregon at its own

-request and with Oregon's consent in 1853. It had no great population

-and was the subject of no agricultural boom as Oregon had been, but

-the small settlements on Puget Sound and around Olympia were too far

-from the Willamette country for convenient government. When Oregon was

-admitted in 1859, Washington was made to include all the Oregon country

-outside the state, embracing the present Washington and Idaho, portions

-of Montana and Wyoming, and extending to the continental divide.

-Through it ran the overland trail from Fort Hall almost to Walla Walla.

-Because of its urging Congress built a new wagon road that was passable

-by 1860 from Fort Benton, on the upper Missouri, to the junction of the

-Columbia and Snake. Farther east the active business of the American

-Fur Company had by 1859 established steamboat communication from St.

-Louis to Fort Benton, so that an overland route to rival the old Platte

-trail was now available.

-

-In eastern Washington the most important of the Indians were the Nez

-Perces, whose peaceful habits and friendly disposition had been noted

-since the days of Lewis and Clark, and who had permitted their valley

-of the Snake to become a main route to Oregon. Treaties with these had

-been made in 1855 by Governor Stevens, in accordance with which most of

-the tribe were in 1860 living on their reserve at the junction of the

-Clearwater and Snake, and were fairly prosperous. Here as elsewhere was

-the specific agreement that no whites save government employees should

-be allowed in the Indian Country; but in the summer of 1861 the news

-that gold had been found along the Clearwater brought the agreement to

-naught. Gold had actually been discovered the summer before. In the

-spring of 1861 pack trains from Walla Walla brought a horde of miners

-east over the range, while steamboats soon found their way up the

-Snake. In the fork between the Clearwater and Snake was a good landing

-where, in the autumn of 1861, sprang up the new Lewiston, named in

-honor of the great explorer, acting as centre of life for five thousand

-miners in the district, and showing by its very existence on the Indian

-reserve the futility of treaty restrictions in the face of the gold

-fever. The troubles of the Indian department were great. "To attempt

-to restrain miners would be, to my mind, like attempting to restrain

-the whirlwind," reported Superintendent Kendall. "The history of

-California, Australia, Frazer river, and even of the country of which I

-am now writing, furnishes abundant evidence of the attractive power of

-even only reported gold discoveries.

-

-"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed fact, and are equalled

-in richness by few recorded discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility

-of preventing miners from going to the mines, I have refrained from

-taking any steps which, by certain want of success, would tend to

-weaken the force of the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided

-giving any consent to unauthorized statements, and verbally instructed

-the agent in charge that, while he might not be able to enforce the

-laws for want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt to lay

-out a town at the juncture of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, as he

-had expressed a desire of doing."

-

-Continued developments proved that Lewiston was in the centre of a

-region of unusual mineral wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed

-closely by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary of the

-Snake, a little farther south. The Boise mines came on the heels of

-this boom, being followed by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of

-the great bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured the usual

-flood of miners from the whole West. Before 1862 was over eastern

-Washington had outgrown the bounds of the territorial government on

-Puget Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the placers of the

-Colorado Valley, and the Carson and Virginia City camps, these called

-for and received a new territorial establishment.

-

-In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska had met along a

-common boundary at the top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington

-was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape under the pressure

-of a small but active population north of its seat of government. The

-centres of population in Nebraska north of the Platte River represented

-chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota. Emigrating from these

-states farmers had by 1860 opened the country on the left bank of the

-Missouri, in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri traffic had

-developed both shores of the river past Fort Pierre and Fort Union

-to Fort Benton, by 1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people

-here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along the line of the

-Missouri and the forty-third parallel. Dakota had been created out of

-the country thus cut loose and in two years more shared in the fate

-of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in 1863 to provide home

-rule for the miners of the new mineral region. It included a great

-rectangle, on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah and

-Nebraska, west to its present western boundary at Oregon and 117 deg.,

-east to 104 deg., the present eastern line of Montana and Wyoming.

-Dakota and Washington were cut down for its sake.

-

-It seemed, in 1862 and 1863, as though every little rivulet in the

-whole mountain country possessed its treasures to be given up to the

-first prospector with the hardihood to tickle its soil. Four important

-districts along the upper course of the Snake, not to mention hundreds

-of minor ones, lent substance to this appearance. Almost before Idaho

-could be organized its area of settlement had broadened enough to make

-its own division in the near future a certainty. East of the Bitter

-Root Mountains, in the head waters of the Missouri tributaries, came a

-long series of new booms.

-

-When the American Fur Company pushed its little steamer _Chippewa_ up

-to the vicinity of Fort Benton in 1859, none realized that a new era

-for the upper Missouri had nearly arrived. For half a century the fur

-trade had been followed in this region and had dotted the country with

-tiny forts and palisades, but there had been no immigration, and no

-reason for any. The Mullan road, which Congress had authorized in 1855,

-was in course of construction from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, but as

-yet there were few immigrants to follow the new route. Considerably

-before the territory of Idaho was created, however, the active

-prospectors of the Snake Valley had crossed the range and inspected

-most of the Blackfoot country in the direction of Fort Benton. They

-had organized for themselves a Missoula County, Washington territory,

-in July, 1862, an act which may be taken as the beginning of an

-entirely new movement.

-

-Two brothers, James and Granville Stuart, were the leaders in

-developing new mineral areas east of the main range. After experience

-in California and several years of life along the trails, they settled

-down in the Deer Lodge Valley, and began to open up their mines in

-1861. They accomplished little this year since the steamboat to Fort

-Benton, carrying supplies, was burned, and their trip to Walla Walla

-for shovels and picks took up the rest of the season. But early in

-1862 they were hard and successfully at work. Reenforcements, destined

-for the Salmon River mines farther west, came to them in June; one

-party from Fort Benton, the other from the Colorado diggings, and both

-were easily persuaded to stay and join in organizing Missoula County.

-Bannack City became the centre of their operations.

-

-Alder Gulch and Virginia City were, in 1863, a second focus for the

-mines of eastern Idaho. Their deposits had been found by accident

-by a prospecting party which was returning to Bannack City after an

-unsuccessful trip. The party, which had been investigating the Big

-Horn Mountains, discovered Alder Gulch between the Beaver Head and

-Madison rivers, early in June. With an accurate knowledge of the

-mining population, the discoverers organized the mining district and

-registered their own claims before revealing the location of the new

-diggings. Then came a stampede from Bannack City which gave to Virginia

-City a population of 10,000 by 1864.

-

-Another mining district, in Last Chance Gulch, gave rise in 1864 to

-Helena, the last of the great boom towns of this period. Its situation

-as well as its resources aided in the growth of Helena, which lay a

-little west of the Madison fork of the Missouri, and in the direct line

-from Bannack and Virginia City to Fort Benton. Only 142 miles of easy

-staging above the head of Missouri River navigation, it was a natural

-post on the main line of travel to the northwest fields.

-

-The excitement over Bannack and Virginia and Helena overlapped in years

-the period of similar boom in Idaho. It had begun even before Idaho had

-been created. When this was once organized, the same inconveniences

-which had justified it, justified as well its division to provide home

-rule for the miners east of the Bitter Root range. An act of 1864

-created Montana territory with the boundaries which the state possesses

-to-day, while that part of Idaho south of Montana, now Wyoming, was

-temporarily reattached to Dakota. Idaho assumed its present form. The

-simultaneous development in all portions of the great West of rich

-mining camps did much to attract public attention as well as population.

-

-In 1863 nearly all of the camps were flourishing. The mountains were

-occupied for the whole distance from Mexico to Canada, while the trails

-were crowded with emigrants hunting for fortune. The old trails bore

-much of the burden of migration as usual, but new spurs were opened

-to meet new needs. In the north, the Mullan road had made easy travel

-from Fort Benton to Walla Walla, and had been completed since 1862.

-Congress authorized in 1864 a new road from eastern Nebraska, which

-should run north of the Platte trail, and the war department had sent

-out personally conducted parties of emigrants from the vicinity of St.

-Paul. The Idaho and Montana mines were accessible from Fort Hall, the

-former by the old emigrant road, the latter by a new northeast road to

-Virginia City. The Carson mines were on the main line of the California

-road. The Arizona fields were commonly reached from California, by way

-of Fort Yuma.

-

-The shifting population which inhabited the new territories invites

-and at the same time defies description. It was made up chiefly of

-young men. Respectable women were not unknown, but were so few in

-number as to have little measurable influence upon social life. In

-many towns they were in the minority, even among their sex, since the

-easily won wealth of the camps attracted dissolute women who cannot

-be numbered but who must be imagined. The social tone of the various

-camps was determined by the preponderance of men, the absence of

-regular labor, and the speculative fever which was the justification

-of their existence. The political tone was determined by the nature

-of the population, the character of the industry, and the remoteness

-from a seat of government. Combined, these factors produced a type of

-life the like of which America had never known, and whose picturesque

-qualities have blinded the thoughtless into believing that it was

-romantic. It was at best a hard bitter struggle with the dark places

-only accentuated by the tinsel of gambling and adventure.

-

-A single street meandering along a valley, with one-story huts

-flanking it in irregular rows, was the typical mining camp. The saloon

-and the general store, sometimes combined, were its representative

-institutions. Deep ruts along the street bore witness to the heavy

-wheels of the freighters, while horses loosely tied to all available

-posts at once revealed the regular means of locomotion, and by the

-careless way they were left about showed that this sort of property

-was not likely to be stolen. The mining population centring here lived

-a life of contrasts. The desolation and loneliness of prospecting and

-working claims alternated with the excitement of coming to town. Few

-decent beings habitually lived in the towns. The resident population

-expected to live off the miners, either in way of trade, or worse.

-The bar, the gambling-house, the dance-hall have been made too common

-in description to need further account. In the reaction against

-loneliness, the extremes of drunkenness, debauchery, and murder were

-only too frequent in these places of amusement.

-

-That the camps did not destroy themselves in their own frenzy is a

-tribute to the solid qualities which underlay the recklessness and

-shiftlessness of much of the population. In most of the camps there

-came a time when decency finally asserted itself in the only possible

-way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity with which these camps had

-drawn their hundreds and their thousands into the fastnesses of the

-territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary law and regular

-institutions. Law and the politician followed fast enough, but there

-was generally an interval after the discovery during which such peace

-prevailed as the community itself demanded. In absence of sheriff and

-constable, and jail in which to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance

-committee was the only protection of the new camp. Such summary justice

-as these committees commonly executed is evidence of innate tendency

-toward law and order, not of their defiance. The typical camp passed

-through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start, then came

-an era of invasion by hordes of miners and disreputable hangers-on,

-with accompanying violence and crime. Following this, the vigilance

-committee, in its stern repression of a few of the crudest sins, marks

-the beginning of a reign of law.

-

-The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized the United

-States with the whole area of the nation, and dispelled most of the

-remaining tradition of desert which hung over the mountain West. They

-attracted a large floating population, they secured the completion of

-the political map through the erection of new territories, and they

-emphasized loudly the need for national transportation on a larger

-scale than the trail and the stage coach could permit. But they did

-not directly secure the presence of permanent population in the new

-territories. Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants as soon

-as the first flush of discovery was over. Montana, Idaho, and Colorado

-declined rapidly to a fraction of their largest size. None of them was

-successful in securing a large permanent population until agriculture

-had gained firm foothold. Many indeed who came to mine remained to

-plough, but the permanent populating of the Far West was the work

-of railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the mining camps

-had served their purpose in revealing the nature of the whole of the

-national domain.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XI

-

-THE OVERLAND MAIL

-

-

-Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized

-traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all

-the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri

-border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and

-left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not

-self-supporting for a decade or more; few of them were independent

-within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand for necessities

-and luxuries which must be hauled from the states to the new market

-by the routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled. Greater

-than their need for material supplies was that for intellectual

-stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and the regular carriage of the mails

-were constantly demanded of the express companies and the post-office

-department. To meet this pressure there was organized in the fifties

-a great system of wagon traffic. In the years from 1858 to 1869 it

-reached its mighty culmination; while its possibilities of speed,

-order, and convenience had only just come to be realized when the

-continental railways brought this agency of transportation to an end.

-

-The individual emigrant who had gathered together his family, his

-flocks, and his household goods, who had cut away from the life at

-home and staked everything on his new venture, was the unit in the

-great migrations. There was no regular provision for going unless one

-could form his own self-contained and self-supporting party. Various

-bands grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence, but the

-characteristic feature of the emigration was private initiative. The

-home-seekers had no power in themselves to maintain communication

-with the old country, yet they had no disposition to be forgotten or

-to forget. Professional freighting companies and carriers of mails

-appeared just as soon as the traffic promised a profit.

-

-A water mail to California had been arranged even before the gold

-discovery lent a new interest to the Pacific Coast. From New York

-to the Isthmus, and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be

-carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which sent the

-nucleus of its fleet around Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The

-arrival of the first mail in San Francisco in February, 1849, commenced

-the regular public communication between the United States and the

-new colonies. For the places lying away from the coast, mails were

-hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and

-California were given a measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.

-

-There is little interest in the earlier phases of the overland mail

-service save in that they foreshadowed greater things. A stage line

-was started from Independence to Santa Fe in the summer of 1849;

-another contract was let to a man named Woodson for a monthly carriage

-to Salt Lake City. Neither of the carriers made a serious attempt to

-stock his route or open stations. Their stages advanced under the same

-conditions, and with little more rapidity than the ordinary emigrant

-or freighter. Mormon interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley

-Carrying Company at about this time. For four or five years both

-government and private industry were experimenting with the problems of

-long-distance wagon traffic,--the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the

-stations, the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort made in 1856,

-by the War Department, to acclimate the Saharan camel on the American

-desert as a beast of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the

-experiment, in execution of which Secretary Davis sent Lieutenant H. C.

-Wayne to the Levant to purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels

-were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio. There is a long

-congressional document filled with the correspondence of this attempt

-and embellished with cuts of types of camels and equipment.

-

-While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas plains, Congress made

-a more definite movement towards supplying the Pacific Slope with

-adequate service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in 1857 to call

-for bids for an overland mail which, in a single organization, should

-join the Missouri to Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run

-at a high scheduled speed. The service which the Postmaster-general

-invited in his advertisement was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or

-semi-monthly at his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years;

-it was to carry through the mails in four-horse wagons in not more

-than twenty-five days. A long list of bidders, including most of the

-firms engaged in plains freighting, responded with their bids and

-itineraries; from them the department selected the offer of a company

-headed by one John Butterfield, and explained to the public in 1857 the

-reasons for its choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract

-was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made a junction near the

-western border of Arkansas, and proceeded thence through Preston,

-Texas, El Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails the company was

-to receive $600,000 a year. The choice of the most southern of routes

-required considerable explanation, since the best-known road ran

-by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this latter route the

-Postmaster-general pointed out the cold and snow of winter, and claimed

-that the experience of the department during seven years proved the

-impossibility of maintaining a regular service here. A second available

-road had been revealed by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across

-northern Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but this was

-likewise too long and too severe. The best route, in his mind--the one

-open all the year, through a temperate climate, suitable for migration

-as well as traffic--was this southern route, via El Paso. It is well to

-remember that the administration which made this choice was democratic

-and of strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific railway was

-expected to follow the course of the overland mail.

-

-The first overland coaches left the opposite ends of the line on

-September 15, 1858. The east-bound stage carried an agent of the

-Post-office Department, whose report states that the through trip to

-Tipton, Missouri, and thence by rail to St. Louis, was made in 20 days,

-18 hours, 26 minutes, actual time. "I cordially congratulate you upon

-the result," wired President Buchanan to Butterfield. "It is a glorious

-triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon follow

-the course of the road, and the East and West will be bound together

-by a chain of living Americans which can never be broken." The route

-was 2795 miles long. For nearly all the way there was no settlement

-upon which the stages could rely. The company built such stations as it

-needed.

-

-The vehicle of the overland mail, the most interesting vehicle of

-the plains, was the coach manufactured by the Abbott-Downing Company

-of Concord, New Hampshire. No better wagon for the purpose has been

-devised. Its heavy wheels, with wide, thick tires, were set far apart

-to prevent capsizing. Its body, braced with iron bands, and built of

-stout white oak, was slung on leather thoroughbraces which took the

-strain better and were more nearly unbreakable than any other springs.

-Inside were generally three seats, for three passengers each, though

-at times as many as fourteen besides the driver and messenger were

-carried. Adjustable curtains kept out part of the rain and cold. High

-up in front sat the driver, with a passenger or two on the box and a

-large assortment of packages tucked away beneath his seat. Behind the

-body was the triangular "boot" in which were stowed the passengers'

-boxes and the mail sacks. The overflow of mail went inside under the

-seats. Mr. Clemens tells of filling the whole body three feet deep with

-mail, and of the passengers being forced to sprawl out on the irregular

-bed thus made for them. Complaining letter-writers tell of sacks

-carried between the axles and the body, under the coach, and of the

-disasters to letters and contents resulting from fording streams. Drawn

-by four galloping mules and painted a gaudy red or green, the coach

-was a visible emblem of spectacular western advance. Horace Greeley's

-coach, bright red, was once charged by a herd of enraged buffaloes and

-overturned, to the discomfort and injury of the venerable editor.

-

-It was no comfortable or luxurious trip that the overland passenger

-had, with all the sumptuous equipment of the new route. The time

-limit was twenty-five days, reduced in practice to twenty-two or

-twenty-three, at the price of constant travel day and night, regardless

-of weather or convenience. One passenger who declined to follow this

-route has left his reason why. The "Southern, known as the Butterfield

-or American Express, offered to start me in an ambulance from St.

-Louis, and to pass me through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on the

-Gila River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate portion

-of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and nights--twenty-five being

-schedule time--must be spent in that ambulance; passengers becoming

-crazy by whiskey, mixed with want of sleep, are often obliged to be

-strapped to their seats; their meals, despatched during the ten-minute

-halts, are simply abominable, the heats are excessive, the climate

-malarious; lamps may not be used at night for fear of non-existent

-Indians: briefly there is no end to this Via Mala's miseries." But the

-alternative which confronted this traveller in 1860 was scarcely more

-pleasant. "You may start by stage to the gold regions about Denver City

-or Pike's Peak, and thence, if not accidentally or purposely shot, you

-may proceed by an uncertain ox train to Great Salt Lake City, which

-latter part cannot take less than thirty-five days."

-

-Once upon the road, the passenger might nearly as well have been at

-sea. There was no turning back. His discomforts and dangers became

-inevitable. The stations erected along the trail were chiefly for the

-benefit of the live stock. Horses and mules must be kept in good shape,

-whatever happened to passengers. Some of the depots, "home stations,"

-had a family in residence, a dwelling of logs, adobe, or sod, and

-offered bacon, potatoes, bread, and coffee of a sort, to those who were

-not too squeamish. The others, or "swing" stations, had little but a

-corral and a haystack, with a few stock tenders. The drivers were often

-drunk and commonly profane. The overseers and division superintendents

-differed from them only in being a little more resolute and dangerous.

-Freighting and coaching were not child's play for either passengers or

-employees.

-

-The Butterfield Overland Express began to work its six year contract

-in September, 1858. Other coach and mail services increased the number

-of continental routes to three by 1860. From New Orleans, by way of

-San Antonio and El Paso, a weekly service had been organized, but its

-importance was far less than that of the great route, and not equal to

-that by way of the Great Salt Lake.

-

-Staging over the Platte trail began on a large scale with the discovery

-of gold near Pike's Peak in 1858. The Mormon mails, interrupted by the

-Mormon War, had been revived; but a new concern had sprung up under the

-name of the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company. The firm of

-Jones and Russell, soon to give way to Russell, Majors, and Waddell,

-had seen the possibilities of the new boom camps, and had inaugurated

-regular stage service in May, 1859. Henry Villard rode out in the

-first coach. Horace Greeley followed in June. After some experimenting

-in routes, the line accepted a considerable part of the Platte trail,

-leaving the road at the forks of the river. Here Julesburg came into

-existence as the most picturesque home station on the plains. It was

-at this station that Jack Slade, whom Mark Twain found to be a mild,

-hospitable, coffee-sharing man, cut off the ears of old Jules, after

-the latter had emptied two barrels of bird-shot into him. It was

-"celebrated for its desperadoes," wrote General Dodge. "No twenty-four

-hours passed without its contribution to Boots Hill (the cemetery whose

-every occupant was buried in his boots), and homicide was performed in

-the most genial and whole-souled way."

-

-Before the Denver coach had been running for a year another enterprise

-had brought the central route into greater prominence. Butterfield had

-given California news in less than twenty-five days from the Missouri,

-but California wanted more even than this, until the electric telegraph

-should come. Senator Gwin urged upon the great freight concern the

-starting of a faster service for light mails only. It was William H.

-Russell who, to meet this supposed demand, organized a pony express,

-which he announced to a startled public in the end of March. Across the

-continent from Placerville to St. Joseph he built his stations from

-nine to fifteen miles apart, nearly two hundred in all. He supplied

-these with tenders and riders, stocked them with fodder and fleet

-American horses, and started his first riders at both ends on the 3d of

-April, 1860.

-

-Only letters of great commercial importance could be carried by the

-new express. They were written on tissue paper, packed into a small,

-light saddlebag, and passed from rider to rider along the route. The

-time announced in the schedule was ten days,--two weeks better than

-Butterfield's best. To make it called for constant motion at top

-speed, with horses trained to the work and changed every few miles.

-The carriers were slight men of 135 pounds or under, whose nerve and

-endurance could stand the strain. Often mere boys were employed in the

-dangerous service. Rain or snow or death made no difference to the

-express. Dangers of falling at night, of missing precipitous mountain

-roads where advance at a walk was perilous, had to be faced. When

-Indians were hostile, this new risk had to be run. But for eighteen

-months the service was continued as announced. It ceased only when the

-overland telegraph, in October, 1861, declared its readiness to handle

-through business.

-

-In the pony express was the spectacular perfection of overland service.

-Its best record was some hours under eight days. It was conducted along

-the well-known trail from St. Joseph to Forts Kearney, Laramie, and

-Bridger; thence to Great Salt Lake City, and by way of Carson City to

-Placerville and Sacramento. It carried the news in a time when every

-day brought new rumors of war and disunion, in the pregnant campaign

-of 1860 and through the opening of the Civil War. The records of its

-riders at times approached the marvellous. One lad, William F. Cody,

-who has since lived to become the personal embodiment of the Far West

-as Buffalo Bill, rode more than 320 consecutive miles on a single

-tour. The literature of the plains is full of instances of courage and

-endurance shown in carrying through the despatches.

-

-The Butterfield mail was transferred to the central route of the pony

-express in the summer of 1861. For two and a half years it had run

-steadily along its southern route, proving the entire practicability

-of carrying on such a service. But its expense had been out of all

-proportion to its revenue. In 1859 the Postmaster-general reported

-that its total receipts from mails had been $27,229.94, as against a

-cost of $600,000. It is not unlikely that the fast service would have

-been dropped had not the new military necessity of 1861 forbidden any

-act which might loosen the bonds between the Pacific and the Atlantic

-states. Congress contemplated the approach of war and authorized early

-in 1861 the abandonment of the southern route through the confederate

-territory, and the transfer of the service to the line of the pony

-express. To secure additional safety the mails were sent by way of

-Davenport, Iowa, and Omaha, to Fort Kearney a few times, but Atchison

-became the starting-point at last, while military force was used to

-keep the route free from interference. The transfer worked a shortening

-of from five to seven days over the southern route.

-

-In the autumn of 1861, when the overland mail and the pony express were

-both running at top speed along the Platte trail, the overland service

-reached its highest point. In October the telegraph brought an end to

-the express. "The Pacific to the Atlantic sends greeting," ran the

-first message over the new wire, "and may both oceans be dry before a

-foot of all the land that lies between them shall belong to any other

-than one united country." Probably the pony express had done its share

-in keeping touch between California and the Union. Certainly only its

-national purpose justified its existence, since it was run at a loss

-that brought ruin to Russell, its backer, and to Majors and Waddell,

-his partners.

-

-Russell, Majors, and Waddell, with the biggest freighting business of

-the plains, had gone heavily into passenger and express service in

-1859-1860. Russell had forced through the pony express against the

-wishes of his partners, carried away from practical considerations

-by the magnitude of the idea. The transfer of the southern overland

-to their route increased their business and responsibility. The

-future of the route steadily looked larger. "Every day," wrote the

-Postmaster-general, "brings intelligence of the discovery of new

-mines of gold and silver in the region traversed by this mail route,

-which gives assurance that it will not be many years before it will

-be protected and supported throughout the greater part of the route

-by a civilized population." Under the name of the Central Overland,

-California, and Pike's Peak Express the firm tried to keep up a

-struggle too great for them. "Clean out of Cash and Poor Pay" is said

-to have been an irreverent nickname coined by one of their drivers.

-As their embarrassments steadily increased, their notes were given to

-a rival contractor who was already beginning local routes to reach

-the mining camps of eastern Washington. Ben Holladay had been the

-power behind the company for several months before the courts gave him

-control of their overland stage line in 1862. The greatest names in

-this overland business are first Butterfield, then Russell, Majors, and

-Waddell, and then Ben Holladay, whose power lasted until he sold out

-to Wells, Fargo, and Company in 1866. Ben Holladay was the magnate of

-the plains during the early sixties. A hostile critic, Henry Villard,

-has written that he was "a genuine specimen of the successful Western

-pioneer of former days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful,

-false, and cunning." In later days he carried his speculation into

-railways and navigation, but already his was the name most often heard

-in the West. Mark Twain, who has left in "Roughing It" the best picture

-of life in the Far West in this decade, speaks lightly of him when he

-tells of a youth travelling in the Holy Land with a reverend preceptor

-who was impressing upon him the greatness of Moses, "'the great guide,

-soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot where

-we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in

-extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children

-of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over

-the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and

-landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot. It

-was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack. Think of it!"

-

-"'Forty years? Only three hundred miles?'" replied Jack. "'Humph! Ben

-Holladay would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!'"

-

-Under Holladay's control the passenger and express service were

-developed into what was probably the greatest one-man institution in

-America. He directed not only the central overland, but spur lines with

-government contracts to upper California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

-He travelled up and down the line constantly himself, attending in

-person to business in Washington and on the Pacific. The greatest

-difficulties in his service were the Indians and progress as stated in

-the railway. Man and nature could be fought off and overcome, but the

-life of the stage-coach was limited before it was begun.

-

-The Indian danger along the trails had steadily increased since the

-commencement of the migrations. For many years it had not been large,

-since there was room for all and the emigrants held well to the beaten

-track. But the gold camps had introduced settlers into new sections,

-and had sent prospectors into all the Indian Country. The opening of

-new roads to the Pacific increased the pressure, until the Indians

-began to believe that the end was at hand unless they should bestir

-themselves. The last years of the overland service, between 1862 and

-1868, were hence filled with Indian attacks. Often for weeks no coach

-could go through. Once, by premeditation, every station for nearly two

-hundred miles was destroyed overnight, Julesburg, the greatest of them

-all, being in the list. The presence of troops to defend seemed only to

-increase the zeal of the red men to destroy.

-

-Besides these losses, which lessened his profits and threatened ruin,

-Holladay had to meet competition in his own trade, and detraction as

-well. Captain James L. Fiske, who had broken a new road through from

-Minnesota to Montana, came east in 1863, "by the 'overland stage,'

-travelling over the saline plains of Laramie and Colorado Territory

-and the sand deserts of Nebraska and Kansas. The country was strewed

-with the skeletons and carcases of cattle, and the graves of the early

-Mormon and California pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst

-emigrant route that I have ever travelled; much of the road is through

-deep sand, feed is very scanty, a great deal of the water is alkaline,

-and the snows in winter render it impassable for trains. The stage line

-is wretchedly managed. The company undertake to furnish travellers with

-meals, (at a dollar a meal,) but very frequently on arriving at a

-station there was nothing to eat, the supplies had not been sent on. On

-one occasion we fasted for thirty-six hours. The stages were sometimes

-in a miserable condition. We were put into a coach one night with only

-two boards left in the bottom. On remonstrating with the driver, we

-were told to hold on by the sides."

-

-At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay controlled a monopoly

-in stage service between the Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The

-express companies and railways met him at the ends of his link, but had

-to accept his terms for intermediate traffic. In the summer of 1865

-a competing firm started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on

-the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that Indian dangers here

-were greater than along the Platte, and it learned how near it was to

-bankruptcy when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had sent

-his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand a more detailed

-statement of resources and conditions than the Overland Despatch itself

-possessed. He purchased easily at his own price and so ended this

-danger of competition.

-

-Such was the character of the overland traffic that any day might

-bring a successful rival, or loss by accident. Holladay seems to have

-realized that the advantages secured by priority were over, and that

-the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866 he sold out his

-lines to the greatest of his competitors, Wells, Fargo, and Company.

-He sold out wisely. The new concern lost on its purchase through the

-rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the Pacific railway had

-advanced so far that the end of the mail route was moved to Fort

-Kearney in November. By May, 1869, some years earlier than Wells, Fargo

-had estimated, the road was done. And on the completion of the Union

-and Central Pacific railways the great period of the overland mail was

-ended.

-

-Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland freight that lacked

-the seeming romance of the former, but possessed quite as much of

-real significance. No one has numbered the trains of wagons that

-supplied the Far West. Santa Fe wagons they were now; Pennsylvania

-or Pittsburg wagons they had been called in the early days of the

-Santa Fe trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the remoter time

-of the trans-Alleghany migrations. But whatever their name, they

-retained the characteristics of the wagons and caravans of the earlier

-period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons, organized in trains

-of twenty-six, from the Butterfield Overland Despatch in 1866. Six

-thousand were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in 1865. One

-of the drivers on the overland mail, Frank Root, relates that Russell,

-Majors, and Waddell owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height of

-their business. The long trains, crawling along half hidden in their

-clouds of dust, with the noises of the animals and the profanity of

-the drivers, were the physical bond between the sections. The mail and

-express served politics and intellect; the freighters provided the

-comforts and decencies of life.

-

-The overland traffic had begun on the heels of the first migrations.

-Its growth during the fifties and its triumphant period in the sixties

-were great arguments in favor of the construction of railways to take

-its place. It came to an end when the first continental railroad

-was completed in 1869. For decades after this time the stages still

-found useful service on branch lines and to new camps, and occasional

-exhibition in the "Wild West Shows," but the railways were following

-them closely, for a new period of American history had begun.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XII

-

-THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER

-

-

-In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented

-the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the

-Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf hoped to become the terminus

-and had advocates throughout its section of the country. The list of

-claimants is a catalogue of Mississippi Valley towns. New Orleans,

-Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, and Duluth were all

-entered in the competition. By 1860 the idea had received general

-acceptance; no one in the future need urge its adoption, but the

-greatest part of the work remained to be done.

-

-Born during the thirties, the idea of a Pacific railway was of

-uncertain origin and parentage. Just so soon as there was a railroad

-anywhere, it was inevitable that some enterprising visionary should

-project one in imagination to the extremity of the continent. The

-railway speculation, with which the East was seething during the

-administrations of Andrew Jackson, was boiling over in the young West,

-so that the group of men advocating a railway to connect the oceans

-were but the product of their time.

-

-Greatest among these enthusiasts was Asa Whitney, a New York merchant

-interested in the China trade and eager to win the commerce of the

-Orient for the United States. Others had declared such a road to be

-possible before he presented his memorial to Congress in 1845, but none

-had staked so much upon the idea. He abandoned the business, conducted

-a private survey in Wisconsin and Iowa, and was at last convinced that

-"the time is not far distant when Oregon will become ... a separate

-nation" unless communication should "unite them to us." He petitioned

-Congress in January, 1845, for a franchise and a grant of land, that

-the national road might be accomplished; and for many years he agitated

-persistently for his project.

-

-The annexation of Oregon and the Southwest, coming in the years

-immediately after the commencement of Whitney's advocacy, gave new

-point to arguments for the railway and introduced the sectional

-element. So long as Oregon constituted the whole American frontage on

-the Pacific it was idle to debate railway routes south of South Pass.

-This was the only known, practicable route, and it was the course

-recommended by all the projectors, down to Whitney. But with California

-won, the other trails by El Paso and Santa Fe came into consideration

-and at once tempted the South to make the railway tributary to its own

-interests.

-

-Chief among the politicians who fell in with the growing railway

-movement was Senator Benton, who tried to place himself at its

-head. "The man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I

-say (without believing it perhaps)," he declared in October, 1844,

-"who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific

-Ocean--entering the Oregon River--climbing the western slopes of the

-Rocky Mountains--issuing from its gorges--and spreading its fertilizing

-streams over our wide-extended Union!" After this date there was no

-subject closer to his interest than the railway, and his advocacy

-was constant. His last word in the Senate was concerning it. In 1849

-he carried off its feet the St. Louis railroad convention with his

-eloquent appeal for a central route: "Let us make the iron road, and

-make it from sea to sea--States and individuals making it east of

-the Mississippi, the nation making it west. Let us ... rise above

-everything sectional, personal, local. Let us ... build the great

-road ... which shall be adorned with ... the colossal statue of the

-great Columbus--whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass

-of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road ... pointing

-with outstretched arm to the western horizon and saying to the flying

-passengers, 'There is the East, there is India.'"

-

-By 1850 it was common knowledge that a railroad could be built along

-the Platte route, and it was believed that the mountains could be

-penetrated in several other places, but the process of surveying

-with reference to a particular railway had not yet been begun. It

-is possible and perhaps instructive to make a rough grouping, in two

-classes divided by the year 1842, of the explorations before 1853.

-So late as Fremont's day it was not generally known whether a great

-river entered the Pacific between the Columbia and the Colorado.

-Prior to 1842 the explorations are to be regarded as "incidents"

-and "adventures" in more or less unknown countries. The narratives

-were popular rather than scientific, representing the experiences of

-parties surveying boundary lines or locating wagon roads, of troops

-marching to remote posts or chastising Indians, of missionaries and

-casual explorers. In the aggregate they had contributed a large mass

-of detailed but unorganized information concerning the country where

-the continental railway must run. But Lieutenant Fremont, in 1842,

-commenced the effort by the United States to acquire accurate and

-comprehensive knowledge of the West. In 1842, 1843, and 1845 Fremont

-conducted the three Rocky Mountain expeditions which established him

-for life as a popular hero. The map, drawn by Charles Preuss for his

-second expedition, confined itself in strict scientific fashion to the

-facts actually observed, and in skill of execution was perhaps the best

-map made before 1853. The individual expeditions which in the later

-forties filled in the details of portions of the Fremont map are too

-numerous for mention. At least twenty-five occurred before 1853, all

-serving to extend both general and particular knowledge of the West. To

-these was added a great mass of popular books, prepared by emigrants

-and travellers. By 1853 there was good, unscientific knowledge of

-nearly all the West, and accurate information concerning some portions

-of it. The railroad enthusiasts could tell the general direction in

-which the roads must run, but no road could well be located without a

-more comprehensive survey than had yet been made.

-

-The agitation of the Pacific railway idea was founded almost

-exclusively upon general and inaccurate knowledge of the West. The

-exact location of the line was naturally left for the professional

-civil engineer, its popular advocate contented himself with general

-principles. Frequently these were sufficient, yet, as in the case

-of Benton, misinformation led to the waste of strength upon routes

-unquestionably bad. But there was slight danger of the United States

-being led into an unwise route, since in the diversity of routes

-suggested there was deadlock. Until after 1850, in proportion as

-the idea was received with unanimity, the routes were fought with

-increasing bitterness. Whitney was shelved in 1852 when the choice of

-routes had become more important than the method of construction.

-

-In 1852-1853 Congress worked upon one of the many bills to construct

-the much-desired railway to the Pacific. It was discovered that an

-absolute majority in favor of the work existed, but the enemies of the

-measure, virulent in proportion as they were in the minority, were

-able to sow well-fertilized dissent. They admitted and gloried in

-the intrigue which enabled them to command through the time-honored

-method of division. They defeated the road in this Congress. But when

-the army appropriation bill came along in February, 1853, Senator

-Gwin asked for an amendment for a survey. He doubted the wisdom of a

-survey, since, "if any route is reported to this body as the best,

-those that may be rejected will always go against the one selected."

-But he admitted himself to be as a drowning man who "will catch at

-straws," and begged that $150,000 be allowed to the President for a

-survey of the best routes from the Mississippi to the Pacific, the

-survey to be conducted by the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the

-regular army. To a non-committal measure like this the opposition could

-make slight resistance. The Senate, by a vote of 31 to 16, added this

-amendment to the army appropriation bill, while the House concurred in

-nearly the same proportion. The first positive official act towards the

-construction of the road was here taken.

-

-Under the orders of Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, well-organized

-exploring parties took to the field in the spring of 1853. Farthest

-north, Isaac I. Stevens, bound for his post as first governor of

-Washington territory, conducted a line of survey to the Pacific between

-the parallels of 47 deg. and 49 deg., north latitude. South of the

-Stevens survey, four other lines were worked out. Near the parallels of

-41 deg. and 42 deg., the old South Pass route was again examined.

-Fremont's favorite line, between 38 deg. and 39 deg., received

-consideration. A thirty-fifth parallel route was examined in great

-detail, while on this and another along the thirty-second parallel the

-most friendly attentions of the War Department were lavished. The second

-and third routes had few important friends. Governor Stevens, because he

-was a first-rate fighter, secured full space for the survey in his

-charge. But the thirty-second and thirty-fifth parallel routes were

-those which were expected to make good.

-

-Governor Stevens left Washington on May 9, 1853, for St. Louis, where

-he made arrangements with the American Fur Company to transport a large

-part of his supplies by river to Fort Union. From St. Louis he ascended

-the Mississippi by steamer to St. Paul, near which city Camp Pierce,

-his first organized camp, had been established. Here he issued his

-instructions and worked into shape his party,--to say nothing of his

-172 half-broken mules. "Not a single full team of broken animals could

-be selected, and well broken riding animals were essential, for most of

-the gentlemen of the scientific corps were unaccustomed to riding." One

-of the engineers dislocated a shoulder before he conquered his steed.

-

-The party assigned to Governor Stevens's command was recruited with

-reference to the varied demands of a general exploring and scientific

-reconnaissance. Besides enlisted men and laborers, it included

-engineers, a topographer, an artist, a surgeon and naturalist, an

-astronomer, a meteorologist, and a geologist. Its two large volumes of

-report include elaborate illustrations and appendices on botany and

-seven different varieties of zoology in addition to the geographical

-details required for the railway.

-

-The expedition, in its various branches, attacked the northernmost

-route simultaneously in several places. Governor Stevens led the

-eastern division from St. Paul. A small body of his men, with much of

-the supplies, were sent up the Missouri in the American Fur Company's

-boat to Fort Union, there to make local observations and await the

-arrival of the governor. United there the party continued overland

-to Fort Benton and the mountains. Six years later than this it would

-have been possible to ascend by boat all the way to Fort Benton, but

-as yet no steamer had gone much above Fort Union. From the Pacific end

-the second main division operated. Governor Stevens secured the recall

-of Captain George B. McClellan from duty in Texas, and his detail in

-command of a corps which was to proceed to the mouth of the Columbia

-River and start an eastward survey. In advance of McClellan, Lieutenant

-Saxton was to hurry on to erect a supply depot in the Bitter Root

-Valley, and then to cross the divide and make a junction with the main

-party.

-

-From Governor Stevens's reports it would seem that his survey was a

-triumphal progress. To his threefold capacities as commander, governor,

-and Indian superintendent, nature had added a magnifying eye and

-an unrestrained enthusiasm. No formal expedition had traversed his

-route since the day of Lewis and Clark. The Indians could still be

-impressed by the physical appearance of the whites. His vanity led him

-at each success or escape from accident to congratulate himself on the

-antecedent wisdom which had warded off the danger. But withal, his

-report was thorough and his party was loyal. The _voyageurs_ whom he

-had engaged received his special praise. "They are thorough woodsmen

-and just the men for prairie life also, going into the water as

-pleasantly as a spaniel, and remaining there as long as needed."

-

-Across the undulating fertile plains the party advanced from St. Paul

-with little difficulty. Its draught animals steadily improved in health

-and strength. The Indians were friendly and honest. "My father," said

-Old Crane of the Assiniboin, "our hearts are good; we are poor and have

-not much.... Our good father has told us about this road. I do not

-see how it will benefit us, and I fear my people will be driven from

-these plains before the white men." In fifty-five days Fort Union was

-reached. Here the American Fur Company maintained an extensive post

-in a stockade 250 feet square, and carried on a large trade with "the

-Assiniboines, the Gros Ventres, the Crows, and other migratory bands

-of Indians." At Fort Union, Alexander Culbertson, the agent, became

-the guide of the party, which proceeded west on August 10. From Fort

-Union it was nearly 400 miles to Fort Benton, which then stood on the

-left bank of the Missouri, some eighteen miles below the falls. The

-country, though less friendly than that east of the Missouri, offered

-little difficulty to the party, which covered the distance in three

-weeks. A week later, September 8, a party sent on from Fort Benton met

-Lieutenant Saxton coming east.

-

-The chief problems of the Stevens survey lay west of Fort Benton,

-in the passes of the continental divide. Lieutenant Saxton had left

-Vancouver early in July, crossed the Cascades with difficulty, and

-started up the Columbia from the Dalles on July 18. He reached Fort

-Walla Walla on the 27th, and proceeded thence with a half-breed guide

-through the country of the Spokan and the Coeur d'Alene. Crossing the

-Snake, he broke his only mercurial barometer and was forced thereafter

-to rely on his aneroid. Deviating to the north, he crossed Lake Pend

-d'Oreille on August 10, and reached St. Mary's village, in the Bitter

-Root Valley, on August 28. St. Mary's village, among the Flatheads, had

-been established by the Jesuit fathers, and had advanced considerably,

-as Indian civilization went. Here Saxton erected his supply depot,

-from which he advanced with a smaller escort to join the main party.

-Always, even in the heart of the mountains, the country exceeded his

-expectations. "Nature seemed to have intended it for the great highway

-across the continent, and it appeared to offer but little obstruction

-to the passage of a railroad."

-

-Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced his party at Fort

-Benton, stored much of his government property there, and started

-west with a pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved on

-September 22, anxious lest snow should catch him in the mountains. At

-Fort Benton he left a detachment to make meteorological observations

-during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left another under Lieutenant

-Mullan. On October 7 he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley

-for Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's party, which had been

-spending a difficult season in the passes of the Cascade range. Because

-of overcautious advice which McClellan here gave him, and since his

-animals were tired out with the summer's hardships, he practically

-ended his survey for 1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia

-to Olympia and his new territory.

-

-The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to make one of the first

-of the Pacific railway reports. His was the only survey from the

-Mississippi to the ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30, 1854,

-it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled reports. In 1859 he

-submitted his "narrative and final report" which the Senate ordered

-Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February of

-that year. This document is printed as supplement to Volume I, but

-really consists of two large volumes which are commonly bound together

-as Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes of the reports,

-his are filled with lithographs and engravings of fauna, flora, and

-topography.

-

-The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by Lieutenant E. G.

-Beckwith, of the third artillery, in the summer of 1854. East of Fort

-Bridger, the War Department felt it unnecessary to make a special

-survey, since Fremont had traversed and described the country several

-times and Stansbury had surveyed it carefully as recently as 1849-1850.

-At the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt Lake. During

-April he visited the Green River Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by

-his surveys the entire practicability of railway construction here.

-In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake and passed along

-the Humboldt to the Sacramento Valley. He had no important adventures

-and was impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians, whose

-grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups" were frequently seen. As

-his band approached the Indians would fearfully cache their belongings

-in the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed a novel and ludicrous

-sight of wretchedness to see them approach their bush and attempt,

-slyly (for they still tried to conceal from me what they were about),

-to repossess themselves of their treasures, one bringing out a piece

-of old buckskin, a couple of feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn;

-another a half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition,

-sewed together, which he would swing over his shoulders by a

-string--his only blanket or clothing; while a third brought out a blue

-string, which he girded about him and walked away in full dress--one

-of the lords of the soil." It needed no special emphasis in Beckwith's

-report to prove that a railway could follow this middle route, since

-thousands of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.

-

-[Illustration: FORT SNELLING

-

-From an old photograph, loaned by Horace B. Hudson, of Minneapolis.]

-

-Beckwith, who started his forty-second parallel survey from Salt Lake

-City, had reached that point as one of the officers in Gunnison's

-unfortunate party. Captain J. W. Gunnison had followed Governor Stevens

-into St. Louis in 1853. His field of exploration, the route of 38

-deg.-39 deg., was by no means new to him since he had been to Utah with

-Stansbury in 1849 and 1850, and had already written one of the best books

-upon the Mormon settlement. He carried his party up the Missouri to a

-fitting-out camp just below the mouth of the Kansas River, five miles

-from Westport. Like other commanders he spent much time at the start

-in "breaking in wild mules," with which he advanced in rain and mud on

-June 23. For more than two weeks his party moved in parallel columns

-along the Santa Fe road and the Smoky Hill fork of the Kansas. Near

-Walnut creek on the Santa Fe road they united, and soon were following

-the Arkansas River towards the mountains. At Fort Atkinson they found a

-horde of the plains Indians waiting for Major Fitzpatrick to make a

-treaty with them. Always their observations were taken with regularity.

-One day Captain Gunnison spent in vain efforts to secure specimens of

-the elusive prairie dog. On August 1, when they were ready to leave the

-Arkansas and plunge southwest into the Sangre de Cristo range, they

-were gratified "by a clear and beautiful view of the Spanish Peaks."

-

-This thirty-ninth parallel route, which had been a favorite with

-Fremont, crossed the divide near the head of the Rio Grande. Its

-grades, which were difficult and steep at best, followed the Huerfano

-Valley and Cochetopa Pass. Across the pass, Gunnison began his descent

-of the arid alkali valley of the Uncompahgre,--a valley to-day about

-to blossom as the rose because of the irrigation canal and tunnel

-bringing to it the waters of the neighboring Gunnison River. With

-heavy labor, intense heat, and weakening teams, Gunnison struggled on

-through September and October towards Salt Lake in Utah territory. Near

-Sevier Lake he lost his life. Before daybreak, on October 26, he and a

-small detachment of men were surprised by a band of young Paiute. When

-the rest of his party hurried up to the rescue, they found his body

-"pierced with fifteen arrows," and seven of his men lying dead around

-him. Beckwith, who succeeded to the command, led the remainder of the

-party to Salt Lake City, where public opinion was ready to charge the

-Mormons with the murder. Beckwith believed this to be entirely false,

-and made use of the friendly assistance of Brigham Young, who persuaded

-the chiefs of the tribe to return the instruments and records which had

-been stolen from the party.

-

-The route surveyed by Captain Gunnison passed around the northern end

-of the ravine of the Colorado River, which almost completely separates

-the Southwest from the United States. Farther south, within the United

-States, were only two available points at which railways could cross

-the canyon, at Fort Yuma and near the Mojave River. Towards these

-crossings the thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallel surveys were

-directed.

-

-Second only to Governor Stevens's in its extent was the exploration

-conducted by Lieutenant A. W. Whipple from Fort Smith on the Arkansas

-to Los Angeles along the thirty-fifth parallel. Like that of Governor

-Stevens this route was not the channel of any regular traffic, although

-later it was to have some share in the organized overland commerce.

-Here also was found a line that contained only two or three serious

-obstacles to be overcome. Whipple's instructions planned for him to

-begin his observations at the Mississippi, but he believed that the

-navigable Arkansas River and the railways already projected in that

-state made it needless to commence farther east than Fort Smith, on the

-edge of the Indian Country. He began his survey on July 14, 1853. His

-westward march was for two months up the right bank of the Canadian

-River, as it traversed the Choctaw and Chickasaw reserves, to the

-hundredth meridian, where it emerged from the panhandle of Texas, and

-across the panhandle into New Mexico. After crossing the upper waters

-of the Rio Pecos he reached the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, where his

-party tarried for a month or more, working over their observations,

-making local explorations, and sending back to Washington an account

-of their proceedings thus far. Towards the middle of November they

-started on toward the Colorado Chiquita and the Bill Williams Fork,

-through "a region over which no white man is supposed to have passed."

-The severest difficulties of the trip were found near the valley of the

-Colorado River, which was entered at the junction of the Bill Williams

-Fork and followed north for several days. A crossing here was made near

-the supposed mouth of the Mojave River at a place where porphyritic

-and trap dykes, outcropping, gave rise to the name of the Needles.

-The river was crossed February 27, 1854, three weeks before the party

-reached Los Angeles.

-

-South of the route of Lieutenant Whipple, the thirty-second parallel

-survey was run to the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. No

-attempt was made in this case at a comprehensive survey under a single

-leader. Instead, the section from the Rio Grande at El Paso to the

-Red River at Preston, Texas, was run by John Pope, brevet captain in

-the topographical engineers, in the spring of 1854. Lieutenant J. G.

-Parke carried the line at the same time from the Pimas villages on the

-Gila to the Rio Grande. West of the Pimas villages to the Colorado,

-a reconnoissance made by Lieutenant-colonel Emory in 1847 was drawn

-upon. The lines in California were surveyed by yet a different party.

-Here again an easy route was discovered to exist. Within the states of

-California and Oregon various connecting lines were surveyed by parties

-under Lieutenant R. S. Williamson in 1855.

-

-The evidence accumulated by the Pacific railway surveys began to pour

-in upon the War Department in the spring of 1854. Partial reports

-at first, elaborate and minute scientific articles following later,

-made up a series which by the close of the decade filled the twelve

-enormous volumes of the published papers. Rarely have efforts so great

-accomplished so little in the way of actual contribution to knowledge.

-The chief importance of the surveys was in proving by scientific

-observation what was already a commonplace among laymen--that the

-continent was traversable in many places, and that the incidental

-problems of railway construction were in finance rather than in

-engineering. The engineers stood ready to build the road any time and

-almost anywhere.

-

-The Secretary of War submitted to Congress the first instalment of his

-report under the resolution of March 3, 1853, on February 27, 1855. As

-yet the labors of compilation and examination of the field manuscripts

-were by no means completed, but he was able to make general statements

-about the probability of success. At five points the continental

-divide had been crossed; over four of these railways were entirely

-practicable, although the shortest of the routes to San Francisco ran

-by the one pass, Cochetopa, where it would be unreasonable to construct

-a road.

-

-From the routes surveyed, Secretary Davis recommended one as "the most

-practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi

-River to the Pacific Ocean." In all cases cost, speed of construction,

-and ease in operation needed to be ascertained and compared. The

-estimates guessed at by the parties in the field, and revised by the

-War Department, pointed to the southernmost as the most desirable

-route. To reach this conclusion it was necessary to accuse Governor

-Stevens of underestimating the cost of labor along his northern line;

-but the figures as taken were conclusive. On this thirty-second

-parallel route, declared the Secretary of War, "the progress of the

-work will be regulated chiefly by the speed with which cross-ties

-and rails can be delivered and laid.... The few difficult points ...

-would delay the work but an inconsiderable period.... The climate on

-this route is such as to cause less interruption to the work than on

-any other route. Not only is this the shortest and least costly route

-to the Pacific, but it is the shortest and cheapest route to San

-Francisco, the greatest commercial city on our western coast; while

-the aggregate length of railroad lines connecting it at its eastern

-terminus with the Atlantic and Gulf seaports is less than the aggregate

-connection with any other route."

-

-The Pacific railway surveys had been ordered as the only step which

-Congress in its situation of deadlock could take. Senator Gwin had long

-ago told his fears that the advocates of the disappointed routes would

-unite to hinder the fortunate one. To the South, as to Jefferson Davis,

-Secretary of War, the thirty-second parallel route was satisfactory;

-but there was as little chance of building a railway as there had been

-in 1850. In days to come, discussion of railways might be founded upon

-facts rather than hopes and fears, but either unanimity or compromise

-was in a fairly remote future. The overland traffic, which was assuming

-great volume as the surveys progressed, had yet nearly fifteen years

-before the railway should drive it out of existence. And no railway

-could even be started before war had removed one of the contesting

-sections from the floor of Congress.

-

-Yet in the years since Asa Whitney had begun his agitation the railways

-of the East had constantly expanded. The first bridge to cross the

-Mississippi was under construction when Davis reported in 1855. The

-Illinois Central was opened in 1856. When the Civil War began, the

-railway frontier had become coterminous with the agricultural frontier,

-and both were ready to span the gap which separated them from the

-Pacific.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIII

-

-THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD

-

-

-It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of the Union Pacific

-Railroad that the period of agitation was approaching probable success

-when the latter was deferred because of the rivalry of sections and

-localities into which the scheme was thrown. From about 1850 until 1853

-it indeed seemed likely that the road would be built just so soon as

-the terminus could be agreed upon. To be sure, there was keen rivalry

-over this; yet the rivalry did not go beyond local jealousies and might

-readily be compromised. After the reports of the surveys were completed

-and presented to Congress the problem took on a new aspect which

-promised postponement until a far greater question could be solved.

-Slavery and the Pacific railroad are concrete illustrations of the two

-horns of the national dilemma.

-

-As a national project, the railway raised the problem of its

-construction under national auspices. Was the United States, or

-should it become, a nation competent to undertake the work? With no

-hesitation, many of the advocates of the measure answered yes. Yet

-even among the friends of the road the query frequently evoked the

-other answer. Slavery had already taken its place as an institution

-peculiar to a single section. Its defence and perpetuation depended

-largely upon proving the contrary of the proposition that the Pacific

-railroad demanded. For the purposes of slavery defence the United

-States must remain a mere federation, limited in powers and lacking in

-the attributes of sovereignty and nationality. Looking back upon this

-struggle, with half a century gone by, it becomes clear that the final

-answer upon both questions, slavery and railway, had to be postponed

-until the more fundamental question of federal character had been

-worked out. The antitheses were clear, even as Lincoln saw them in

-1858. Slavery and localism on the one hand, railway and nationalism on

-the other, were engaged in a vital struggle for recognition. Together

-they were incompatible. One or the other must survive alone. Lincoln

-saw a portion of the problem, and he sketched the answer: "I do not

-expect the Union to be dissolved,--I do not expect the house to fall,

-but I do expect it will cease to be divided."

-

-The stages of the Pacific railroad movement are clearly marked

-through all these squabbles. Agitation came first, until conviction

-and acceptance were general. This was the era of Asa Whitney.

-Reconnoissance and survey followed, in a decade covering approximately

-1847-1857. Organization came last, beginning in tentative schemes which

-counted for little, passing through a long series of intricate debates

-in Congress, and being merged in the larger question of nationality,

-but culminating finally in the first Pacific railroad bills of 1862 and

-1864.

-

-When Congress began its session of 1853-1854, most of the surveying

-parties contemplated by the act of the previous March were still in

-the field. The reports ordered were not yet available, and Congress

-recognized the inexpediency of proceeding farther without the facts.

-It is notable, however, that both houses at this time created select

-committees to consider propositions for a railway. Both of these

-committees reported bills, but neither received sanction even in the

-house of its friends. The next session, 1854-1855, saw the great

-struggle between Douglas and Benton.

-

-Stephen A. Douglas, who had triumphantly carried through his

-Kansas-Nebraska bill in the preceding May, started a railway bill in

-the Senate in 1855. As finally considered and passed by the Senate,

-his bill provided for three railroads: a Northern Pacific, from the

-western border of Wisconsin to Puget Sound; a Southern Pacific, from

-the western border of Texas to the Pacific; and a Central Pacific,

-from Missouri or Iowa to San Francisco. They were to be constructed by

-private parties under contracts to be let jointly by the Secretaries

-of War and Interior and the Postmaster-general. Ultimately they were

-to become the property of the United States and the states through

-which they passed. The House of Representatives, led by Benton in the

-interests of a central road, declined to pass the Douglas measure.

-Before its final rejection, it was amended to please Benton and his

-allies by the restriction to a single trunk line from San Francisco,

-with eastern branches diverging to Lake Superior, Missouri or Iowa, and

-Memphis.

-

-During the two years following the rejection of the Douglas scheme

-by the allied malcontents, the select committees on the Pacific

-railways had few propositions to consider, while Congress paid little

-attention to the general matter. Absorbing interest in politics,

-the new Republican party, and the campaign of 1856 were responsible

-for part of the neglect. The conviction of the dominant Democrats

-that the nation had no power to perform the task was responsible

-for more. The transition from a question of selfish localism to one

-of national policy which should require the whole strength of the

-nation for its solution was under way. The northern friends of the

-railway were disheartened by the southern tendencies of the Democratic

-administration which lasted till 1861. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary

-of War, was followed by Floyd, of Virginia, who believed with his

-predecessor that the southern was the most eligible route. At the same

-time, Aaron V. Brown, of Tennessee, Postmaster-general, was awarding

-the postal contract for an overland mail to Butterfield's southern

-route in spite of the fact that Congress had probably intended the

-central route to be employed.

-

-Between 1857 and 1861 the debates of Congress show the difficulties

-under which the railroad labored. Many bills were started, but few

-could get through the committees. In 1859 the Senate passed a bill. In

-1860 the House passed one which the Senate amended to death. In the

-session of 1860-1861 its serious consideration was crowded out by the

-incipiency of war.

-

-Through the long years of debate over the organization of the road, the

-nature of its management and the nature of its governmental aid were

-much in evidence. Save only the Cumberland road the United States had

-undertaken no such scheme, while the Cumberland road, vastly less in

-magnitude than this, had raised enough constitutional difficulties to

-last a generation. That there must be some connection between the road

-and the public lands had been seen even before Whitney commenced his

-advocacy. The nature of that connection was worked out incidentally to

-other movements while the Whitney scheme was under fire.

-

-The policy of granting lands in aid of improvements in transportation

-had been hinted at as far back as the admission of Ohio, but it had not

-received its full development until the railroad period began. To some

-extent, in the thirties and forties, public lands had been allotted to

-the states to aid in canal building, but when the railroad promoters

-started their campaign in the latter decade, a new era in the history

-of the public domain was commenced. The definitive fight over the

-issue of land grants for railways took place in connection with the

-Illinois Central and Mobile and Ohio scheme in the years from 1847 to

-1850.

-

-The demand for a central railroad in Illinois made its appearance

-before the panic of 1837. The northwest states were now building their

-own railroads, and this enterprise was designed to connect the Galena

-lead country with the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi by a road

-running parallel to the Mississippi through the whole length of the

-state of Illinois. Private railways in the Northwest ran naturally from

-east to west, seeking termini on the Mississippi and at the Alleghany

-crossings. This one was to intersect all the horizontal roads, making

-useful connections everywhere. But it traversed a country where yet

-the prairie hen held uncontested sway. There was little population

-or freight to justify it, and hence the project, though it guised

-itself in at least three different corporate garments before 1845,

-failed of success. No one of the multitude of transverse railways, on

-whose junctions it had counted, crossed its right-of-way before 1850.

-La Salle, Galena, and Jonesboro were the only villages on its line

-worth marking on a large-scale map, while Chicago was yet under forty

-thousand in population.

-

-Men who in the following decade led the Pacific railway agitation

-promoted the Illinois Central idea in the years immediately preceding

-1850. Both Breese and Douglas of Illinois claimed the parentage of the

-bill which eventually passed Congress in 1850, and by opening the way

-to public aid for railway transportation commenced the period of the

-land-grant railroads. Already in some of the canal grants the method

-of aid had been outlined, alternate sections of land along the line

-of the canal being conveyed to the company to aid it in its work. The

-theory underlying the granting of alternate sections in the familiar

-checker-board fashion was that the public lands, while inaccessible,

-had slight value, but once reached by communication the alternate

-sections reserved by the United States would bring a higher price than

-the whole would have done without the canal, while the construction

-company would be aided without expense to any one. The application of

-this principle to railroads came rather slowly in a Congress somewhat

-disturbed by a doubt as to its power to devote the public resources to

-internal improvements. The sectional character of the Illinois Central

-railway was against it until its promoters enlarged the scheme into a

-Lake-to-Gulf railway by including plans for a continuation to Mobile

-from the Ohio. With southern aid thus enticed to its support, the bill

-became a law in 1850. By its terms, the alternate sections of land in

-a strip ten miles wide were given to the interested states to be used

-for the construction of the Illinois Central and the Mobile and Ohio.

-The grants were made directly to the states because of constitutional

-objections to construction within a state without its consent and

-approval. It was twelve years before Congress was ready to give the

-lands directly to the railroad company.

-

-The decade following the Illinois Central grant was crowded with

-applications from other states for grants upon the same terms. In this

-period of speculative construction before the panic of 1857, every

-western state wanted all the aid it could get. In a single session

-seven states asked for nearly fourteen million acres of land, while

-before 1857 some five thousand miles of railway had been aided by land

-grants.

-

-When Asa Whitney began his agitation for the Pacific railway, he asked

-for a huge land grant, but the machinery and methods of the grants had

-not yet become familiar to Congress. During the subsequent fifteen

-years of agitation and survey the method was worked out, so that when

-political conditions made it possible to build the road, there had

-ceased to be great difficulty in connection with its subsidy.

-

-The sectional problem, which had reached its full development in

-Congress by 1857, prevented any action in the interest of a Pacific

-railway so long as it should remain unchanged. As the bickerings

-widened into war, the railway still remained a practical impossibility.

-But after war had removed from Congress the representatives of the

-southern states the way was cleared for action. When Congress met in

-its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in favor of southern

-routes was silenced by disunion. It remained only to choose among the

-routes lying north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize the

-construction along one of them of the railway which all admitted to be

-possible of construction, and to which military need in preservation of

-the union had now added an imperative quality.

-

-The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a Pacific railway,

-and handed them over to the regular session of 1861-1862 as unfinished

-business. In the lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah, a

-young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave powerful aid to the

-final settlement of route and means. Judah had come east in the autumn

-in company with one of the newly elected California representatives.

-During the long sea voyage he had drilled into his companion, who

-happily was later appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of

-the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem which he had acquired

-in his advocacy of the railway on the Pacific Coast. California had

-begun the construction of local railways several years before the war

-broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant need and prayer. Her own

-corporations were planned with reference to the time when tracks from

-the East should cross her border and find her local creations waiting

-for connections with them.

-

-When the advent of war promised an early maturity for the scheme, a few

-Californians organized the most significant of the California railways,

-the Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company was incorporated,

-having for its leading spirits Judah, its chief engineer, and Collis

-Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford,

-soon to be governor of the state. Its founders were all men of moderate

-means, but they had the best of that foresight and initiative in which

-the frontier was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861 Judah

-prospected for routes across the mountains into Utah territory, where

-the new silver fields around Carson indicated the probable course of a

-route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on to Washington in the

-fall to aid in the quick settlement of the long-debated question.

-

-Judah's interest in a special California road coincided well with the

-needs and desires of Congress. Already various bills were in the hands

-of the select committees of both houses. The southern interest was

-gone. The only remaining rivalries were among St. Louis, Chicago, and

-the new Minnesota; while the first of these was tainted by the doubtful

-loyalty of Missouri, and the last was embarrassed by the newness of its

-territory and its lack of population. The Sioux were yet in control of

-much of the country beyond St. Paul. Out of this rivalry Chicago and a

-central route could emerge triumphant.

-

-The spring of 1862 witnessed a long debate over a Union Pacific

-railroad to meet the new military needs of the United States as well

-as to satisfy the old economic necessities. Why it was called "Union"

-is somewhat in doubt. Bancroft thinks its name was descriptive of the

-various local roads which were bound together in the single continental

-scheme. Davis, on the contrary, is inclined to believe that the name

-was in contrast to the "Disunion" route of the thirty-second parallel,

-since the route chosen was to run entirely through loyal territory.

-Whatever the reason, however, the Union Pacific Railroad Company was

-incorporated on the 1st of July, 1862.

-

-Under the act of incorporation a continental railway was to be

-constructed by several companies. Within the limits of California, the

-Central Pacific of California, already organized and well managed,

-was to have the privilege. Between the boundary line of California

-and Nevada and the hundredth meridian, the new Union Pacific was

-to be the constructing company. On the hundredth meridian, at some

-point between the Republican River in Kansas and the Platte River in

-Nebraska, radiating lines were to advance to various eastern frontier

-points, somewhat after the fashion of Benton's bill of 1855. Thus

-the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western of Kansas was authorized to

-connect this point with the Missouri River, south of the mouth of the

-Kansas, with a branch to Atchison and St. Joseph in connection with

-the Hannibal and St. Joseph of Missouri. The Union Pacific itself was

-required to build two more connections; one to run from the hundredth

-meridian to some point on the west boundary of Iowa, to be fixed by

-the President of the United States, and another to Sioux City, Iowa,

-whenever a line from the east should reach that place.

-

-The aid offered for the construction of these lines was more generous

-than any previously provided by Congress. In the first place, the

-roads were entitled to a right-of-way four hundred feet wide, with

-permission to take material for construction from adjacent parts of the

-public domain. Secondly, the roads were to receive ten sections of land

-for each mile of track on the familiar alternate section principle.

-Finally, the United States was to lend to the roads bonds to the

-amount of $16,000 per mile, on the level, $32,000 in the foothills,

-and $48,000 in the mountains, to facilitate construction. If not

-completed and open by 1876, the whole line was to be forfeited to the

-United States. If completed, the loan of bonds was to be repaid out of

-subsequent earnings.

-

-The Central Pacific of California was prompt in its acceptance of the

-terms of the act of July 1, 1862. It proceeded with its organization,

-broke ground at Sacramento on February 22, 1863, and had a few miles of

-track in operation before the next year closed. But the Union Pacific

-was slow. "While fighting to retain eleven refractory states," wrote

-one irritated critic of the act, "the nation permitted itself to be

-cozened out of territory sufficient to form twelve new republics." Yet

-great as were the offered grants, eastern capital was reluctant to put

-life into the new route across the plains. That it could ever pay, was

-seriously doubted. Chances for more certain and profitable investment

-in the East were frequent in the years of war-time prosperity. Although

-the railroad organized according to the terms of the law, subscribers

-to the stock of the Union Pacific were hard to find, and the road

-lay dormant for two more years until Congress revised its offer and

-increased its terms.

-

-In the session of 1863-1864 the general subject was again approached.

-Writes Davis, "The opinion was almost universal that additional

-legislation was needed to make the Act of 1862 effective, but the

-point where the limit of aid to patriotic capitalists should be set

-was difficult to determine." It was, and remained, the belief of the

-opponents of the bill now passed that "lobbyists, male and female,

-... shysters and adventurers" had much to do with the success of the

-measure. In its most essential parts, the new bill of 1864 increased

-the degree of government aid to the companies. The land grant was

-doubled from ten sections per mile of track to twenty, and the road

-was allowed to borrow of the general public, on first mortgage bonds,

-money to the amount of the United States loan, which was reduced by a

-self-denying ordinance to the status of a second mortgage. With these

-added inducements, the Union Pacific was finally begun.

-

-The project at last under way in 1864-1865, as Davis graphically

-pictures it, "was thoroughly saturated and fairly dripping with the

-elements of adventure and romance." But he overstates his case when he

-goes on to remark that, "Before the building of the Pacific railway

-most of the wide expanse of territory west of the Missouri was _terra

-incognita_ to the mass of Americans." For twenty years the railway had

-been under agitation; during the whole period population had crossed

-the great desert in increasing thousands; new states had banked up

-around its circumference, east, west, and south, while Kansas had been

-thrust into its middle; new camps had dotted its interior. The great

-West was by no means unknown, but with the construction of the railway

-the American frontier entered upon its final phase.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIV

-

-THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR

-

-

-That the fate of the outlying colonies of the United States should

-have aroused grave concerns at the beginning of the Civil War is not

-surprising. California and Oregon, Carson City, Denver, and the other

-mining camps were indeed on the same continent with the contending

-factions, but the degree of their isolation was so great that they

-might as well have been separated by an ocean. Their inhabitants were

-more mixed than those of any portion of the older states, while in

-several of the communities the parties were so evenly divided as to

-raise doubts of the loyalty of the whole. "The malignant secession

-element of this Territory," wrote Governor Gilpin of Colorado, in

-October, 1861, "has numbered 7,500. It has been ably and secretly

-organized from November last, and requires extreme and extraordinary

-measures to meet and control its onslaught." At best, the western

-population was scanty and scattered over a frontier that still

-possessed its virgin character in most respects, though hovering at

-the edge of a period of transition. An English observer, hopeful for

-the worst, announced in the middle of the war that "When that 'late

-lamented institution,' the once United States, shall have passed

-away, and when, after this detestable and fratricidal war--the most

-disgraceful to human nature that civilization ever witnessed--the New

-World shall be restored to order and tranquility, our shikaris will

-not forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel suffices to

-transport them from fallow deer and pheasant shooting to the haunts of

-the bison and the grizzly bear. There is little chance of these animals

-being 'improved off' the Prairies, or even of their becoming rare

-during the lifetime of the present generation." The factors of most

-consequence in shaping the course of the great plains during the Civil

-War were those of mixed population, of ever present Indian danger, and

-of isolation. Though the plains had no effect upon the outcome of the

-war, the war furthered the work already under way of making known the

-West, clearing off the Indians, and preparing for future settlement.

-

-Like the rest of the United States the West was organized into

-military divisions for whose good order commanding officers were made

-responsible. At times the burden of military control fell chiefly upon

-the shoulders of territorial governors; again, special divisions were

-organized to meet particular needs, and generals of experience were

-detached from the main armies to direct movements in the West.

-

-Among the earliest of the episodes which drew attention to the western

-departments was the resignation of Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding

-the Department of the Pacific, and his rather spectacular flight

-across New Mexico, to join the confederate forces. From various

-directions, federal troops were sent to head him off, but he succeeded

-in evading all these and reaching safety at the Rio Grande by August

-1. Here he could take an overland stage for the rest of his journey.

-The department which he abandoned included the whole West beyond the

-Rockies except Utah and present New Mexico. The country between the

-mountains and Missouri constituted the Department of the West. As the

-war advanced, new departments were created and boundaries were shifted

-at convenience. The Department of the Pacific remained an almost

-constant quantity throughout. A Department of the Northwest, covering

-the territory of the Sioux Indians, was created in September, 1862, for

-the better defence of Minnesota and Wisconsin. To this command Pope was

-assigned after his removal from the command of the Army of Virginia.

-Until the close of the war, when the great leaders were distributed and

-Sheridan received the Department of the Southwest, no detail of equal

-importance was made to a western department.

-

-The fighting on the plains was rarely important enough to receive

-the dignified name of battle. There were plenty of marching and

-reconnoitring, much police duty along the trails, occasional skirmishes

-with organized troops or guerrillas, aggressive campaigns against

-the Indians, and campaigns in defence of the agricultural frontier.

-But the armies so occupied were small and inexperienced. Commonly

-regiments of local volunteers were used in these movements, or returned

-captives who were on parole to serve no more against the confederacy.

-Disciplined veterans were rarely to be found. As a consequence of the

-spasmodic character of the plains warfare and the inferior quality

-of the troops available, western movements were often hampered and

-occasionally made useless.

-

-The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important as any of the military

-operations on the plains. At the beginning of the war the confederate

-forces seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear the way

-for Johnston as he hurried east. The Tucson country was occupied about

-the same time, so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts

-were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the Rio Grande, with New

-Mexico, Utah, and Colorado threatened. In December General Henry

-Hopkins Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops in the upper

-Rio Grande, while Colonel E. R. S. Canby, from Fort Craig, organized

-the resistance against further extension of the confederate power.

-

-Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio Grande country,

-around Santa Fe and Albuquerque, aroused federal apprehensions in the

-winter of 1862. Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened at

-the danger within his own territory, and scarcely needed the order

-which came from Fort Leavenworth through General Hunter to reenforce

-Canby and look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility easily,

-drew upon the federal treasury for funds which had not been allowed

-him, and shortly had the first Colorado, and a part of the second

-Colorado volunteers marching south to join the defensive columns. It is

-difficult to define this march in terms applicable to movements of war.

-At least one soldier in the second Colorado took with him two children

-and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the regiment and

-praising the chivalry of the soldiers, apparently oblivious of the fact

-that it is not a soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's

-family. But with wife and children, and the degree of individualism and

-insubordination which these imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched

-south to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was sure.

-

-As Sibley pushed up the river, passing Fort Craig and brushing aside

-a small force at Valverde, the Colorado forces reached Fort Union.

-Between Fort Union and Albuquerque, which Sibley entered easily, was

-the turning-point in the campaign. On March 26, 1862, Major J. M.

-Chivington had a successful skirmish at Johnson's ranch in Apache

-Canyon, about twenty miles southeast of Santa Fe. Two days later, at

-Pigeon's ranch, a more decisive check was given to the confederates,

-but Colonel John P. Slough, senior volunteer in command, fell back upon

-Fort Union after the engagement, while the confederates were left

-free to occupy Santa Fe. A few days later Slough was deposed in the

-Colorado regiment, Chivington made colonel, and the advance on Santa Fe

-begun again. Sibley, now caught between Canby advancing from Fort Craig

-and Chivington coming through Apache Canyon from Fort Union, evacuated

-Santa Fe on April 7, falling back to Albuquerque. The union troops,

-taking Santa Fe on April 12, hurried down the Rio Grande after Sibley

-in his final retreat. New Mexico was saved, and its security brought

-tranquillity to Colorado. The Colorado volunteers were back in Denver

-for the winter of 1862-1863, but Gilpin, whose vigorous and independent

-support had made possible their campaign, had been dismissed from his

-post as governor.

-

-Along the frontier of struggle campaigns of this sort occurred from

-time to time, receiving little attention from the authorities who were

-directing weightier movements at the centre. Less formal than these,

-and more provocative of bitter feeling, were the attacks of guerrillas

-along the central frontier,--chiefly the Missouri border and eastern

-Kansas. Here the passions of the struggle for Kansas had not entirely

-cooled down, southern sympathizers were easily found, and communities

-divided among themselves were the more intense in their animosities.

-

-The Department of Kansas, where the most aggravated of these

-guerrilla conflicts occurred, was organized in November, 1861, under

-Major-general Hunter. From his headquarters at Leavenworth the

-commanding officer directed the affairs of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota,

-Colorado, and "the Indian Territory west of Arkansas." The department

-was often shifted and reshaped to meet the needs of the frontier. A

-year later the Department of the Northwest was cut away from it, after

-the Sioux outbreak, its own name was changed to Missouri, and the

-states of Missouri and Arkansas were added to it. Still later it was

-modified again. But here throughout the war continued the troubles

-produced by the mixture of frontier and farm-lands, partisan whites and

-Indians.

-

-Bushwhacking, a composite of private murder and public attack, troubled

-the Kansas frontier from an early period of the war. It was easily

-aroused because of public animosities, and difficult to suppress

-because its participating parties retired quickly into the body of

-peace-professing citizens. In it, asserted General Order No. 13, of

-June 26, 1862, "rebel fiends lay in wait for their prey to assassinate

-Union soldiers and citizens; it is therefore ... especially directed

-that whenever any of this class of offenders shall be captured, they

-shall not be treated as prisoners of war but be summarily tried by

-drumhead court-martial, and if proved guilty, be executed ... on the

-spot."

-

-In August, 1863, occurred Quantrill's notable raid into Kansas to

-terrify the border which was already harassed enough. The old border

-hatred between Kansas and Missouri had been intensified by the

-"murders, robberies, and arson" which had characterized the irregular

-warfare carried on by both sides. In western Missouri, loyal unionists

-were not safe outside the federal lines; here the guerrillas came and

-went at pleasure; and here, about August 18, Quantrill assembled a

-band of some three hundred men for a foray into Kansas. On the 20th he

-entered Kansas, heading at once for Lawrence, which he surprised on the

-21st. Although the city arsenal contained plenty of arms and the town

-could have mustered 500 men on "half an hour's notice," the guerrilla

-band met no resistance. It "robbed most of the stores and banks, and

-burned one hundred and eighty-five buildings, including one-fourth

-of the private residences and nearly all of the business houses of

-the town, and, with circumstances of the most fiendish atrocity,

-murdered 140 unarmed men." The retreat of Quantrill was followed by

-a vigorous federal pursuit and a partial devastation of the adjacent

-Missouri counties. Kansas, indignant, was in arms at once, protesting

-directly to President Lincoln of the "imbecility and incapacity" of

-Major-general John M. Schofield, commanding the Department of the

-Missouri, "whose policy has opened Kansas to invasion and butchery."

-Instead of carrying out an unimpeded pursuit of the guerrillas,

-Schofield had to devote his strength to keeping the state of Kansas

-from declaring war against and wreaking indiscriminate vengeance upon

-the state of Missouri. A year after Quantrill's raid came Price's

-Missouri expedition, with its pitched battles near Kansas City and

-Westport, and its pursuit through southern Missouri, where confederate

-sympathizers and the partisan politics of this presidential year made

-punitive campaigns anything but easy.

-

-Carleton's march into New Mexico has already been described in

-connection with the mining boom of Arizona. The silver mines of the

-Santa Cruz Valley had drawn American population to Tubac and Tucson

-several years before the war; while the confederate successes in the

-upper Rio Grande in the summer of 1861 had compelled federal evacuation

-of the district. Colonel E. R. S. Canby devoted the small force at his

-command to regaining the country around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, while

-the relief of the forts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado was

-intrusted to Carleton's California Column. After May, 1862, Carleton

-was firmly established in Tucson, and later he was given command of

-the whole Department of New Mexico. Of fighting with the confederates

-there was almost none. He prosecuted, instead, Apache and Navaho wars,

-and exploited the new gold fields which were now found. In much of

-the West, as in his New Mexico, occasional ebullitions of confederate

-sympathizers occurred, but the military task of the commanders was easy.

-

-The military problem of the plains was one of police, with the

-extinction of guerrilla warfare and the pacification of Indians as its

-chief elements. The careers of Canby, Carleton, and Gilpin indicate

-the nature of the western strategic warfare, Schofield's illustrates

-that of guerrilla fighting, the Minnesota outbreak that of the Indian

-relations.

-

-In the Northwest, where the agricultural expansion of the fifties

-had worked so great changes, the pressure on the tribes had steadily

-increased. In 1851 the Sioux bands had ceded most of their territory in

-Minnesota, and had agreed upon a reduced reserve in the St. Peter's,

-or Minnesota, Valley. But the terms of this treaty had been delayed

-in enforcement, while bad management on the part of the United States

-and the habitual frontier disregard of Indian rights created tense

-feelings, which might break loose at any time. No single grievance

-of the Indians caused more trouble than that over traders' claims.

-The improvident savages bought largely of the traders, on credit, at

-extortionate prices. The traders could afford the risk because when

-treaties of cession were made, their influence was generally able to

-get inserted in the treaty a clause for satisfying claims against

-individuals out of the tribal funds before these were handed over to

-the savages. The memory of the savage was short, and when he found that

-his allowance, the price for his lands, had gone into the traders'

-pockets, he could not realize that it had gone to pay his debts, but

-felt, somehow, defrauded. The answer would have been to prevent trade

-with the Indians on credit. But the traders' influence at Washington

-was great. It would be an interesting study to investigate the

-connection between traders' bills and agitation for new cessions, since

-the latter generally meant satisfaction of the former.

-

-Among the Sioux there were factional feelings that had aroused the

-apprehensions of their agents before the war broke out. The "blanket"

-Indians continually mocked at the "farmers" who took kindly to the

-efforts of the United States for their agricultural civilization. There

-was civil strife among the progressives and irreconcilables which made

-it difficult to say what was the disposition of the whole nation. The

-condition was so unstable that an accidental row, culminating in the

-murder of five whites at Acton, in Meeker County, brought down the most

-serious Indian massacre the frontier had yet seen.

-

-There was no more occasion for a general uprising in 1862 than there

-had been for several years. The wiser Indians realized the futility

-of such a course. Yet Little Crow, inclined though he was to peace,

-fell in with the radicals as the tribe discussed their policy; and

-he determined that since a massacre had been commenced they had best

-make it as thorough as possible. Retribution was certain whether they

-continued war or not, and the farmer Indians were unlikely to be

-distinguished from the blankets by angry frontiersmen. The attack fell

-first upon the stores at the lower agency, twenty miles above Fort

-Ridgely, whence refugee whites fled to Fort Ridgely with news of the

-outbreak. All day, on the 18th of August, massacres occurred along

-the St. Peter's, from near New Ulm to the Yellow Medicine River. The

-incidents of Indian war were all there, in surprise, slaughter of women

-and children, mutilation and torture.

-

-The next day, Tuesday the 19th, the increasing bands fell upon the

-rambling village of New Ulm, twenty-eight miles above Mankato, where

-fugitives had gathered and where Judge Charles E. Flandrau hastily

-organized a garrison for defence. He had been at St. Peter's when

-the news arrived, and had led a relief band through the drenching

-rain, reaching New Ulm in the evening. On Wednesday afternoon Little

-Crow, his band still growing--the Sioux could muster some 1300

-warriors--surprised Fort Ridgely, though with no success. On Thursday

-he renewed the attack with a force now dwindling because of individual

-plundering expeditions which drew his men to various parts of the

-neighboring country. On Friday he attacked once more.

-

-On Saturday the 23d Little Crow came down the river again to renew

-his fight upon New Ulm, which, unmolested since Tuesday, had been

-increasing its defences. Here Judge Flandrau led out the whites in

-a pitched battle. A few of his men were old frontiersmen, cool and

-determined, of unerring aim; but most were German settlers, recently

-arrived, and often terrified by their new experiences. During the week

-of horrors the depredations covered the Minnesota frontier and lapped

-over into Iowa and Dakota. Isolated families, murdered and violated,

-or led captive into the wilderness, were common. Stories of those who

-survived these dangers form a large part of the local literature of

-this section of the Northwest. At New Ulm the situation had become so

-desperate that on the 25th Flandrau evacuated the town and led its

-whole remaining population to safety at Mankato.

-

-Long before the week of suffering was over, aid had been started to

-the harassed frontier. Governor Ramsey, of Minnesota, hurried to

-Mendota, and there organized a relief column to move up the Minnesota

-Valley. Henry Hastings Sibley, quite different from him of Rio Grande

-fame, commanded the column and reached St. Peter's with his advance

-on Friday. By Sunday he had 1400 men with whom to quiet the panic

-and restore peace and repopulate the deserted country. He was now

-joined by Ignatius Donnelly, Lieutenant-governor, sent to urge greater

-speed. The advance was resumed. By Friday, the 29th, they had reached

-Fort Ridgely, passing through country "abandoned by the inhabitants;

-the houses, in many cases, left with the doors open, the furniture

-undisturbed, while the cattle ranged about the doors or through the

-cultivated fields." The country had been settled up to the very edge

-of the Fort Ridgely reserve. It was entirely deserted, though only

-partially devastated. Donnelly commented in his report upon the

-prayer-books and old German trunks of "Johann Schwartz," strewn upon

-the ground in one place; and upon bodies found, "bloated, discolored,

-and far gone in decomposition." The Indian agent, Thomas J. Galbraith,

-who was at Fort Ridgely during the trouble, reported in 1863, that 737

-whites were known to have been massacred.

-

-Sibley, having reached Fort Ridgely, proceeded at first to reconnoitre

-and bury the dead, then to follow the Indians and rescue the captives.

-More than once the tribes had found that it was wise to carry off

-prisoners, who by serving as hostages might mollify or prevent

-punishment for the original outbreak. Early in September there were

-pitched battles at Birch Coolie and Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake.

-At this last engagement, on September 23, Sibley was able not only

-to defeat the tribes and take nearly 2000 prisoners, but to release

-227 women and children, who had been the "prime object," from whose

-"pursuit nothing could drive or divert him." The Indians were handed

-over under arrest to Agent Galbraith to be conveyed first to the Lower

-Agency, and then, in November, to Fort Snelling.

-

-The punishment of the Sioux was heavy. Inkpaduta's massacre at Spirit

-Lake was still remembered and unavenged. Sibley now cut them down in

-battle in 1862, though Little Crow and other leaders escaped. In 1863,

-Pope, who had been called to command a new department in the Northwest,

-organized a general campaign against the tribes, sending Sibley up the

-Minnesota River to drive them west, and Sully up the Missouri to head

-them off, planning to catch and crush them between the two columns.

-The manoeuvre was badly timed and failed, while punishment drifted

-gradually into a prolonged war.

-

-Civil retribution was more severe, and fell, with judicial irony, on

-the farmer Sioux who had been drawn reluctantly into the struggle.

-At the Lower Agency, at Redwood, the captives were held, while

-more than four hundred of their men were singled out for trial for

-murder. Nothing is more significant of the anomalous nature of the

-Indian relation than this trial for murder of prisoners of war. The

-United States held the tribes nationally to account, yet felt free to

-punish individuals as though they were citizens of the United States.

-The military commission sat at Redwood for several weeks with the

-missionary and linguist, Rev. S. R. Riggs, "in effect, the Grand Jury

-of the court." Three hundred and three were condemned to death by

-the court for murder, rape, and arson, their condemnation starting a

-wave of protest over the country, headed by the Indian Commissioner,

-W. P. Dole. To the indignation of the frontier, naturally revengeful

-and never impartial, President Lincoln yielded to the protests in the

-case of most of the condemned. Yet thirty-eight of them were hanged on

-a single scaffold at Mankato on December 26, 1862. The innocent and

-uncondemned were punished also, when Congress confiscated all their

-Minnesota reserve in 1863, and transferred the tribe to Fort Thompson

-on the Missouri, where less desirable quarters were found for them.

-

-All along the edge of the frontier, from Minnesota to the Rio Grande,

-were problems that drew the West into the movement of the Civil War.

-The situation was trying for both whites and Indians, but nowhere did

-the Indians suffer between the millstones as they did in the Indian

-Territory, where the Cherokee and Creeks, Choctaw and Chickasaw and

-Seminole, had been colonized in the years of creation of the Indian

-frontier. For a generation these nations had resided in comparative

-peace and advancing civilization, but they were undone by causes which

-they could not control.

-

-The confederacy was no sooner organized than its commissioners demanded

-of the tribes colonized west of Arkansas their allegiance and support,

-professing to have inherited all the rights and obligations of the

-United States. To the Indian leaders, half civilized and better, this

-demand raised difficulties which would have been a strain on any

-diplomacy. If they remained loyal to the United States, the confederate

-forces, adjacent in Arkansas and Texas, and already coveting their

-lands, would cut them to pieces. If they adhered to the confederacy and

-the latter lost, they might anticipate the resentment of the United

-States. Yet they were too weak to stand alone and were forced to go

-one way or other. The resulting policy was temporizing and brought to

-them a large measure of punishment from both sides, and the heavy

-subsequent wrath of the United States.

-

-John Ross, principal chief in the Cherokee nation, tried to maintain

-his neutrality at the commencement of the conflict, but the fiction

-of Indian nationality was too slight for his effort to be successful.

-During the spring and summer of 1861 he struggled against the

-confederate control to which he succumbed by August, when confederate

-troops had overrun most of Indian Territory, and disloyal Indian agents

-had surrendered United States property to the enemy. The war which

-followed resembled the guerrilla conflicts of Kansas, with the addition

-of the Indian element.

-

-By no means all the Indians accepted the confederate control. When

-the Indian Territory forts--Gibson, Arbuckle, Washita, and Cobb--fell

-into the hands of the South, loyal Indians left their homes and sought

-protection within the United States lines. Almost the only way to

-fight a war in which a population is generally divided, is by means of

-depopulation and concentration. Along the Verdigris River, in southeast

-Kansas, these Indian refugees settled in 1861 and 1862, to the number

-of 6000. Here the Indian Commissioner fed them as best he could, and

-organized them to fight when that was possible. With the return of

-federal success in the occupation of Fort Smith and western Arkansas

-during the next two years, the natives began to return to their homes.

-But the relation of their tribes to the United States was tainted. The

-compulsory cession of their western lands which came at the close of

-the conflict belongs to a later chapter and the beginnings of Oklahoma.

-Here, as elsewhere, the condition of the tribes was permanently changed.

-

-The great plains and the Far West were only the outskirts of the Civil

-War. At no time did they shape its course, for the Civil War was, from

-their point of view, only an incidental sectional contest in the East,

-and merely an episode in the grander development of the United States.

-The way is opening ever wider for the historian who shall see in this

-material development and progress of civilization the central thread

-of American history, and in accordance with it, retail the story.

-But during the years of sectional strife the West was occasionally

-connected with the struggle, while toward their close it passed rapidly

-into a period in which it came to be the admitted centre of interest.

-The last stand of the Indians against the onrush of settlement is a

-warfare with an identity of its own.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XV

-

-THE CHEYENNE WAR

-

-

-It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous restlessness of

-the Indians during and after the Civil War to the evil machinations of

-the Confederacy. It has been plausible to charge that agents of the

-South passed among the tribes, inciting them to outbreak by pointing

-out the preoccupation of the United States and the defencelessness of

-the frontier. Popular narratives often repeat this charge when dealing

-with the wars and depredations, whether among the Sioux of Minnesota,

-or the Northwest tribes, or the Apache and Navaho, or the Indians of

-the plains. Indeed, had the South been able thus to harass the enemy it

-is not improbable that it would have done it. It is not impossible that

-it actually did it. But at least the charge has not been proved. No one

-has produced direct evidence to show the existence of agents or their

-connection with the Confederacy, though many have uttered a general

-belief in their reality. Investigators of single affairs have admitted,

-regretfully, their inability to add incitement of Indians to the

-charges against the South. If such a cause were needed to explain the

-increasing turbulence of the tribes, it might be worth while to search

-further in the hope of establishing it, but nothing occurred in these

-wars which cannot be accounted for, fully, in facts easily obtained and

-well authenticated.

-

-Before 1861 the Indians of the West were commonly on friendly terms

-with the United States. Occasional wars broke this friendship, and

-frequent massacres aroused the fears of one frontier or another,

-for the Indian was an irresponsible child, and the frontiersman was

-reckless and inconsiderate. But the outbreaks were exceptional, they

-were easily put down, and peace was rarely hard to obtain. By 1865

-this condition had changed over most of the West. Warfare had become

-systematic and widely spread. The frequency and similarity of outbreaks

-in remote districts suggested a harmonious plan, or at least similar

-reactions from similar provocations. From 1865, for nearly five years,

-these wars continued with only intervals of truce, or professed peace;

-while during a long period after 1870, when most of the tribes were

-suppressed and well policed, upheavals occurred which were clearly to

-be connected with the Indian wars. The reality of this transition from

-peace to war has caused many to charge it to the South. It is, however,

-connected with the culmination of the westward movement, which more

-than explains it.

-

-For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement of the events before

-1861 is needed. By 1840 the agricultural frontier of the United States

-had reached the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes, with

-plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains. In the generation

-following appeared the heavy traffic along the overland trails, the

-advance of the frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific railway

-surveys. Each of these served to compress the Indians and restrict

-their range. Accompanying these came curtailing of reserves, shifting

-of residences to less desirable grounds, and individual maltreatment to

-a degree which makes marvellous the incapacity, weakness, and patience

-of the Indians. Occasionally they struggled, but always they lost. The

-scalped and mutilated pioneer, with his haystacks burning and his stock

-run off, is a vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic

-than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable, and moving to

-let the white man in.

-

-The necessary results of white encroachment were destruction of game

-and education of the Indian to the luxuries and vices of the white man.

-At a time when starvation was threatening because of the disappearance

-of the buffalo and other food animals, he became aware of the

-superior diet of the whites and the ease with which robbery could be

-accomplished. In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier than ever.

-The railway surveys reached nearly every corner of the Indian Country.

-In the next few years came the prospectors who started hundreds of

-mining camps beyond the line of settlements, while the engineers

-began to stick the advancing heads of railways out from the Missouri

-frontier and into the buffalo range.

-

-Even the Indian could see the approaching end. It needed no confederate

-envoy to assure him that the United States could be attacked. His

-own hunger and the white peril were persuading him to defend his

-hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the widespread Indian wars of the

-later sixties, uniformity of action came without much previous

-cooperation. A general Indian league against the whites was never

-raised. The general war, upon dissection and analysis, breaks up into a

-multitude of little wars, each having its own particular causes, which,

-in many instances, if the word of the most expert frontiersmen is to be

-believed, ran back into cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.

-

-The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of the general wars,

-with causes rising from the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux

-in 1851. The plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly

-stated in this year. "We are constrained to say," wrote the men who

-made these treaties, "that in our opinion _the time has come_ when the

-extinguishment of the Indian title to this region should no longer

-be delayed, if government would not have the mortification, on the

-one hand, of confessing its inability to protect the Indian from

-encroachment; or be subject to the painful necessity, upon the other,

-of ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a land which they

-desire to make their homes, and which, without their occupancy and

-labor, will be comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties

-concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie were equally the fountains

-of discontent which boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at

-last to one of the most horrible incidents of the plains war.

-

-In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt to partition the

-plains among the tribes was made. The lines agreed upon recognized

-existing conditions to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in

-consideration of which the savages agreed to stay at peace, to allow

-free migration along the trails, and to keep within their boundaries.

-The Sioux here agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The

-Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as lying between the Platte

-and the Arkansas, the mountains and, roughly, the hundred and first

-meridian. For ten years after these treaties the last-named tribes kept

-the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon settlers or emigrants. They

-even allowed the Senate in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the

-term of the annuities from fifty years to fifteen.

-

-In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians lay off the beaten tracks

-and apart from contact with the whites. Their home was in the triangle

-between the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them that

-offered almost insuperable obstacles to those who would cross the

-continent through their domain. The Gunnison railroad survey, which

-was run along the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa

-Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range at this point.

-Accordingly, a decade which built up Oregon and California made little

-impression on this section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry

-Creek. Then came the deluge.

-

-Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on crossed the plains to

-the Pike's Peak country in 1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst

-of the Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than the right of

-transit over these lands," admitted the Peace Commissioners in 1868.

-Yet they "took possession of them for the purpose of mining, and,

-against the protest of the Indians, founded cities, established farms,

-and opened roads. Before 1861 the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven

-from the mountain regions down upon the waters of the Arkansas, and

-were becoming sullen and discontented because of this violation of

-their rights." The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in their

-possession, pledging the United States to prevent depredations by the

-whites, but here, as in most similar cases, the guarantees had no

-weight in the face of a population under way. The Indians were brushed

-aside, the United States agents made no real attempts to enforce the

-treaty, and within a few months the settlers were demanding protection

-against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw their former homes and

-hunting grounds overrun by a greedy population, thirsting for gold,"

-continued the Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east to the

-plains, and soon found themselves the objects of jealousy and hatred.

-They too must go. The presence of the injured is too often painful to

-the wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of guilt. It now

-became apparent that what had been taken by force must be retained

-by the ravisher, and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a

-treaty consecrating the act."

-

-Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho and Cheyenne strove to

-defend their lands and to drive out the intruders, a war in which the

-United States ought to have cooperated with the Indians, a treaty of

-cession followed. On February 18, 1861, at Fort Wise, which was the new

-name for Bent's old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed by

-which these tribes gave up much of the great range reserved for them in

-1851, and accepted in its place, with what were believed to be greater

-guarantees, a triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by Sand

-Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by the Arkansas and Purgatory

-rivers; and extending west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand

-Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the Ute on the other

-side of the range, not long after this, are another part of the same

-story of mining aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed to

-remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from under the feet of the restless

-prospectors. For years they had kept the peace in the face of great

-provocation. For three years more they put up with white encroachment

-before their war began.

-

-The Colorado miners, like those of the other boom camps, had been loud

-in their demand for transportation. To satisfy this, overland traffic

-had been organized on a large scale, while during 1862 the stage and

-freight service of the plains fell under the control of Ben Holladay.

-Early in August, 1864, Holladay was nearly driven out of business.

-About the 10th of the month, simultaneous attacks were made along

-his mail line from the Little Blue River to within eighty miles of

-Denver. In the forays, stations were sacked and burned, isolated farms

-were wiped out, small parties on the trails were destroyed. At Ewbank

-Station, a family of ten "was massacred and scalped, and one of the

-females, besides having suffered the latter inhuman barbarity, was

-pinned to the earth by a stake thrust through her person, in a most

-revolting manner; ... at Plum Creek ... nine persons were murdered,

-their train, consisting of ten wagons, burnt, and two women and two

-children captured.... The old Indian traders ... and the settlers ...

-abandoned their habitations." For a distance of 370 miles, Holladay's

-general superintendent declared, every ranch but one was "deserted and

-the property abandoned to the Indians."

-

-Fifteen years after the destruction of his stations, Holladay was still

-claiming damages from the United States and presenting affidavits from

-his men which revealed the character of the attacks. George H. Carlyle

-told how his stage was chased by Indians for twenty miles, how he had

-helped to bury the mutilated bodies of the Plum Creek victims, and how

-within a week the route had to be abandoned, and every ranch from Fort

-Kearney to Julesburg was deserted. The division agent told how property

-had been lost in the hurried flight. To save some of the stock, fodder

-and supplies had to be sacrificed,--hundreds of sacks of corn, scores

-of tons of hay, besides the buildings and their equipment. Nowhere

-were the Indians overbold in their attacks. In small bands they waited

-their time to take the stations by surprise. Well-armed coaches might

-expect to get through with little more than a few random shots, but

-along the hilltops they could often see the savages waiting in safety

-for them to pass. Indian warfare was not one of organized bodies and

-formal manoeuvres. Only when cornered did the Indian stand to fight.

-But in wild, unexpected descents the tribes fell upon the lines of

-communication, reducing the frontier to an abject terror overnight.

-

-The destruction of the stage route was not the first, though it was the

-most general hostility which marked the commencement of a new Indian

-war. Since the spring of 1864 events had occurred which in the absence

-of a more rigorous control than the Indian Department possessed, were

-likely to lead to trouble. The Cheyenne had been dissatisfied with the

-Fort Wise treaty ever since its conclusion. The Sioux were carrying on

-a prolonged war. The Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa were ready to be

-started on the war-path. It was the old story of too much compression

-and isolated attacks going unpunished. Whatever the merits of an

-original controversy, the only way to keep the savages under control

-was to make fair retribution follow close upon the commission of an

-outrage. But the punishment needed to be fair.

-

-In April, 1864, a ranchman named Ripley came into one of the camps on

-the South Platte and declared that some Indians had stolen his stock.

-Perhaps his statement was true; but it must be remembered that the

-ranchman whose stock strayed away was prone to charge theft against

-the Indians, and that there is only Ripley's own word that he ever had

-any stock. Captain Sanborn, commanding, sent out a troop of cavalry

-to recover the animals. They came upon some Indians with horses which

-Ripley claimed as his, and in an attempt to disarm them, a fight

-occurred in which the troop was driven off. Their lieutenant thought

-the Indians were Cheyenne.

-

-A few weeks after this, Major Jacob Downing, who had been in Camp

-Sanborn inspecting troops, came into Denver and got from Colonel

-Chivington about forty men, with whom "to go against the Indians."

-Downing later swore that he found the Cheyenne village at Cedar Bluffs.

-"We commenced shooting; I ordered the men to commence killing them....

-They lost ... some twenty-six killed and thirty wounded.... I burnt up

-their lodges and everything I could get hold of.... We captured about

-one hundred head of stock, which was distributed among the boys."

-

-On the 12th of June, a family living on Box Elder Creek, twenty miles

-east of Denver, was murdered by the Indians. Hungate, his wife, and

-two children were killed, the house burned, and fifty or sixty head

-of stock run off. When the "scalped and horribly mangled bodies" were

-brought into Denver, the population, already uneasy, was thrown into

-panic by this appearance of danger so close to the city. Governor Evans

-began at once to organize the militia for home defence and to appeal to

-Washington for help.

-

-By the time of the attack upon the stage line it was clear that an

-Indian war existed, involving in varying degrees parts of the Arapaho,

-Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the causes which

-provoked it were considerably in doubt. On the frontier there was no

-hesitation in charging it all to the innate savagery of the tribes.

-Governor Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the Indians

-might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a general peace on the

-plains, until after a severe chastisement of the Indians for these

-depredations."

-

-In restoring tranquillity the frontier had to rely largely upon its own

-resources. Its own Second Colorado was away doing duty in the Missouri

-campaign, while the eastern military situation presented no probability

-of troops being available to help out the West. Colonel Chivington and

-Governor John Evans, with the long-distance aid of General Curtis,

-were forced to make their own plans and execute them.

-

-As early as June, Governor Evans began his corrective measures,

-appealing first to Washington for permission to raise extra troops,

-and then endeavoring to separate the friendly and warlike Indians in

-order that the former "should not fall victims to the impossibility

-of soldiers discriminating between them and the hostile, upon whom

-they must, to do any good, inflict the most severe chastisement." To

-this end, and with the consent of the Indian Department, he sent out

-a proclamation, addressed to "the friendly Indians of the Plains,"

-directing them to keep away from those who were at war, and as

-evidence of friendship to congregate around the agencies for safety.

-Forts Lyons, Laramie, Larned, and Camp Collins were designated as

-concentration points for the several tribes. "None but those who intend

-to be friendly with the whites must come to these places. The families

-of those who have gone to war with the whites must be kept away

-from among the friendly Indians. The war on hostile Indians will be

-continued until they are all effectually subdued." The Indians, frankly

-at war, paid no attention to this invitation. Two small bands only

-sought the cover of the agencies, and with their exception, so Governor

-Evans reported on October 15, the proclamation "met no response from

-any of the Indians of the plains."

-

-The war parties became larger and more general as the summer advanced,

-driving whites off the plains between the two trails for several

-hundred miles. But as fall approached, the tribes as usual sought

-peace. The Indians' time for war was summer. Without supplies, they

-were unable to fight through the winter, so that autumn brought them

-into a mood well disposed to peace, reservations, and government

-rations. Major Colley, the agent on the Sand Creek reserve at Fort

-Lyon, received an overture early in September. In a letter written for

-them on August 29, by a trader, Black Kettle, of the Cheyenne, and

-other chiefs declared their readiness to make a peace if all the tribes

-were included in it. As an olive branch, they offered to give up seven

-white prisoners. They admitted that five war parties, three Cheyenne

-and two Arapaho, were yet in the field.

-

-Upon receipt of Black Kettle's letter, Major E. W. Wynkoop, military

-commander at Fort Lyon, marched with 130 men to the Cheyenne camp at

-Bend of Timbers, some eighty miles northeast of Fort Lyons. Here he

-found "from six to eight hundred Indian warriors drawn up in line

-of battle and prepared to fight." He avoided fighting, demanded and

-received the prisoners, and held a council with the chiefs. Here he

-told them that he had no authority to conclude a peace, but offered to

-conduct a group of chiefs to Denver, for a conference with Governor

-Evans.

-

-On September 28, Governor Evans held a council with the Cheyenne and

-Arapaho chiefs brought in by Major Wynkoop; Black Kettle and White

-Antelope being the most important. Black Kettle opened the conference

-with an appeal to the governor in which he alluded to his delivery of

-the prisoners and Wynkoop's invitation to visit Denver. "We have come

-with our eyes shut, following his handful of men, like coming through

-the fire," Black Kettle went on. "All we ask is that we may have peace

-with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand. You are our father.

-We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever

-since the war began. These braves who are with me are all willing to do

-what I say. We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they

-may sleep in peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers

-here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace,

-that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies." To him Governor Evans

-responded that this submission was a long time coming, and that the

-nation had gone to war, refusing to listen to overtures of peace. This

-Black Kettle admitted.

-

-"So far as making a treaty now is concerned," continued Governor

-Evans, "we are in no condition to do it.... You, so far, have had the

-advantage; but the time is near at hand when the plains will swarm with

-United States soldiers. I have learned that you understand that as the

-whites are at war among themselves, you think you can now drive the

-whites from this country; but this reliance is false. The Great Father

-at Washington has men enough to drive all the Indians off the plains,

-and whip the rebels at the same time. Now the war with the whites is

-nearly through, and the Great Father will not know what to do with all

-his soldiers, except to send them after the Indians on the plains. My

-proposition to the friendly Indians has gone out; [I] shall be glad

-to have them all come in under it. I have no new proposition to make.

-Another reason that I am not in a condition to make a treaty is that

-war is begun, and the power to make a treaty of peace has passed to

-the great war chief." He further counselled them to make terms with

-the military authorities before they could hope to talk of peace.

-No prospect of an immediate treaty was given to the chiefs. Evans

-disclaimed further powers, and Colonel Chivington closed the council,

-saying: "I am not a big war chief, but all the soldiers in this

-country are at my command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians

-is to fight them until they lay down their arms and submit." The same

-evening came a despatch from Major-general Curtis, at Fort Leavenworth,

-confirming the non-committal attitude of Evans and Chivington: "I want

-no peace till the Indians suffer more.... I fear Agent of the Interior

-Department will be ready to make presents too soon.... No peace must be

-made without my directions."

-

-The chiefs were escorted home without their peace or any promise of it,

-Governor Evans believing that the great body of the tribes was still

-hostile, and that a decisive winter campaign was needed to destroy

-their lingering notion that the whites might be driven from the plains.

-Black Kettle had been advised at the council to surrender to the

-soldiers, Major Wynkoop at Fort Lyon being mentioned as most available.

-Many of his tribe acted on the suggestion, so that on October 20 Agent

-Colley, their constant friend, reported that "nearly all the Arapahoes

-are now encamped near this place and desire to remain friendly, and

-make reparation for the damages committed by them."

-

-The Indians unquestionably were ready to make peace after their fashion

-and according to their ability. There is no evidence that they were

-reconciled to their defeat, but long experience had accustomed them

-to fighting in the summer and drawing rations as peaceful in the

-winter. The young men, in part, were still upon the war-path, but the

-tribes and the head chiefs were anxious to go upon a winter basis.

-Their interpreter who had attended the conference swore that they left

-Denver, "perfectly contented, deeming that the matter was settled,"

-that upon their return to Fort Lyon, Major Wynkoop gave them permission

-to bring their families in under the fort where he could watch them

-better; and that "accordingly the chiefs went after their families and

-villages and brought them in, ... satisfied that they were in perfect

-security and safety."

-

-While the Indians gathered around the fort, Major Wynkoop sent to

-General Curtis for advice and orders respecting them. Before the

-orders arrived, however, he was relieved from command and Major Scott

-J. Anthony, of the First Colorado Cavalry, was detailed in his place.

-After holding a conference with the Indians and Anthony, in which the

-latter renewed the permission for the bands to camp near the fort, he

-left Fort Lyons on November 26. Anthony meanwhile had become convinced

-that he was exceeding his authority. First he disarmed the savages,

-receiving only a few old and worn-out weapons. Then he returned these

-and ordered the Indians away from Fort Lyons. They moved forty miles

-away and encamped on Sand Creek.

-

-The Colorado authorities had no idea of calling it a peace. Governor

-Evans had scolded Wynkoop for bringing the chiefs in to Denver. He had

-received special permission and had raised a hundred-day regiment for

-an Indian campaign. If he should now make peace, Washington would think

-he had misrepresented the situation and put the government to needless

-expense. "What shall I do with the third regiment, if I make peace?" he

-demanded of Wynkoop. They were "raised to kill Indians, and they must

-kill Indians."

-

-Acting on the supposition that the war was still on, Colonel Chivington

-led the Third Colorado, and a part of the First Colorado Cavalry, from

-900 to 1000 strong, to Fort Lyons in November, arriving two days

-after Wynkoop departed. He picketed the fort, to prevent the news of

-his arrival from getting out, and conferred on the situation with

-Major Anthony, who, swore Major Downing, wished he would attack the

-Sand Creek camp and would have done so himself had he possessed troops

-enough. Three days before, Anthony had given a present to Black Kettle

-out of his own pocket. As the result of the council of war, Chivington

-started from Fort Lyon at nine o'clock, on the night of the 28th.

-

-About daybreak on November 29 Chivington's force reached the Cheyenne

-village on Sand Creek, where Black Kettle, White Antelope, and some

-500 of their band, mostly women and children, were encamped in the

-belief that they had made their peace. They had received no pledge of

-this, but past practice explained their confidence. The village was

-surrounded by troops who began to fire as soon as it was light. "We

-killed as many as we could; the village was destroyed and burned,"

-declared Downing, who further professed, "I think and earnestly

-believe the Indians to be an obstacle to civilization, and should be

-exterminated." White Antelope was killed at the first attack, refusing

-to leave the field, stating that it was the fault of Black Kettle,

-others, and himself that occasioned the massacre, and that he would

-die. Black Kettle, refusing to leave the field, was carried off by his

-young men. The latter had raised an American flag and a white flag in

-his effort to stop the fight.

-

-The firing began, swore interpreter Smith, on the northeast side of

-Sand Creek, near Black Kettle's lodge. Driven thence, the disorderly

-horde of savages retreated to War Bonnet's lodge at the upper end of

-the village, some few of them armed but most making no resistance. Up

-the dry bottom of Sand Creek they ran, with the troops in wild charge

-close behind. In the hollows of the banks they sought refuge, but the

-soldiers dragged them out, killing seventy or eighty with the worst

-barbarities Smith had seen: "All manner of depredations were inflicted

-on their persons; they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men

-used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked

-them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated

-their bodies in every sense of the word." The affidavits of soldiers

-engaged in the attack are printed in the government documents. They are

-too disgusting to be more than referred to elsewhere.

-

-Here at last was the culmination of the plains war of 1864 in the

-"Chivington massacre," which has been the centre of bitter controversy

-ever since its heroes marched into Denver with their bloody trophies.

-It was without question Indian fighting at its worst, yet it was

-successful in that the Indian hostilities stopped and a new treaty was

-easily obtained by the whites in 1865. The East denounced Chivington,

-and the Indian Commissioner described the event in 1865 as a butchery

-"in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States."

-"Comment cannot magnify the horror," said the _Nation_. The heart of

-the question had to do with the matter of good faith. At no time did

-the military or Colorado authorities admit or even appear to admit that

-the war was over. They regarded the campaign as punitive and necessary

-for the foundation of a secure peace. The Indians, on the other hand,

-believed that they had surrendered and were anxious to be let alone.

-Too often their wish in similar cases had been gratified, to the

-prolongation of destructive wars. What here occurred was horrible from

-any standard of civilized criticism. But even among civilized nations

-war is an unpleasant thing, and war with savages is most merciful, in

-the long run, when it speaks the savages' own tongue with no uncertain

-accent. That such extreme measures could occur was the result of the

-impossible situation on the plains. "My opinion," said Agent Colley,

-"is that white men and wild Indians cannot live in the same country

-in peace." With several different and diverging authorities over

-them, with a white population wanting their reserves and anxious

-for a provocation that might justify retaliation upon them, little

-difficulties were certain to lead to big results. It was true that the

-tribes were being dispossessed of lands which they believed to belong

-to them. It was equally true that an Indian war could terrify a whole

-frontier and that stern repression was its best cure. The blame which

-was accorded to Chivington left out of account the terror in Colorado,

-which was no less real because the whites were the aggressors. The

-slaughter and mutilation of Indian women and children did much to

-embitter Eastern critics, who did not realize that the only way to

-crush an Indian war is to destroy the base of supplies,--the camp

-where the women are busy helping to keep the men in the field; and who

-overlooked also the fact that in the melee the squaws were quite as

-dangerous as the bucks. Indiscriminate blame and equally indiscriminate

-praise have been accorded because of the Sand Creek affair. The

-terrible event was the result of the orderly working of causes over

-which individuals had little control.

-

-In October, 1865, a peace conference was held on the Little Arkansas at

-which terms were agreed upon with Apache, Kiowa and Comanche, Arapaho

-and Cheyenne, while the last named surrendered their reserve at Sand

-Creek. For four years after this, owing to delays in the Senate and

-ambiguity in the agreements, they had no fixed abode. Later they were

-given room in the Indian Territory in lands taken from the civilized

-tribes.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVI

-

-THE SIOUX WAR

-

-

-The struggle for the possession of the plains worked the displacement

-of the Indian tribes. At the beginning, the invasion of Kansas had

-undone the work accomplished in erecting the Indian frontier. The

-occupation of Minnesota led surely to the downfall and transportation

-of the Sioux of the Mississippi. Gold in Colorado attracted multitudes

-who made peace impossible for the Indians of the southern plains. The

-Sioux of the northern plains came within the influence of the overland

-march in the same years with similar results.

-

-The northern Sioux, commonly known as the Sioux of the plains, and

-distinguished from their relatives the Sioux of the Mississippi, had

-participated in the treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, had granted rights

-of transit to the whites, and had been recognized themselves as nomadic

-bands occupying the plains north of the Platte River. Heretofore they

-had had no treaty relations with the United States, being far beyond

-the frontier. Their people, 16,000 perhaps, were grouped roughly in

-various bands: Brule, Yankton, Yanktonai, Blackfoot, Hunkpapa, Sans

-Arcs, and Miniconjou. Their dependence on the chase made them more

-dependent on the annuities provided them at Laramie. As the game

-diminished the annuity increased in relative importance, and scarcely

-made a fair equivalent for what they lost. Yet on the whole, they

-imitated their neighbors, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and kept the peace.

-

-Almost the only time that the pledge was broken was in the autumn of

-1854. Continual trains of immigrants passing through the Sioux country

-made it nearly impossible to prevent friction between the races in

-which the blame was quite likely to fall upon the timorous homeseekers.

-On August 17, 1854, a cow strayed away from a band of Mormons encamped

-a few miles from Fort Laramie. Some have it that the cow was lame, and

-therefore abandoned; but whatever the cause, the cow was found, killed,

-and eaten by a small band of hungry Miniconjou Sioux. The charge of

-theft was brought into camp at Laramie, not by the Mormons, but by The

-Bear, chief of the Brule, and Lieutenant Grattan with an escort of

-twenty-nine men, a twelve-pounder and a mountain howitzer, was sent out

-the next day to arrest the Indian who had slaughtered the animal. At

-the Indian village the culprit was not forthcoming, Grattan's drunken

-interpreter roughened a diplomacy which at best was none too tactful,

-and at last the troops fired into the lodge which was said to contain

-the offender. No one of the troops got away from the enraged Sioux,

-who, after their anger had led them to retaliate, followed it up by

-plundering the near-by post of the fur company. Commissioner Manypenny

-believed that this action by the troops was illegal and unnecessary

-from the start, since the Mormons could legally have been reimbursed

-from the Indian funds by the agent.

-

-No general war followed this outbreak. A few braves went on the

-war-path and rumors of great things reached the East, but General

-Harney, sent out with three regiments to end the Sioux war in 1855,

-found little opposition and fought only one important battle. On the

-Little Blue Water, in September, 1855, he fell upon Little Thunder's

-band of Brule Sioux and killed or wounded nearly a hundred of them.

-There is some doubt whether this band had anything to do with the

-Grattan episode, or whether it was even at war, but the defeat was,

-as Agent Twiss described it, "a thunderclap to them." For the first

-time they learned the mighty power of the United States, and General

-Harney made good use of this object lesson in the peace council which

-he held with them in March, 1856. The treaty here agreed upon was

-never legalized, and remained only a sort of _modus vivendi_ for the

-following years. The Sioux tribes were so loosely organized that the

-authority of the chiefs had little weight; young braves did as they

-pleased regardless of engagements supposed to bind the tribes. But the

-lesson of the defeat lasted long in the memory of the plains tribes,

-so that they gave little trouble until the wars of 1864 broke out.

-Meanwhile Chouteau's old Fort Pierre on the Missouri was bought by the

-United States and made a military post for the control of these upper

-tribes.

-

-Before the plains Sioux broke out again, the Minnesota uprising had led

-the Mississippi Sioux to their defeat. Some were executed in the fall

-of 1862, others were transported to the Missouri Valley; still others

-got away to the Northwest, there to continue a profitless war that kept

-up fighting for several years. Meanwhile came the plains war of 1864

-in which the tribes south of the Platte were chiefly concerned, and in

-which men at the centre of the line thought there were evidences of

-an alliance between northern and southern tribes. Thus Governor Evans

-wrote of "information furnished me, through various sources, of an

-alliance of the Cheyenne and a part of the Arapahoe tribes with the

-Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians of the south, and the great family

-of the Sioux Indians of the north upon the plains," and the Indian

-Commissioner accepted the notion. But, like the question of intrigue,

-this was a matter of belief rather than of proof; while local causes to

-account for the disorder are easily found. Yet it is true that during

-1864 and 1865 the northern Sioux became uneasy.

-

-During 1865, though the causes likely to lead to hostilities were in

-no wise changed, efforts were made to reach agreements with the plains

-tribes. The Cheyenne, humbled at Sand Creek, were readily handled at

-the Little Arkansas treaty in October. They there surrendered to the

-United States all their reserve in Colorado and accepted a new one,

-which they never actually received, south of the Arkansas, and bound

-themselves not to camp within ten miles of the route to Santa Fe. On

-the other side, "to heal the wounds caused by the Chivington affair,"

-special appropriations were made by the United States to the widows and

-orphans of those who had been killed. The Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche

-joined in similar treaties. During the same week, in 1865, a special

-commission made treaties of peace with nine of the Sioux tribes,

-including the remnants of the Mississippi bands. "These treaties were

-made," commented the Commissioner, "and the Indians, in spite of the

-great suffering from cold and want of food endured during the very

-severe winter of 1865-66, and consequent temptation to plunder to

-procure the absolute necessaries of life, faithfully kept the peace."

-

-In September, 1865, the steamer _Calypso_ struggled up the shallow

-Missouri River, carrying a party of commissioners to Fort Sully, there

-to make these treaties with the Sioux. Congress had provided $20,000

-for a special negotiation before adjourning in March, 1865, and General

-Sully, who was yet conducting the prolonged Sioux War, had pointed out

-the place most suitable for the conference. The first council was held

-on October 6.

-

-The military authorities were far from eager to hold this council.

-Already the breach between the military power responsible for policing

-the plains and the civilian department which managed the tribes was

-wide. Thus General Pope, commanding the Department of the Missouri,

-grumbled to Grant in June that whenever Indian hostilities occurred,

-the Indian Department, which was really responsible, blamed the

-soldiers for causing them. He complained of the divided jurisdiction

-and of the policy of buying treaties from the tribes by presents made

-at the councils. In reference to this special treaty he had "only to

-say that the Sioux Indians have been attacking everybody in their

-region of country; and only lately ... attacked in heavy force Fort

-Rice, on the upper Missouri, well fortified and garrisoned by four

-companies of infantry with artillery. If these things show any desire

-for peace, I confess I am not able to perceive it."

-

-In future years this breach was to become wider yet. At Sand Creek the

-military authorities had justified the attack against the criticism of

-the local Indian agents and Eastern philanthropists. There was indeed

-plenty of evidence of misconduct on both sides. If the troops were

-guilty on the charge of being over-ready to fight--and here the words

-of Governor Evans were prophetic, "Now the war ... is nearly through,

-and the Great Father will not know what to do with all his soldiers,

-except to send them after the Indians on the plains,"--the Indian

-agents often succumbed to the opportunity for petty thieving. The case

-of one of the agents of the Yankton Sioux illustrates this. It was his

-custom each year to have the chiefs of his tribe sign general receipts

-for everything sent to the agency. Thus at the end of the year he could

-turn in Indians' vouchers and report nothing on hand. But the receipt

-did not mean that the Indian had got the goods; although signed for,

-these were left in the hands of the agent to be given out as needed.

-The inference is strong that many of the supplies intended for and

-signed for by the Indians went into the pocket of the agent. During the

-third quarter of 1863 this agent claimed to have issued to his charges:

-"One pair of bay horses, 7 years old; ... 1 dozen 17-inch mill files;

-... 6 dozen Seidlitz powders; 6 pounds compound syrup of squills; 6

-dozen Ayer's pills; ... 3 bottles of rose water; ... 1 pound of wax;

-... 1 ream of vouchers; ... 1/2 M 6434 8-1/2-inch official envelopes;

-... 4 bottles 8-ounce mucilage." So great was this particular agent's

-power that it was nearly impossible to get evidence against him. "If

-I do, he will fix it so I'll never get anything in the world and he

-will drive me out of the country," was typical of the attitude of his

-neighbors.

-

-With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for it quarrelling, it

-is no wonder that the charges suffered. But the ill results came more

-from the impossible situation than from abuse on either side. It needs

-often to be reiterated that the heart of the Indian question was in the

-infiltration of greedy, timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who

-could not be restrained by any process known to American government. In

-the conflict between two civilizations, the lower must succumb. Neither

-the War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible for most of

-the troubles; yet of the two, the former, through readiness to fight

-and to hold the savage to a standard of warfare which he could not

-understand, was the greater offender. It was not so great an offender,

-however, as the selfish interests of those engaged in trading with the

-Indians would make it out to be.

-

-The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty signed on October

-10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory. Many of the western Sioux did

-not come at all. Even the eastern were only partially represented.

-And among tribes in which the central authority of the chiefs was

-weak, full representation was necessary to secure a binding peace. The

-commissioners, after most pacific efforts, were "unable to ascertain

-the existence of any really amicable feeling among these people towards

-the government." The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the treaty

-which resulted did little more than repeat the terms of the treaty of

-1851, binding the Indians to permit roads to be opened through their

-country and to keep away from the trails.

-

-It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were bound by the

-treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie treaty of 1851 had never had full

-force of law because the Senate had added amendments to it, which

-all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although Congress had

-appropriated the annuities specified in the treaty the binding force

-of the document was not great on savages. The Fort Sully treaty was

-deficient in that it did not represent all of the interested tribes.

-In making Indian treaties at all, the United States acted upon a

-convenient fiction that the Indians had authorities with power to bind;

-whereas the leaders had little control over their followers and after

-nearly every treaty there were many bands that could claim to have

-been left out altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed,

-and the United States proceeded in 1865 and 1866 to use its specified

-rights in opening roads through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.

-

-The mines of Montana and Idaho, which had attracted notice and

-emigration in the early sixties, were still the objective points of

-a large traffic. They were somewhat off the beaten routes, being

-accessible by the Missouri River and Fort Benton, or by the Platte

-trail and a northern branch from near Fort Hall to Virginia City. To

-bring them into more direct connection with the East an available route

-from Fort Laramie was undertaken in 1865. The new trail left the main

-road near Fort Laramie, crossed to the north side of the Platte, and

-ran off to the northwest. Shortly after leaving the Platte the road got

-into the charming foothill country where the slopes "are all covered

-with a fine growth of grass, and in every valley there is either a

-rushing stream or some quiet babbling brook of pure, clear snow-water

-filled with trout, the banks lined with trees--wild cherry, quaking

-asp, some birch, willow, and cottonwood." To the left, and not far

-distant, were the Big Horn Mountains. To the right could sometimes be

-seen in the distance the shadowy billows of the Black Hills. Running to

-the north and draining the valley were the Powder and Tongue rivers,

-both tributaries of the Yellowstone. Here were water, timber, and

-forage, coal and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the Indians,

-"the very heart of their hunting-grounds." In a single day's ride were

-seen "bear, buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens."

-With little exaggeration it was described as a "natural source of

-recuperation and supply to moving, hunting, and roving bands of all

-tribes, and their lodge trails cross it in great numbers from north to

-south." Through this land, keeping east of the Big Horn Mountains and

-running around their northern end into the Yellowstone Valley, was to

-run the new Powder River road to Montana. The Sioux treaties were to

-have their severest testing in the selection of choice hunting-grounds

-for an emigrant road, for it was one of the certainties in the opening

-of new roads that game vanished in the face of emigration.

-

-While the commissioners were negotiating their treaty at Fort Sully,

-the first Powder River expedition, in its attempt to open this new road

-by the short and direct route from Fort Laramie to Bozeman and the

-Montana mines, was undoing their work. In the summer of 1865 General

-Patrick E. Connor, with a miscellaneous force of 1600, including a

-detachment of ex-Confederate troops who had enlisted in the United

-States army to fight Indians, started from Fort Laramie for the mouth

-of the Rosebuds on the Yellowstone, by way of the Powder River. Old

-Jim Bridger, the incarnation of this country, led them, swearing

-mightily at "these damn paper-collar soldiers," who knew so little of

-the Indians. There was plenty of fighting as Connor pushed into the

-Yellowstone, but he was relieved from command in September and the

-troops were drawn back, so that there were no definitive results of the

-expedition of 1865.

-

-In 1866, in spite of the fact that the Sioux of this region, through

-their leader Red Cloud, had refused to yield the ground or even to

-treat concerning it, Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered by General

-Pope to command the Mountain District, Department of the Platte, and to

-erect and garrison posts for the control of the Powder River road. On

-December 21 of this year, Captain W. J. Fetterman, of his command, and

-seventy-eight officers and men were killed near Fort Philip Kearney in

-a fight whose merits aroused nearly as much acrimonious discussion as

-the Sand Creek massacre.

-

-[Illustration: RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH

-

-From a cut lent by Professor Warren K. Moorehead, of Andover, Mass.]

-

-The events leading up to the catastrophe at Fort Philip Kearney, a

-catastrophe so complete that none of its white participants escaped

-to tell what happened, were connected with Carrington's work in

-building forts. He had been detailed for the work in the spring, and

-after a conference at Fort Kearney, Nebraska, with General Sherman,

-had marched his men in nineteen days to Fort Laramie. He reached Fort

-Reno, which became his headquarters, on June 28. On the march, if his

-orders were obeyed, his soldiers were scrupulous in their regard for

-the Indians. His orders issued for the control of emigrants passing

-along the Powder River route were equally careful. Thirty men were

-to constitute the minimum single party; these were to travel with a

-military pass, which was to be scrutinized by the commanding officer

-of each post. The trains were ordered to hold together and were

-warned that "nearly all danger from Indians lies in the recklessness

-of travellers. A small party, when separated, either sell whiskey to

-or fire upon scattering Indians, or get into disputes with them, and

-somebody is hurt. An insult to an Indian is resented by the Indians

-against the first white men they meet, and innocent travellers suffer."

-

-Carrington's orders were to garrison Fort Reno and build new forts

-on the Powder, Big Horn, and Yellowstone rivers, and cover the road.

-The last-named fort was later cut away because of his insufficient

-force, but Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith were located

-during July and August. The former stood on a little plateau formed

-between the two Pineys as they emerge from the Big Horn Mountains.

-Its site was surveyed and occupied on July 15. Already Carrington was

-complaining that he had too few men for his work. With eight companies

-of eighty men each, and most of these new recruits, he had to garrison

-his long line, all the while building and protecting his stockades

-and fortifications. "I am my own engineer, draughtsman, and visit

-my pickets and guards nightly, with scarcely a day or night without

-attempts to steal stock." Worse than this, his military equipment was

-inadequate. Only his band, specially armed for the expedition, had

-Spencer carbines and enough ammunition. His main force, still armed

-with Springfield rifles, had under fifty rounds to the man.

-

-The Indians, Cheyenne and Sioux, were, all through the summer, showing

-no sign of accepting the invasion of the hunting-grounds without a

-fight. Yet Carrington reported on August 29 that he was holding them

-off; that Fort C. F. Smith on the Big Horn had been occupied; that

-parties of fifty well-armed men could get through safely if they were

-careful. The Indians, he said, "are bent on robbery; they only fight

-when assured of personal security and remunerative stealings; they are

-divided among themselves."

-

-With the sites for forts C. F. Smith and Philip Kearney selected,

-the work of construction proceeded during the autumn. A sawmill,

-sent out from the states, was kept hard at work. Wood was cut on the

-adjacent hills and speedily converted into cabins and palisades

-which approached completion before winter set in. It was construction

-during a state of siege, however. Instead of pacifying the valley

-the construction of the forts aggravated the Sioux hostility so that

-constant watchfulness was needed. That the trains sent out to gather

-wood were not seriously injured was due to rigorous discipline. The

-wagons moved twenty or more at a time, with guards, and in two parallel

-columns. At first sight of Indians they drove into corral and signalled

-back to the lookouts at the fort for help. Occasionally men were indeed

-cut out by the Indians, who in turn suffered considerable loss; but

-Carrington reduced his own losses to a minimum. Friendly Indians were

-rarely seen. They were allowed to come to the fort, by the main road

-and with a white flag, but few availed themselves of the privilege. The

-Sioux were up in arms, and in large numbers hung about the Tongue and

-Powder river valleys waiting for their chance.

-

-Early in December occurred an incident revealing the danger of

-annihilation which threatened Carrington's command. At one o'clock on

-the afternoon of the sixth a messenger reported to the garrison at Fort

-Philip Kearney that the wood train was attacked by Indians four miles

-away. Carrington immediately had every horse at the post mounted. For

-the main relief he sent out a column under Brevet Lieutenant-colonel

-Fetterman, who had just arrived at the fort, while he led in person a

-flanking party to cut off the Indians' retreat. The mercury was below

-zero. Carrington was thrown into the water of Peno Creek when his

-horse stumbled through breaking ice. Fetterman's party found the wood

-train in corral and standing off the attack with success. The savages

-retreated as the relief approached and were pursued for five miles,

-when they turned and offered battle. Just as the fighting began, most

-of the cavalry broke away from Fetterman, leaving him and some fourteen

-others surrounded by Indians and attacked on three sides. He held them

-off, however, until Carrington came in sight and the Indians fled.

-Why Lieutenant Bingham retreated with his cavalry and left Fetterman

-in such danger was never explained, for the Indians killed him and

-one of his non-commissioned officers, while several other privates

-were wounded. The Indians, once the fight was over, disappeared among

-the hills, and Carrington had no force with which to follow them. In

-reporting the battle that night he renewed his requests for men and

-officers. He had but six officers for the six companies at Fort Philip

-Kearney. He was totally unable to take the aggressive because of the

-defences which had constantly to be maintained.

-

-In this fashion the fall advanced in the Powder River Valley. The forts

-were finished. The Indian hostilities increased. The little, overworked

-force of Carrington, chopping, building, guarding, and fighting,

-struggled to fulfil its orders. If one should criticise Carrington,

-the attack would be chiefly that he looked to defensive measures in the

-Indian war. He did indeed ask for troops, officers, and equipment, but

-his despatches and his own vindication show little evidence that he

-realized the need for large reenforcements for the specific purpose of

-a punitive campaign. More skilful Indian fighters knew that the Indians

-could and would keep up indefinitely this sort of filibustering against

-the forts, and that a vigorous move against their own villages was the

-surest means to secure peace. In Indian warfare, even more perhaps

-than in civilized, it is advantageous to destroy the enemy's base of

-supplies.

-

-The wood train was again attacked on December 21. About eleven o'clock

-that morning the pickets reported the train "corralled and threatened

-by Indians on Sullivant Hills, a mile and a half from the fort." The

-usual relief party was at once organized and sent out under Fetterman,

-who claimed the right to command it by seniority, and who was not

-highest in the confidence of Colonel Carrington. He had but recently

-joined the command, was full of enthusiasm and desire to hunt Indians,

-and needed the admonition with which he left the fort: that he was

-"fighting brave and desperate enemies who sought to make up by cunning

-and deceit all the advantage which the white man gains by intelligence

-and better arms." He was ordered to support and bring in the wood

-train, this being all Carrington believed himself strong enough to do

-and keep on doing. Any one could have had a fight at any time, and

-Carrington was wise to issue the "peremptory and explicit" orders to

-avoid pursuit beyond the summit of Lodge Trail Ridge, as needless and

-unduly dangerous. Three times this order was given to Fetterman; and

-after that, "fearing still that the spirit of ambition might override

-prudence," says Carrington, "I crossed the parade and from a sentry

-platform halted the cavalry and again repeated my precise orders."

-

-With these admonitions, Fetterman started for the relief, leading a

-party of eighty-one officers and men, picked and all well armed. He

-crossed the Lodge Trail Ridge as soon as he was out of sight of the

-fort and disappeared. No one of his command came back alive. The wood

-train, before twelve o'clock, broke corral and moved on in safety,

-while shots were heard beyond the ridge. For half an hour there was a

-constant volleying; then all was still. Meanwhile Carrington, nervous

-at the lack of news from Fetterman, had sent a second column, and two

-wagons to relieve him, under Captain Ten Eyck. The latter, moving

-along cautiously, with large bands of Sioux retreating before him,

-came finally upon forty-nine bodies, including that of Fetterman.

-The evidence of arrows, spears, and the position of bodies was that

-they had been surrounded, surprised, and overwhelmed in their defeat.

-The next day the rest of the bodies were reached and brought back.

-Naked, dismembered, slashed, visited with indescribable indignities,

-they were buried in two great graves; seventy-nine soldiers and two

-civilians.

-

-The Fetterman massacre raised a storm in the East similar in volume

-to that following Sand Creek, two years before. Who was at fault, and

-why, were the questions indignantly asked. Judicious persons were well

-aware, wrote the _Nation_, that "our whole Indian policy is a system of

-mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse." The military

-authorities tried to place the blame on Carrington, as plausible,

-energetic, and industrious, but unable to maintain discipline or

-inspire his officers with confidence. Unquestionably a part of this

-was true, yet the letter which made the charge admitted that often the

-Indians were better armed than the troops, and the critic himself,

-General Cooke, had ordered Carrington: "You can only defend yourself

-and trains, and emigrants, the best you can." The Indian Commissioner

-charged it on the bad disposition of the troops, always anxious to

-fight.

-

-The issue broke over the number of Indians involved. Current reports

-from Fort Philip Kearney indicated from 3000 to 5000 hostile

-warriors, chiefly Sioux and led by Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe. The

-Commissioner pointed out that such a force must imply from 21,000 to

-35,000 Indians in all--a number that could not possibly have been in

-the Powder River country. It is reasonable to believe that Fetterman

-was not overwhelmed by any multitude like this, but that his own

-rash disobedience led to ambush and defeat by a force well below

-3000. Upon him fell the immediate responsibility; above him, the War

-Department was negligent in detailing so few men for so large a task;

-and ultimately there was the impossibility of expecting savage Sioux to

-give up their best hunting-grounds as a result of a treaty signed by

-others than themselves.

-

-The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of transition in Indian

-warfare. Even here the Indians were mostly armed with bows and arrows,

-and were relying upon their superior numbers for victory. Yet a change

-in Indian armament was under way, which in a few years was to convert

-the Indian from a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in

-the world." He was being armed with rifles. As the game diminished

-the tribes found that the old methods of hunting were inadequate and

-began the pressure upon the Indian Department for better weapons. The

-department justified itself in issuing rifles and ammunition, on the

-ground that the laws of the United States expected the Indians to

-live chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure by the older

-means. Hence came the anomalous situation in which one department

-of the United States armed and equipped the tribes for warfare

-against another. If arms were cut down, the tribes were in danger of

-extinction; if they were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the

-Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that the hostile Sioux

-were merely hungry, because the War Department had caused the issuing

-of guns to be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with bad

-temper and suspicion on both sides.

-

-A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud tried again to wreck

-a wood train near Fort Philip Kearney. But this time the escort erected

-a barricade with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety of army

-wagon, and though deserted by most of his men, Major James Powell, with

-one other officer, twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind

-their fortification and repelled charge after charge from some 800

-Sioux and Cheyenne. With little loss to himself he inflicted upon the

-savages a lesson that lasted many years.

-

-The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the chain of Indian outbreaks

-that stretched across the path of the westward movement, the overland

-traffic and the continental railways. The Pacific railways had been

-chartered just as the overland telegraph had been opened to the

-Pacific coast. With this last, perhaps from reverence for the nearly

-supernatural, the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway advanced,

-increasing compression and repression stirred the tribes to a series of

-hostilities. The first treaties which granted transit--meaning chiefly

-wagon transit--broke down. A new series of conferences and a new policy

-were the direct result of these wars.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVII

-

-THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY

-

-

-The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may

-fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter

-of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous

-fifteen years the causes had been shaping through the development of

-the use of the trails, the opening of the mining territories, and

-the agitation for a continental railway. Now the railway was not

-only authorized and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon its

-completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted the Union Pacific

-to build west and the Central Pacific to build east until the two

-lines should meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the roads

-were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis of the Indian problem

-was speedily reached. In the fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of

-the overland freighting and sold out. In November the terminus of the

-overland mail route was moved west to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither

-the Union Pacific had now arrived in its course of construction. No

-wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke out in protest.

-

-As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion among those who

-must handle the tribes became apparent. The question of the management

-by the War Department or the Interior was in the air, and was raised

-again and again in Congress. More fundamental was the question of

-policy, upon which the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as

-any. "I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William, in 1867,

-"that Indian wars will not cease until all the Indian tribes are

-absorbed in our population, and can be controlled by constables instead

-of soldiers." Upon another phase of management Francis A. Walker

-wrote a little later: "There can be no question of national dignity

-involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest

-Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him.... With wild men,

-as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run is a

-question merely of what is safest or easiest in the situation given."

-That responsibility for some decided action lay heavily upon the whites

-may be implied from the admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the

-frontier well--"that, during more than a third of a century passed on

-the plains and in the mountains, he has never known of a war with the

-hostile tribes that was not caused by broken faith on the part of the

-United States or its agents." A professional Indian fighter, like Kit

-Carson, declared on oath that "as a general thing, the difficulties

-arise from aggressions on the part of the whites."

-

-In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian problem found

-spokesmen. The War and Interior departments had ample representation;

-the Western members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of the

-frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian sentiment that

-saw much good in the Indian and much evil in his treatment. But withal,

-when it came to special action upon any situation, Congress felt its

-lack of information. The departments best informed were partisan and

-antagonistic. Even to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship

-to determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and responsibility

-in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak, and the Chivington or the

-Fetterman massacre. To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness

-in the midst of interested parties Congress raised a committee of

-seven, three of the Senate and four of the House, in March, 1865, to

-investigate and report on the condition of the Indian tribes. The joint

-committee was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed debate

-on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne war ended and the Sioux

-broke out; the committee reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its

-investigation it divided itself into three groups to visit the Pacific

-Slope, the southern plains, and the northern plains. Its report, with

-the accompanying testimony, fills over five hundred pages. In all the

-storm centres of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and

-questioned.

-

-The _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_ gave a doleful view

-of the future from the Indians' standpoint. General Pope was quoted

-to the effect that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars,

-cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration, "and by

-steady and resistless encroachments of the white emigration towards

-the west, which is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits,

-and driving off or killing the game, their only means of subsistence."

-To this catalogue of causes General Carleton, who must have believed

-his war of Apache and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of

-providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty originates, when in

-their appointed time He wills that one race of man--as in races of

-lower animals--shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place

-to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced out by Himself,

-which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The

-races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed

-away; the red man of America is passing away!"

-

-The committee believed that the wars with their incidents of slaughter

-and extermination by both sides, as occasion offered, were generally

-the result of white encroachments. It did not fall in with the growing

-opinion that the control of the tribes should be passed over to the War

-Department, but recommended instead a system of visiting boards, each

-including a civilian, a soldier, and an Assistant Indian Commissioner,

-for the regular inspection of the tribes. The recommendation of the

-committee came to naught in Congress, but the information it gathered,

-supplementing the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs

-and the special investigations of single wars, gave much additional

-weight to the belief that a crisis was at hand.

-

-Meanwhile, through 1866 and 1867, the Cheyenne and Sioux wars dragged

-on. The Powder River country continued to be a field of battle, with

-Powell's fight coming in the summer of 1867. In the spring of 1867

-General Hancock destroyed a Cheyenne village at Pawnee Fork. Eastern

-opinion came to demand more forcefully that this fighting should stop.

-Western opinion was equally insistent that the Indian must go, while

-General Sherman believed that a part of its bellicose demand was due to

-a desire for "the profit resulting from military occupation." Certain

-it was that war had lasted for several years with no definite results,

-save to rouse the passions of the West, the revenge of the Indians, and

-the philanthropy of the East. The army had had its chance. Now the time

-had come for general, real attempts at peace.

-

-The fortieth Congress, beginning its life on March 4, 1867, actually

-began its session at that time. Ordinarily it would have waited until

-December, but the prevailing distrust of President Johnson and his

-reconstruction ideas induced it to convene as early as the law allowed.

-Among the most significant of its measures in this extra session was

-"Mr. Henderson's bill for establishing peace with certain Indian

-tribes now at war with the United States," which, in the view of the

-_Nation_, was a "practical measure for the security of travel through

-the territories and for the selection of a new area sufficient to

-contain all the unsettled tribes east of the Rocky Mountains." Senator

-Sherman had informed his brother of the prospect of this law, and the

-General had replied: "The fact is, this contact of the two races has

-caused universal hostility, and the Indians operate in small, scattered

-bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains and hitting little

-parties who are off their guard. I have a much heavier force on the

-plains, but they are so large that it is impossible to guard at all

-points, and the clamor for protection everywhere has prevented our

-being able to collect a large force to go into the country where we

-believe the Indians have hid their families; viz. up on the Yellowstone

-and down on the Red River." Sherman believed more in fighting than in

-treating at this time, yet he went on the commission erected by the

-act of July 20, 1867. By this law four civilians, including the Indian

-Commissioner, and three generals of the army, were appointed to collect

-and deal with the hostile tribes, with three chief objects in view:

-to remove the existing causes of complaint, to secure the safety of

-the various continental railways and the overland routes, and to work

-out some means for promoting Indian civilization without impeding the

-advance of the United States. To this last end they were to hunt for

-permanent homes for the tribes, which were to be off the lines of all

-the railways then chartered,--the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific,

-and the Atlantic and Pacific.

-

-The Peace Commission, thus organized, sat for fifteen months. When

-it rose at last, it had opened the way for the railways, so far as

-treaties could avail. It had persuaded many tribes to accept new and

-more remote reserves, but in its debates and negotiations the breach

-between military and civil control had widened, so that the Commission

-was at the end divided against itself.

-

-On August 6, 1867, the Commission organized at St. Louis and discussed

-plans for getting into touch with the tribes with whom it had to treat.

-"The first difficulty presenting itself was to secure an interview with

-the chiefs and leading warriors of these hostile tribes. They were

-roaming over an immense country, thousands of miles in extent, and much

-of it unknown even to hunters and trappers of the white race. Small

-war parties constantly emerging from this vast extent of unexplored

-country would suddenly strike the border settlements, killing the men

-and carrying off into captivity the women and children. Companies of

-workmen on the railroads, at points hundreds of miles from each other,

-would be attacked on the same day, perhaps in the same hour. Overland

-mail coaches could not be run without military escort, and railroad

-and mail stations unguarded by soldiery were in perpetual danger. All

-safe transit across the plains had ceased. To go without soldiers was

-hazardous in the extreme; to go with them forbade reasonable hope of

-securing peaceful interviews with the enemy." Fortunately the Peace

-Commission contained within itself the most useful of assistants.

-General Sherman and Commissioner Taylor sent out word to the Indians

-through the military posts and Indian agencies, notifying the tribes

-that the Commissioners desired to confer with them near Fort Laramie in

-September and Fort Larned in October.

-

-The Fort Laramie conference bore no fruit during the summer of 1867.

-After inspecting conditions on the upper Missouri the Commissioners

-proceeded to Omaha in September and thence to North Platte station

-on the Union Pacific Railroad. Here they met Swift Bear of the Brule

-Sioux and learned that the Sioux would not be ready to meet them until

-November. The Powder River War was still being fought by chiefs who

-could not be reached easily and whose delegations must be delayed. When

-the Commissioners returned to Fort Laramie in November, they found

-matters little better. Red Cloud, who was the recognized leader of the

-Oglala and Brule Sioux and the hostile northern Cheyenne, refused even

-to see the envoys, and sent them word: "that his war against the whites

-was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground

-left to his nation, from our intrusion. He assured us that whenever

-the military garrisons at Fort Philip Kearney and Fort C. F. Smith

-were withdrawn, the war on his part would cease." Regretfully, the

-Commissioners left Fort Laramie, having seen no savages except a few

-non-hostile Crows, and having summoned Red Cloud to meet them during

-the following summer, after asking "a truce or cessation of hostilities

-until the council could be held."

-

-The southern plains tribes were met at Medicine Lodge Creek some eighty

-miles south of the Arkansas River. Before the Commissioners arrived

-here General Sherman was summoned to Washington, his place being taken

-by General C. C. Augur, whose name makes the eighth signature to the

-published report. For some time after the Commissioners arrived the

-Cheyenne, sullen and suspicious, remained in their camp forty miles

-away from Medicine Lodge. But the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache came to

-an agreement, while the others held off. On the 21st of October these

-ceded all their rights to occupy their great claims in the Southwest,

-the whole of the two panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and agreed to

-confine themselves to a new reserve in the southwestern part of Indian

-Territory, between the Red River and the Washita, on lands taken from

-the Choctaw and Chickasaw in 1866.

-

-The Commissioners could not greatly blame the Arapaho and Cheyenne for

-their reluctance to treat. These had accepted in 1861 the triangular

-Sand Creek reserve in Colorado, where they had been massacred by

-Chivington in 1864. Whether rightly or not, they believed themselves

-betrayed, and the Indian Office sided with them. In 1865, after Sand

-Creek, they exchanged this tract for a new one in Kansas and Indian

-Territory, which was amended to nothingness when the Senate added to

-the treaty the words, "no part of the reservation shall be within the

-state of Kansas." They had left the former reserve; the new one had not

-been given them; yet for two years after 1865 they had generally kept

-the peace. Sherman travelled through this country in the autumn of 1866

-and "met no trouble whatever," although he heard rumors of Indian wars.

-In 1867, General Hancock had destroyed one of their villages on the

-Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas, without provocation, the Indians believed.

-After this there had been admitted war. The Indians had been on the

-war-path all the time, plundering the frontier and dodging the military

-parties, and were unable for some weeks to realize that the Peace

-Commissioners offered a change of policy. Yet finally these yielded

-to blandishment and overture, and signed, on October 28, a treaty

-at Medicine Lodge. The new reserve was a bit of barren land nearly

-destitute of wood and water, and containing many streams that were

-either brackish or dry during most of the year. It was in the Cherokee

-Outlet, between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers.

-

-The Medicine Lodge treaties were the chief result of the summer's

-negotiations. The Peace Commission returned to Fort Laramie in the

-following spring to meet the reluctant northern tribes. The Sioux, the

-Crows, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne who were allied with them, made

-peace after the Commissioners had assented to the terms laid down by

-Red Cloud in 1867. They had convinced themselves that the occupation of

-the Powder River Valley was both illegal and unjust, and accordingly

-the garrisons had been drawn out of the new forts. Much to the anger of

-Montana was this yielding. "With characteristic pusillanimity," wrote

-one of the pioneers, years later, denouncing the act, "the government

-ordered all the forts abandoned and the road closed to travel." In the

-new Fort Laramie treaty of April 29, 1868, it was specifically agreed

-that the country east of the Big Horn Mountains was to be considered as

-unceded Indian territory; while the Sioux bound themselves to occupy

-as their permanent home the lands west of the Missouri, between the

-parallels of 43 deg. and 46 deg., and east of the 104th meridian--an

-area coinciding to-day with the western end of South Dakota. Thus was

-begun the actual compression of the Sioux of the plains.

-

-The treaties made by the Peace Commissioners were the most important,

-but were not the only treaties of 1867 and 1868, looking towards the

-relinquishment by the Indians of lands along the railroad's right

-of way. It had been found that rights of transit through the Indian

-Country, such as those secured at Laramie in 1851, were insufficient.

-The Indian must leave even the vicinity of the route of travel, for

-peace and his own good.

-

-Most important of the other tribes shoved away from the route were the

-Ute, Shoshoni, and Bannock, whose country lay across the great trail

-just west of the Rockies. The Ute, having given their name to the

-territory of Utah, were to be found south of the trail, between it and

-the lower waters of the Colorado. Their western bands were earliest

-in negotiation and were settled on reserves, the most important being

-on the Uintah River in northeast Utah, after 1861. The Colorado Ute

-began to treat in 1863, but did not make definite cessions until

-1868, when the southwestern third of Colorado was set apart for them.

-Active life in Colorado territory was at the start confined to the

-mountains in the vicinity of Denver City, while the Indians were pushed

-down the slopes of the range on both sides. But as the eastern Sand

-Creek reserve soon had to be abolished, so Colorado began to growl at

-the western Ute reserve and to complain that indolent savages were

-given better treatment than white citizens. The Shoshoni and Bannock

-ranged from Fort Hall to the north and were visited by General Augur

-at Fort Bridger in the summer of 1868. As the results of his gifts

-and diplomacy the former were pushed up to the Wind River reserve in

-Wyoming territory, while the latter were granted a home around Fort

-Hall.

-

-The friction with the Indians was heaviest near the line of the old

-Indian frontier and tended to be lighter towards the west. It was

-natural enough that on the eastern edge of the plains, where the

-tribes had been colonized and where Indian population was most dense,

-the difficulties should be greatest. Indeed the only wars which were

-sufficiently important to count as resistance to the westward movement

-were those of the plains tribes and were fought east of the continental

-divide. The mountain and western wars were episodes, isolated from the

-main movements. Yet these great plains that now had to be abandoned

-had been set aside as a permanent home for the race in pursuance of

-Monroe's policy. In the report of the Peace Commissioners all agreed

-that the time had come to change it.

-

-The influence of the humanitarians dominated the report of the

-Commissioners, which was signed in January, 1868. Wherever possible,

-the side of the Indian was taken. The Chivington massacre was an

-"indiscriminate slaughter," scarcely paralleled in the "records of

-the Indian barbarity"; General Hancock had ruthlessly destroyed the

-Cheyenne at Pawnee Fork, though himself in doubt as to the existence

-of a war: Fetterman had been killed because "the civil and military

-departments of our government cannot, or will not, understand each

-other." Apologies were made for Indian hostility, and the "revolting"

-history of the removal policy was described. It had been the result of

-this policy to promote barbarism rather than civilization. "But one

-thing then remains to be done with honor to the nation, and that is to

-select a district, or districts of country, as indicated by Congress,

-on which all the tribes east of the Rocky mountains may be gathered.

-For each district let a territorial government be established, with

-powers adapted to the ends designed. The governor should be a man of

-unquestioned integrity and purity of character; he should be paid

-such salary as to place him above temptation." He should be given

-adequate powers to keep the peace and enforce a policy of progressive

-civilization. The belief that under American conditions the Indian

-problem was insoluble was confirmed by this report of the Peace

-Commissioners, well informed and philanthropic as they were. After

-their condemnation of an existing removal policy, the only remedy which

-they could offer was another policy of concentration and removal.

-

-The Commissioners recommended that the Indians should be colonized on

-two reserves, north and south of the railway lines respectively. The

-southern reserve was to be the old territory of the civilized tribes,

-known as Indian Territory, where the Commissioners thought a total of

-86,000 could be settled within a few years. A northern district might

-be located north of Nebraska, within the area which they later allotted

-to the Sioux; 54,000 could be colonized here. Individual savages might

-be allowed to own land and be incorporated among the citizens of the

-Western states, but most of the tribes ought to be settled in the two

-Indian territories, while this removal policy should be the last.

-

-Upon the vexed question of civilian or military control the

-Commissioners were divided. They believed that both War and Interior

-departments were too busy to give proper attention to the wards, and

-recommended an independent department for the Indians. In October,

-1868, they reversed this report and, under military influence,

-spoke strongly for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the

-War Department. "We have now selected and provided reservations for

-all, off the great roads," wrote General Sherman to his brother in

-September, 1868. "All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are

-hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort

-of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the

-indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so

-large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a

-single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances

-and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the

-tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near

-the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together.

-

-The way across the continent was opened by these treaties of 1867 and

-1868, and the Union Pacific hurried to take advantage of it. The other

-Pacific railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific, were so

-slow in using their charters that hope in their construction was

-nearly abandoned, but the chief enterprise neared completion before the

-inauguration of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming, rather

-than the statue of Columbus which Benton had foreseen, was perched upon

-the summit of the Rockies as its monument.

-

-Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping pace with western

-development during the decade of the Civil War. The United States

-itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and

-allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a

-thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and

-army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general

-public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the

-Mississippi," lamented the _Nation_ in 1868, but "there is no book

-of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a

-mass of very desultory information. Few men have more than the most

-unconnected and unmethodical knowledge of the vast expanse of territory

-which lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth must have

-ceased to be in the West; probably, as we write, Denver has become an

-Eastern city, and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the

-marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life.... A man talks to us

-of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and while he is talking,

-the Territory of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor his

-auditors have before heard."

-

-[Illustration: THE WEST IN 1863

-

-The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the

-Southwest. In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming

-followed in 1868.]

-

-In that division of the plains which was sketched out in the fifties,

-the great amorphous eastern territories of Kansas and Nebraska met on

-the summit of the Rockies the great western territories of Washington,

-Utah, and New Mexico. The gold booms had broken up all of these.

-Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found their

-excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada entered the Union, with

-Nebraska following in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first

-parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide. To the north, in the

-region of the great river valleys,--Green, Big Horn, Powder, Platte,

-and Sweetwater,--the precious metals were not found in quantities which

-justified exploitation earlier than 1867. But in that year moderate

-discoveries on the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal camps of

-the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a scheme for a new territory.

-

-The Sweetwater mines, without causing any great excitement, brought a

-few hundred men to the vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was

-established, a county was organized, a newspaper was brought into life

-at Fort Bridger. If the railway had not appeared at the same time, the

-foundation for a territory would probably have been too slight. But the

-Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg early in 1867, extended its

-terminus to a new town, Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in

-the spring of 1868.

-

-Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the Union Pacific advanced

-to its site. It had a better prospect of life than had most of the

-mushroom cities that accompanied the westward course of the railroad,

-because it was the natural junction point for Denver trade. Colorado

-had been much disappointed at its own failure to induce the Union

-Pacific managers to put Denver City on the main line of the road, and

-felt injured when compelled to do its business through Cheyenne. But

-just because of this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a

-rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an orderly or reputable

-population that it had during the first months of its existence, but,

-to its good fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off the

-worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868. Cheyenne was left with

-an overlarge town site, but with some real excuse for existence. Most

-of the terminal towns vanished completely when the railroad moved on.

-

-A new territory for the country north of Colorado had been talked about

-as early as 1861. Since the creation of Montana territory in 1864, this

-area had been attached, obviously only temporarily, to Dakota. Now,

-with the mining and railway influences at work, the population made

-appeal to the Dakota legislature and to Congress for independence.

-"Without opposition or prolonged discussion," as Bancroft puts it, the

-new territory was created by Congress in July, 1868. It was called

-Wyoming, just escaping the names of Lincoln and Cheyenne, and received

-as bounds the parallels of 41 deg. and 45 deg., and the meridians of

-27 deg. and 34 deg., west of Washington.

-

-For several years after the Sioux treaties of 1868 and the erection of

-Wyoming territory, the Indians of the northern plains kept the peace.

-The routes of travel had been opened, the white claim to the Powder

-River Valley had been surrendered, and a great northern reserve had

-been created in the Black Hills country of southern Dakota. All these,

-by lessening contact, removed the danger of Indian friction. But

-the southern tribes were still uneasy,--treacherous or ill-treated,

-according as the sources vary,--and one more war was needed before they

-could be compelled to settle down.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVIII

-

-BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID

-

-

-Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations determined the

-condition of the frontier, none admitted that it desired to provoke

-Indian wars. The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish to

-be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian agents lost their authority

-and many of their perquisites during war time. The army and the

-frontiersmen denied that they were belligerent. "I assert," wrote

-Custer, "and all candid persons familiar with the subject will sustain

-the assertion, that of all classes of our population the army and

-the people living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of an

-Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices to avoid

-its horrors." To fix the responsibility for the wars which repeatedly

-occurred, despite the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls

-for the examination of individual episodes in large number. It is

-easier to acquit the first two classes than the last two. There are

-enough instances in which the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep

-the peace to establish the belief that a policy combining benevolence,

-equity, and relentless firmness in punishing wrong-doers, white or red,

-could have maintained friendly relations with ease. The Indian agents

-were hampered most by their inability to enforce the laws intrusted

-to them for execution, and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying

-agreements and of Congress in voting supplies. The frontiersmen, with

-their isolated homesteads lying open to surprise and destruction,

-would seem to be sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly

-they thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted Indian

-title, while their personal relations with the red men were commonly

-marked by fear and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and better

-administration than the Indian Bureau, overdid its work, being unable

-to think of the Indians as anything but public enemies and treating

-them with an arbitrary curtness that would have been dangerous even

-among intelligent whites. The history of the southwest Indians, after

-the Sand Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially

-ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances which led to their

-destruction.

-

-After the battle at Sand Creek, the southwest tribes agreed to a

-series of treaties in 1865 by which new reserves were promised them

-on the borderland of Kansas and Indian Territory. These treaties were

-so amended by the Senate that for a time the tribes had no admitted

-homes or rights save the guaranteed hunting privileges on the plains

-south of the Platte. They seem generally to have been peaceful during

-1866, in spite of the rather shabby treatment which the neglect

-of Congress procured for them. In 1867 uneasiness became apparent.

-Agent E. W. Wynkoop, of Sand Creek fame, was now in charge of the

-Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache tribes in the vicinity of Fort Larned,

-on the Santa Fe trail in Kansas. In 1866 they had "complained of the

-government not having fulfilled its promises to them, and of numerous

-impositions practised upon them by the whites." Some of their younger

-braves had gone on the war-path. But Wynkoop claimed to have quieted

-them, and by March, 1867, thought that they were "well satisfied and

-quiet, and anxious to retain the peaceful relations now existing."

-

-The military authorities at Fort Dodge, farther up the Arkansas and

-near the old Santa Fe crossing, were less certain than Wynkoop that

-the Indians meant well. Little Raven, of the Arapaho, and Satanta,

-"principal chief" of the Kiowa, were reported as sending in insulting

-messages to the troops, ordering them to cut no more wood, to leave

-the country, to keep wagons off the Santa Fe trail. Occasional thefts

-of stock and forays were reported along the trail. Custer thought that

-there was "positive evidence from the agents themselves" that the

-Indians were guilty, the trouble only being that Wynkoop charged the

-guilt on the Kiowa and Comanche, while J. H. Leavenworth, agent for

-these tribes, asserted their innocence and accused the wards of Wynkoop.

-

-The Department of the Missouri, in which these tribes resided, was

-under the command of Major-general Winfield Scott Hancock in the spring

-of 1867. With a desire to promote the tranquillity of his command,

-Hancock prepared for an expedition on the plains as early as the roads

-would permit. He wrote of this intention to both of the agents, asking

-them to accompany him, "to show that the officers of the government are

-acting in harmony." His object was not necessarily war, but to impress

-upon the Indians his ability "to chastise any tribes who may molest

-people who are travelling across the plains." In each of the letters he

-listed the complaints against the respective tribes--failure to deliver

-murderers, outrages on the Smoky Hill route in 1866, alliances with

-the Sioux, hostile incursions into Texas, and the specially barbarous

-Box murder. In this last affair one James Box had been murdered by the

-Kiowas, and his wife and five daughters carried off. The youngest of

-these, a baby, died in a few days, the mother stated, and they "took

-her from me and threw her into a ravine." Ultimately the mother and

-three of the children were ransomed from the Kiowas after Mrs. Box and

-her eldest daughter, Margaret, had been passed around from chief to

-chief for more than two months. Custer wrote up this outrage with much

-exaggeration, but the facts were bad enough.

-

-With both agents present, Hancock advanced to Fort Larned. "It is

-uncertain whether war will be the result of the expedition or not,"

-he declared in general orders of March 26, 1867, thus admitting that

-a state of war did not at that time exist. "It will depend upon the

-temper and behavior of the Indians with whom we may come in contact. We

-go prepared for war and will make it if a proper occasion presents."

-The tribes which he proposed to visit were roaming indiscriminately

-over the country traversed by the Santa Fe trail, in accordance with

-the treaties of 1865, which permitted them, until they should be

-settled upon their reserves, to hunt at will over the plains south

-of the Platte, subject only to the restriction that they must not

-camp within ten miles of the main roads and trails. It was Hancock's

-intention to enforce this last provision, and more, to insist "upon

-their keeping off the main lines of travel, where their presence is

-calculated to bring about collisions with the whites."

-

-The first conference with the Indians was held at Fort Larned, where

-the "principal chiefs of the Dog Soldiers of the Cheyennes" had been

-assembled by Agent Wynkoop. Leavenworth thought that the chiefs here

-had been very friendly, but Wynkoop criticised the council as being

-held after sunset, which was contrary to Indian custom and calculated

-"to make them feel suspicious." At this council General Hancock

-reprimanded the chiefs and told them that he would visit their village,

-occupied by themselves and an almost equal number of Sioux; which

-village, said Wynkoop, "was 35 miles from any travelled road." "Why

-don't he confine the troops to the great line of travel?" demanded

-Leavenworth, whose wards had the same privilege of hunting south of the

-Arkansas that those of Wynkoop had between the Arkansas and the Platte.

-So long as they camped ten miles from the roads, this was their right.

-

-Contrary to Wynkoop's urgings, Hancock led his command from Fort

-Larned on April 13, 1867, moving for the main Arapaho, Cheyenne, and

-Sioux village on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles west of the post. With

-cavalry, infantry, artillery, and a pontoon train, it was hard for him

-to assume any other appearance than that of war. Even the General's

-particular assurance, as Custer puts it, "that he was not there to

-make war, but to promote peace," failed to convince the chiefs who had

-attended the night council. It was not a pleasant march. The snow was

-nearly a foot deep, fodder was scarce, and the Indian disposition was

-uncertain. Only a few had come in to the Fort Larned conference, and

-none appeared at camp after the first day's march. After this refusal

-to meet him, Hancock marched on to the village, in front of which he

-found some three hundred Indians drawn up in battle array. Fighting

-seemed imminent, but at last Roman Nose, Bull Bear, and other chiefs

-met Hancock between the lines and agreed upon an evening conference. It

-developed that the men alone were left at the Indian camp. Women and

-children, with all the movables they could handle, had fled out upon

-the snowy plains at the approach of the troops. Fear of another Sand

-Creek had caused it, said Wynkoop. But Hancock chose to regard this

-as evidence of a treacherous disposition, demanded that the fugitives

-return at once, and insisted upon encamping near the village against

-the protest of the chiefs. Instead of bringing back their people, the

-men themselves abandoned the village that evening, while Hancock,

-learning of the flight, surrounded and took possession of it. The next

-morning, April 15, Custer was sent with cavalry in pursuit of the

-flying bands. Depredations occurring to the north of Pawnee Fork within

-a day or two, Hancock burned the village in retaliation and proceeded

-to Fort Dodge. Wynkoop insisted that the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been

-entirely innocent and that these injuries had been committed by the

-Sioux. "I have no doubt," he wrote, "but that they think that war has

-been forced upon them."

-

-When Hancock started upon the plains, there was no war, but there was

-no doubt about its existence as the spring advanced. When the Peace

-Commissioners of this year came with their protestations of benevolence

-for the Great Father, it was small wonder that the Cheyenne and Arapaho

-had to be coaxed into the camp on the Medicine Lodge Creek. And when

-the treaties there made failed of prompt execution by the United

-States, the war naturally dragged on in a desultory way during 1868 and

-1869.

-

-In the spring of 1868 General Sheridan, who had succeeded Hancock in

-command of the Department of the Missouri, visited the posts at Fort

-Larned and Fort Dodge. Here on Pawnee and Walnut creeks most of the

-southwest Indians were congregated. Wynkoop, in February and April,

-reported them as happy and quiet. They were destitute, to be sure, and

-complained that the Commissioners at Medicine Lodge had promised them

-arms and ammunition which had not been delivered. Indeed, the treaty

-framed there had not yet been ratified. But he believed it possible to

-keep them contented and wean them from their old habits. To Sheridan

-the situation seemed less happy. He declined to hold a council with

-the complaining chiefs on the ground that the whole matter was yet in

-the hands of the Peace Commission, but he saw that the young men were

-chafing and turbulent and that frontier hostilities would accompany the

-summer buffalo hunt.

-

-There is little doubt of the destitution which prevailed among the

-plains tribes at this time. The rapid diminution of game was everywhere

-observable. The annuities at best afforded only partial relief, while

-Congress was irregular in providing funds. Three times during the

-spring the Commissioner prodded the Secretary of the Interior, who in

-turn prodded Congress, with the result that instead of the $1,000,000

-asked for $500,000 were, in July, 1868, granted to be spent not by the

-Indian Office, but by the War Department. Three weeks later General

-Sherman created an organization for distributing this charity, placing

-the district south of Kansas in command of General Hazen. Meanwhile,

-the time for making the spring issues of annuity goods had come. It

-was ordered in June that no arms or ammunition should be given to the

-Cheyenne and Arapaho because of their recent bad conduct; but in July

-the Commissioner, influenced by the great dissatisfaction on the part

-of the tribes, and fearing "that these Indians, by reason of such

-non-delivery of arms, ammunition, and goods, will commence hostilities

-against the whites in their vicinity, modified the order and

-telegraphed Agent Wynkoop that he might use his own discretion in the

-matter: "If you are satisfied that the issue of the arms and ammunition

-is necessary to preserve the peace, and that no evil will result from

-their delivery, let the Indians have them." A few days previously on

-July 20, Wynkoop had issued the ordinary supplies to his Arapaho and

-Apache, his Cheyenne refusing to take anything until they could have

-the guns as well. "They felt much disappointed, but gave no evidence of

-being angry ... and would wait with patience for the Great Father to

-take pity upon them." The permission from the Commissioner was welcomed

-by the agent, and approved by Thomas Murphy, his superintendent. Murphy

-had been ordered to Fort Larned to reenforce Wynkoop's judgment. He

-held a council on August 1 with Little Raven and the Arapaho and

-Apache, and issued them their arms. "Raven and the other chiefs then

-promised that these arms should never be used against the whites, and

-Agent Wynkoop then delivered to the Arapahoes 160 pistols, 80 Lancaster

-rifles, 12 kegs of powder, 1-1/2 keg of lead, and 15,000 caps; and to

-the Apaches he gave 40 pistols, 20 Lancaster rifles, 3 kegs of powder,

-1/2 keg of lead, and 5000 caps." The Cheyenne came in a few days later

-for their share, which Wynkoop handed over on the 9th. "They were

-delighted at receiving the goods," he reported, "particularly the

-arms and ammunition, and never before have I known them to be better

-satisfied and express themselves as being so well contented." The

-fact that within three days murders were committed by the Cheyenne on

-the Solomon and Saline forks throws doubt upon the sincerity of their

-protestations.

-

-The war party which commenced the active hostilities of 1868 at a time

-so well calculated to throw discredit upon the wisdom of the Indian

-Office, had left the Cheyenne village early in August, "smarting

-under their _supposed_ wrongs," as Wynkoop puts it. They were mostly

-Cheyenne, with a small number of Arapaho and a few visiting Sioux,

-about 200 in all. Little Raven's son and a brother of White Antelope,

-who died at Sand Creek, were with them; Black Kettle is said to have

-been their leader. On August 7 some of them spent the evening at Fort

-Hays, where they held a powwow at the post. "Black Kettle loves his

-white soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he meets them

-and shakes their hands in friendship," is the way the post-trader,

-Hill P. Wilson, reported his speech. "The white soldiers ought to be

-glad all the time, because their ponies are so big and so strong,

-and because they have so many guns and so much to eat.... All other

-Indians may take the war trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep

-friendship with his white brothers." Three nights later they began to

-kill on Saline River, and on the 11th they crossed to the Solomon. Some

-fifteen settlers were killed, and five women were carried off. Here

-this particular raid stopped, for the news had got abroad, and the

-frontier was instantly in arms. Various isolated forays occurred, so

-that Sheridan was sure he had a general war upon his hands. He believed

-nearly all the young men of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche

-to be in the war parties, the old women, men, and children remaining

-around the posts and professing solicitous friendship. There were 6000

-potential warriors in all, and that he might better devote himself to

-suppressing them, Sheridan followed the Kansas Pacific to its terminus

-at Fort Hays and there established his headquarters in the field.

-

-The war of 1868 ranged over the whole frontier south of the Platte

-trail. It influenced the Peace Commission, at its final meeting in

-October, 1868, to repudiate many of the pacific theories of January

-and recommend that the Indians be handed over to the War Department.

-Sheridan, who had led the Commission to this conclusion, was in the

-field directing the movement. His policy embraced a concentration of

-the peaceful bands south of the Arkansas, and a relentless war against

-the rest. It is fairly clear that the war need not have come, had it

-not been for the cross-purposes ever apparent between the Indian Office

-and the War Department, and even within the War Department itself.

-

-At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared for war. He had, at the start, about

-2600 men, nearly equally divided among cavalry and infantry. Believing

-his force too small to cover the whole plains between Fort Hays and

-Denver, he called for reenforcements, receiving a part of the Fifth

-Cavalry and a regiment of Kansas volunteers. With enthusiasm this last

-addition was raised among the frontiersmen, where Indian fighting was

-popular; the governor of the state resigned his office to become its

-colonel. September and October were occupied in getting the troops

-together, keeping the trails open for traffic, and establishing, about

-a hundred miles south of Fort Dodge, a rendezvous which was known

-as Camp Supply. It was the intention to protect the frontier during

-the autumn, and to follow up the Indian villages after winter had

-fallen, catching the tribes when they would be concentrated and at a

-disadvantage.

-

-On October 15, 1868, Sherman, just from the Chicago meeting of the

-Peace Commissioners and angry because he had there been told that the

-army wanted war, gave Sheridan a free hand for the winter campaign. "As

-to 'extermination,' it is for the Indians themselves to determine. We

-don't want to exterminate or even to fight them.... The present war ...

-was begun and carried on by the Indians in spite of our entreaties and

-in spite of our warnings, and the only question to us is, whether we

-shall allow the progress of our western settlements to be checked, and

-leave the Indians free to pursue their bloody career, or accept their

-war and fight them.... We ... accept the war ... and hereby resolve to

-make its end final.... I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain

-our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow

-no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their

-hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these

-Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not

-again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind

-of pretext that they may choose to allege."

-

-The plan of campaign provided that the main column, Custer in immediate

-command, should march from Fort Hays directly against the Indians, by

-way of Camp Supply; two smaller columns were to supplement this, one

-marching in on Indian Territory from New Mexico, and the other from

-Fort Lyon on the old Sand Creek reserve. Detachments of the chief

-column began to move in the middle of November, Custer reaching the

-depot at Camp Supply ahead of the rest, while the Kansas volunteers

-lost themselves in heavy snow-storms. On November 23 Custer was ordered

-out of Camp Supply, on the north fork of the Canadian, to follow a

-fresh trail which led southwest towards the Washita River, near the

-eastern line of Texas. He pushed on as rapidly as twelve inches of snow

-would allow, discovering in the early morning of November 27 a large

-camp in the valley of the Washita.

-

-It was Black Kettle's camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho that they had found

-in a strip of heavy timber along the river. After reconnoitring Custer

-divided his force into four columns for simultaneous attacks upon the

-sleeping village. At daybreak "my men charged the village and reached

-the lodges before the Indians were aware of our presence. The moment

-the charge was ordered the band struck up 'Garry Owen,' and with cheers

-that strongly reminded me of scenes during the war, every trooper,

-led by his officer, rushed towards the village." For several hours a

-promiscuous fight raged up and down the ravine, with Indians everywhere

-taking to cover, only to be prodded out again. Fifty-one lodges in

-all fell into Custer's hands; 103 dead Indians, including Black

-Kettle himself, were found later. "We captured in good condition 875

-horses, ponies, and mules; 241 saddles, some of very fine and costly

-workmanship; 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins for lodges, 160

-untanned robes, 210 axes, 140 hatchets, 35 revolvers, 47 rifles, 535

-pounds of powder, 1050 pounds of lead, 4000 arrows and arrowheads, 75

-spears, 90 bullet moulds, 35 bows and quivers, 12 shields, 300 pounds

-of bullets, 775 lariats, 940 buckskin saddle-bags, 470 blankets, 93

-coats, 700 pounds of tobacco."

-

-As the day advanced, Custer's triumph seemed likely to turn into

-defeat. The Cheyenne village proved to be only the last of a long

-string of villages that extended down the Washita for fifteen miles

-or more, and whose braves rode up by hundreds to see the fight. A

-general engagement was avoided, however, and with better luck and more

-discretion than he was one day to have, Custer marched back to Camp

-Supply on December 3, his band playing gayly the tune of battle, "Garry

-Owen." The commander in his triumphal procession was followed by his

-scouts and trailers, and the captives of his prowess--a long train of

-Indian widows and orphans.

-

-The decisive blow which broke the power of the southwest tribes had

-been struck, and Black Kettle had carried on his last raid,--if indeed

-he had carried on this one at all--but as the reports came in it became

-evident that the merits of the triumph were in doubt. The Eastern

-humanitarians were shocked at the cold-blooded attack upon a camp of

-sleeping men, women, and children, forgetting that if Indians were to

-be fought this was the most successful way to do it, and was no shock

-to the Indians' own ideals of warfare and attack. The deeper question

-was whether this camp was actually hostile, whether the tribes had not

-abandoned the war-path in good faith, whether it was fair to crush a

-tribe that with apparent earnestness begged peace because it could not

-control the excesses of some of its own braves. It became certain, at

-least, that the War Department itself had fallen victim to that vice

-with which it had so often reproached the Indian Office--failure to

-produce a harmony of action among several branches of the service.

-

-The Indian Office had no responsibility for the battle of the Washita.

-It had indeed issued arms to the Cheyenne in August, but only with

-the approval of the military officer commanding Forts Larned and

-Dodge, General Alfred Sully, "an officer of long experience in Indian

-affairs." In the early summer all the tribes had been near these forts

-and along the Santa Fe trail. After Congress had voted its half million

-to feed the hungry, Sherman had ordered that the peaceful hungry among

-the southern tribes should be moved from this locality to the vicinity

-of old Fort Cobb, in the west end of Indian Territory on the Washita

-River.

-

-During September, while Sheridan was gathering his armament at Fort

-Hays, Sherman was ordering the agents to take their peaceful charges

-to Fort Cobb. With the major portion of the tribes at war it would

-be impossible for the troops to make any discrimination unless there

-should be an absolute separation between the well-disposed and the

-warlike. He proposed to allow the former a reasonable time to get to

-their new abode and then beg the President for an order "declaring all

-Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations" to be outlaws.

-He believed that by going to war these tribes had violated their

-hunting rights. Superintendent Murphy thought he saw another Sand Creek

-in these preparations. Here were the tribes ordered to Fort Cobb; their

-fall annuity goods were on the way thither for distribution; and now

-the military column was marching in the same direction.

-

-In the meantime General W. B. Hazen had arrived at Fort Cobb on

-November 7 and had immediately voiced his fear that "General Sheridan,

-acting under the impression of hostiles, may attack bands of Comanche

-and Kiowa before they reach this point." He found, however, most of

-these tribes, who had not gone to war this season, encamped within

-reach on the Canadian and Washita rivers,--5000 of the Comanche and

-1500 of the Kiowa. Within a few days Cheyenne and Arapaho began to join

-the settlements in the district, Black Kettle bringing in his band to

-the Washita, forty miles east of Antelope Hills, and coming in person

-to Fort Cobb for an interview with General Hazen on November 20.

-

-"I have always done my best," he protested, "to keep my young men

-quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have

-not been able to keep them all at home. But we all want peace." To

-which added Big Mouth, of the Arapaho: "I came to you because I wish

-to do right.... I do not want war, and my people do not, but although

-we have come back south of the Arkansas, the soldiers follow us and

-continue fighting, and we want you to send out and stop these soldiers

-from coming against us."

-

-To these, General Hazen, fearful as he was of an unjust attack,

-responded with caution. Sherman had spoken of Fort Cobb in his orders

-to Sheridan, as "aimed to hold out the olive branch with one hand

-and the sword in the other. But it is not thereby intended that any

-hostile Indians shall make use of that establishment as a refuge from

-just punishment for acts already done. Your military control over

-that reservation is as perfect as over Kansas, and if hostile Indians

-retreat within that reservation, ... they may be followed even to

-Fort Cobb, captured, and punished." It is difficult to see what could

-constitute the fact of peaceful intent if coming in to Fort Cobb did

-not. But Hazen gave to Black Kettle cold comfort: "I am sent here as

-a peace chief; all here is to be peace; but north of the Arkansas is

-General Sheridan, the great war chief, and I do not control him; and he

-has all the soldiers who are fighting the Arapahoes and Cheyennes....

-If the soldiers come to fight, you must remember they are not from me,

-but from that great war chief, and with him you must make peace....

-I cannot stop the war.... You must not come in again unless I send

-for you, and you must keep well out beyond the friendly Kiowas and

-Comanches." So he sent the suitors away and wrote, on November 22,

-to Sherman for more specific instructions covering these cases. He

-believed that Black Kettle and Big Mouth were themselves sincere, but

-doubted their control over their bands. These were the bands which

-Custer destroyed before the week was out, and it is probable that

-during the fight they were reenforced by braves from the friendly

-lodges of Satanta's Kiowa and Little Raven's Arapaho.

-

-Whatever might have been a wise policy in treating semi-hostile Indian

-tribes, this one was certainly unsatisfactory. It is doubtful whether

-the war was ever so great as Sherman imagined it. The injured tribes

-were unquestionably drawn to Fort Cobb by a desire for safety; the army

-was in the position of seeming to use the olive branch to assemble

-the Indians in order that the sword might the better disperse them.

-There is reasonable doubt whether Black Kettle had anything to do with

-the forays. Murphy believed in him and cited many evidences of his

-friendly disposition, while Wynkoop asserted positively that he had

-been encamped on Pawnee Fork all through the time when he was alleged

-to have been committing depredations on the Saline. The army alone had

-been no more successful in producing obvious justice than the army and

-Indian Office together had been. Yet whatever the merits of the case,

-the power of the Cheyenne and their neighbors was permanently gone.

-

-During the winter of 1868-1869 Sheridan's army remained in the

-vicinity of Fort Cobb, gathering the remnants of the shattered tribes

-in upon their reservation. The Kiowa and Comanche were placed at last

-on the lands awarded them at the Medicine Lodge treaties, while the

-Arapaho and Cheyenne once more had their abiding-place changed in

-August, 1869, and were settled down along the upper waters of the

-Washita, around the valley of their late defeat.

-

-The long controversy between the War and Interior departments over the

-management of the tribes entered upon a new stage with the inauguration

-of Grant in 1869. One of the earliest measures of his administration

-was a bill erecting a board of civilian Indian commissioners to advise

-the Indian Department and promote the civilization of the tribes. A

-generous grant of two millions accompanied the act. More care was used

-in the appointment of agents than had hitherto been taken, and the

-immediate results seemed good when the Commissioner wrote his annual

-report in December, 1869. But the worst of the troubles with the

-Indians of the plains was over, so that without special effort peace

-could now have been the result.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIX

-

-THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS

-

-

-Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last

-stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun;

-ten years before, Congress, under the inspiration of the prophetic

-Whitney and the leadership of more practical men, had provided for a

-survey of railroad routes along the trails; on the eve of the struggle

-the earliest continental railway had received its charter; and the

-struggle had temporarily ceased while Congress, in 1867, sent out its

-Peace Commission to prepare an open way. That the tribes must yield

-was as inevitable as it was that their yielding must be ungracious and

-destructive to them. Too weak to compel their enemy to respect their

-rights, and uncertain what their rights were, they were too low in

-intelligence to realize that the more they struggled, the worse would

-be their suffering. So they struggled on, during the years in which

-the iron band was put across the continent. Its completion and their

-subjection came in 1869.

-

-After years of tedious debate the earliest of the Pacific railways was

-chartered in 1862. The withdrawal of southern claims had made possible

-an agreement upon a route, while the spirit of nationality engendered

-by the Civil War gave to the project its final impetus. Under the

-management of the Central Pacific of California, the Union Pacific, and

-two or three border railways, provision was made for a road from the

-Iowa border to California. Land grants and bond subsidies were for two

-years dangled before the capitalists of America in the vain attempt to

-entice them to construct it. Only after these were increased in 1864

-did active organization begin, while at the end of 1865 but forty miles

-of the Union Pacific had been built.

-

-Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was

-easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In

-their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania

-Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of

-these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled

-along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across

-plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains.

-Worse yet, the road could hope for little aid from the country through

-which it ran. Except for the small colonies at Carson, Salt Lake, and

-Denver, the last of which it missed by a hundred miles, its course lay

-through unsettled wilderness for nearly the whole distance. Like the

-trusses of a cantilever, its advancing ends projected themselves across

-the continent, relying, up to the moment of joining, upon the firm

-anchorage of the termini in the settled lands of Iowa and California.

-Equally trying, though different in variety, were the difficulties

-attendant upon construction at either end.

-

-The impetus which Judah had given to the Central Pacific had started

-the western end of the system two years ahead of the eastern, but had

-not produced great results at first. It was hard work building east

-into the Sierra Nevadas, climbing the gullies, bridging, tunnelling,

-filling, inch by inch, to keep the grade down and the curvature out.

-Twenty miles a year only were completed in 1863, 1864, and 1865,

-thirty in 1866, and forty-six in 1867--one hundred and thirty-six

-miles during the first five years of work. Nature had done her best

-to impede the progress of the road by thrusting mountains and valleys

-across its route. But she had covered the mountains with timber and

-filled them with stone, so that materials of construction were easily

-accessible along all of the costliest part of the line. Bridges and

-trestles could be built anywhere with local material. The labor problem

-vexed the Central Pacific managers at the start. It was a scanty

-and inefficient supply of workmen that existed in California when

-construction began. Like all new countries, California possessed more

-work than workmen. Economic independence was to be had almost for the

-asking. Free land and fertile soil made it unnecessary for men to work

-for hire. The slight results of the first five years were due as much

-to lack of labor as to refractory roadway or political opposition. But

-by 1865 the employment of Chinese laborers began. Coolies imported

-by the thousand and ably directed by Charles Crocker, who was the

-most active constructor, brought a new rapidity into construction. "I

-used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull," Crocker

-dictated to Bancroft's stenographer, "stopping along wherever there

-was anything amiss, and raising Old Nick with the boys that were not

-up to time." With roadbed once graded new troubles began. California

-could manufacture no iron. Rolling stock and rails had to be imported

-from Europe or the East, and came to San Francisco after the costly sea

-voyage, _via_ Panama or the Horn. But the men directing the Central

-Pacific--Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and the rest--rose to the

-difficulties, and once they had passed the mountains, fairly romped

-across the Nevada desert in the race for subsidies.

-

-The eastern end started nearer to a base of supplies than did the

-California terminus, yet until 1867 no railroad from the East reached

-Council Bluffs, where the President had determined that the Union

-Pacific should begin. There had been railway connection to the Missouri

-River at St. Joseph since 1859, and various lines were hurrying across

-Iowa in the sixties, but for more than two years of construction the

-Union Pacific had to get rolling stock and iron from the Missouri

-steamers or the laborious prairie schooners. Until its railway

-connection was established its difficulty in this respect was only less

-great than that of the Central Pacific. The compensation of the Union

-Pacific came, however, in its roadbed. Following the old Platte trail,

-flat and smooth as the best highways, its construction gangs could

-do the light grading as rapidly as the finished single track could

-deliver the rails at its growing end. But for the needful culverts and

-trestles there was little material at hand. The willows and Cottonwood

-lining the river would not do. The Central Pacific could cut its wood

-as it needed it, often within sight of its track. The Union Pacific had

-to haul much of its wood and stone, like its iron, from its eastern

-terminus.

-

-The labor problem of the Union Pacific was intimately connected with

-the solution of its Indian problem. The Central Pacific had almost no

-trouble with the decadent tribes through whom it ran, but the Union

-Pacific was built during the very years when the great plains were

-most disturbed and hostile forays were most frequent. Its employees

-contained large elements of the newly arrived Irish and of the recently

-discharged veterans of the Civil War. General Dodge, who was its chief

-engineer, has described not only the military guards who "stacked their

-arms on the dump and were ready at a moment's warning to fall in and

-fight," but the military capacity of the construction gangs themselves.

-The "track train could arm a thousand men at a word," and from chief

-constructor down to chief spiker "could be commanded by experienced

-officers of every rank, from general to a captain. They had served five

-years at the front, and over half of the men had shouldered a musket

-in many battles. An illustration of this came to me after our track had

-passed Plum Creek, 200 miles west of the Missouri River. The Indians

-had captured a freight train and were in possession of it and its

-crews." Dodge came to the rescue in his car, "a travelling arsenal,"

-with twenty-odd men, most of whom were strangers to him; yet "when I

-called upon them to fall in, to go forward and retake the train, every

-man on the train went into line, and by his position showed that he was

-a soldier.... I gave the order to deploy as skirmishers, and at the

-command they went forward as steadily and in as good order as we had

-seen the old soldiers climb the face of Kenesaw under fire."

-

-By an act passed in July, 1866, Congress did much to accelerate the

-construction of the road. Heretofore the junction point had been in the

-Nevada Desert, a hundred and fifty miles east of the California line.

-It was now provided that each road might build until it met the other.

-Since the mountain section, with the highest accompanying subsidies,

-was at hand, each of the companies was spurred on by its desire to get

-as much land and as many bonds as possible. The race which began in the

-autumn of 1866 ended only with the completion of the track in 1869. A

-mile a day had seemed like quick work at the start; seven or eight a

-day were laid before the end.

-

-The English traveller, Bell, who published his _New Tracks in North

-America_ in 1869, found somewhere an enthusiastic quotation admirably

-descriptive of the process. "Track-laying on the Union Pacific is a

-science," it read, "and we pundits of the Far East stood upon that

-embankment, only about a thousand miles this side of sunset, and backed

-westward before that hurrying corps of sturdy operatives with mingled

-feelings of amusement, curiosity, and profound respect. On they came.

-A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its

-load of rails. Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the

-rest of the gang taking hold by twos until it is clear of the car. They

-come forward at a run. At the word of command, the rail is dropped in

-its place, right side up, with care, while the same process goes on at

-the other side of the car. Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each

-gang, and so four rails go down to the minute! Quick work, you say, but

-the fellows on the U. P. are tremendously in earnest. The moment the

-car is empty it is tipped over on the side of the track to let the next

-loaded car pass it, and then it is tipped back again; and it is a sight

-to see it go flying back for another load, propelled by a horse at full

-gallop at the end of 60 or 80 feet of rope, ridden by a young Jehu,

-who drives furiously. Close behind the first gang come the gaugers,

-spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it. It is a grand

-Anvil Chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.

-It is in a triple time, three strokes to a spike. There are ten spikes

-to a rail, four hundred rails to a mile, eighteen hundred miles to San

-Francisco. That's the sum, what is the quotient? Twenty-one million

-times are those sledges to be swung--twenty-one million times are they

-to come down with their sharp punctuation, before the great work of

-modern America is complete!"

-

-Handling, housing, and feeding the thousands of laborers who built

-the road was no mean problem. Ten years earlier the builders of the

-Illinois Central had complained because their road from Galena and

-Chicago to Cairo ran generally through an uninhabited country upon

-which they could not live as they went along. Much more the continental

-railways, building rapidly away from the settlements, were forced to

-carry their dwellings with them. Their commissariat was as important as

-their general offices.

-

-An acquaintance of Bell told of standing where Cheyenne now is and

-seeing a long freight train arrive "laden with frame houses, boards,

-furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish" of a mushroom city.

-"The guard jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform,

-called out with a flourish, 'Gentlemen, here's Julesburg.'" The head of

-the serpentine track, sometimes indeed "crookeder than the horn that

-was blown around the walls of Jericho," was the terminal town; its

-tongue was the stretch of track thrust a few miles in advance of the

-head; repeatedly as the tongue darted out the head followed, leaving

-across the plains a series of scars, marking the spots where it had

-rested for a time. Every few weeks the town was packed upon a freight

-train and moved fifty or sixty miles to the new end of the track. Its

-vagrant population followed it. It was at Julesburg early in 1867; at

-Cheyenne in the end of the year; at Laramie City the following spring.

-Always it was the most disreputably picturesque spot on the anatomy of

-the railroad.

-

-In the fall of 1868 "Hell on Wheels," as Samuel Bowles, editor of

-the _Springfield Republican_, appropriately designated the terminal

-town, was at Benton, Wyoming, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from

-Omaha and near the military reservation at Fort Steele. In the very

-midst of the gray desert, with sand ankle-deep in its streets, the

-town stood dusty white--"a new arrival with black clothes looked like

-nothing so much as a cockroach struggling through a flour barrel."

-A less promising location could hardly have been found, yet within

-two weeks there had sprung up a city of three thousand people with

-ordinances and government suited to its size, and facilities for vice

-ample for all. The needs of the road accounted for it: to the east the

-road was operating for passengers and freight; to the west it was yet

-constructing track. Here was the end of rail travel and the beginning

-of the stage routes to the coast and the mines. Two years earlier the

-similar point had been at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.

-

-The city of tents and shacks contained, according to the count of John

-H. Beadle, a peripatetic journalist, twenty-three saloons and five

-dance houses. It had all the worst details of the mining camp. Gambling

-and rowdyism were the order of day and night. Its great institution

-was the "'Big Tent,' sometimes, with equal truth but less politeness,

-called the 'Gamblers' Tent.'" This resort was a hundred feet long by

-forty wide, well floored, and given over to drinking, dancing, and

-gambling. The sumptuous bar provided refreshment much desired in a dry

-alkali country; all the games known to the professional gambler were in

-full blast; women, often fair and well-dressed, were there to gather in

-what the bartender and faro-dealer missed. Whence came these people,

-and how they learned their trade, was a mystery to Bowles. "Hell would

-appear to have been raked to furnish them," he said, "and to it they

-must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its

-highest seats and most diabolical service."

-

-Behind the terminal town real estate disappointments, like beads,

-were strung along the cord of rails. In advance of the construction

-gangs land companies would commonly survey town sites in preparation

-for a boom. Brisk speculation in corner lots was a form of gambling

-in which real money was often lost and honest hopes were regularly

-shattered. Each town had its advocates who believed it was to be the

-great emporium of the West. Yet generally, as the railroad moved on,

-the town relapsed into a condition of deserted prairie, with only the

-street lines and debris to remind it of its past. Omaha, though Beadle

-thought in 1868 that no other "place in America had been so well lied

-about," and Council Bluffs retained a share of greatness because of

-their strategic position at the commencement of the main line. Tied

-together in 1872 by the great iron bridge of the Union Pacific, their

-relations were as harmonious as those of the cats of Kilkenny, as they

-quarrelled over the claims of each to be the real terminus. But the

-future of both was assured when the eastern roads began to run in to

-get connections with the West. Cheyenne, too, remained a city of some

-consequence because the Denver Pacific branched off at this point

-to serve the Pike's Peak region. But the names of most of the other

-one-time terminal towns were writ in sand.

-

-The progress of construction of the road after 1866 was rapid enough.

-At the end of 1865, though the Central Pacific had started two years

-before the Union Pacific, it had completed only sixty miles of track,

-to the latter's forty. During 1866 the Central Pacific built thirty

-laborious miles over the mountains, and in 1867, forty-six miles, while

-in the same two years the Union Pacific built five hundred. In 1868,

-the western road, now past its worst troubles, added more than 360 to

-its mileage; the Union Pacific, unchecked by the continental divide,

-making a new record of 425. By May 10, 1869, the line was done, 1776

-miles from Omaha to Sacramento. For the last sixteen months of the

-continental race the two roads together had built more than two and a

-half miles for every working day. Never before had construction been

-systematized so highly or the rewards for speed been so great.

-

-Whether regarded as an economic achievement or a national work, the

-building of the road deserved the attention it received; yet it was

-scarcely finished before the scandal-monger was at work. Beadle had

-written a chapter full of "floridly complimentary notices" of the

-men who had made possible the feat, but before he went to press

-their reputations were blasted, and he thought it safest "to mention

-no names." "Never praise a man," he declared in disgust, "or name

-your children after him, till he is dead." Before the end of Grant's

-first administration the _Credit Mobilier_ scandal proved that men,

-high in the national government, had speculated in the project whose

-success depended on their votes. That many of them had been guilty of

-indiscretion, was perfectly clear, but they had done only what many of

-their greatest predecessors had done. Their real fault was made more

-prominent by their misfortune in being caught by an aroused national

-conscience which suddenly awoke to heed a call that it had ever

-disregarded in the past.

-

-The junction point for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had been

-variously fixed by the acts of 1862 and 1864. In 1866 it was left open

-to fortune or enterprise, and had not Congress intervened in 1869 it

-might never have existed. In their rush for the land grants the two

-rivals hurried on their surveys to the vicinity of Great Salt Lake,

-where their advancing ends began to overlap, and continued parallel

-for scores of miles. Congress, noticing their indisposition to agree

-upon a junction, intervened in the spring of 1869, ordering the two to

-bring their race to an end at Promontory Point, a few miles northwest

-of Ogden on the shore of the lake. Here in May, 1869, the junction was

-celebrated in due form.

-

-Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the

-Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of

-a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May,

-1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction

-of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short

-notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the

-Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come

-to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last

-Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General

-Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how

-at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie

-of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few

-beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic

-taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the

-United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the

-leading paragraph of the _Nation_ of the Thursday after. "So far as

-we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the

-speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down

-under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them

-to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to

-get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man

-says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with

-questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will

-say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being

-offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with

-a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying.

-The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was

-celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country.

-Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting,

-fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity;

-Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled

-Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of

-a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the

-Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between

-the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the

-perpetuity of the Union as it is."

-

-No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater

-significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this

-act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question

-that all were framing:--

-

-      "What was it the Engines said,

-      Pilots touching, head to head

-      Facing on the single track,

-      Half a world behind each back?"

-

-But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine

-retorted to the eastern:--

-

-      "'You brag of the East! _You_ do?

-      Why, _I_ bring the East to _you_!

-      All the Orient, all Cathay,

-      Find through me the shortest way;

-      And the sun you follow here

-      Rises in my hemisphere.

-      Really,--if one must be rude,--

-      Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"

-

-The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the

-men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying

-beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more

-important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the

-road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific

-Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert

-and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised

-a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the

-railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading

-upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the

-Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national

-assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as

-other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap

-between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XX

-

-THE NEW INDIAN POLICY

-

-

-Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868,

-and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the

-plains had been cleanly split into two main groups which had their

-centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest Dakota and the old Indian

-Territory. The advance of a new wave of population had followed along

-the road thus opened, pushing settlements into central Nebraska and

-Kansas. Through the latter state the Union Pacific, Eastern Division,

-better known as the Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver,

-where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this advance of civilized

-life upon the plains it became clear that the old Indian policy

-was gone for good, and that the idea of a permanent country, where

-the tribes, free from white contact, could continue their nomadic

-existence, had broken down. The old Indian policy had been based upon

-the permanence of this condition, but with the white advance troops

-for police had been added, while the loud bickerings between the

-military authorities, thus superimposed, and the Indian Office, which

-regarded itself as the rightful custodian of the problem, proved

-to be the overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first annual

-message in 1869: "No matter what ought to be the relations between

-such [civilized] settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do

-not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end.

-A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible

-for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all

-Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life

-and the rights of others, dangerous to society. I see no substitute for

-such a system, except in placing all the Indians on large reservations,

-as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection

-there."

-

-The vexed question of civilian or military control had reached the

-bitterest stage of its discussion when Grant became President. For five

-years there had been general wars in which both departments seemed

-to be badly involved and for which responsibility was hard to place.

-There were many things to be said in favor of either method of control.

-Beginning with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in

-1832, the office had been run by the War Department for seventeen

-years. In this period the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been

-carried out; the frontier had been established in an unbroken line of

-reserves from Texas to Green Bay; and the migration across the plains

-had begun. But with the creation of the Interior Department in 1849

-the Indian Bureau had been transferred to civilian hands. As yet the

-Indian war was so exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments in

-favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly too, though the

-results make this conviction hard to hold, to treat the Indian well,

-to keep the peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they would

-permit it. However the government failed in practice and in controlling

-the men of the frontier, there is no doubt about the sincerity of its

-general intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California, no mines

-and no railways, and no mixture of slavery and politics, the hope might

-not have failed of realization. Even as it was, the civilian bureau

-had little trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years after

-its organization. In general the military power was called upon when

-disorder passed beyond the control of the agent; short of that time the

-agent remained in authority.

-

-As a means of introducing civilization among the tribes the agents

-were more effective than army officers could be. They were, indeed,

-underpaid, appointed for political reasons, and often too weak to

-resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty; but they were

-civilians. Their ideals were those of industry and peace. Their terms

-of service were often too short for them to learn the business, but

-they were not subject to the rapid shifting and transfer which made up

-a large part of army life. Army officers were better picked and trained

-than the agents, but their ambitions were military, and they were

-frequently unable to understand why breaches of formal discipline were

-not always matters of importance.

-

-The strong arguments in favor of military control were founded largely

-on the permanency of tenure in the army. Political appointments were

-fewer, the average of personal character and devotion was higher. Army

-administration had fewer scandals than had that of the Indian Bureau.

-The partisan on either side in the sixties was prone to believe that

-his favorite branch of the service was honest and wise, while the

-other was inefficient, foolish, and corrupt. He failed to see that

-in the earliest phase of the policy, when there was no friction, and

-consequently little fighting, the problem was essentially civilian;

-that in the next period, when constant friction was provoking wars,

-it had become military; and that finally, when emigration and

-transportation had changed friction into overwhelming pressure, the

-wars would again cease. A large share of the disputes were due to

-the misunderstandings as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes

-should be under the bureau or the army. On the whole, even when the

-tribes were hostile, army control tended to increase the cost of

-management and the chance of injustice. There never was a time when

-a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals of police rather than

-those of soldiers, could not have done better than the army did. But

-the student, attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve it

-fully and justly as were its immediate custodians. He can at most steer

-in between the badly biassed "Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson,

-and the outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier, that the

-Indian must go.

-

-The demand of the army for the control of the Indians was never

-gratified. Around 1870 its friends were insistent that since the army

-had to bear the knocks of the Indian policy,--knocks, they claimed,

-generally due to mistakes of the bureau,--it ought to have the whole

-responsibility and the whole credit. The inertia which attaches to

-federal reforms held this one back, while the Indian problem itself

-changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary. Once the great

-wars of the sixties were done the tribes subsided into general peace.

-Their vigorous resistance was confined to the years when the last great

-wave of the white advance was surging over them. Then, confined to

-their reservations, they resumed the march to civilization.

-

-From the commencement of his term, Grant was willing to aid in at once

-reducing the abuses of the Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy

-on the plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done good work, which

-would have been more effective had cooperation between the army and the

-bureau been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted two millions

-to be used in maintaining peace on the plains, "among and with the

-several tribes ... to promote civilization among said Indians, bring

-them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve their necessities,

-and encourage their efforts at self-support." The President was

-authorized at the same time to erect a board of not more than ten men,

-"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy," who should, with the

-Secretary of the Interior, and without salary, exercise joint control

-over the expenditures of this or any money voted for the use of the

-Indian Department.

-

-The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed to give greater wisdom

-to the administration of the Indian policy and to minimize peculation

-in the bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of the peace

-party over the army. "The gentlemen who wrote the reports of the

-Commissioners revelled in riotous imaginations and discarded facts,"

-sneered a friend of military control; but there was, more or less, a

-distinct improvement in the management of the reservation tribes after

-1869; although, as the exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption

-was by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners and Grant

-sought to elevate the tone of agency control was through the religious,

-charitable, and missionary societies. These organizations, many of

-which had long maintained missionary schools among the more civilized

-tribes, were invited to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians

-for appointment by the bureau. On the whole these appointments were

-an improvement over the men whom political influence had heretofore

-brought to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner and the board

-were again complaining of the character of the agents; but there was an

-increasing standard of criticism.

-

-In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869,

-and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In

-1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to

-civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable

-spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and

-Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of

-Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without

-occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers

-whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872,

-"the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity

-has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly

-improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their

-own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over

-them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult

-Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its _38th Annual

-Report_, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last

-thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their

-education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their

-admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes,

-upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may

-justly be proud."

-

-The board of Indian Commissioners believed that most of the obvious

-improvement in the Indian condition was due to the substitution of

-a peace policy for a policy of something else. It made a mistake in

-assuming that there had ever been a policy of war. So far as the United

-States government had been concerned the aim had always been peace

-and humanity, and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the

-Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy been administered.

-Even then it was distinctly temporary. The events of the sixties

-had involved such continuous friction and necessitated such severe

-repression that contemporaries might be pardoned for thinking that war

-was the policy rather than the cure. But the resistance of the tribes

-would generally have ceased by 1870, even without the new peace policy.

-Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for

-resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The

-Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific,

-and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads

-like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande,

-the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, and the Missouri, Kansas, and

-Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet

-the board was right in that its influence in bringing closer harmony

-between public opinion and the Indian Bureau, and in improving the

-tone of the bureau, had made the transformation of the savage into the

-citizen farmer more rapid.

-

-Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian Commissioners

-Congress took another long step towards a better condition by

-ordering that no more treaties with the Indian tribes should be made

-by President and Senate. For more than two years before 1871 no

-treaty had been made and ratified, and now the policy was definitely

-changed. For ninety years the Indians had been treated as independent

-nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had been concluded with

-various tribes, the United States only once repudiating any of them.

-In 1863, after the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the

-tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had not applied

-to Indian relations the rule of international law that war terminates

-all existing treaties. The relation implied by the treaty had been

-anomalous. The tribes were at once independent and dependent. No

-foreign nation could treat with them; hence they were not free. No

-state could treat with them, and the Indian could not sue in United

-States courts; hence they were not Americans. The Supreme Court in the

-Cherokee cases had tried to define their unique status, but without

-great success. It was unfortunate for the Indians that the United

-States took their tribal existence seriously. The agreements had always

-a greater sanctity in appearance than in fact. Indians honestly unable

-to comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and often denying that they

-were in any wise bound by it, were held to fulfilment by the power

-of the United States. The United States often believed that treaty

-violation represented deliberate hostility of the tribes, when it

-signified only the unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to

-follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce treaties thus

-violated led constantly to wars whose justification the Indian could

-not see.

-

-The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making of any Indian treaty in

-the future. Hereafter when agreements became necessary, they were to be

-made, much as they had been in the past, but Congress was the ratifying

-power and not the Senate. The fiction of an independence which had held

-the Indians to a standard which they could not understand was here

-abandoned; and quite as much to the point, perhaps, the predominance of

-the Senate in Indian affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a

-whole. In no other branch of internal administration would the Senate

-have been permitted to make binding agreements, but here the fiction

-had given it a dominance ever since the organization of the government.

-

-In the thirty-five years following the abandonment of the Indian

-treaties the problems of management changed with the ascending

-civilization of the national wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian

-Commissioner in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day of deliverance

-from the fear of Indian hostilities," while his successors in office

-saw his prophecy fulfilled. Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary

-of the Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement of

-management and the drafting of a positive policy. His application

-of the merit system to Indian appointments, which was a startling

-innovation in national politics, worked a great change after the petty

-thievery which had flourished in the presidency of General Grant.

-Grant had indeed desired to do well, and conditions had appreciably

-bettered, yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians to

-continue their peculations in instances which ranged from humble agents

-up to the Cabinet itself. Schurz not only corrected much of this,

-but the first report of his Commissioner, E. A. Hayt, outlined the

-preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides the continuance

-of concentration and education there were four policies which stood

-out in this report--economy in the administration of rations, that

-the Indians might not be pauperized; a special code of law for the

-Indian reserves; a well-organized Indian police to enforce the laws;

-and a division of reserve lands into farms which should be assigned to

-individual Indians in severalty. The administration of Secretary Schurz

-gave substance to all these policies.

-

-The progress of Indian education and civilization began to be a

-real thing during Hayes's presidency. Most of the wars were over,

-permanency in residence could be relied on to a considerable degree,

-the Indians could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In

-1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department, the Indian

-Office reported an Indian population of 256,127 for the United

-States, excluding Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing

-citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read. Among them had been

-erected both boarding and day schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the

-latter. "Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement,

-showing an increased and more regular attendance of pupils and a

-growing interest in education on the part of parents." Interest in

-the problem of Indian education had been aroused in the East as well

-as among the tribes during the preceding year or two, because of the

-experiment with which the name of R. H. Pratt was closely connected.

-The non-resident boarding school, where the children could be taken

-away from the tribe and educated among whites, had become a factor in

-Carlisle, Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt had opened the

-first of these with 147 students in November, 1879. His design had been

-to give to the boys and girls the rudiments of education and training

-in farming and mechanic arts. His experience had already, in 1880,

-shown this to be entirely practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled

-as soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals, marched to the

-music of their own band. Both sexes had exhibited at the Cumberland

-County Agricultural Fair, where prizes were awarded to many of them for

-quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness, tinware, and penmanship.

-Many of the students had increased their knowledge of white customs by

-going out in the summers to work in the fields or kitchens of farmers

-in the East. Here, too, they had shown the capacity for education and

-development which their bitterest frontier enemies had denied. In 1906

-there were twenty-five of these schools with more than 9000 students in

-attendance.

-

-It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away

-from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another

-to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The

-ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive

-to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or

-Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade,

-and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for

-rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but

-the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana Crows, for

-instance, were, in 1904, encouraged into agricultural rivalry by a

-county fair. Their congenital love for gambling was converted into

-competition over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906 they had not been

-drawing rations for nearly two years. While their settling down was

-but a single incident in tribal education and not a general reform,

-it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian conditions since

-the warlike sixties. The brilliant green placard which announced their

-county fair for 1906 bears witness to this:--

-

-                          "CROWS, WAKE UP!

-

-          "Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.

-                    "Begin Planting for it Now.

-                       "Plant a Good Garden.

-                      "Put in Wheat and Oats.

-  Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to

-                             the Fair.

-   Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best

-                             Exhibits.

-    "Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.

-

-  "_Committee._"

-

-A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence

-for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their

-relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership

-of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no

-attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them,

-while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of

-this on their own account. Individual attempts at progress were often

-checked by the fact that crime went unpunished in the Indian Country.

-An Indian police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in 1880,

-but the law respecting trespassers on Indian lands was inadequate, and

-Congress was slow in providing codes and courts for the reservations.

-The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts on his own

-authority in 1883; Congress extended certain laws over the tribes in

-1885; and a little later provided salaries for the officials of the

-agency courts.

-

-An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in severalty by

-Indians marked a great step towards solidifying Indian civilization.

-There had been no greater obstacle to this civilization than communal

-ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of hunting, with

-agriculture as an incidental and rather degrading feature. Few of

-the tribes had any recognition of individual ownership. The educated

-Indian and the savage alike were forced into economic stagnation by the

-system. Education could accomplish little in face of it. The changes of

-the seventies brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated

-requests that Congress begin the breaking down of the tribal system

-through the substitution of Indian ownership.

-

-In isolated cases and by special treaty provisions a few of the Indians

-had been permitted to acquire lands and be blended in the body of

-American citizens. But no general statute existed until the passage

-of the Dawes bill in February, 1887. In this year the Commissioner

-estimated that there were 243,299 Indians in the United States,

-occupying a total of 213,117 square miles of land, nearly a section

-apiece. By the Dawes bill the President was given authority to divide

-the reserves among the Indians located on them, distributing the

-lands on the basis of a quarter section or 160 acres to each head

-of a family, an eighth section to single adults and orphans, and a

-sixteenth to each dependent child. It was provided also that when the

-allotments had been made, tribal ownership should cease, and the title

-to each farm should rest in the individual Indian or his heirs. But to

-forestall the improvident sale of this land the owner was to be denied

-the power to mortgage or dispose of it for at least twenty-five years.

-The United States was to hold it in trust for him for this time.

-

-Besides allowing the Indian to own his farm and thus take his

-step toward economic independence, the Dawes bill admitted him to

-citizenship. Once the lands had been allotted, the owners came within

-the full jurisdiction of the states or territories where they lived,

-and became amenable to and protected by the law as citizens of the

-United States.

-

-The policy which had been recommended since the time of Schurz became

-the accepted policy of the United States in 1887. "I fail to comprehend

-the full import of the allotment act if it was not the purpose of the

-Congress which passed it and the Executive whose signature made it

-a law ultimately to dissolve all tribal relations and to place each

-adult Indian on the broad platform of American citizenship," wrote

-the Commissioner in 1887. For the next twenty years the reports of

-the office were filled with details of subdivision of reserves and

-the adjustment of the legal problems arising from the process. And in

-the twenty-first year the old Indian Country ceased to exist as such,

-coming into the Union as the state of Oklahoma.

-

-The progress of allotment under the Dawes bill steadily broke down the

-reserves of the so-called Indian Territory. Except the five civilized

-tribes, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, the

-inhabitants who had been colonized there since the Civil War wanted to

-take advantage of the act. The civilized tribes preferred a different

-and more independent system for themselves, and retained their tribal

-identity until 1906. In the transition it was found that granting

-citizenship to the Indian in a way increased his danger by opening him

-to the attack of the liquor dealer and depriving him of some of the

-special protection of the Indian Office. To meet this danger, as the

-period of tribal extinction drew near, the Burke act of 1906 modified

-and continued the provisions of the Dawes bill. The new statute

-postponed citizenship until the expiration of the twenty-five-year

-period of trust, while giving complete jurisdiction over the allottee

-to the United States in the interim. In special cases the Secretary of

-the Interior was allowed to release from the period of guardianship

-and trusteeship individual Indians who were competent to manage their

-own affairs, but for the generality the period of twenty-five years

-was considered "not too long a time for most Indians to serve their

-apprenticeship in civic responsibilities."

-

-Already the opening up to legal white settlement had begun. In the

-Dawes bill it was provided that after the lands had been allotted in

-severalty the undivided surplus might be bought by the United States

-and turned into the public domain for entry and settlement. Following

-this, large areas were purchased in 1888 and 1889, to be settled in

-1890. The territory of Oklahoma, created in this year in the western

-end of Indian Territory, and "No Man's Land," north of Texas, marked

-the political beginning of the end of Indian Territory. It took nearly

-twenty years to complete it, through delays in the process of allotment

-and sale; but in these two decades the work was done thoroughly, the

-five civilized tribes divided their own lands and abandoned tribal

-government, and in November, 1908, the state of Oklahoma was admitted

-by President Roosevelt.

-

-The Indian relations, which were most belligerent in the sixties, had

-changed completely in the ensuing forty years. In part the change was

-due to a greater and more definite desire at Washington for peace, but

-chiefly it was environmental, due to the progress of settlement and

-transportation which overwhelmed the tribes, destroying their capacity

-to resist and embedding them firmly in the white population. Oklahoma

-marked the total abandonment of Monroe's policy of an Indian Country.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXI

-

-THE LAST STAND OF CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL

-

-

-The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians ceased with the

-termination of the Indian wars of the sixties. Here the resistance had

-most closely resembled a general war with the tribes in close alliance

-against the invader. With this obstacle overcome, the work left to

-be done in the conquest of the continent fell into two main classes:

-terminating Indian resistance by the suppression of sporadic outbreaks

-in remote byways and letting in the population. The new course of the

-Indian problem after 1869 led it speedily away from the part it had

-played in frontier advance until it became merely one of many social or

-race problems in the United States. It lost its special place as the

-great illustration of the difficulties of frontier life. But although

-the new course tended toward chronic peace, there were frequent

-relapses, here and there, which produced a series of Indian flurries

-after 1869. Never again do these episodes resemble, however remotely, a

-general Indian war.

-

-Human nature did not change with the adoption of the so-called peace

-policy. The government had constantly to be on guard against the

-dishonest agent, while improved facilities in communication increased

-the squatters' ability to intrude upon valuable lands. The Sioux treaty

-of 1868, whereby the United States abandoned the Powder River route and

-erected the great reserve in Dakota, west of the Missouri River, was

-scarcely dry before rumors of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills

-turned the eyes of prospectors thither.

-

-Early in 1870 citizens of Cheyenne and the territory of Wyoming

-organized a mining and prospecting company that professed an intention

-to explore the Big Horn country in northern Wyoming, but was believed

-by the Sioux to contemplate a visit to the Black Hills within their

-reserve. The local Sioux agent remonstrated against this, and General

-C. C. Augur was sent to Cheyenne to confer with the leaders of the

-expedition. He found Wyoming in a state of irritation against the

-Sioux treaty, which left the Indians in control of their Powder River

-country--the best third of the territory. He sympathized with the

-frontiersmen, but finally was forced by orders from Washington to

-prevent the expedition from starting into the field. Four years later

-this deferred reconnoissance took place as an official expedition under

-General Custer, with "great excitement among the whole Sioux." The

-approach from the northeast of the Northern Pacific, which had reached

-a landing at Bismarck on the Missouri before the panic of 1873, still

-further increased the apprehension of the tribes that they were to be

-dispossessed. The Indian Commissioner, in the end of 1874, believed

-that no harm would come of the expedition since no great gold finds

-had been made, but the Montana historian was nearer the truth when

-he wrote: "The whole Sioux nation was successfully defied." It was a

-clear violation of the tribal right, and necessarily emboldened the

-frontiersmen to prospect on their own account.

-

-[Illustration: POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN

-

-From a photograph made by Mr. W. R. Bowlin, of Chicago, and reproduced

-by his permission]

-

-Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give countenance to the

-disgruntled warrior bands that resented the treaties already made, came

-the mismanagement of the Red Cloud agency. Professor O. C. Marsh, of

-Yale College, was stopped by Red Cloud, while on a geological visit to

-the Black Hills, in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the

-Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington samples of decayed

-flour and inferior rations which the Indian agent was issuing to the

-Oglala Sioux. With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded

-to study the new problem thus brought to his notice, and accumulated

-a mass of evidence which seemed to him to prove the existence of big

-plots to defraud the government, and mismanagement extending even to

-the Secretary of the Interior. He published his charges in pamphlet

-form, and wrote letters of protest to the President, in which he

-maintained that the Indian officials were trying harder to suppress

-his evidence than to correct the grievances of the Sioux. He managed

-to stir up so much interest in the East that the Board of Indian

-Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate the affairs

-of the Red Cloud agency. The report of the committee in October, 1875,

-whitewashed many of the individuals attacked by Professor Marsh, and

-exonerated others of guilt at the expense of their intelligence,

-but revealed abuses in the Indian Office which might fully justify

-uneasiness among the Sioux.

-

-To these tribes, already discontented because of their compression

-and sullen because of mismanagement, the entry of miners into the

-Black Hills country was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners

-were there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating disturbances

-and exaggerating in the Indian mind the value of the reserve, so that

-an attempt by the Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn

-came to nothing. The natural tendency of these forces was to drive the

-younger braves off the reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty

-bands that roamed at will and were scornful of those that lived in

-peace. Most important of the leaders of these bands was Sitting Bull.

-

-In December the Indian Commissioner, despite the Sioux privilege to

-pursue the chase, ordered all the Sioux to return to their reserves

-before February 1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile. As

-yet the mutterings had not broken out in war, and the evidence does not

-show that conflict was inevitable. The tribes could not have got back

-on time had they wanted to; but their failure to return led the Indian

-Office to turn the Sioux over to the War Department. The army began by

-destroying a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested not

-by an enemy of the army, but by General H. H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who

-himself had fought the Sioux with marked success in 1862.

-

-With war now actually begun, three columns were sent into the field to

-arrest and restrain the hostile Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook,

-Gibbon, and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic of fighters.

-He was already well known for his Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier

-book. Sherman had described him in 1867 as "young, _very_ brave, even

-to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer," and as "ready and

-willing now to fight the Indians." La Barge, who had carried some

-of Custer's regiment on his steamer _De Smet_, in 1873, saw him as

-"an officer ... clad in buckskin trousers from the seams of which a

-large fringe was fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large

-gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited animal." His showy

-vanity and his admitted courage had already got him into more than one

-difficulty; now on June 25, 1876, his whole column of five companies,

-excepting only his battle horse, Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was

-destroyed in a battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had lived,

-he might perhaps have been cleared of the charge of disobedience, as

-Fetterman might ten years before, but, as it turned out, there were

-many to lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended before 1876

-was over, though Sitting Bull with a small band escaped to Canada,

-where he worried the Dominion Government for several years. "I know of

-no instance in history," wrote Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, "where a

-great nation has so shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux

-were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the disappointed tribes

-settled down to another decade of quiescence.

-

-In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull a hero in the

-Centennial year was transferred to Chief Joseph, leader of the

-non-treaty Nez Perces, in the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been

-a friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since the expedition

-of Lewis and Clark. Living in the valleys of the Snake and its

-tributaries, it could easily have hindered the course of travel along

-the Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was always good.

-In 1855 it had begun to treat with the United States and had ceded

-considerable territory at the conference held by Governor Stevens with

-Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.

-

-The exigencies of the Civil War, failure of Congress to fulfil treaty

-stipulations, and the discovery of gold along the Snake served to

-change the character of the Nez Perces. Lawyer's annuity of five

-hundred dollars, as Principal Chief, was at best not royal, and when

-its vouchers had to be cashed in greenbacks at from forty-five to

-fifty cents on the dollar, he complained of hardship. It was difficult

-to persuade the savage that a depreciated greenback was as good as

-money. Congress was slow with the annuities promised in 1855. In 1861,

-only one Indian in six could have a blanket, while the 4393 yards of

-calico issued allowed under two yards to each Indian. The Commissioner

-commented mildly upon this, to the effect that "Giving a blanket to one

-Indian works no satisfaction to the other five, who receive none." The

-gold boom, with the resulting rise of Lewiston, in the heart of the

-reserve, brought in so many lawless miners that the treaty of 1855 was

-soon out of date.

-

-In 1863 a new treaty was held with Chief Lawyer and fifty other

-headmen, by which certain valleys were surrendered and the bounds of

-the Lapwai reserve agreed upon. Most of the Nez Perces accepted this,

-but Chief Joseph refused to sign and gathered about him a band of

-unreconciled, non-treaty braves who continued to hunt at will over the

-Wallowa Valley, which Lawyer and his followers had professed to cede.

-It was an interesting legal point as to the right of a non-treaty chief

-to claim to own lands ceded by the rest of his tribe. But Joseph,

-though discontented, was not dangerous, and there was little friction

-until settlers began to penetrate into his hunting-grounds. In 1873,

-President Grant created a Wallowa reserve for Joseph's Nez Perces,

-since they claimed this chiefly as their home. But when they showed no

-disposition to confine themselves to its limits, he revoked the order

-in 1875. The next year a commission, headed by the Secretary of the

-Interior, Zachary Chandler, was sent to persuade Joseph to settle down,

-but returned without success. Joseph stood upon his right to continue

-to occupy at pleasure the lands which had always belonged to the Nez

-Perces, and which he and his followers had never ceded. The commission

-recommended the segregation of the medicine-men and dreamers,

-especially Smohalla, who seemed to provide the inspiration for Joseph,

-and the military occupation of the Wallowa Valley in anticipation of an

-outbreak by the tribe against the incoming white settlers. These things

-were done in part, but in the spring of 1877, "it becoming evident to

-Agent Monteith that all negotiations for the peaceful removal of Joseph

-and his band, with other non-treaty Nez Perce Indians, to the Lapwai

-Indian reservation in Idaho must fail of a satisfactory adjustment,"

-the Indian Office gave it up, and turned the affair over to General O.

-O. Howard and the War Department.

-

-The conferences held by Howard with the leaders, in May, made it clear

-to them that their alternatives were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight.

-At first Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass and White

-Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater to which the tribe agreed to

-remove at once; but just before the day fixed for the removal, the

-murder of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge directed

-against the whites and the massacre of several. War immediately

-followed, for the next two months covering the borderland of Idaho

-and Montana with confusion. A whole volume by General Howard has been

-devoted to its details. Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the

-_North American Review_ in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically in

-his _Massacres of the Mountains_, and the Montana Historical Society

-has published many articles concerning it. Considerably less is known

-of the more important wars which preceded it than of this struggle of

-the Nez Perces. In August the fighting turned to flight, Chief Joseph

-abandoning the Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone

-Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased him 1321 miles, across the

-Yellowstone Park toward the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve.

-Along the swift flight there were running battles from time to time,

-while the fugitives replenished their stores and stock from the country

-through which they passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front

-Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them off. Miles caught

-their trail in the end of September after they had crossed the Missouri

-River and had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting Bull had

-found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised the Nez Perce camp on Snake

-Creek, capturing six hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's

-band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later the stubborn chief

-surrendered to Colonel Miles.

-

-"What shall be done with them?" Commissioner Hayt asked at the end of

-1877. For once an Indian band had conducted a war on white principles,

-obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation and torture.

-Joseph had by his sheer military skill won the admiration and respect

-of his military opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated the

-war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho. To exile they were sent,

-and Joseph's uprising ended as all such resistances must. The forcible

-invasion of the territory by the whites was maintained; the tribe was

-sent in punishment to malarial lands in Indian Territory, where they

-rapidly dwindled in number. There has been no adequate defence of the

-policy of the United States from first to last.

-

-The Modoc of northern California, and the Apache of Arizona and New

-Mexico fought against the inevitable, as did the Sioux and the Nez

-Perces. The former broke out in resistance in the winter of 1872-1873,

-after they had long been proscribed by California opinion. In March of

-1873 they made their fate sure by the treacherous murder of General E.

-R. S. Canby and other peace commissioners sent to confer with them.

-In the war which resulted the Modoc, under Modoc Jack and Scar-Faced

-Charley, were pursued from cave to ravine among the lava beds of the

-Modoc country until regular soldiers finally corralled them all. Jack

-was hanged for murder at Fort Klamath in October, but Charley lived to

-settle down and reform with a portion of the tribe in Indian Territory.

-

-The Apache had always been a thorn in the flesh of the trifling

-population of Arizona and New Mexico, and a nuisance to both army and

-Indian Office. The Navaho, their neighbors, after a hard decade with

-Carleton and the Bosque Redondo, had quieted down during the seventies

-and advanced towards economic independence. But the Apache were long

-in learning the virtues of non-resistance. Bell had found in Arizona

-a young girl whose adventures as a fifteen-year-old child served to

-explain the attitude of the whites. She had been carried off by Indians

-who, when pressed by pursuers, had stripped her naked, knocked her

-senseless with a tomahawk, pierced her arms with three arrows and a leg

-with one, and then rolled her down a ravine, there to abandon her. The

-child had come to, and without food, clothes, or water, had found her

-way home over thirty miles of mountain paths. Such episodes necessarily

-inspired the white population with fear and hatred, while the continued

-residence of the sufferers in the Indians' vicinity illustrates the

-persistence of the pressure which was sure to overwhelm the tribes in

-the end. Tucson had retaliated against such excesses of the red men

-by equal excesses of the whites. Without any immediate provocation,

-fourscore Arivapa Apache, who had been concentrated under military

-supervision at Camp Grant, were massacred in cold blood.

-

-General George Crook alone was able to bring order into the Arizona

-frontier. From 1871 to 1875 he was there in command,--"the beau-ideal

-Indian fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged in constant

-campaigns against the "incorrigibly hostile," but before 1873 was over

-he had most of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police

-supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a brass identification

-check, so that it might be easier for his police to watch them. The

-tribes were passed back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook

-was transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately the Indian

-Commissioner commenced to concentrate the scattered tribes, but was

-hindered by hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as bitter as

-their hatred for the whites. First Victorio, and then Geronimo was the

-centre of the resistance to the concentration which placed hereditary

-enemies side by side. They protested against the sites assigned them,

-and successfully defied the Commissioner to carry out his orders. Crook

-was brought back to the department in 1882, and after another long war

-gradually established peace.

-

-Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876, returned to Dakota in the

-early eighties in time to witness the rapid settlement of the northern

-plains and the growth of the territories towards statehood. After his

-revolt the Black Hills had been taken away from the tribe, as had

-been the vague hunting rights over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood

-advanced in the later eighties, and as population piled up around the

-edges of the reserve, the time was ripe for the medicine-men to preach

-the coming of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his personal

-following. Bad crops which in these years produced populism in Kansas

-and Nebraska, had even greater menace for the half-civilized Indians.

-Agents and army officers became aware of the undercurrent of danger

-some months before trouble broke out.

-

-The state of South Dakota was admitted in November, 1889. Just a year

-later the Bureau turned the Sioux country over to the army, and General

-Nelson A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in the vicinity

-of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies. The arrest of Sitting Bull,

-who claimed miraculous powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts"

-were supposed to give invulnerability to his followers, was attempted

-in December. The troops sent out were resisted, however, and in the

-melee the prophet was killed. The war which followed was much noticed,

-but of little consequence. General Miles had plenty of troops and

-Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph stations conveyed news easily and safely.

-But when orders were issued two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull

-to disarm the camp at Wounded Knee, the savages resisted. The troops

-within reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their rapid-fire guns,

-regardless of age or sex, with such effect that more than two hundred

-Indian bodies, mostly women and children, were found dead upon the

-field.

-

-With the death of Sitting Bull, turbulence among the Indians,

-important enough to be called resistance, came to an end. There had

-been many other isolated cases of outbreak since the adoption of the

-peace policy in 1869. There were petty riots and individual murders

-long after 1890. But there were, and could be, no more Indian wars.

-Many of the tribes had been educated to half-civilization, while lands

-in severalty had changed the point of view of many tribesmen. The

-relative strength of the two races was overwhelmingly in favor of the

-whites.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXII

-

-LETTING IN THE POPULATION[3]

-

-    [3] This chapter follows, in part, F. L. Paxson, "The Pacific

-        Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in

-        America," in Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol.

-        I, pp. 105-118.

-

-      "Veil them, cover them, wall them round--

-        Blossom, and creeper, and weed--

-      Let us forget the sight and the sound,

-        The smell and the touch of the breed!"

-

-

-Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle," upon the Indian village.

-The forces of nature were turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled

-at the growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and the wild

-pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the thatched huts dissolved in

-the torrents, and "by the end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle

-in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months

-before." The white man worked the opposite of this on what remained of

-the American desert in the last fifteen years of the history of the old

-frontier. In a decade and a half a greater change came over it than the

-previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890, it is fair to say that

-the frontier was no more.

-

-The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary line separating the

-farm lands and the unused West, had become nearly a circle before

-the compromise of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks

-it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the last generation.

-The flanks had widened out in the thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri,

-and Iowa had received their population. In the next ten years Texas

-and the Pacific settlements had carried the line further west until

-the circular shape of the frontier was clearly apparent by the middle

-of the century. And thus it stood, with changes only in detail, for a

-generation more. In whatever sense the word "frontier" is used, the

-fact is the same. If it be taken as the dividing line, as the area

-enclosed, or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the frontier

-of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier of 1850.

-

-The pressure on the frontier line had increased steadily during these

-thirty years. Population moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War.

-The agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in size and

-wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that became clearer as more

-citizens settled along it. East and south, it was close to the rainfall

-line which divides easy farming country from the semi-arid plains;

-west, it was a mountain range. In either case the country enclosed was

-too refractory to yield to the piecemeal process which had conquered

-the wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to expansion

-and hindrance to communication became of increasing consequence as

-population grew.

-

-Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural frontier was pressing

-against it. By 1860 the railway frontier had reached it. The former

-could not cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture

-offered by the lands beyond; the latter was restrained by the

-prohibitive cost of building railways through an entirely unsettled

-district. Private initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the

-continent; the one remaining task called for direct national aid.

-

-The influences operating upon this frontier of the Far West, though

-not making it less of a barrier, made it better known than any of the

-earlier frontiers. In the first place, the trails crossed it, with the

-result that its geography became well known throughout the country.

-No other frontier had been the site of a thoroughfare for many years

-before its actual settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the

-later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge of the West, and

-scattered groups of inhabitants here and there, without populating it

-in any sense. Finally the Indian friction produced the series of Indian

-wars which again called the wild West to the centre of the stage for

-many years.

-

-All of these forces served to advertise the existence of this frontier

-and its barrier character. They had cooperated to enlarge the railway

-movement, as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union Pacific

-was authorized to meet the new demand; and while the Union Pacific

-was under construction, other roads to meet the same demands were

-chartered and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled the

-final barrier.

-

-Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation of the

-entire frontier between 1862 and 1871. The charter acts of the Northern

-Pacific, the Atlantic and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern

-Pacific at once opened the way for some five new continental lines and

-closed the period of direct federal aid to railway construction. The

-Northern Pacific received its charter on the same day that the Union

-Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864. It was authorized to

-join the waters of Lake Superior and Puget Sound, and was to receive a

-land grant of twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in the

-territories through which it should run. In the summer of 1866 a third

-continental route was provided for in the South along the line of the

-thirty-fifth parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific, was to

-build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico,

-to the Pacific, and to connect, near the eastern line of California,

-with the Southern Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised

-twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the territories.

-The Texas Pacific was chartered March 3, 1871, as the last of the land

-grant railways. It received the usual grant, which was applicable only

-west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana and El Paso, it

-could receive no federal aid since in Texas there were no public lands.

-Its charter called for construction to San Diego, but the Southern

-Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico, headed it off at El

-Paso, and it got no farther.

-

-To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways, Congress

-added others in the form of local or state grants in the same years,

-so that by 1871 all that the companies could ask for the future was

-lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the first time the

-federal government had taken an active initiative in providing for

-the destruction of a frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no

-longer with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence of a

-realization of the approaching frontier change.

-

-The new Pacific railways began to build just as the Union Pacific was

-completed and opened to traffic. In the cases of all, the development

-was slow, since the investing public had little confidence in the

-existence of a business large enough to maintain four systems,

-or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert. The first period of

-construction of all these roads terminated in 1873, when panic brought

-transportation projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of

-five years.

-

-Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done much to establish public

-credit during the war and had created a market of small buyers

-for investment securities on the strength of United States bonds,

-popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869 and 1870. Within two years he

-is said to have raised thirty millions for the construction of the

-road, making its building a financial possibility. And although he

-may have distorted the isotherm several degrees in order to picture

-his farm lands as semi-tropical in their luxuriance, as General

-Hazen charged, he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul her

-opportunity, and had run the main line of track through Fargo, on the

-Red, to Bismarck, on the Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty

-miles from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought expansion

-to an end.

-

-For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern Pacific was of

-fundamental importance. The railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota,

-Dakota, and much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential grain

-fields of the Red River region were virgin forest, and on the main

-line of the new road, for two thousand miles, hardly a trace of

-settled habitation existed. The panic of 1873 caught the Union

-Pacific at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable

-track extending in advance of the railroad frontier. The Atlantic

-and Pacific and Texas Pacific were less seriously overbuilt, but not

-less effectively checked. The former, starting from Springfield,

-had constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita, in Indian

-Territory, where it arrived in the fall of 1871. It had meanwhile

-acquired some of the old Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track

-into St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita remained its

-terminus for several years, and when it emerged from the receiver's

-hands, it bore the new name of St. Louis and San Francisco.

-

-The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of local lines which

-expected, through federal incorporation, to reach the dignity of a

-continental railroad. It began its construction towards El Paso from

-Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state line, and reached

-the vicinity of Dallas and Fort Worth before the panic. It planned to

-get into St. Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern, and

-into New Orleans over the New Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas,

-Arkansas, and Missouri became through these lines a centre of railway

-development, while in the near-by grazing country the meat-packing

-industries shortly found their sources of supply.

-

-The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated in 1873 could

-scarcely have been deferred for many years. The waste of the Civil War

-period, and the enthusiasm for economic development which followed it,

-invited the retribution that usually follows continued and widespread

-inflation. Already the completion of a national railway system was

-foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had been for railways at

-any cost, but the Granger activities following the panic gave warning

-of an approaching period when this should be changed into a demand for

-regulation of railroads. But as yet the frontier remained substantially

-intact, and until its railway system should be completed the Granger

-demand could not be translated into an effective movement for federal

-control. It was not until 1879 that the United States recovered from

-the depression following the crisis. In that year resumption marked the

-readjustment of national currency, reconstruction was over, and the

-railways entered upon the last five years of the culminating period in

-the history of the frontier. When the five years were over, five new

-continental routes were available for transportation.

-

-The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress across Texas when

-checked by the panic in the vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived,

-it pushed its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by a land

-grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never built. Corporations of

-California, Arizona, and New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern

-Pacific, constructed the line across the Colorado River and along the

-Gila, through lands acquired by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains

-were running over its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to

-New Orleans by the following October. In the course of this Southern

-Pacific construction, connection had been made with the Atchison,

-Topeka, and Santa Fe at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but

-through lack of harmony between the roads their junction was of little

-consequence.

-

-[Illustration: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884

-

-This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads

-in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads which existed

-everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower

-Missouri valleys.]

-

-The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an additional line through

-southern Texas in the beginning of 1883. Around the Galveston,

-Harrisburg, and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other lines

-and begun double construction from San Antonio west, and from El Paso,

-or more accurately Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra

-Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new line and the Texas

-and Pacific used the same track. In later years the line through San

-Antonio and Houston became the main line of the Southern Pacific.

-

-A third connection of the Southern Pacific across Texas was operated

-before the end of 1883 over its Mojave extension in California and the

-Atlantic and Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic

-and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership, and come out

-as St. Louis and San Francisco. But its land grant had remained unused,

-while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe had reached Albuquerque and

-had exhausted its own land grant, received through the state of Kansas

-and ceasing at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter had

-passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch along the old Santa Fe trail

-to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Here it came to an agreement with the

-St. Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were to build

-jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise, from Albuquerque

-into California. They built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not

-relishing a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege

-to meet the new road on the eastern boundary of California. Hence its

-Mojave branch was waiting at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific

-arrived there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the completion of

-bridges over the Colorado and Rio Grande this third eastern connection

-of the Southern Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were running

-through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.

-

-The names of Billings and Villard are most closely connected with the

-renascence of the Northern Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at

-the Missouri River, although it had built a few miles in Washington

-territory, around its new terminal city of Tacoma. The illumination of

-crisis times had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay

-Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in his palmy days. The

-existence of various land grant railways in Washington and Oregon made

-the revival difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer

-competition by both water and rail along the Columbia River, below

-Walla Walla. Under the presidency of Frederick Billings construction

-revived about 1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri,

-and from Wallula, at the junction of the Columbia and Snake. From

-these points lines were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri

-divisions towards the continental divide. Below Wallula, the Columbia

-Valley traffic was shared by agreement with the Oregon Railway and

-Navigation Company, which, under the presidency of Henry Villard, owned

-the steamship and railway lines of Oregon. As the time for opening the

-through lines approached, the question of Columbia River competition

-increased in serious aspect. Villard solved the problem through the

-agency of his famous blind pool, which still stands remarkable in

-railway finance. With the proceeds of the pool he organized the Oregon

-and Transcontinental as a holding company, and purchased a controlling

-interest in the rival roads. With harmony of plan thus insured, he

-assumed the presidency of the Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to

-complete and celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His

-celebration was elaborate, yet the _Nation_ remarked that the "mere

-achievement of laying a continuous rail across the continent has long

-since been taken out of the realm of marvels, and the country can

-never feel again the thrill which the joining of the Central and Union

-Pacific lines gave it."

-

-The land grant railways completed these four eastern connections across

-the frontier in the period of culmination. Private capital added a

-fifth in the new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled by the

-Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the Denver and Rio Grande. The

-Burlington, built along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had

-competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of that point since

-June, 1882. West of Denver the narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio

-Grande had been advancing since 1870.

-

-General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia capitalists had,

-in 1870, secured a Colorado charter for their Denver and Rio Grande.

-Started in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at Colorado Springs

-that autumn, and had continued south in later years. Like other roads

-it had progressed slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had been met at

-Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. From Pueblo it contested

-successfully with this rival for the grand canyon of the Arkansas,

-and built up that valley through the Gunnison country and across the

-old Ute reserve, to Grand Junction. From the Utah line it had been

-continued to Ogden by an allied corporation. A through service to

-Ogden, inaugurated in the summer of 1883, brought competition to the

-Union Pacific throughout its whole extent.

-

-The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had

-threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different

-lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to

-cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer

-could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach

-of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in

-its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and

-through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and

-political unit. "As the railroads overtook the successive lines of

-isolated frontier posts, and settlements spread out over country no

-longer requiring military protection," wrote General P. H. Sheridan in

-1882, "the army vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into

-remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its pioneer work.

-In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and

-cabins of the frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful

-houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who

-knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The

-civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly

-approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening

-strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old

-Mexico, yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines will

-entirely disappear and the mingling settlements absorb the remnants

-of the once powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly

-attempted to forbid the destined progress of the age." The deluge of

-population realized by Sheridan, and let in by the railways, had, by

-1890, blotted the uninhabited frontier off the map. Local spots yet

-remained unpeopled, but the census of 1890 revealed no clear division

-between the unsettled West and the rest of the United States.

-

-New states in plains and mountains marked the abolition of the last

-frontier as they had the earlier. In less than ten years the gap

-between Minnesota and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and South

-Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington. In 1890, for the

-first time, a solid band of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific.

-Farther south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new pressure. The

-Dawes bill released a fertile acreage to be distributed to the land

-hungry who had banked up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and

-Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890, while in eighteen

-more years, swallowing up the whole Indian Country, it had taken its

-place as a member of the Union. Between the northern tier of states

-and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and

-Colorado, the last creating eleven new counties in its eastern third

-in 1889, had seen their population densify under the stimulus of easy

-transportation. Much of the settlement had been premature, inviting

-failure, as populism later showed, but it left no area in the United

-States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large enough to be regarded as a

-national frontier. The last frontier, the same that Long had described

-as the American Desert in 1820, had been won.

-

-

-

-

-NOTE ON THE SOURCES

-

-

-The fundamental ideas upon which all recent careful work in western

-history has been based were first stated by Frederick J. Turner, in

-his paper on _The Significance of the Frontier in American History_,

-in the _Annual Report of the Am. Hist. Assn._, 1893. No comprehensive

-history of the trans-Mississippi West has yet appeared; Randall

-Parrish, _The Great Plains_ (2d ed., Chicago, 1907), is at best only a

-brief and superficial sketch; the histories of the several far western

-states by Hubert Howe Bancroft remain the most useful collection of

-secondary materials upon the subject. R. G. Thwaites, _Rocky Mountain

-Exploration_ (N.Y., 1904); O. P. Austin, _Steps in the Expansion of

-our Territory_ (N.Y., 1903); H. Gannett, _Boundaries of the United

-States and of the Several States and Territories_ (_Bulletin of the

-U.S. Geological Survey_, No. 226, 1904); and _Organic Acts for the

-Territories of the United States with Notes thereon_ (56th Cong., 1st

-sess., Sen. Doc. 148), are also of use.

-

-The local history of the West must yet be collected from many varieties

-of sources. The state historical societies have been active for many

-years, their more important collections comprising: _Publications of

-the Arkansas Hist. Assn._, _Annals of Iowa_, _Iowa Hist. Record_, _Iowa

-Journal of Hist. and Politics_, _Collections of the Minnesota Hist.

-Soc._, _Trans. of the Kansas State Hist. Soc._, _Trans. and Rep. of

-the Nebraska Hist. Soc._, _Proceedings of the Missouri Hist. Soc._,

-_Contrib. to the Hist. Soc. of Montana_, _Quart. of the Oregon Hist.

-Soc._, _Quart. of the Texas State Hist. Assn._, _Collections of the

-Wisconsin State Hist. Soc._ The scattered but valuable fragments to be

-found in these files are to be supplemented by the narratives contained

-in the histories of the single states or sections, the more important

-of these being: T. H. Hittell, _California_; F. Hall, _Colorado_; J.

-C. Smiley, _Denver_ (an unusually accurate and full piece of local

-history); W. Upham, _Minnesota in Three Centuries_; G. P. Garrison,

-_Texas_; E. H. Meany, _Washington_; J. Schafer, _Hist. of the Pacific

-Northwest_; R. G. Thwaites, _Wisconsin_, and the _Works_ of H. H.

-Bancroft.

-

-The comprehensive collection of geographic data for the West is

-the _Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad from the

-Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean_, made by the War Department and

-published by Congress in twelve huge volumes, 1855-. The most important

-official predecessors of this survey left the following reports: E.

-James, _Account of an Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains,

-performed in the Years 1819, 1820, ... under the Command of Maj. S.

-H. Long_ (Phila., 1823); J. C. Fremont, _Report of the Exploring

-Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and

-North California in the Years 1843-'44_ (28th Cong., 2d sess., Sen.

-Doc. 174); W. H. Emory, _Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Ft.

-Leavenworth ... to San Diego ..._ (30th Cong., 1st sess., Ex. Doc.

-41); H. Stansbury, _Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great

-Salt Lake of Utah ..._ (32d Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Ex. Doc. 3). From

-the great number of personal narratives of western trips, those of

-James O. Pattie, John B. Wyeth, John K. Townsend, and Joel Palmer may

-be selected as typical and useful. All of these, as well as the James

-narrative of the Long expedition, are reprinted in the monumental R.

-G. Thwaites, _Early Western Travels_, which does not, however, give

-any aid for the period after 1850. Later travels of importance are J.

-I. Thornton, _Oregon and California in 1848 ..._ (N.Y., 1849); Horace

-Greeley, _An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the

-Summer of 1859_ (N.Y., 1860); R. F. Burton, _The City of the Saints,

-and across the Rocky Mountains to California_ (N.Y., 1862); R. B.

-Marcy, _The Prairie Traveller, a Handbook for Overland Expeditions_

-(edited by R. F. Burton, London, 1863); F. C. Young, _Across the

-Plains in '65_ (Denver, 1905); Samuel Bowles, _Across the Continent_

-(Springfield, 1861); Samuel Bowles, _Our New West, Records of Travels

-between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean_ (Hartford, 1869);

-W. A. Bell, _New Tracks in North America_ (2d ed., London, 1870); J.

-H. Beadle, _The Undeveloped West, or Five Years in the Territories_

-(Phila., 1873).

-

-The classic account of traffic on the plains is Josiah Gregg, _Commerce

-of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fe Trader_ (many editions,

-and reprinted in Thwaites); H. M. Chittenden, _History of Steamboat

-Navigation on the Missouri River_ (N.Y., 1903), and _The American Fur

-Trade of the Far West_ (N.Y., 1902), are the best modern accounts. A

-brilliant sketch is C. F. Lummis, _Pioneer Transportation in America,

-Its Curiosities and Romance_ (_McClure's Magazine_, 1905). Other works

-of use are Henry Inman, _The Old Santa Fe Trail_ (N.Y., 1898); Henry

-Inman and William F. Cody, _The Great Salt Lake Trail_ (N.Y., 1898);

-F. A. Root and W. E. Connelley, _The Overland Stage to California_

-(Topeka, 1901); F. G. Young, _The Oregon Trail_, in _Oregon Hist. Soc.

-Quarterly_, Vol. I; F. Parkman, _The Oregon Trail_.

-

-Railway transportation in the Far West yet awaits its historian.

-Some useful antiquarian data are to be found in C. F. Carter, _When

-Railroads were New_ (N.Y., 1909), and there are a few histories

-of single roads, the most valuable being J. P. Davis, _The Union

-Pacific Railway_ (Chicago, 1894), and E. V. Smalley, _History

-of the Northern Pacific Railroad_ (N.Y., 1883). L. H. Haney, _A

-Congressional History of Railways in the United States to 1850_; J.

-B. Sanborn, _Congressional Grants of Lands in Aid of Railways_, and

-B. H. Meyer, _The Northern Securities Case_, all in the _Bulletins_

-of the University of Wisconsin, contain much information and useful

-bibliographies. The local historical societies have published many

-brief articles on single lines. There is a bibliography of the

-continental railways in F. L. Paxson, _The Pacific Railroads and the

-Disappearance of the Frontier in America_, in _Ann. Rep. of the Am.

-Hist. Assn._, 1907. Their social and political aspects may be traced in

-J. B. Crawford, _The Credit Mobilier of America_ (Boston, 1880) and E.

-W. Martin, _History of the Granger Movement_ (1874). The sources, which

-are as yet uncollected, are largely in the government documents and the

-files of the economic and railroad periodicals.

-

-For half a century, during which the Indian problem reached and

-passed its most difficult places, the United States was negligent

-in publishing compilations of Indian laws and treaties. In 1837 the

-Commissioner of Indian Affairs published in Washington, _Treaties

-between the United States of America and the Several Indian Tribes,

-from 1778 to 1837: with a copious Table of Contents_. After this date,

-documents and correspondence were to be found only in the intricate

-sessional papers and the _Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian

-Affairs_, which accompanied the reports of the Secretary of War,

-1832-1849, and those of the Secretary of the Interior after 1849. In

-1902 Congress published C. J. Kappler, _Indian Affairs, Laws, and

-Treaties_ (57th Cong., 1st sess., Sen. Doc. 452). Few historians have

-made serious use of these compilations or reports. Two other government

-documents of great value in the history of Indian negotiations are,

-Thomas Donaldson, _The Public Domain_ (47th Cong., 2d sess., H. Misc.

-Doc. 45, Pt. 4), and C. C. Royce, _Indian Land Cessions in the United

-States_ (with many charts, in 18th _Ann. Rep. of the Bureau of Am.

-Ethnology_, Pt. 2, 1896-1897). Most special works on the Indians

-are partisan, spectacular, or ill informed; occasionally they have

-all these qualities. A few of the most accessible are: A. H. Abel,

-_History of the Events resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the

-Mississippi_ (in _Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn._, 1906, an elaborate

-and scholarly work); J. P. Dunn, _Massacres of the Mountains, a

-History of the Indian Wars of the Far West_ (N.Y., 1886; a relatively

-critical work, with some bibliography); R. I. Dodge, _Our Wild Indians

-..._ (Hartford, 1883); G. E. Edwards, _The Red Man and the White Man

-in North America from its Discovery to the Present Time_ (Boston,

-1882; a series of Lowell Institute lectures, by no means so valuable

-as the pretentious title would indicate); I. V. D. Heard, _History

-of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863_ (N.Y., 1863; a

-contemporary and useful narrative); O. O. Howard, _Nez Perce Joseph,

-an Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his Confederates, his Enemies,

-his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and Capture_ (Boston, 1881; this

-is General Howard's personal vindication); Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson,

-_A Century of Dishonor, a Sketch of the United States Government's

-Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes_ (N.Y., 1881; highly colored

-and partisan); G. W. Manypenny, _Our Indian Wards_ (Cincinnati, 1880;

-by a former Indian Commissioner); L. E. Textor, _Official Relations

-between the United States and the Sioux Indians_ (Palo Alto, 1896; one

-of the few scholarly and dispassionate works on the Indians); F. A.

-Walker, _The Indian Question_ (Boston, 1874; three essays by a former

-Indian Commissioner); C. T. Brady, _Indian Fights and Fighters_ and

-_Northwestern Fights and Fighters_ (N.Y., 1907; two volumes in his

-series of _American Fights and Fighters_, prepared for consumers of

-popular sensational literature, but containing much valuable detail,

-and some critical judgments).

-

-Nearly every incident in the history of Indian relations has been made

-the subject of investigations by the War and Interior departments. The

-resulting collections of papers are to be found in the congressional

-documents, through the indexes. They are too numerous to be listed

-here. The searcher should look for reports from the Secretary of

-War, the Secretary of the Interior, or the Postmaster-general, for

-court-martial proceedings, and for reports of special committees of

-Congress. Dunn gives some classified lists in his _Massacres of the

-Mountains_.

-

-There is a rapidly increasing mass of individual biography and

-reminiscence for the West during this period. Some works of this class

-which have been found useful here are: W. M. Meigs, _Thomas Hart

-Benton_ (Phila., 1904); C. W. Upham, _Life, Explorations, and Public

-Services of John Charles Fremont_ (40th thousand, Boston, 1856); S.

-B. Harding, _Life of George B. Smith, Founder of Sedalia, Missouri_

-(Sedalia, 1907); P. H. Burnett, _Recollections and Opinions of an Old

-Pioneer_ (N.Y., 1880; by one who had followed the Oregon trail and

-had later become governor of California); A. Johnson, _S. A. Douglas_

-(N.Y., 1908; one of the most significant biographies of recent years);

-H. Stevens, _Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens_ (Boston, 1900); R. S.

-Thorndike, _The Sherman Letters_ (N.Y., 1894; full of references

-to frontier conditions in the sixties); P. H. Sheridan, _Personal

-Memoirs_ (London, 1888; with a good map of the Indian war of 1867-1868,

-which the later edition has dropped); E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke,

-Financier of the Civil War_ (Phila., 1907; with details of Northern

-Pacific railway finance); H. Villard, _Memoirs_ (Boston, 1904; the life

-of an active railway financier); Alexander Majors, _Seventy Years on

-the Frontier_ (N.Y., 1893; the reminiscences of one who had belonged

-to the great firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell); G. R. Brown,

-_Reminiscences of William M. Stewart of Nevada_ (1908).

-

-Miscellaneous works indicating various types of materials which

-have been drawn upon are: O. J. Hollister, _The Mines of Colorado_

-(Springfield, 1867; a miners' handbook); S. Mowry, _Arizona and Sonora_

-(3d ed., 1864; written in the spirit of a mining prospectus); T. B.

-H. Stenhouse, _The Rocky Mountain Saints_ (London, 1874; a credible

-account from a Mormon missionary who had recanted without bitterness);

-W. A. Linn, _The Story of the Mormons_ (N.Y., 1902; the only critical

-history of the Mormons, but having a strong Gentile bias); T. J.

-Dimsdale, _The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky

-Mountains_ (2d ed., Virginia City, 1882; a good description of the

-social order of the mining camp).

-

-

-

-

-INDEX

-

-

-  Acton, Minnesota, Sioux massacre at, 235.

-

-  Alder Gulch mines, Idaho, 168.

-

-  Anthony, Major Scott J., 259.

-

-  Apache Indians, 247, 267, 268, 292, 312;

-    treaty of 1853 with, 124;

-    troubles with, in Arizona, 162-163;

-    last struggles of, against whites, 368-369.

-

-  Arapaho Indians, 247, 248, 252, 256 ff., 263, 267, 292;

-    Medicine Lodge treaty with, 292-293;

-    issue of arms to, 312-313;

-    join in war of 1868, 313-318;

-    Custer's defeat of, 317-318.

-

-  Arapahoe, county of, 141.

-

-  Arickara Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Arizona, beginnings of, 158 ff.;

-    erection of territory of, 162.

-

-  Arkansas, boundaries of, 28-29;

-    admission as a state, 40.

-

-  Army, question of control of Indian affairs by, 324-344.

-

-  Assiniboin Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Atchison, Senator, 129.

-

-  Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, 347, 384.

-

-  Atlantic and Pacific Railway, 375, 376, 377;

-    becomes the St. Louis and San Francisco, 378.

-

-  Augur, General C. C., 292, 295, 359.

-

-  Auraria settlement, Colorado, 142.

-

-

-  Bannack City, mining centre, 168.

-

-  Bannock Indians, 295.

-

-  Beadle, John H., on western railways and their builders, 332-333, 335.

-

-  Bear Flag Republic, the, 105.

-

-  Becknell, William, 56.

-

-  Beckwith, Lieut. E. G., Pacific railway survey by, 203-206.

-

-  Bell, English traveller, on railway building in the West, 329-331.

-

-  Benton, Thomas Hart, 58;

-    interest of, in railways, 193-194.

-

-  Bent's Fort, 65, 66.

-

-  Billings, Frederick, 382.

-

-  Blackfoot Indians, 264.

-

-  Black Hawk, Colorado, village of, 145.

-

-  Black Hawk, Indian chief, 17.

-

-  Black Hawk War, 21, 25-26, 37.

-

-  Black Hills, discovery of gold in, 359;

-    troubles with Indians resulting from discovery, 361 ff.

-

-  Black Kettle, Indian chief, 255-261;

-    leads war party in 1868, 313;

-    death of, 317.

-

-  Blind pool, Villard's, 383.

-

-  Boise mines, 165.

-

-  Boulder, Colorado, 145.

-

-  Bowles, Samuel, on railway terminal towns, 332, 333.

-

-  Box family outrage, 307.

-

-  Bridge across the Mississippi, the first, 210.

-

-  Bridger, "Jim," 274.

-

-  Brown, John, murder of Kansans by, 134.

-

-  Brule Sioux Indians, 264, 266.

-

-  Bull Bear, Indian chief, 309.

-

-  Bureau of Indian Affairs, 31, 123, 341 ff.

-

-  Burlington, capital of Iowa territory, 45;

-    description of, in 1840, 47-48.

-

-  Burnett, governor of California, 117.

-

-  Bushwhacking in Kansas during Civil War, 231.

-

-  Butterfield, John, mail and express route of, 177 ff.

-

-  Byers, Denver editor, 144;

-    quoted, 149, 150.

-

-

-  Caddo Indians, 28.

-

-  California, early American designs on, 104-105;

-    becomes American possession, 105;

-    discovery of gold in, and results, 108-113;

-    population in 1850, 117;

-    local railways constructed in, 219;

-    Central Pacific Railway in, 220, 222.

-

-  Camels, experiment with, in Texas, 176.

-

-  Camp Grant massacre, 162.

-

-  Canals, land grants in aid of, 215, 217.

-

-  Canby, E. R. S., 228, 233;

-    murder of, 367.

-

-  Carleton, Colonel J. H., 160, 233.

-

-  Carlyle, George H., 250-251.

-

-  Carrington, Colonel Henry B., 274-275.

-

-  Carson, Kit, 285.

-

-  Carson City, 157-158.

-

-  Carson County, 157.

-

-  Cass, Lewis, 21, 23.

-

-  Census of Indians, in 1880, 351.

-

-  Central City, Colorado, 145.

-

-  Central Overland, California, and Pike's Peak Express, 186.

-

-  Central Pacific of California Railway, 220, 222;

-    description of construction of, 325-335.

-

-  Cherokee Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Cherokee Neutral Strip, 29.

-

-  Cheyenne, founding of, 301;

-    consequence of, as a railway junction, 334.

-

-  Cheyenne Indians, massacre of, at Sand Creek, 260-261;

-    assigned lands in Indian Territory, 263;

-    Medicine Lodge treaty with, 292-293;

-    issue of arms to, 312-313;

-    begin war against whites in 1868, 313;

-    Custer's defeat of, 317-318.

-

-  Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway, 383.

-

-  Chickasaw Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Chief Joseph, leader of Nez Perce Indians, 363-365;

-    military skill shown by, in retreat of Nez Perces, 366-367.

-

-  Chief Lawyer, 363-364.

-

-  Chinese labor for railway building, 326-327.

-

-  Chippewa Indians, 26-27.

-

-  Chittenden, Hiram Martin, 70-71, 93.

-

-  Chivington, J. M., 229-230, 257;

-    massacre of Indians at Sand Creek by, 260-261.

-

-  Civil War, the West during the, 225 ff.

-

-  Claims associations, 47.

-

-  Clark, Governor, 20, 21, 25.

-

-  Clemens, S. L., quoted, 186-187.

-

-  Cody, William F., 184.

-

-  Colley, Major, Indian agent, 255, 258, 262.

-

-  Colorado, first settlements in, 142-145;

-    movement for separate government for, 146 ff.;

-    Senate bill for erection of territory of, 151, 154;

-    boundaries of, 154;

-    admission of, and first governor, 154-155;

-    during the Civil War, 228-230.

-

-  Colorado-Idaho plan, 151.

-

-  Comanche Indians, 28, 124, 252, 253, 263, 267, 268, 292.

-

-  Comstock lode, the, 157.

-

-  Conestoga wagons, 41, 64.

-

-  Connor, General Patrick E., 274.

-

-  Cooke, Jay, railway promotion and later failure of, 376-377.

-

-  Cooper, Colonel, 57.

-

-  Council Bluffs, importance of, as a railway terminus, 334.

-

-  Council Grove, rendezvous of Santa Fe traders, 59, 63-64.

-

-  _Credit Mobilier_, the, 335.

-

-  Creek Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Crocker, Charles, 220;

-    activity of, as a railway builder, 327.

-

-  Crook, General George, 368-369.

-

-  Crow Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Culbertson, Alexander, 200.

-

-  Cumberland Road, 41, 215, 325.

-

-  Custer, General, 304, 306, 307 ff., 310, 316, 359;

-    commands in attack on Cheyenne, 316-318;

-    romantic character of, and death in Sioux war, 362.

-

-

-  Dakota, erection and growth of territory of, 166-167;

-    Idaho created from a part of, 167.

-

-  Dawes bill of 1887, for division of lands among Indians, 354-355;

-    effect of, on Indian reserves, 356.

-

-  Delaware Indians, settlement of, in the West, 24, 127.

-

-  Demoine County created, 42.

-

-  Denver, settlement of, 142;

-    early caucuses and conventions at, 147-149.

-

-  Denver and Rio Grande Railway, 383-384.

-

-  Desert, tradition of a great American, 11-13;

-    disappearance of tradition, 119;

-    Kansas formed out of a portion of, 137;

-    final conquest by railways of region known as, 384-386.

-

-  Digger Indians, 203-204.

-

-  Dillon, President, 336.

-

-  Dodge, Henry, 35-36, 37-38, 44, 328-329.

-

-  Dole, W. P., Indian Commissioner, 239.

-

-  Donnelly, Ignatius, 237.

-

-  Douglas, Stephen A., 128, 213-214.

-

-  Downing, Major Jacob, 252, 260.

-

-  Dubuque, lead mines at, 34;

-    as a mining camp, 42.

-

-  Dubuque County created, 42.

-

-

-  Education of Indians, 351-352.

-

-  Emigrant Aid Society, 130.

-

-  Emory, Lieut.-Col., survey by, 208.

-

-  Erie Canal, 10, 21, 24, 38, 325.

-

-  Evans, Governor, war against Indians conducted by, 253 ff.;

-    quoted, 269.

-

-  Ewbank Station massacre, 250.

-

-

-  Fairs, agricultural, for Indians, 352-353.

-

-  Falls line, 5.

-

-  Far West, Mormon headquarters at, 90.

-

-  Fetterman, Captain W. J., 274, 277-278, 279;

-    slaughter of, by Indians, 280-281.

-

-  Fiske, Captain James L., 188.

-

-  Fitzpatrick, Indian agent, 122-124.

-

-  Fort Armstrong, purchase at, of Indian lands, 26.

-

-  Fort Benton, 163, 164.

-

-  Fort Bridger, 301.

-

-  Fort C. F. Smith, 275-277.

-

-  Fort Hall, 74.

-

-  Fort Kearney, 78.

-

-  Fort Laramie, 78, 121;

-    treaties with Indians signed at, in 1851, 123-124;

-    conference of Peace Commission with Indians held at (1867), 291.

-

-  Fort Larned, conference with Indians at, 308.

-

-  Fort Leavenworth, 24, 59.

-

-  Fort Philip Kearney, Indian fight at (1866), 274-275;

-    extermination of Fetterman's party at, 280-282.

-

-  Fort Pierre, 267.

-

-  Fort Ridgely, Sioux attack on, 235-236.

-

-  Fort Snelling, 33-34, 48.

-

-  Fort Sully conference, 271-272, 273.

-

-  Fort Whipple, 162.

-

-  Fort Winnebago, 35.

-

-  Fort Wise, treaty with Indians signed at, 249.

-

-  Forty-niners, 109-118.

-

-  Fox Indians, 21, 25, 26, 127.

-

-  Flandrau, Judge Charles E., 236-237.

-

-  Franklin, town of, 63.

-

-  Freighting on the plains, 174 ff.

-

-  Fremont, John C., 58;

-    explorations of, beyond the Rockies, 73-75, 195;

-    senator from California, 117.

-

-  Fur traders, pioneer western, 70-71.

-

-

-  Galbraith, Thomas J., Indian agent, 238.

-

-  Geary, John W., 135.

-

-  Georgetown, Colorado, 145.

-

-  Geronimo, Indian chief, 369.

-

-  Gilpin, William, first governor of Colorado Territory, 155;

-    quoted, 225;

-    responsibility assumed by, during the Civil War, 228-229.

-

-  Gold, discovery of, in California, 108-113;

-    in Pike's Peak region, 141-142;

-    in the Black Hills, 359-361.

-

-  Grattan, Lieutenant, 265.

-

-  Great American desert. _See_ Desert.

-

-  Great Salt Lake. _See_ Salt Lake.

-

-  Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company, 176.

-

-  Greeley, Horace, western adventures of, 145, 179, 182.

-

-  Gregg, Josiah, 61-62.

-

-  Grosventre Indians, treaties of 1851 with, 123-124.

-

-  Guerrilla conflicts during the Civil War, 230-233.

-

-  Gunnison, Captain J. W., 204-205.

-

-

-  Hancock, General W. S., 306-311.

-

-  Hand-cart incident in Mormon emigration, 100-101.

-

-  Harney, General, 266.

-

-  Harte, Bret, verses by, 338.

-

-  Hayt, E. A., Indian Commissioner, 350.

-

-  Hazen, General W. B., 320-321.

-

-  Helena, growth of city of, 169.

-

-  Highland settlement, Colorado, 142.

-

-  Holladay, Ben, 186-190, 284;

-    losses from Indians by, 250.

-

-  Hopkins, Mark, 220.

-

-  Howard, General O. O., 365-366.

-

-  Hungate family, murder of, by Indians, 253.

-

-  Hunkpapa Indians, 264.

-

-  Hunter, General, in charge of Department of Kansas during Civil War,

-      230-231.

-

-  Huntington, Collis P., 220.

-

-

-  Idaho, proposed name for Colorado, 151, 154;

-    establishment of territory of, 166-167.

-

-  Idaho Springs, settlement of, 145.

-

-  Illinois, opening of, to whites, 21.

-

-  Illinois Central Railroad, 210, 216-218.

-

-  Independence, town of, 63;

-    outfitting post of traders, 71;

-    Mormons at, 89-90.

-

-  Indian agents, position of, in regard to Indian affairs, 304-305;

-    question regarding, as opposed to military control of Indians,

-        342-343.

-

-  Indian Bureau, creation of, 31;

-    transference from War Department to the Interior, 123;

-    history of the, 341 ff.

-

-  Indian Commissioners, Board of, created in 1869, 345.

-

-  Indian Intercourse Act, 31.

-

-  Indian Territory, position of Indians in, during the Civil War,

-        240-241;

-    breaking up of, following allotment of lands to individual Indians,

-        357.

-

-  Indians, numbers of, in United States, 14;

-    governmental policy regarding, 16 ff.;

-    Monroe's policy of removal of, to western lands, 18-19;

-    treaties of 1825 with, 19-20;

-    allotment of territory among, on western frontier, 20-30;

-    troubles with, resulting from Oregon, California, and Mormon

-        emigrations, 119-123;

-    fresh treaties with at Upper Platte agency in 1851, 123-124;

-    further cession of lands in Indian Country by, in 1854, 127;

-    treatment of, by Arizona settlers, 162-163;

-    danger to overland mail and express business from, 187-188, 250;

-    Digger Indians, 203-204;

-    the Sioux war in Minnesota, 234 ff.;

-    effect of the Civil War on, 240-242;

-    causes of restlessness of, during Civil War, 234 ff.;

-    antagonism of, aroused by advance westward of whites, 244-252;

-    conditions leading to Sioux war, 264 ff.;

-    war with plains Sioux (1866), 273-283;

-    the discussion as to proper treatment of, 284-288;

-    appointment of Peace Commissioner of 1867 to end Cheyenne and Sioux

-        troubles, 289-290;

-    Medicine Lodge treaties concluded with, 292-293;

-    report and recommendations of Peace Commission, 296-298;

-    interval of peace with, 302-303;

-    continued troubles with, and causes, 304 ff.;

-    war begun by Arapahoes and Cheyenne in 1868, 313;

-    war of 1868, 313-318;

-    President Grant appoints board of civilian Indian commissioners,

-        323, 341 ff.;

-    railway builders' troubles with, 328-329;

-    question of civilian or military control of, 342-344;

-    Board of Commissioners, appointed for (1869), 345;

-    Congress decides to make no more treaties with, 348;

-    mistaken policy of treaties, 348-349;

-    census of, in 1880, 351;

-    agricultural fairs for, 352-353;

-    individual ownership of land by, 354-357;

-    effect of allotment of lands among, on Indian reserves, 356-357;

-    end of Monroe's policy, 357;

-    last struggles of the Sioux, Nez Perces, and Apaches, 361-371.

-

-  Inkpaduta's massacre, 51.

-

-  Inman, Colonel Henry, quoted, 285.

-

-  Iowa, Indian lands out of which formed, 26;

-    territory of, organized, 45.

-

-  Iowa Indians, 127.

-

-

-  Jackson, Helen Hunt, work by, 344.

-

-  Jefferson, early name of state of Colorado, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155.

-

-  Johnston, Albert Sidney, commands army against Mormons, 102;

-    escapes to the South, on opening of the Civil War, 226-227.

-

-  Jones and Russell, firm of, 181.

-

-  Judah, Theodore D., 219, 220, 326.

-

-  Julesburg, station on overland mail route, 182, 331.

-

-

-  Kanesville, Iowa, founding of, 95.

-

-  Kansa Indians, 19, 20, 24.

-

-  Kansas, reasons for settlement of, 124-125;

-    creation of territory of, 129;

-    the slavery struggle in, 129-131;

-    squatters on Indian lands in, 131-132;

-    further contests between abolition and pro-slave parties, 132-136;

-    admission to the union in 1861, 136;

-    boundaries of, 138;

-    during the Civil War, 230-233.

-

-  Kansas-Nebraska bill, 128-129.

-

-  Kansas Pacific Railway, 340.

-

-  Kaskaskia Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Kaw Indians. _See_ Kansa Indians.

-

-  Kearny, Stephen W., 65-66, 78.

-

-  Kendall, Superintendent of Indian department, quoted, 165.

-

-  Keokuk, Indian chief, 25.

-

-  Kickapoo Indians, 24, 127.

-

-  Kiowa Indians, 252, 253, 263, 267, 268, 292, 306.

-

-  Kirtland, Ohio, temporary headquarters of Mormons, 88.

-

-  Labor question in railway construction, 326-327.

-

-  Lake-to-Gulf railway scheme, 217.

-

-  Land, allotment of, to Indians as individuals, 354-357.

-

-  Land grants in aid of railways, 215-218, 222, 325, 329, 336, 375.

-

-  Land titles, pioneers' difficulties over, 46-47.

-

-  Larimer, William, 147, 152.

-

-  Last Chance Gulch, Idaho, mining district, 169.

-

-  Lawrence, Amos A., 130.

-

-  Lawrence, Kansas, settlement of, 130-131;

-    visit of Missouri mob to, 134;

-    Quantrill's raid on, 232.

-

-  Lead mines about Dubuque, 34-35.

-

-  Leavenworth, J. H., Indian agent, 306, 308-309.

-

-  Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company, 181.

-

-  Leavenworth constitution, 135-136.

-

-  Lecompton constitution, 135-136.

-

-  Lewiston, Washington, founding of, 164.

-

-  Linn, Senator, 72-73.

-

-  Liquor question in Oregon, 81-82.

-

-  Little Big Horn, battle of the, 362.

-

-  Little Blue Water, defeat of Brule Sioux at, 266.

-

-  Little Crow, Sioux chief, 235-239.

-

-  Little Raven, Indian chief, 306.

-

-  Long, Major Stephen H., 11.

-

-

-  McClellan, George B., survey for Pacific railway by, 199.

-

-  Madison, Wisconsin, development of, 44, 45.

-

-  Mails, carriage of, to frontier points, 174 ff.

-

-  Manypenny, George W., 126, 266.

-

-  Marsh, O. C., bad treatment of Indians revealed by, 360-361.

-

-  Marshall, James W., 108-109.

-

-  Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, 130.

-

-  Medicine Lodge Creek, conference with Indians at, 292-293.

-

-  Menominee Indians, 27.

-

-  Methodist missionaries to western Indians, 72.

-

-  Mexican War, Army of the West in the, 65-66.

-

-  Miami Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Michigan, territory and state of, 39-40.

-

-  Miles, General Nelson A., as an Indian fighter, 366, 370.

-

-  Milwaukee, founding of, 44.

-

-  Mines, trails leading to, 169-170.

-

-  Miniconjou Indians, 265.

-

-  Mining, lead, 34-35, 42;

-    gold, 108-113, 141-142, 156-157, 359-361;

-    silver, 157 ff.

-

-  Mining camps, description of, 170-173.

-

-  Minnesota, organization of, as a territory, 48-49;

-    Sioux war in, in 1862, 234 ff.

-

-  Missionaries, pioneer, 72;

-    civilization and education of Indians by, 345-346.

-

-  Missoula County, Washington Territory, 168.

-

-  Missouri Indians, 127.

-

-  Modoc Indians, last war of the, 367.

-

-  Modoc Jack, 367.

-

-  Mojave branch of Southern Pacific Railway, 381-382.

-

-  Monroe's policy toward Indians, 18-19;

-    end of, 357.

-

-  Montana, creation of territory of, 169.

-

-  Montana settlement, Colorado, 142.

-

-  Monteith, Indian Agent, 365.

-

-  Mormons, the, 86 ff., 102.

-

-  Mowry, Sylvester, 159, 161.

-

-  Mullan Road, the, 167, 170.

-

-  Murphy, Thomas, Indian superintendent, 312.

-

-

-  Nauvoo, Mormon settlement of, 91-94.

-

-  Navaho Indians, 243, 368.

-

-  Nebraska, movement for a territory of, 125;

-    creation of territory of, 129;

-    boundaries of, 138.

-

-  Neutral Line, the, 21.

-

-  Nevada, beginnings of, 156-158;

-    territory of, organized, 158.

-

-  New Mexico, the early trade to, 53-69;

-    boundaries of, in 1854, 139;

-    during the Civil War, 229-230.

-

-  New Ulm, Minnesota, fight with Sioux Indians at, 236-237.

-

-  Nez Perce Indians, 164, 363-365;

-    precipitation of war with, in 1877, 365-366;

-    defeat and disposal of tribe, 366-367.

-

-  Niles, Hezekiah, 60, 79.

-

-  Noland, Fent, 42-43.

-

-  No Man's Land, 357.

-

-  Northern Pacific Railway, 375, 376, 377, 382-383.

-

-

-  Oglala Sioux, 281, 291, 360.

-

-  Oklahoma, 357, 386.

-

-  Omaha, cause of growth of, 334.

-

-  Omaha Indians, 25.

-

-  Oregon, fur traders and early pioneers, in, 70-72;

-    emigration to, in 1844-1847, 75-76;

-    provisional government organized by settlers in, 79-80;

-    region included under name, 83-84;

-    territory of, organized (1848), 85;

-    population in 1850, 117;

-    boundaries of, in 1854, 139;

-    territory of Washington cut from, 163;

-    railway lines in, 382-383.

-

-  Oregon trail, 70-85;

-    course of the, 78-79;

-    the Mormons on the, 86 ff.

-

-  Osage Indians, 19, 20.

-

-  Oto Indians, 127.

-

-  Ottawa Indians, 27.

-

-  Overland mail, the, 174 ff.

-

-  Owyhee mining district, 165.

-

-

-  Paiute Indians, murder of Captain Gunnison by, 205.

-

-  Palmer, General William J., 383.

-

-  Panic, of 1837, 43-44;

-    of 1857, 51-52;

-    of 1873, 377-379.

-

-  Parke, Lieut. J. G., survey for Pacific railway by, 207-208.

-

-  Peace Commission of 1867, to conclude Cheyenne and Sioux wars,

-      289-290;

-    Medicine Lodge treaties concluded by, 292-293;

-    report of, quoted, 296-298.

-

-  Pennsylvania Portage Railway, 325.

-

-  Peoria Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Piankashaw Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Pike, Zebulon M., 19, 34, 55.

-

-  Pike's Peak, discovery of gold about, 141-142;

-    the rush to, 142-145;

-    reaction from boom, 145-146;

-    origin of Colorado Territory in the Pike's Peak boom, 146-155.

-

-  "Pike's Peak Guide," the, 144.

-

-  Plum Creek massacre, 250.

-

-  Pony express, 158, 182-185.

-

-  Pope, Captain John, survey by, 207.

-

-  Popular sovereignty, doctrine of, 128.

-

-  Poston, Charles D., 159.

-

-  Potawatomi Indians, 26-27.

-

-  Powder River expedition, 273-274.

-

-  Powder River war with Indians, 276-283.

-

-  Powell, Major James, 283.

-

-  Prairie du Chien, treaty made with Indians at, 20-21;

-    second treaty of (1830), 25.

-

-  Prairie schooners, 64.

-

-  Pratt, R. H., education of Indians attempted by, 351.

-

-  Price's Missouri expedition, 233.

-

-

-  Quantrill's raid into Kansas, 231-232.

-

-  Quapaw Indians, 29.

-

-

-  Railways, early craze for building, 40;

-    advance of, in the fifties, 51;

-    first thoughts about a Pacific road, 192 ff.;

-    surveys for Pacific, 192 ff., 197-203;

-    bearing of slavery question on transcontinental, 211-214;

-    Senator Douglas's bill, 213-214;

-    land grants in aid of, 215-218, 222, 325, 329, 336, 375;

-    Indian hostilities caused by advance of the, 283;

-    description of construction of Central Pacific and Union Pacific

-        roads, 325-335;

-    scandals connected with building of roads, 335;

-    description of formal junction of Central Pacific and Union

-        Pacific, 336-337;

-    effect of roads in bringing peace upon the plains, 347;

-    charter acts of the Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas

-        Pacific, and Southern Pacific, 375;

-    slow development of the later Pacific roads, 376;

-    the five new continental routes and their connections, 379-382;

-    Northern Pacific, 382-383;

-    Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, 383;

-    Denver and Rio Grande, 383-384;

-    disappearance of frontier through extension of lines of, and

-        conquest of Great American Desert, 384-386.

-

-  Ration system, pauperization of Indians by, 352.

-

-  Real estate speculation along western railways, 333-334.

-

-  Red Cloud, Indian chief, 274, 281, 283, 291-292, 294, 360.

-

-  Reeder, Andrew H., governor of Kansas Territory, 131-133.

-

-  _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_, 286-287.

-

-  Rhodes, James Ford, cited, 128.

-

-  Riggs, Rev. S. R., 239.

-

-  Riley, Major, 59-60.

-

-  Rio Grande, struggle for the, in Civil War, 228-230.

-

-  Robinson, Dr. Charles, 130;

-    elected governor of Kansas, 133.

-

-  _Rocky Mountain News_, the, 144, 150.

-

-  Roman Nose, Indian chief, 309.

-

-  Ross, John, Cherokee chief, 241.

-

-  Russell, William H., 181, 182, 185.

-

-  Russell, Majors, and Waddell, firm of, 181.

-

-

-  St. Charles settlement, Colorado, 142;

-    merged into Denver, 146.

-

-  St. Paul, Sioux Indian reserve at, 19;

-    early fort near site of, 33-34;

-    first settlement at, 49.

-

-  Saline River raid by Indians, 313, 314.

-

-  Salt Lake, Fremont's visit to, 74;

-    settlement of Mormons at, 96;

-    population of, in 1850, 117-118.

-

-  Sand Creek, massacre of Cheyenne Indians at, 260-261.

-

-  Sans Arcs Indians, 264.

-

-  Santa Fe, trade with, 53-69.

-

-  Santa Fe trail, Indians along the, 20;

-    beginnings of the (1822), 56-58;

-    course of the, 64-65.

-

-  Satanta, Kiowa Indian chief, 306.

-

-  Sauk Indians, 21, 25, 26, 127.

-

-  Saxton, Lieutenant, 199, 201.

-

-  Scandals, railway-building, 335.

-

-  Scar-faced Charley, Modoc Indian leader, 367.

-

-  Schofield, General John M., 232.

-

-  Schools for Indians, 351-352.

-

-  Schurz, Carl, policy of, toward Indians, 350.

-

-  Seminole Indians, 28-29.

-

-  Seneca Indians, 29.

-

-  Shannon, Wilson, governor of Kansas, 133, 134.

-

-  Shawnee Indians, 23-24, 127.

-

-  Sheridan, General, in command against Indians, 310-323;

-    quoted, 384-385.

-

-  Sherman, John, quoted on Indian matters, 285, 289.

-

-  Sherman, W. T., quoted, 143-144, 298;

-    instructions issued to Sheridan by, in Indian war of 1868, 316.

-

-  Shoshoni Indians, 123-124, 295.

-

-  Sibley, General H. H., 228, 237-238, 362.

-

-  Silver mining, 157 ff.

-

-  Sioux Indians, treaty of 1825 affecting the, 21;

-    location of, in 1837, 27;

-    surrender of lands in Minnesota by, 49;

-    treaties of 1851 with, 123-124;

-    war with, in Minnesota, in 1862, 234 ff.;

-    trial and punishment of, for Minnesota outrages, 239-240;

-    bands composing the plains Sioux, 264-265;

-    war with the plains Sioux in 1866, 264-283;

-    lands assigned to, by Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, 294;

-    sources of irritation between white settlers and, in 1870, 359;

-    disturbance of, by discovery of gold in the Black Hills, 359, 361;

-    war with, in 1876, 362-363;

-    crushing of, by United States forces, 363.

-

-  Sitting Bull, 361;

-    career of, as leader of insurgent Sioux, 362-363;

-    settles in Canada, 363;

-    returns to United States, 369;

-    death of, 370.

-

-  Slade, Jack, 182.

-

-  Slavery question, in territories, 128 ff.;

-    bearing of, on transcontinental railway question, 211-214.

-

-  Slough, Colonel John P., 229-230.

-

-  Smith, Joseph, 87, 90-93.

-

-  Smohalla, medicine-man, 365.

-

-  Sod breaking, Iowa, 46.

-

-  Solomon River raid, 313, 314.

-

-  Southern Pacific Railway, 375-376, 379, 381.

-

-  South Pass, the gateway to Oregon, 70.

-

-  Southport, founding of, 44.

-

-  Spirit Lake massacre, 51.

-

-  Stanford, Leland, 220, 336.

-

-  Stansbury, Lieutenant, survey by, 112, 113, 203;

-    quoted, 114-115.

-

-  Steamboats as factors in emigration, 40-41, 49.

-

-  Steele, Robert W., governor of Jefferson Territory (Colorado), 150,

-      152, 153, 155.

-

-  Stevens, Isaac I., 197-203.

-

-  Stuart, Granville and James, 168.

-

-  Subsidies to railways, 222, 325, 329, 375.

-    _See_ Land grants.

-

-  Sully, General Alfred, 268, 319.

-

-  Surveys for Pacific railway, 192 ff.

-

-  Sutter, John A., 104, 107-109.

-

-  Sweetwater mines, 301.

-

-

-  Telegraph system, inauguration of transcontinental, 185;

-    freedom of, from Indian interference, 283.

-

-  Ten Eyck, Captain, 280.

-

-  Texas, railway building in, 375-376, 377 ff.

-

-  Texas Pacific Railway, 375-376, 378, 379.

-

-  Thayer, Eli, 129-130.

-

-  Tippecanoe, battle of, 17.

-

-  Topeka constitution, 133.

-

-  Traders, wrongs done to Indians by, 234-235.

-

-  Treaties with Indians, 19-20, 123-124, 292-293;

-    fallacy of, 348-349.

-    _See_ Indians.

-

-  Tucson, 159, 160.

-

-

-  Union Pacific Railway, the, 211 ff.;

-    reason for name, 221;

-    incorporation of company, 221;

-    route of, 221-222;

-    land grants in aid of, 222 (_see_ Land grants);

-    financing of project, 222-223;

-    progress in construction of, 298-299, 301;

-    description of construction of, 325-335.

-

-  Utah, territory of, organized, 101-102;

-    boundaries of, 139;

-    partition of Nevada from, 157 ff.;

-    derivation of name from Ute Indians, 295.

-

-

-  Victorio, Indian chief, 369.

-

-  Vigilance committees in mining camps, 172.

-

-  Villard, Henry, 145, 182, 186, 382-383.

-

-  Vinita, terminus of Atlantic and Pacific road, 377.

-

-  Virginia City, 158, 168-169.

-

-

-  Wagons, Conestoga, 41, 64;

-    overland mail coaches, 178-179;

-    numbers employed in overland freight business, 190.

-

-  Wakarusa War, 133-134.

-

-  Walker, General Francis A., 285, 349.

-

-  Walker, Robert J., 135.

-

-  Washington, creation of territory of, 163;

-    mining in, 164-166;

-    a part of Idaho formed from, 166-167.

-

-  Washita, battle of the, 317-318.

-

-  Wayne, Anthony, 8, 17.

-

-  Wea Indians, 30, 127.

-

-  Wells, Fargo, and Company, 186, 190.

-

-  Whipple, Lieut. A. W., survey for Pacific railway by, 206-207.

-

-  White, Dr. Elijah, 75-76.

-

-  White Antelope, Indian chief, 256, 260, 313.

-

-  Whitman, Marcus, 72, 77, 80-81.

-

-  Whitney, Asa, 193, 212.

-

-  Willamette provisional government, 79-80.

-

-  Williams, Beverly D., 149.

-

-  Williamson, Lieut. R. S., survey by, 208.

-

-  Wilson, Hill P., Indian trader, 314.

-

-  Winnebago Indians, 26.

-

-  Wisconsin, opening of, to whites, 21;

-    territory of, organized, 44.

-

-  Wounded Knee, Indian fight at, 370.

-

-  Wyeth, Nathaniel J., 72.

-

-  Wynkoop, E. W., 255-259, 306, 310, 312-313.

-

-  Wyoming, territory of, 299, 302.

-

-

-  Yankton Sioux, the, 25, 166, 264.

-

-  Yerba Buena, village of, later San Francisco, 105.

-

-  Young, Brigham, 93-94, 96, 97 ff., 206;

-    made governor of Utah Territory, 101-102.

-

-

-

-

-      *      *      *      *      *      *

-

-

-

-

-Transcribers' note:

-

-Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a

-predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were

-not changed.

-

-Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unpaired

-quotation marks were retained. For example, the paragraph beginning

-on page 311 with "There is little doubt" and ending on page 313 with

-"sincerity of their protestations" contains an unpaired quotation

-mark.

-

-Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

-

-Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

-

-Text uses both "reconnaissance" and "reconnoissance"; both retained.

-

-Text mostly uses "Santa Fe", so three occurrences of "Sante Fe" have

-been changed.

-

-

-

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