Title: The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
Author: Ogg, Frederic Austin, 1878-1951
Language: English
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University, and Alev Akman



THE OLD NORTHWEST,

A CHRONICLE OF THE OHIO VALLEY AND BEYOND


By Frederic Austin Ogg

New Haven: Yale University Press

Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.

London: Humphrey Milford

Oxford University Press

1919


CONTENTS

     I.    PONTIAC'S CONSPIRACY
     II.  "A LAIR OF WILD BEASTS"
     III.  THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
     IV.   THE CONQUEST COMPLETED
     V.    WAYNE, THE SCOURGE OF THE INDIANS
     VI.   THE GREAT MIGRATION
     VII.  PIONEER DAYS AND WAYS
     VIII. TECUMSEH
     IX.   THE WAR OF 1812 AND THE NEW WEST
     X.    SECTIONAL CROSS CURRENTS
     XI.   THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY

     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



THE OLD NORTHWEST



Chapter I. Pontiac's Conspiracy

The fall of Montreal, on September 8, 1760, while the plains about the
city were still dotted with the white tents of the victorious English
and colonial troops, was indeed an event of the deepest consequence to
America and to the world. By the articles of capitulation which were
signed by the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, Canada and
all its dependencies westward to the Mississippi passed to the British
Crown. Virtually ended was the long struggle for the dominion of the
New World. Open now for English occupation and settlement was that
vast country lying south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio and the
Mississippi--which we know as the Old Northwest--today the seat of five
great commonwealths of the United States.

With an ingenuity born of necessity, the French pathfinders and
colonizers of the Old Northwest had chosen for their settlements sites
which would serve at once the purposes of the priest, the trader, and
the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these sites are as important
today as when they were first selected. Four regions, chiefly, were
still occupied by the French at the time of the capitulation of
Montreal. The most important, as well as the most distant, of these
regions was on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite and below
the present city of St. Louis, where a cluster of missions, forts, and
trading-posts held the center of the tenuous line extending from Canada
to Louisiana. A second was the Illinois country, centering about the
citadel of St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A third was
the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of the eighteenth
century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony commanding both the
Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was the western end of Lake
Erie, where Detroit, founded by the doughty Cadillac in 1701, had
assumed such strength that for fifty years it had discouraged the
ambitions of the English to make the Northwest theirs.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760, forthwith
dispatched to the western country a military force to take possession
of the posts still remaining in the hands of the French. The mission
was entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire Scotch-Irishman, Major Robert
Rogers, who as leader of a band of intrepid "rangers" had made himself
the hero of the northern frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for
the undertaking, and on the 13th of September the party, in fifteen
whaleboats, started up the St. Lawrence for Detroit.

At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present city
of Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian chiefs and
warriors who, in the name of their great ruler Pontiac, demanded to
know the object of their journeying. Parleys followed, in which Pontiac
himself took part, and it was explained that the French had surrendered
Canada to the English and that the English merely proposed to assume
control of the western posts, with a view to friendly relations between
the red men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would flow
with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming in
endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the savages, and,
after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the chieftain and his
followers withdrew.

Late in November, Rogers and his men in their whaleboats appeared before
the little palisaded town of Detroit. They found the French commander,
Beletre, in surly humor and seeking to stir up the neighboring Wyandots
and Potawatomi against them. But the attempt failed, and there was
nothing for Beletre to do but yield. The French soldiery marched out of
the fort, laid down their arms, and were sent off as prisoners down the
river. The fleur-de-lis, which for more than half a century had floated
over the village, was hauled down, and, to the accompaniment of cheers,
the British ensign was run up. The red men looked on with amazement
at this display of English authority and marveled how the conquerors
forbore to slay their vanquished enemies on the spot.

Detroit in 1760 was a picturesque, lively, and rapidly growing frontier
town. The central portions of the settlement, lying within the bounds of
the present city, contained ninety or a hundred small houses, chiefly
of wood and roofed with bark or thatch. A well-built range of
barracks afforded quarters for the soldiery, and there were two public
buildings--a council house and a little church. The whole was surrounded
by a square palisade twenty-five feet high, with a wooden bastion at
each corner and a blockhouse over each gateway. A broad passageway, the
chemin du ronde, lay next to the palisade, and on little narrow streets
at the center the houses were grouped closely together.

Above and below the fort the banks of the river were lined on both
sides, for a distance of eight or nine miles, with little rectangular
farms, so laid out as to give each a water-landing. On each farm was
a cottage, with a garden and orchard, surrounded by a fence of rounded
pickets; and the countryside rang with the shouts and laughter of a
prosperous and happy peasantry. Within the limits of the settlement were
villages of Ottawas, Potawatomi, and Wyandots, with whose inhabitants
the French lived on free and easy terms. "The joyous sparkling of the
bright blue water," writes Parkman; "the green luxuriance of the woods;
the white dwellings, looking out from the foliage; and in the distance
the Indian wigwams curling their smoke against the sky--all were mingled
in one broad scene of wild and rural beauty."

At the coming of the English the French residents were given an
opportunity to withdraw. Few, however, did so, and from the gossipy
correspondence of the pleasure-loving Colonel Campbell, who for some
months was left in command of the fort, it appears that the life of
the place lost none of its gayety by the change of masters. Sunday card
parties at the quarters of the commandant were festive affairs; and at a
ball held in celebration of the King's birthday the ladies presented an
appearance so splendid as to call forth from the impressionable officer
the most extravagant praises. A visit in the summer of 1761 from Sir
William Johnson, general supervisor of Indian affairs on the frontier,
became the greatest social event in the history of the settlement, if
not of the entire West. Colonel Campbell gave a ball at which the guests
danced nine hours. Sir William reciprocated with one at which they
danced eleven hours. A round of dinners and calls gave opportunity for
much display of frontier magnificence, as well as for the consumption of
astonishing quantities of wines and cordials. Hundreds of Indians were
interested spectators, and the gifts with which they were generously
showered were received with evidences of deep satisfaction.

No amount of fiddling and dancing, however, could quite drown
apprehension concerning the safety of the post and the security of the
English hold upon the great region over which this fort and its distant
neighbors stood sentinel. Thousands of square miles of territory were
committed to the keeping of not more than six hundred soldiers. From the
French there was little danger. But from the Indians anything might be
expected. Apart from the Iroquois, the red men had been bound to the
French by many ties of friendship and common interest, and in the late
war they had scalped and slaughtered and burned unhesitatingly at
the French command. Hardly, indeed, had the transfer of territorial
sovereignty been made before murmurs of discontent began to be heard.

Notwithstanding outward expressions of assent to the new order of
things, a deep-rooted dislike on the part of the Indians for the English
grew after 1760 with great rapidity. They sorely missed the gifts and
supplies lavishly provided by the French, and they warmly resented the
rapacity and arrogance of the British traders. The open contempt of the
soldiery at the posts galled the Indians, and the confiscation of their
lands drove them to desperation. In their hearts hope never died that
the French would regain their lost dominion; and again and again rumors
were set afloat that this was about to happen. The belief in such
a reconquest was adroitly encouraged, too, by the surviving French
settlers and traders. In 1761 the tension among the Indians was
increased by the appearance of a "prophet" among the Delawares, calling
on all his race to purge itself of foreign influences and to unite to
drive the white man from the land.

Protests against English encroachments were frequent and, though
respectful, none the less emphatic. At a conference in Philadelphia in
1761, an Iroquois sachem declared, "We, your Brethren, of the several
Nations, are penned up like Hoggs. There are Forts all around us, and
therefore we are apprehensive that Death is coming upon us." "We are now
left in Peace," ran a petition of some Christian Oneidas addressed to
Sir William Johnson, "and have nothing to do but to plant our Corn, Hunt
the wild Beasts, smoke our Pipes, and mind Religion. But as these Forts,
which are built among us, disturb our Peace, and are a great hurt to
Religion, because some of our Warriors are foolish, and some of our
Brother Soldiers don't fear God, we therefore desire that these Forts
may be pull'd down, and kick'd out of the way."

The leadership of the great revolt that was impending fell naturally
upon Pontiac, who, since the coming of the English, had established
himself with his squaws and children on a wooded island in Lake St.
Clair, barely out of view of the fortifications of Detroit. In all
Indian annals no name is more illustrious than Pontiac's; no figure more
forcefully displays the good and bad qualities of his race. Principal
chief of the Ottawa tribe, he was also by 1763 the head of a powerful
confederation of Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomi, and a leader known
and respected among Algonquin peoples from the sources of the Ohio
to the Mississippi. While capable of acts of magnanimity, he had an
ambition of Napoleonic proportions, and to attain his ends he was
prepared to use any means. More clearly than most of his forest
contemporaries, he perceived that in the life of the Indian people a
crisis had come. He saw that, unless the tide of English invasion was
rolled back at once, all would be lost. The colonial farmers would
push in after the soldiers; the forests would be cut away; the
hunting-grounds would be destroyed; the native population would be
driven away or enslaved. In the silence of his wigwam he thought out a
plan of action, and by the closing weeks of 1762 he was ready. Never was
plot more shrewdly devised and more artfully carried out.

During the winter of 1762-63 his messengers passed stealthily from
nation to nation throughout the whole western country, bearing the
pictured wampum belts and the reddened tomahawks which symbolized war;
and in April, 1763, the Lake tribes were summoned to a great council
on the banks of the Ecorces, below Detroit, where Pontiac in person
proclaimed the will of the Master of Life as revealed to the Delaware
prophet, and then announced the details of his plan. Everywhere the
appeal met with approval; and not only the scores of Algonquin peoples,
but also the Seneca branch of the Iroquois confederacy and a number of
tribes on the lower Mississippi, pledged themselves with all solemnity
to fulfill their prophet's injunction "to drive the dogs which wear
red clothing into the sea." While keen-eyed warriors sought to keep up
appearances by lounging about the forts and begging in their customary
manner for tobacco, whiskey, and gunpowder, every wigwam and forest
hamlet from Niagara to the Mississippi was astir. Dusky maidens chanted
the tribal war-songs, and in the blaze of a hundred camp-fires chiefs
and warriors performed the savage pantomime of battle.

A simultaneous attack, timed by a change of the moon, was to be made on
the English forts and settlements throughout all the western country.
Every tribe was to fall upon the settlement nearest at hand, and
afterwards all were to combine--with French aid, it was confidently
believed--in an assault on the seats of English power farther east.
The honor of destroying the most important of the English strongholds,
Detroit, was reserved for Pontiac himself.

The date fixed for the rising was the 7th of May. Six days in advance
Pontiac with forty of his warriors appeared at the fort, protested
undying friendship for the Great Father across the water, and insisted
on performing the calumet dance before the new commandant, Major
Gladwyn. This aroused no suspicion. But four days later a French settler
reported that his wife, when visiting the Ottawa village to buy venison,
had observed the men busily filing off the ends of their gunbarrels; and
the blacksmith at the post recalled the fact that the Indians had lately
sought to borrow files and saws without being able to give a plausible
explanation of the use they intended to make of the implements.

The English traveler Jonathan Carver, who visited the post five years
afterwards, relates that an Ottawa girl with whom Major Gladwyn had
formed an attachment betrayed the plot. Though this story is of doubtful
authenticity, there is no doubt that, in one way or another, the
commandant was amply warned that treachery was in the air. The sounds
of revelry from the Indian camps, the furtive glances of the redskins
lounging about the settlement, the very tension of the atmosphere, would
have been enough to put an experienced Indian fighter on his guard.

Accordingly when, on the fated morning, Pontiac and sixty redskins,
carrying under long blankets their shortened muskets, appeared before
the fort and asked admission, they were taken aback to find the whole
garrison under arms. On their way from the gate to the council house
they were obliged to march literally between rows of glittering steel.
Well might even Pontiac falter. With uneasy glances, the party crowded
into the council room, where Gladwyn and his officers sat waiting.
"Why," asked the chieftain stolidly, "do I see so many of my father's
young men standing in the street with their guns?" "To keep them in
training," was the laconic reply.

The scene that was planned was then carried out, except in one vital
particular. When, in the course of his speech professing strong
attachment to the English, the chieftain came to the point where he was
to give the signal for slaughter by holding forth the wampum belt of
peace inverted, he presented the emblem--to the accompaniment of a
significant clash of arms and roll of drums from the mustered garrison
outside--in the normal manner; and after a solemn warning from the
commandant that vengeance would follow any act of aggression, the
council broke up. To the forest leader's equivocal announcement that he
would bring all of his wives and children in a few days to shake hands
with their English fathers, Gladwyn deigned no reply.

Balked in his plans, the chief retired, but only to meditate fresh
treachery; and when, a few days later, with a multitude of followers,
he sought admission to the fort to assure "his fathers" that "evil birds
had sung lies in their ears," and was refused, he called all his forces
to arms, threw off his disguises, and began hostilities. For six months
the settlement was besieged with a persistence rarely displayed
in Indian warfare. At first the French inhabitants encouraged the
besiegers, but, after it became known that a final peace between England
and France had been concluded, they withheld further aid. Throughout
the whole period, the English obtained supplies with no great difficulty
from the neighboring farms. There was little actual fighting, and the
loss of life was insignificant.

By order of General Amherst, the French commander still in charge of
Fort Chartres sent a messenger to inform the redskins definitely that
no assistance from France would be forthcoming. "Forget then, my dear
children,"--so ran the admonition--"all evil talks. Leave off from
spilling the blood of your brethren, the English. Our hearts are now but
one; you cannot, at present, strike the one without having the other for
an enemy also." The effect was, as intended, to break the spirit of the
besiegers; and in October Pontiac humbly sued for peace.

Meanwhile a reign of terror spread over the entire frontier. Settlements
from Forts Le Boeuf and Venango, south of Lake Eric, to Green Bay, west
of Lake Michigan, were attacked, and ruses similar to that attempted at
Detroit were generally successful. A few Indians in friendly guise would
approach a fort. After these were admitted, others would appear, as if
quite by chance. Finally, when numbers were sufficient, the conspirators
would draw their concealed weapons, strike down the garrison, and begin
a general massacre of the helpless populace. Scores of pioneer families,
scattered through the wilderness, were murdered and scalped; traders
were waylaid in the forest solitudes; border towns were burned and
plantations were devastated. In the Ohio Valley everything was lost
except Fort Pitt, formerly Fort Duquesne; in the Northwest, everything
was taken except Detroit.

Fort Pitt was repeatedly endangered, and the most important engagement
of the war was fought in its defense. The relief of the post was
entrusted in midsummer to a force of five hundred regulars lately
transferred from the West Indies to Pennsylvania and placed under the
command of Colonel Henry Bouquet. The expedition advanced with all
possible caution, but early in August, 1763, when it was yet twenty-five
miles from its destination, it was set upon by a formidable Indian band
at Bushy Run and threatened with a fate not un-like that suffered by
Braddock's little army in the same region nine years earlier. Finding
the woods full of redskins and all retreat cut off, the troops, drawn up
in a circle around their horses and supplies, fired with such effect
as they could upon the shadowy forms in the forest. No water was
obtainable, and in a few hours thirst began to make the soldiery
unmanageable. Realizing that the situation was desperate, Bouquet
resorted to a ruse by ordering his men to fall back as if in retreat.
The trick succeeded, and with yells of victory the Indians rushed from
cover to seize the coveted provisions--only to be met by a deadly
fire and put to utter rout. The news of the battle of Bushy Run spread
rapidly through the frontier regions and proved very effective in
discouraging further hostilities.

It was Bouquet's intention to press forward at once from Fort Pitt
into the disturbed Ohio country. His losses, however, compelled the
postponement of this part of the undertaking until the following year.
Before he started off again he built at Fort Pitt a blockhouse which
still stands, and which has been preserved for posterity by becoming,
in 1894, the property of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Daughters of
the American Revolution. In October, 1764, he set out for the Muskingum
valley with a force of fifteen hundred regulars, Pennsylvania and
Virginia volunteers, and friendly Indians. By this time the great
conspiracy was in collapse, and it was a matter of no great difficulty
for Bouquet to enter into friendly relations with the successive tribes,
to obtain treaties with them, and to procure the release of such English
captives as were still in their hands. By the close of November, 1764,
the work was complete, and Bouquet was back at Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania
and Virginia honored him with votes of thanks; the King formally
expressed his gratitude and tendered him the military governorship of
the newly acquired territory of Florida.

The general pacification of the Northwest was accomplished by treaties
with the natives in great councils held at Niagara, Presqu'isle (Erie),
and Detroit. Pontiac had fled to the Maumee country to the west of Lake
Erie, whence he still hurled his ineffectual threats at the "dogs in
red." His power, however, was broken. The most he could do was to gather
four hundred warriors on the Maumee and Illinois and present himself
at Fort Chartres with a demand for weapons and ammunition with which to
keep up the war. The French commander, who was now daily awaiting orders
to turn the fortress over to the English, refused; and a deputation
dispatched to New Orleans in quest of the desired equipment received
no reply save that New Orleans itself, with all the country west of the
river, had been ceded to Spain. The futility of further resistance on
the part of Pontiac was apparent. In 1765 the disappointed chieftain
gave pledges of friendship; and in the following year he and other
leaders made a formal submission to Sir William Johnson at Oswego, and
Pontiac renounced forever the bold design to make himself at a stroke
lord of the West and deliverer of his country from English domination.

For three years the movements of this disappointed Indian leader are
uncertain. Most of the time, apparently, he dwelt in the Maumee country,
leading the existence of an ordinary warrior. Then, in the spring of
1769, he appeared at the settlements on the middle Mississippi. At
the newly founded French town of St. Louis, on the Spanish side of the
river, he visited an old friend, the commandant Saint Ange de Bellerive.
Thence he crossed to Cahokia, where Indian and creole alike welcomed him
and made him the central figure in a series of boisterous festivities.

An English trader in the village, observing jealously the honors that
were paid the visitor, resolved that an old score should forthwith be
evened up. A Kaskaskian redskin was bribed, with a barrel of liquor and
with promises of further reward, to put the fallen leader out of
the way; and the bargain was hardly sealed before the deed was done.
Stealing upon his victim as he walked in the neighboring forest, the
assassin buried a tomahawk in his brain, and "thus basely," in the
words of Parkman, "perished the champion of a ruined race." Claimed by
Saint-Ange, the body was borne across the river and buried with military
honors near the new Fort St. Louis. The site of Pontiac's grave was soon
forgotten, and today the people of a great city trample over and about
it without heed.



Chapter II. "A Lair Of Wild Beasts"

Benjamin Franklin, who was in London in 1760 as agent of the
Pennsylvania Assembly, gave the British ministers some wholesome advice
on the terms of the peace that should be made with France. The St.
Lawrence and the Great Lakes regions, he said, must be retained by
England at all costs. Moreover, the Mississippi Valley must be taken,
in order to provide for the growing populations of the seaboard colonies
suitable lands in the interior, and so keep them engaged in agriculture.
Otherwise these populations would turn to manufacturing, and the
industries of the mother country would suffer.

The treaty of peace, three years later, brought the settlement which
Franklin suggested. The vast American back country, with its inviting
rivers and lakes, its shaded hills, and its sunny prairies, became
English territory. The English people had, however, only the vaguest
notion of the extent, appearance, and resources of their new possession.
Even the officials who drew the treaty were as ignorant of the country
as of middle Africa. Prior to the outbreak of the war no widely known
English writer had tried to describe it; and the absorbing French books
of Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small circle.
The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated interest in the
new country. The place-names of the upper Ohio became household words,
and enterprising publishers put out not only translations of the French
writers but compilations by Englishmen designed, in true journalistic
fashion, to meet the demands of the hour for information.

These publications displayed amazing misconceptions of the lands
described. They neither estimated aright the number and strength of the
French settlements nor dispelled the idea that the western country was
of little value. Even the most brilliant Englishman of the day, Dr.
Samuel Johnson, an ardent defender of the treaty of 1763, wrote that the
large tracts of America added by the war to the British dominions were
"only the barren parts of the continent, the refuse of the earlier
adventurers, which the French, who came last, had taken only as
better than nothing." As late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long
Under-Secretary for the Colonies, declared that Americans could not
settle the western territory "for ages," and that the region must be
given up to barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as
unstable as the Scythians and Tartars. But the shortsightedness of these
distant critics can be forgiven when one recalls that Franklin himself,
while conjuring up a splendid vision of the western valleys teeming with
a thriving population, supposed that the dream would not be realized for
"some centuries." None of these observers dreamt that the territories
transferred in 1763 would have within seventy-five years a population
almost equal to that of Great Britain.

The ink with which the Treaty of Paris was signed was hardly dry before
the King and his ministers were confronted with the task of providing
government for the new possessions and of solving problems of land
tenure and trade. Still more imperative were measures to conciliate
the Indians; for already Pontiac's rebellion had been in progress four
months, and the entire back country was aflame. It must be confessed
that a continental wilderness swarming with murderous savages was an
inheritance whose aspect was by no means altogether pleasing to the
English mind.

The easiest solution of the difficulty was to let things take their
course. Let seaboard populations spread at will over the new lands; let
them carry on trade in their own way, and make whatever arrangements
with the native tribes they desire. Colonies such as Virginia and New
York, which had extensive western claims, would have been glad to see
this plan adopted. Strong objections, however, were raised. Colonies
which had no western claims feared the effects of the advantages which
their more fortunate neighbors would enjoy. Men who had invested heavily
in lands lying west of the mountains felt that their returns would be
diminished and delayed if the back country were thrown open to settlers.
Some people thought that the Indians had a moral right to protection
against wholesale white invasion of their hunting-grounds, and many
considered it expedient, at all events, to offer such protection.

After all, however, it was the King and his ministers who had it in
their power to settle the question; and from their point of view it was
desirable to keep the western territories as much as possible apart
from the older colonies, and to regulate, with farsighted policy, their
settlement and trade. Eventually, it was believed, the territories would
be cut into new colonies; and experience with the seaboard dependencies
was already such as to suggest the desirability of having the future
settlements more completely under government control from the beginning.

After due consideration, King George and his ministers made known their
policy on October 7, 1763, in a comprehensive proclamation. The first
subject dealt with was government. Four new provinces--"Quebec,
East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada" *--were set up in the ceded
territories, and their populations were guaranteed all the rights
and privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants of the older colonies. The
Mississippi Valley, however, was included in no one of these provinces;
and, curiously, there was no provision whatever for the government of
the French settlements lying within it. The number and size of these
settlements were underestimated, and apparently it was supposed that all
the habitants and soldiers would avail themselves of their privilege of
withdrawing from the ceded territories.


 * The Proclamation of 1763 drew the boundaries of "four distinct
and separate governments." Grenada was to include the island of that
name, together with the Grenadines. Dominico, St. Vincent, and Tobago.
The Floridas lay south of the bounds of Georgia and east of the
Mississippi River. The Apalachicola River was to be the dividing line
between East and West Florida. Quebec included the modern province of
that name and that part of Ontario lying north of a line drawn from Lake
Nipissing to the point where the forty-fifth parallel intersects the St.
Lawrence River.


The disposition made of the great rectangular area bounded by the
Alleghanies, the Mississippi, the Lakes, and the Gulf, was fairly
startling. With fine disregard of the chartered claims of the seaboard
colonies and of the rights of pioneers already settled on frontier
farms, the whole was erected into an Indian reserve. No "loving subject"
might purchase land or settle in the territory without special license;
present residents should "forthwith remove themselves"; trade should be
carried on only by permit and under close surveillance; officers were
to be stationed among the tribes to preserve friendly relations and to
apprehend fugitives from colonial justice.

The objects of this drastic scheme were never clearly stated. Franklin
believed that the main purpose was to conciliate the Indians. Washington
agreed with him. Later historians have generally thought that what the
English Government had chiefly in mind was to limit the bounds of the
seaboard colonies, with a view to preserving imperial control over
colonial affairs. Very likely both of these motives weighed heavily in
the decision. At all events, Lord Hillsborough, who presided over the
meetings of the Lords of Trade when the proclamation was discussed,
subsequently wrote that the "capital object" of the Government's policy
was to confine the colonies so that they should be kept in easy reach
of British trade and of the authority necessary to keep them in due
subordination to the mother country, and he added that the extension of
the fur trade depended "entirely upon the Indians being undisturbed in
the possession of their hunting-grounds." *


 * But as Lord Hillsborough had just taken office and adopted
bodily a policy formulated by his predecessor, he is none too good an
authority. See Alvord's "Mississippi Valley in British Politics," vol.
I, pp. 203-4.


It does not follow that the King and his advisers intended that the
territory should be kept forever intact as a forest preserve. They seem
to have contemplated that, from time to time, cessions would be secured
from the Indians and tracts would be opened for settlement. But every
move was to be made in accordance with plans formulated or authorized in
England. The restrictive policy won by no means universal assent in
the mother country. The Whigs generally opposed it, and Burke thundered
against it as "an attempt to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth
which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men."

In America there was a disposition to take the proclamation lightly as
being a mere sop to the Indians. But wherever it was regarded seriously,
it was hotly resented. After passing through an arduous war, the
colonists were ready to enter upon a new expansive era. The western
territories were theirs by charter, by settlement, and by conquest.
The Indian population, they believed, belonged to the unprogressive and
unproductive peoples of the earth. Every acre of fertile soil in America
called to the thrifty agriculturist; every westward flowing river
invited to trade and settlement as well, therefore, seek to keep
back the ocean with a broom as to stop by mere decree the tide of
homeseekers. Some of the colonies made honest attempts to compel the
removal of settlers from the reserved lands beyond their borders, and
Pennsylvania went so far as to decree the death penalty for all who
should refuse to remove. But the law was never enforced.


The news of the cession of the eastern bank of the Mississippi to the
English brought consternation to the two or three thousand French
people living in the settlements of the Kaskaskia, Illinois, and Wabash
regions. The transfer of the western bank to Spain did not become known
promptly, and for months the habitants supposed that by taking up their
abode on the opposite side of the stream they would continue under their
own flag. Many of them crossed the Mississippi to find new abodes even
after it was announced that the land had passed to Spain.

From first to last these settlements on the Mississippi, the Wabash,
and the Illinois had remained, in French hands, mere sprawling
villages. The largest of them, Kaskaskia, may have contained in its
most flourishing days two thousand people, many of them voyageurs,
coureurs-de-bois, converted Indians, and transients of one sort or
another. In 1765 there were not above seventy permanent families. Few
of the towns, indeed, attained a population of more than two or three
hundred. All French colonial enterprise had been based on the assumption
that settlers would be few. The trader preferred it so, because
settlements meant restrictions upon his traffic. The Jesuit was of the
same mind, because such settlements broke up his mission field. The
Government at Paris forbade the emigration of the one class of people
that cared to emigrate, the Huguenots.

Though some of the settlements had picturesque sites and others drew
distinction from their fortifications, in general they presented a drab
appearance. There were usually two or three long, narrow streets, with
no paving, and often knee-deep with mud. The houses were built on either
side, at intervals sufficient to give space for yards and garden plots,
each homestead being enclosed with a crude picket fence. Wood and thatch
were the commonest building materials, although stone was sometimes
used; and the houses were regularly one story high, with large
vine-covered verandas. Land was abundant and cheap. Every enterprising
settler had a plot for himself, and as a rule one large field, or more,
was held for use in common. In these, the operations of ploughing,
sowing, and reaping were carefully regulated by public ordinance.
Occasionally a village drew some distinction from the proximity of a
large, well-managed estate, such as that of the opulent M. Beauvais
of Kaskaskia, in whose mill and brewery more than eighty slaves were
employed.

Agriculture was carried on somewhat extensively, and it is recorded
that, in the year 1746 alone, when there was a shortage of foodstuffs at
New Orleans, the Illinois settlers were able to send thither "upward of
eight hundred thousand weight of flour." Hunting and trading, however,
continued to be the principal occupations; and the sugar, indigo,
cotton, and other luxuries which the people were able to import directly
from Europe were paid for mainly with consignments of furs, hides,
tallow, and beeswax. Money was practically unknown in the settlements,
so that domestic trade likewise took the form of simple barter. Periods
of industry and prosperity alternated with periods of depression, and
the easy-going habitants--"farmers, hunters, traders by turn, with
a strong admixture of unprogressive Indian blood"--tended always to
relapse into utter indolence.

Some of these French towns, however, were seats of culture; and none was
wholly barren of diversions. Kaskaskia had a Jesuit college and likewise
a monastery. Cahokia had a school for Indian youth. Fort Chartres, we
are gravely told, was "the center of life and fashion in the West." If
everyday existence was humdrum, the villagers had always the opportunity
for voluble conversation "each from his own balcony"; and there
were scores of Church festivals, not to mention birthdays, visits of
travelers or neighbors, and homecomings of hunters and traders, which
invited to festivity. Balls and dances and other merrymakings at which
the whole village assembled supplied the wants of a people proverbially
fond of amusement. Indeed, French civilization in the Mississippi and
Illinois country was by no means without charm.

Kaskaskia, in the wonderfully fertile "American Bottom," maintained its
existence, in spite of the cession to the English, as did also Vincennes
farther east on the Wabash. Fort Chartres, a stout fortification whose
walls were more than two feet thick, remained the seat of the principal
garrison, and some traces of French occupancy survived on the Illinois.
Cahokia was deserted, save for the splendid mission-farm of St. Sulpice,
with its thirty slaves, its herd of cattle, and its mill, which the
fathers before returning to France sold to a thrifty Frenchman not
averse to becoming an English subject. A few posts were abandoned
altogether. Some of the departing inhabitants went back to France; some
followed the French commandant, Neyon de Villiers, down the river to
New Orleans; many gathered up their possessions, even to the frames
and clapboards of their houses, and took refuge in the new towns which
sprang up on the western bank. One of these new settlements was Ste.
Genevieve, strategically located near the lead mines from which the
entire region had long drawn its supplies of shot. Another, which was
destined to greater importance, was St. Louis, established as a trading
post on the richly wooded bluffs opposite Cahokia by Pierre Laclede in
1764.

Associated with Laclede in his fur-trading operations at the new post
was a lithe young man named Pierre Chouteau. In 1846--eighty-two years
afterwards--Francis Parkman sat on the spacious veranda of Pierre
Chouteau's country house near the city of St. Louis and heard from the
lips of the venerable merchant stories of Pontiac, Saint-Ange, Croghan,
and all the western worthies, red and white, of two full generations.
"Not all the magic of a dream," the historian remarks, "nor the
enchantments of an Arabian tale, could outmatch the waking realities
which were to rise upon the vision of Pierre Chouteau. Where, in his
youth, he had climbed the woody bluff, and looked abroad on prairies
dotted with bison, he saw, with the dim eye of his old age, the land
darkened for many a furlong with the clustered roofs of the western
metropolis. For the silence of the wilderness, he heard the clang and
turmoil of human labor, the din of congregated thousands; and where the
great river rolls down through the forest, in lonely grandeur, he saw
the waters lashed into foam beneath the prows of panting steamboats,
flocking to the broad levee."

Pontiac's war long kept the English from taking actual possession of
the western country. Meanwhile Saint-Ange, commanding the remnant of the
French garrison at Fort Chartres, resisted as best he could the demands
of the redskins for assistance against their common enemy and hoped
daily for the appearance of an English force to relieve him his
difficult position. In the spring of 1764 an English officer, Major
Loftus, with a body of troops lately employed in planting English
authority in "East Florida" and "West Florida," set out from New Orleans
to take possession of the up-river settlements. A few miles above the
mouth of the Red, however, the boats were fired on, without warning,
from both banks of the stream, and many of the men were killed or
wounded. The expedition retreated down the river with all possible
speed. This display of faintheartedness won the keen ridicule of the
French, and the Governor, D'Abadie, with mock magnanimity, offered
an escort of French soldiery to protect the party on its way back to
Pensacola! Within a few months a second attempt was projected, but news
of the bad temper of the Indians caused the leader, Captain Pittman, to
turn back after reaching New Orleans.

Baffled in this direction, the new commander-in-chief, General Gage,
resolved to accomplish the desired end by an expedition from Fort Pitt.
Pontiac, however, was known to be still plotting vengeance at that time,
and it seemed advisable to break the way for the proposed expedition
by a special mission to placate the Indians. For this delicate task
Sir William Johnson selected a trader of long experience and of good
standing among the western tribes, George Croghan. Notwithstanding many
mishaps, the plan was carried out. With two boats and a considerable
party of soldiers and friendly Delawares, Croghan left Fort Pitt in May,
1765. As he descended the Ohio he carefully plotted the river's
windings and wrote out an interesting description of the fauna and flora
observed. All went well until he reached the mouth of the Wabash. There
the party was set upon by a band of Kickapoos, who killed half a dozen
of his men. Fluent apologies were at once offered. They had made the
attack, they explained, only because the French had reported that the
Indians with Croghan's band were Cherokees, the Kickapoos' most deadly
enemies. Now that their mistake was apparent, the artful emissaries
declared, their regret was indeed deep.

All of this was sheer pretense, and Croghan and his surviving followers
were kept under close guard and were carried along with the Kickapoo
band up the Wabash to Vincennes, where the trader encountered old Indian
friends who soundly rebuked the captors for their inhospitality. Croghan
knew the Indian nature too well to attempt to thwart the plans of his
"hosts." Accordingly he went out with the band to the upper Wabash
post Ouiatanon, where he received deputation after deputation from the
neighboring tribes, smoked pipes of peace, made speeches, and shook
hands with greasy warriors by the score. Here came a messenger from
Saint-Ange asking him to proceed to Fort Chartres. Here, also, Pontiac
met him, and, after being assured that the English had no intention of
enslaving the natives, declared that he would no longer stand in the
conquerors' path. Though in unexpected manner, Croghan's mission was
accomplished, and, with many evidences of favor from the natives, he
went on to Detroit and thence to Niagara, where he reported to Johnson
that the situation in the West was ripe for the establishment of English
sovereignty.

There was no reason for further delay, and Captain Thomas Sterling
was dispatched with a hundred Highland veterans to take ever the
settlements. Descending the Ohio from Fort Pitt, the expedition reached
Fort Chartres just as the frosty air began to presage the coming of
winter. On October 10, 1765,--more than two and a half years after
the signing of the Treaty of Paris,--Saint-Ange made the long-desired
transfer of authority. General Gage's high-sounding proclamation was
read, the British flag was run up, and Sterling's red-coated soldiery
established itself in the citadel. In due time small detachments were
sent to Vincennes and other posts; and the triumph of the British power
over Frenchman and Indian was complete. Saint-Ange retired with his
little garrison to St. Louis, where, until the arrival of a Spanish
lieutenant-governor in 1770, he acted by common consent as chief
magistrate.

The creoles who passed under the English flag suffered little from the
change. Their property and trading interests were not molested, and the
English commandants made no effort to displace the old laws and usages.
Documents were written and records were kept in French as well as
English. The village priest and the notary retained their accustomed
places of paternal authority. The old idyllic life went on. Population
increased but little; barter, hunting, and trapping still furnished
the means of a simple subsistence; and with music, dancing, and holiday
festivities the light-hearted populace managed to crowd more pleasure
into a year than the average English frontiersman got in a lifetime.

For a year or two after the European pacification of 1763 Indian
disturbances held back the flood of settlers preparing to enter, through
the Alleghany passes, the upper valleys of the westward flowing rivers.
Neither Indian depredations nor proclamations of kings, however,
could long interpose an effectual restraint. The supreme object of the
settlers was to obtain land. Formerly there was land enough for all
along the coasts or in the nearer uplands. But population, as Franklin
computed, was doubling in twenty-five years; vacant areas had already
been occupied; and desirable lands had been gathered into great
speculative holdings. Newcomers were consequently forced to cross the
mountains--and not only newcomers, but all residents who were still
land-hungry and ambitious to better their condition.

To such the appeal of the great West was irresistible. The English
Government might indeed regard the region as a "barren waste" or a
"profitless wilderness," but not so the Scotch-Irish, Huguenot, and
Palatine homeseekers who poured by the thousands through the Chesapeake
and Delaware ports. Pushing past the settled seaboard country, these
rugged men of adventure plunged joyously into the forest depths and
became no less the founders of the coming nation than were the Pilgrims
and the Cavaliers.

Ahead of the home-builder, however, went the speculator. It has been
remarked that "from the time when Joliet and La Salle first found their
way into the heart of the great West up to the present day when far-off
Alaska is in the throes of development, 'big business' has been engaged
in western speculation." * In pre-revolutionary days this speculation
took the form of procuring, by grant or purchase, large tracts of
western land which were to be sold and colonized at a profit. Franklin
was interested in a number of such projects. Washington, the Lees, and
a number of other prominent Virginians were connected with an enterprise
which absorbed the old Ohio Company; and in 1770 Washington, piloted
by Croghan, visited the Ohio country with a view to the discovery of
desirable areas. Eventually he acquired western holdings amounting to
thirty-three thousand acres, with a water-front of sixteen miles on the
Ohio and of forty miles on the Great Kanawha.


 * Alvord, Mississippi Valley in "British Politics," vol. I, p.86.



In 1773 a company promoted by Samuel Wharton, Benjamin Franklin, William
Johnson, and a London banker, Thomas Walpole, secured the grant of two
and a half million acres between the Alleghanies and the Ohio, which
was to be the seat of a colony called Vandalia. This departure from the
policy laid down in the Proclamation of 1763 was made reluctantly,
but with a view to giving a definite western limit to the seaboard
provinces. The Government's purpose was fully understood in America, and
the project was warmly opposed, especially by Virginia, the chartered
claimant of the territory. The early outbreak of the Revolutionary
War wrecked the project, and nothing ever came of it--or indeed of any
colonization proposal contemporary with it. By and large, the building
of the West was to be the work, not of colonizing companies or other
corporate interests, but of individual homeseekers, moving into the new
country on their own responsibility and settling where and when their
own interests and inclinations led.



Chapter III. The Revolution Begins

One of the grievances given prominence in the Declaration of
Independence was that the English Crown had "abolished the free system
of English laws in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an
arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it
at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same arbitrary
rule into these colonies." The measure which was in the minds of the
signers was the Quebec Act of 1774; and the feature to which they
especially objected was the extension of this peculiarly governed
Canadian province to include the whole of the territory north of the
Ohio and east of the Mississippi.

The Quebec Act was passed primarily to remedy a curious mistake made by
King George's ministers eleven years earlier. The Proclamation of 1763
had been intended to apply to the new French speaking possessions
in only a general way, leaving matters of government and law to be
regulated at a later date. But through oversight it ordained the
establishment of English law, and even of a representative assembly,
precisely as in the other new provinces. The English governors were
thus put in an awkward position. They were required to introduce English
political forms and legal practices. Yet the inexperience and suspicion
of the people made it unwise, if not impossible, to do so. When, for
example, jury trial was broached, the peasants professed to be quite
unable to understand why the English should prefer to have matters of
law decided by tailors and shoemakers rather than by a judge; and as for
a legislature, they frankly confessed that assemblies "had drawn upon
other colonies so much distress, and had occasioned so much riot and
bloodshed, that they had hoped never to have one."

The Act of 1774 relieved the situation by restoring French law in civil
affairs, abolishing jury trial except in criminal cases, rescinding the
grant of representative government, and confirming the Catholic clergy
in the rights and privileges which they hard enjoyed under the old
regime. This would have aroused no great amount of feeling among New
Englanders and Virginians if the new arrangements had been confined to
the bounds of the original province. But they were not so restricted.
On the contrary, the new province was made to include the great region
between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, southward to the Ohio; and
it was freely charged that a principal object of the English Government
was to sever the West from the shore colonies and permanently link it
with the St. Lawrence Valley rather than with the Atlantic slope.

At all events, the Quebec Act marked the beginning of civil government
in the great Northwest. On November 9, 1775, Henry Hamilton appeared as
Lieutenant-Governor at the new capital, Detroit. Already the "shot
heard round the world" had been fired by the farmers at Lexington; and
Hamilton had been obliged to thread his way through General Montgomery's
lines about Montreal in the guise of a Canadian. Arrived at his new seat
of authority, he found a pleasant, freshly fortified town whose white
population had grown to fifteen hundred, including a considerable
number of English-speaking settlers. The country round was overrun with
traders, who cheated and cajoled the Indians without conscience; the
natives, in turn, were a nondescript lot, showing in pitiful manner the
bad effects of their contact with the whites.

As related by a contemporary chronicler--a Pennsylvanian who lived for
years among the western tribes--an Indian hunting party on arriving at
Detroit would trade perhaps a third of the peltries which they brought
in for fine clothes, ammunition, paint, tobacco, and like articles.
Then a keg of brandy would be purchased, and a council would be held to
decide who was to get drunk and who to keep sober. All arms and clubs
were taken away and hidden, and the orgy would begin. It was the task
of those who kept sober to prevent the drunken ones from killing one
another, a task always hazardous and frequently unsuccessful, sometimes
as many as five being killed in a night. When the keg was empty, brandy
was brought by the kettleful and ladled out with large wooden spoons;
and this was kept up until the last skin had been disposed of. Then,
dejected, wounded, lamed, with their fine new shirts torn, their
blankets burned, and with nothing but their ammunition and tobacco
saved, they would start off down the river to hunt in the Ohio country
and begin again the same round of alternating toil and debauchery. In
the history of the country there is hardly a more depressing chapter
than that which records the easy descent of the red man, once his taste
for "fire water" was developed, to bestiality and impotence.

The coming on of the Revolution produced no immediate effects in the
West. The meaning of the occurrences round Boston was but slowly grasped
by the frontier folk. There was little indeed that the Westerners could
do to help the cause of the eastern patriots, and most of them, if left
alone, would have been only distant spectators of the conflict. But
orders given to the British agents and commanders called for the
ravaging of the trans-Alleghany country; and as a consequence the West
became an important theater of hostilities.

The British agents had no troops with which to undertake military
operations on a considerable scale, but they had one great resource--the
Indians--and this they used with a reckless disregard of all
considerations of humanity. In the summer of 1776 the Cherokees were
furnished with fifty horse-loads of ammunition and were turned loose
upon the back country of Georgia and the Carolinas. Other tribes were
prompted to depredations farther north. White, half-breed, and Indian
agents went through the forests inciting the natives to deeds of horror;
prices were fixed on scalps--and it is significant of the temper of
these agents that a woman's scalp was paid for as readily as a man's.

In every corner of the wilderness the bloody scenes of Pontiac's war
were now reenacted. Bands of savages lurked about the settlements, ready
to attack at any unguarded moment; and wherever the thin blue smoke of a
settler's cabin rose, prowlers lay in wait. A woman might not safely
go a hundred yards to milk a cow, or a man lead a horse to water.
The farmer carried a gun strapped to his side as he ploughed, and he
scarcely dared venture into the woods for the winter's supply of fuel
and game. Hardly a day passed on which a riderless horse did not come
galloping into some lonely clearing, telling of afresh tragedy on the
trail.

The rousing of the Indians against the frontiersmen was an odious
act. The people of the back country were in not the slightest degree
responsible for the revolt against British authority in the East. They
were non-combatants, and no amount of success in sweeping them from
their homes could affect the larger outcome. The crowning villainy of
this shameful policy was the turning of the redskins loose to prey upon
helpless women and children.

The responsibility for this inhumanity must be borne in some degree
by the government of George III. "God and nature," wrote the Earl
of Suffolk piously, "hath put into our hands the scalping-knife and
tomahawk, to torture them into unconditional submission." But the fault
lay chiefly with the British officers at the western posts--most of
all, with Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton at Detroit. Probably no British
representative in America was on better terms with the natives. He drank
with them, sang war-songs with them, and received them with open arms
when they came in from the forests with the scalps of white men dangling
at their belts. A great council on the banks of the Detroit in June,
1778, was duly opened with prayer, after which Hamilton harangued the
assembled Chippewas, Hurons, Mohawks, and Potawatomi on their "duties"
in the war and congratulated them on the increasing numbers of their
prisoners and scalps, and then urged them to redoubled activity by
holding out the prospect of the complete expulsion of white men from the
great interior hunting-grounds.

Scarcely were the deputations attending this council well on their way
homewards when a courier arrived from the Illinois country bringing
startling news. The story was that a band of three hundred rebels led by
one George Rogers Clark had fallen upon the Kaskaskia settlements, had
thrown the commandant into irons, and had exacted from the populace an
oath of allegiance to the Continental Congress. It was reported, too,
that Cahokia had been taken, and that, even as the messenger was leaving
Kaskaskia, "Gibault, a French priest, had his horse ready saddled to go
to Vincennes to receive the submission of the inhabitants in the name of
the rebels."

George Rogers Clark was a Virginian, born in the foothills of Albemarle
County three years before Braddock's defeat. His family was not of the
landed gentry, but he received some education, and then, like Washington
and many other adventuresome young men of the day, became a surveyor.
At the age of twenty-two he was a member of Governor Dunmore's staff.
During a surveying expedition he visited Kentucky, which so pleased him
that in 1774 he decided to make that part of the back country his home.
He was even then a man of powerful frame, with broad brow, keen blue
eyes, and a dash of red in his hair from a Scottish ancestress--a man,
too, of ardent patriotism, strong common sense, and exceptional
powers of initiative and leadership. Small wonder that in the rapidly
developing commonwealth beyond the mountains he quickly became a
dominating spirit.

With a view to organizing a civil government and impressing upon the
Virginia authorities the need of defending the western settlements, the
men of Kentucky held a convention at Harrodsburg in the spring of 1775
and elected two delegates to present their petition to the Virginia
Assembly. Clark was one of them. The journey to Williamsburg was long
and arduous, and the delegates arrived only to find that the Legislature
had adjourned. The visit, none the less, gave Clark an opportunity
to explain to the new Governor--"a certain Patrick Henry, of
Hanover County," as the royalist Dunmore contemptuously styled his
successor--the situation in the back country and to obtain five hundred
pounds of powder. He also induced the authorities to take steps which
led to the definite organization of Kentucky as a county of Virginia.

In the bloody days that followed, most of the pioneers saw nothing to be
done except to keep close guard and beat off the Indians when they came.
A year or two of that sort of desperate uncertainty gave Clark an idea.
Why not meet the trouble at its source by capturing the British posts
and suppressing the commandants whose orders were mainly responsible
for the atrocities? There was just one obstacle: Kentucky could spare
neither men nor money for the undertaking.

In the spring of 1777 two young hunters, disguised as traders, were
dispatched to the Illinois country and to the neighborhood of Vincennes,
to spy out the land. They brought back word that the posts were not
heavily manned, and that the French-speaking population took little
interest in the war and was far from reconciled to British rule. The
prospect seemed favorable. Without making his purpose known to anyone,
Clark forthwith joined a band of disheartened settlers and made his way
with them over the Wilderness Trail to Virginia. By this time a plan on
the part of the rebels for the defense of the Kentucky settlements had
grown into a scheme for the conquest of the whole Northwest.

Clark's proposal came opportunely. Burgoyne's surrender had given the
colonial cause a rosy hue, and already the question of the occupation
of the Northwest had come up for discussion in Congress. Governor Henry
thought well of the plan. He called Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and
George Wythe into conference, and on January 2, 1778, Clark was given
two sets of orders--one, for publication, commissioning him to raise
seven companies of fifty men each "in any county of the Commonwealth"
for militia duty in Kentucky, the other, secret, authorizing him to
use this force in an expedition for the capture of the "British post at
Kaskasky." To meet the costs, only twelve hundred pounds in depreciated
continental currency could be raised. But the Governor and his friends
promised to try to secure three hundred acres of land for each soldier,
in case the project should succeed. The strictest secrecy was preserved,
and, even if the Legislature had been in session, the project would
probably not have been divulged to it.

Men and supplies were gathered at Fort Pitt and Wheeling and were
carried down the Ohio to "the Falls," opposite the site of Louisville.
The real object of the expedition was concealed until this point was
reached. On learning of the project, the men were surprised, and some
refused to go farther. But in a few weeks one hundred and seventy-five
men, organized in four companies, were in readiness. The start was made
on the 24th of June. Just as the little flotilla of clumsy flatboats was
caught by the rapid current, the landscape was darkened by an eclipse of
the sun. The superstitious said that this was surely an evil omen. But
Clark was no believer in omens, and he ordered the bateaux to proceed.
He had lately received news of the French alliance, and was surer than
ever that the habitants would make common cause with his forces and give
him complete success.

To appear on the Mississippi was to run the risk of betraying the
object of the expedition to the defenders of the posts. Hence the wily
commander decided to make the last stages of his advance by an overland
route. At the deserted site of Fort Massac, nine miles below the mouth
of the Tennessee, the little army left the Ohio and struck off northwest
on a march of one hundred and twenty miles, as the crow flies, across
the tangled forests and rich prairies of southern Illinois.

Six days brought the invaders to the Kaskaskia River, three miles above
the principal settlement. Stealing silently along the bank of the stream
on the night of the 4th of July, they crossed in boats which they seized
at a farmhouse and arrived at the palisades wholly unobserved. Half of
the force was stationed in the form of a cordon, so that no one might
escape. The remainder followed Clark through an unguarded gateway into
the village.

According to a story long current, the officials of the post were that
night giving a ball, and all of the elite, not of Kaskaskia alone but of
the neighboring settlements as well, were joyously dancing in one of
the larger rooms of the fort. Leaving his men some paces distant, Clark
stepped to the entrance of the hall, and for some time leaned unobserved
against the door-post, grimly watching the gayety. Suddenly the air was
rent by a warwhoop which brought the dancers to a stop. An Indian brave,
lounging in the firelight, had caught a glimpse of the tall, gaunt, buff
and blue figure in the doorway and had recognized it. Women shrieked;
men cursed; the musicians left their posts; all was disorder. Advancing,
Clark struck a theatrical pose and in a voice of command told the
merrymakers to go on with their dancing, but to take note that they now
danced, not as subjects of King George but as Virginians. Finding that
they were in no mood for further diversion, he sent them to their homes;
and all night they shivered with fear, daring not so much as to light a
candle lest they should be set upon and murdered in their beds.

This account is wholly unsupported by contemporary testimony, and it
probably sprang from the imagination of some good frontier story-teller.
It contains at least this much truth, that the settlement, after being
thrown into panic, was quickly and easily taken. Curiously enough, the
commandant was a Frenchman, Rocheblave, who had thriftily entered the
British service. True to the trust reposed in him, he protested and
threatened, but to no avail. The garrison, now much diminished, was
helpless, and the populace--British, French, and Indian alike--was not
disposed to court disaster by offering armed resistance. Hence, on the
morning after the capture the oath of fidelity was administered, and the
American flag was hoisted for the first time within view of the Father
of Waters. After dispatching word to General Carleton that he had been
compelled to surrender the post to "the self-styled Colonel, Mr. Clark,"
Rocheblave was sent as a captive to Williamsburg, where he soon broke
parole and escaped. His slaves were sold for five hundred pounds, and
the money was distributed among the troops. Cahokia was occupied without
resistance, and the French priest, Father Pierre Gibault, whose parish
extended from Lake Superior to the Ohio, volunteered to go to Vincennes
and win its inhabitants to the American cause.

Like Kaskaskia and Cahokia, the Wabash settlement had been put in charge
of a commandant of French descent. The village, however, was at the
moment without a garrison, and its chief stronghold, Fort Sackville,
was untenanted. Gibault argued forcefully for acceptance of American
sovereignty, and within two days the entire population filed into the
little church and took the oath of allegiance. The astonished Indians
were given to understand that their former "Great Father," the King of
France, had returned to life, and that they must comply promptly with
his wishes or incur his everlasting wrath for having given aid to the
despised British.

Thus without the firing of a shot or the shedding of a drop of blood,
the vast Illinois and Wabash country was won for the future United
States. Clark's plan was such that its success was assured by its very
audacity. It never occurred to the British authorities that their far
western forts were in danger, and they were wholly unprepared to fly
to the defense of such distant posts. British sovereignty on the
Mississippi was never recovered; and in the autumn of 1778 Virginia took
steps to organize her new conquest by setting up the county of Illinois,
which included all her territories lying "on the western side of the
Ohio."



Chapter IV. The Conquest Completed

Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton had many faults, but sloth was not one of
them; and when he heard what had happened he promptly decided to regain
the posts and take the upstart Kentucky conqueror captive. Emissaries
were sent to the Wabash country to stir up the Indians, and for weeks
the Detroit settlement resounded with preparations for the expedition.
Boats were built or repaired, guns were cleaned, ammunition was
collected in boxes, provisions were put up in kegs or bags, baubles for
the Indians were made or purchased. Cattle and wheels, together with
a six-pounder, were sent ahead to be in readiness for use at various
stages of the journey.

Further weeks were consumed in awaiting reenforcements which never came;
and in early October, when the wild geese were scudding southward before
the first snow flurries of the coming winter, the commandant started
for the reconquest with a motley force of thirty-six British regulars,
forty-five local volunteers, seventy-nine local militia, and sixty
Indians. Reenforcements were gathered on the road, so that when
Vincennes was reached the little army numbered about five hundred. From
Detroit the party dropped easily down the river to Lake Erie, where
it narrowly escaped destruction in a blinding snowstorm. By good
management, however, it was brought safely to the Maumee, up whose
sluggish waters the bateaux were laboriously poled. A portage of nine
miles gave access to the Wabash. Here the water was very shallow, and
only by building occasional dikes to produce a current did the party
find it possible to complete the journey. As conferences with the
Indians further delayed them, it was not until a few days before
Christmas that the invaders reached their goal.

The capture of Vincennes proved easy enough. The surrender, none
the less, was made in good military style. There were two iron
three-pounders in the wretched little fort, and one of these was loaded
to the muzzle and placed in the open gate. As Hamilton and his men
advanced, so runs a not very well authenticated story, Lieutenant
Helm stood by the gun with a lighted taper and called sternly upon
the invaders to halt. The British leader demanded the surrender of the
garrison. Helm parleyed and asked for terms. Hamilton finally conceded
the honors of war, and Helm magnanimously accepted. Hamilton thereupon
drew up his forces in a double line, the British on one side and
the Indians on the other; and the garrison--one officer and one
soldier--solemnly marched out between them! After the "conquerors" had
regained their equanimity, the cross of St. George was once more run
up on the fort. A body of French militia returned to British allegiance
with quite as much facility as it had shown in accepting American
sovereignty under the eloquence of Father Gibault; and the French
inhabitants, gathered again in the church, with perfectly straight faces
acknowledged that they had "sinned against God and man" by taking sides
with the rebels, and promised to be loyal thereafter to George III.

Had the British forces immediately pushed on, this same scene might have
been repeated at Kaskaskia and Cahokia. Clark's position there was far
from strong. Upon the expiration of their term of enlistment most of
his men had gone back to Kentucky or Virginia, and their places had been
taken mainly by creoles, whose steadfastness was doubtful. Furthermore,
the Indians were restless, and it was only by much vigilance and bravado
that they were kept in a respectful mood. All this was well known to
Hamilton, who now proposed to follow up the recapture of the Mississippi
posts by the obliteration of all traces of American authority west of
the Alleghanies.

The difficulties and dangers of a midwinter campaign in the flooded
Illinois country were not to be lightly regarded, and weeks of
contending with icy blasts and drenching rains lent a seat by an open
fire unusual attractiveness. Hence the completion of the campaign was
postponed until spring--a decision which proved the salvation of the
American cause in the West. As means of subsistence were slender, most
of the Detroit militia were sent home, and the Indians were allowed to
scatter to their distant wigwams. The force kept at the post numbered
only about eighty or ninety whites, with a few Indians.

Clark now had at Kaskaskia a band of slightly over a hundred men. He
understood Hamilton's army to number five or six hundred. The outlook
was dubious, until Francois Vigo, a friendly Spanish trader of St.
Louis, escaping captivity at Vincennes, came to Kaskaskia with the
information that Hamilton had sent away most of his troops; and this
welcome news gave the doughty Kentuckian a brilliant idea. He would
defend his post by attacking the invaders while they were yet at
Vincennes, and before they were ready to resume operations. "The case is
desperate," he wrote to Governor Henry, "but, sir, we must either quit
the country or attack Mr. Hamilton." He had probably never heard of
Scipio Africanus but, like that indomitable Roman, he proposed to carry
the war straight into the enemy's country. "There were undoubtedly
appalling difficulties," says Mr. Roosevelt, "in the way of a midwinter
march and attack; and the fact that Clark attempted and performed the
feat which Hamilton dared not try, marks just the difference between a
man of genius and a good, brave, ordinary commander."

Preparations were pushed with all speed. A large, flat-bottomed boat,
the Willing, was fitted out with four guns and was sent down the
Mississippi with forty men to ascend the Ohio and the Wabash to a place
of rendezvous not far from the coveted post. By early February the
depleted companies were recruited to their full strength; and after the
enterprise had been solemnly blessed by Father Gibault, Clark and
his forces, numbering one hundred and thirty men, pushed out upon the
desolate, windswept prairie.

The distance to be covered was about two hundred and thirty miles. Under
favorable circumstances, the trip could have been made in five or six
days and with little hardship. The rainy season, however, was now at
its height, and the country was one vast quagmire, overrun by swollen
streams which could be crossed only at great risk. Ten days of wearisome
marching brought the expedition to the forks of the Little Wabash. The
entire region between the two channels was under water, and for a little
time it looked as if the whole enterprise would have to be given up.
There were no boats; provisions were running low; game was scarce; and
fires could not be built for cooking.

But Clark could not be turned back by such difficulties. He plunged
ahead of his men, struck tip songs and cheers to keep them in spirit,
played the buffoon, went wherever danger was greatest, and by an almost
unmatched display of bravery, tact, and firmness, won the redoubled
admiration of his suffering followers and held them together. Murmurs
arose among the creoles, but the Americans showed no signs of faltering.
For more than a week the party floundered through the freezing water,
picked its way from one outcropping bit of earth to another, and seldom
found opportunity to eat or sleep. Rifles and powder-horns had to be
borne by the hour above the soldiers' heads to keep them dry.

Finally, on the 23d of February, a supreme effort carried the troops
across the Horseshoe Plain, breast-deep in water, and out upon high
ground two miles from Vincennes. By this time many of the men were so
weakened that they could drag themselves along only with assistance. But
buffalo meat and corn were confiscated from the canoes of some passing
squaws, and soon the troops were refreshed and in good spirits. The
battle with the enemy ahead seemed as nothing when compared with the
struggle with the elements which they had successfully waged. No exploit
of the kind in American history surpasses this, unless it be Benedict
Arnold's winter march through the wilderness of Maine in 1775 to attack
Quebec.

Two or three creole hunters were now taken captive, and from them Clark
learned that no one in Vincennes knew of his approach. They reported,
however, that, although the habitants were tired of the "Hair-Buyer's"
presence and would gladly return to American allegiance, some two
hundred Indians had just arrived at the fort. The Willing had not been
heard from. But an immediate attack seemed the proper course; and the
young colonel planned and carried it out with the curious mixture of
bravery and braggadocio of which he was a past master.

First he drew up a lordly letter, addressed to the inhabitants of the
town, and dispatched it by one of his creole prisoners. "Gentlemen," it
ran, "being now within two miles of your village with my army...and not
being willing to surprise you, I take this step to request such of you
as are true citizens, and willing to enjoy the liberty I bring you,
to remain still in your houses. And those, if any there be, that are
friends to the King, will instantly repair to the fort and join the
Hair-Buyer General and fight like men." Having thus given due warning,
he led his "army" forward, marching and counter-marching his meager
forces among the trees and hills to give an appearance of great numbers,
while he and his captains helped keep up the illusion by galloping
wildly here and there on horses they had confiscated, as if ordering a
vast array. At nightfall the men advanced upon the stockade and opened
fire from two directions.

Not until a sergeant reeled from his chair with a bullet in his breast
did the garrison realize that it was really under attack. The habitants
had kept their secret well. There was a beating of drums and a hurrying
to arms, and throughout the night a hot fusillade was kept up. By firing
from behind houses and trees, and from rifle pits that were dug before
the attack began, the Americans virtually escaped loss; while Hamilton's
gunners were picked off as fast as they appeared at the portholes of the
fort. Clark's ammunition ran low, but the habitants furnished a fresh
supply and at the same time a hot breakfast for the men. In a few hours
the cannon were silenced, and parleys were opened. Hamilton insisted
that he and his garrison were "not disposed to be awed into an action
unworthy of British subjects," but they were plainly frightened, and
Clark finally sent the commandant back to the fort from a conference in
the old French church with the concession of one hour's time in which
to decide what he would do. To help him make up his mind, the American
leader caused half a dozen Indians who had just returned from the
forests with white men's scalps dangling at their belts to be tomahawked
and thrown into the river within plain view of the garrison.

Surrender promptly followed. Hamilton and twenty-five of his men were
sent off as captives to Virginia, where the commandant languished in
prison until, in 1780, he was paroled at the suggestion of Washington.
On taking, an oath of neutrality, the remaining British sympathizers
were set at liberty. For a second time the American flag floated over
Indiana soil, not again to be lowered.

Immediately after the capitulation of Hamilton, a scouting-party
captured a relief expedition which was on its way from Detroit and
placed in Clark's hands ten thousand pounds' worth of supplies for
distribution as prize-money among his deserving men. The commander's cup
of satisfaction was filled to the brim when the Willing appeared with a
long-awaited messenger from Governor Henry who brought to the soldiers
the thanks of the Legislature of Virginia for the capture of Kaskaskia
and also the promise of more substantial reward.

The whole of the Illinois and Indiana country was now in American hands.
Tenure, however, was precarious so long as Detroit remained a British
stronghold, and Clark now broadened his plans to embrace the capture of
that strategic place. Leaving Vincennes in charge of a garrison of forty
men, he returned to Kaskaskia with the Willing and set about organizing
a new expedition. Kentucky pledged three hundred men, and Virginia
promised to help. But when, in midsummer, the commander returned to
Vincennes to consolidate and organize his force, he found the numbers to
be quite insufficient. From Kentucky there came only thirty men.

Disappointment followed disappointment; he was ordered to build a fort
at the mouth of the Ohio--a project of which he had himself approved;
and when at last he had under his command a force that might have been
adequate for the Detroit expedition, he was obliged to use it in meeting
a fresh incursion of savages which had been stirred up by the new
British commandant on the Lakes. But Thomas Jefferson, who in 1779
succeeded Henry as Governor of Virginia, was deeply interested in the
Detroit project, and at his suggestion Washington gave Clark an order on
the commandant of Fort Pitt for guns, supplies, and such troops as
could be spared. On January 22, 1781, Jefferson appointed Clark
"brigadier-general of the forces to be embodied on an expedition
westward of the Ohio." Again Clark was doomed to disappointment.
One obstacle after another interposed. Yet as late as May, 1781, the
expectant conqueror wrote to Washington that he had "not yet lost sight
of Detroit." Suitable opportunity for the expedition never came, and
when peace was declared the northern stronghold was still in British
hands.

Clark's later days were clouded. Although Virginia gave him six thousand
acres of land in southern Indiana and presented him with a sword, peace
left him without employment, and he was never able to adjust himself to
the changed situation. For many years he lived alone in a little
cabin on the banks of the Ohio, spending his time hunting, fishing, and
brooding over the failure of Congress to reward him in more substantial
manner for his services. He was land-poor, lonely, and embittered. In
1818 he died a paralyzed and helpless cripple. His resting place is
in Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville; the finest statue of him stands in
Monument Circle, Indianapolis--"an athletic figure, scarcely past
youth, tall and sinewy, with a drawn sword, in an attitude of energetic
encouragement, as if getting his army through the drowned lands of the
Wabash." *


 * Hosmer, "Short History of the Mississippi Valley." p. 94.


The capture of Vincennes determined the fate of the Northwest. Frontier
warfare nevertheless went steadily on. In 1779 Spain entered the contest
as an ally of France, and it became the object of the British commanders
on the Lakes not only to recover the posts lost to the Americans but to
seize St. Louis and other Spanish strongholds on the west bank of the
Mississippi. In 1780 Lieutenant-Governor Patrick Sinclair, a bustling,
garrulous old soldier stationed at Michilimackinac, sent a force of
some nine hundred traders, servants, and Indians down the Mississippi
to capture both the American and Spanish settlements. An attack on St.
Louis failed, as did likewise a series of efforts against Cahokia
and Kaskaskia, and the survivors were glad to reach their northern
headquarters again, with nothing to show for their pains except a dozen
prisoners.

Not to be outdone, the Spanish commandant at St. Louis sent an
expedition to capture British posts in the Lake country. An arduous
winter march brought the avengers and their Indian allies to Fort St.
Joseph, a mile or two west of the present city of Niles, Michigan.
It would be ungracious to say that this post was selected for attack
because it was without a garrison. At all events, the place was duly
seized, the Spanish standard was set up, and possession of "the fort and
its dependencies" was taken in the name of his Majesty Don Carlos III.
No effort was made to hold the settlement permanently, and the British
from Detroit promptly retook it. Probably the sole intention had been to
add somewhat to the strength of the Spanish position at the forthcoming
negotiations for peace.

The war in the West ended, as it began, in a carnival of butchery.
Treacherous attacks, massacres, burnings, and pillagings were everyday
occurrences, and white men were hardly less at fault than red. Indeed
the most discreditable of all the recorded episodes of the time was a
heartless massacre by Americans of a large band of Indians that had
been Christianized by Moravian missionaries and brought together in a
peaceful community on the Muskingum. This slaughter of the innocents
at Gnadenhutten ("the Tents of Grace") reveals the frontiersman at his
worst. But it was dearly paid for. From the Lakes to the Gulf redskins
rose for vengeance. Villages were wiped out, and murderous bands swept
far into Virginia and Pennsylvania, evading fortified posts in order to
fall with irresistible fury on unsuspecting traders and settlers.

In midsummer, 1782, news of the cessation of hostilities between Great
Britain and her former seaboard colonies reached the back country, and
the commandant at Detroit made an honest effort to stop all offensive
operations. A messenger failed, however, to reach a certain Captain
Caldwell, operating in the Ohio country, in time to prevent him from
attacking a Kentucky settlement and bringing on the deadly Battle
of Blue Licks, in which the Americans were defeated with a loss of
seventy-one men. George Rogers Clark forthwith led a retaliatory
expedition against the Miami towns, taking prisoners, recapturing
whites, and destroying British trading establishments; and with this
final flare-up the Revolution came to an end in the Northwest.

The soldier had won the back country for the new nation. Could the
diplomat hold it? As early as March 19, 1779,--just three weeks after
Clark's capture of Vincennes,--the Continental Congress formally laid
claim to the whole of the Northwest; and a few months later John Adams
was instructed to negotiate for peace on the understanding that the
country's northern and western boundaries were to be the line of the
Great Lakes and the Mississippi. When, in 1781, Franklin, Jefferson,
Jay, and Laurens were appointed to assist Adams in the negotiation, the
new Congress of the Confederation stated that the earlier instructions
on boundaries represented its "desires and expectations."

It might have been supposed that if Great Britain could be brought to
accept these terms there would be no further difficulty. But obstacles
arose from other directions. France had entered the war for her own
reasons, and looked with decidedly more satisfaction on the defeat of
Great Britain than on the prospect of a new and powerful nation in the
Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, she was in close alliance with Spain;
and Spain had no sympathy whatever with the American cause as such. At
all events, she did not want the United States for a neighbor on the
Mississippi.

The American commissioners were under instructions to make no peace
without consulting France. But when, in the spring of 1782, Jay came
upon the scene of the negotiations at Paris, he demurred. He had been
for some time in Spain, and he carried to Paris not only a keen contempt
for the Spanish people and Spanish politics, but a strong suspicion that
Spain was using her influence to keep the United States from getting the
territory between the Lakes and the Ohio. France soon fell under similar
suspicion, for she was under obligations, as everyone knew, to satisfy
Spain; and little time elapsed before the penetrating American diplomat
was semiofficially assured that his suspicions in both directions were
well founded.

The mainspring of Spanish policy was the desire to make the Gulf of
Mexico a closed sea, under exclusive Spanish control. This plan would be
frustrated if the Americans acquired an outlet on the Gulf; furthermore,
it would be jeopardized if they retained control on the upper
Mississippi. Hence, the States must be kept back from the great
river; safety dictated that they be confined to the region east of the
Appalachians.

An ingenious plan was thereupon developed. Spain was to resume
possession of the Floridas, insuring thereby the coveted unbroken
coast line on the Gulf. The vast area between the Mississippi and the
Appalachians and south of the Ohio was to be an Indian territory, half
under Spanish and half under American "protection." The entire region
north of the Ohio was to be kept by Great Britain, or, at the most,
divided--on lines to be determined--between Great Britain and the United
States. From Rayneval, confidential secretary of the French foreign
minister Vergennes, Jay learned that the French Government proposed to
give this scheme its support.

Had such terms as these been forced on the new nation, the hundreds of
Virginian and Pennsylvanian pioneers who had given up their lives in the
planting of American civilization in the back country would have
turned in their graves. But Jay had no notion of allowing the scheme to
succeed. He sent an emissary to England to counteract the Spanish and
French influence. He converted Adams to his way of thinking, and even
raised doubts in Franklin's mind. Finally he induced his colleagues to
cast their instructions to the winds and negotiate a treaty with the
mother country independently.

This simplified matters immensely. Great Britain was a beaten nation,
and from the beginning her commissioners played a losing game. There
was much haggling over the loyalists, the fisheries, debts; but the
boundaries were quickly drawn. Great Britain preferred to see the
disputed western country in American hands rather than to leave a chance
for it to fall under the control of one of her European rivals.

Accordingly, the Treaty of Paris drew the interior boundary of the new
nation through the Great Lakes and connecting waters to the Lake of the
Woods; from the most northwestern point of the Lake of the Woods due
west to the Mississippi (an impossible line); down the Mississippi to
latitude 31 degrees; thence east, by that parallel and by the line which
is now the northern boundary of Florida, to the ocean. Three nations,
instead of two, again shared the North American Continent: Great Britain
kept the territory north of the Lakes; Spain ruled the Floridas
and everything west of the Mississippi; the United States held the
remainder--an area of more than 825,000 square miles, with a population
of three and one half millions.



Chapter V. Wayne, The Scourge Of The Indians

"This federal republic," wrote the Spanish Count d'Aranda to his royal
master in 1782, "is born a pigmy. A day will come when it will be
a giant, even a colossus. Liberty of conscience, the facility for
establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the
advantages of the new government, will draw thither farmers and artisans
from all the nations."

Aranda correctly weighed the value of the country's vast stretches of
free and fertile land. The history of the United States has been
largely a story of the clearing of forests, the laying out of farms,
the erection of homes, the construction of highways, the introduction
of machinery, the building of railroads, the rise of towns and of great
cities. The Germans of Wisconsin and Missouri, the Scandinavians of
Minnesota and the Dakotas, the Poles and Hungarians of Chicago, the
Irish and Italians of a thousand communities, attest the fact that the
"farmers and artisans from all the nations" have had an honorable part
in the achievement.

In laying plans for the development of the western lands the
statesmanship of the evolutionary leaders was at its best. In the first
place, the seven States which had some sort of title to tracts extending
westward to the Mississippi wisely yielded these claims to the nation;
and thus was created a single, national domain which could be dealt with
in accordance with a consistent policy. In the second place, Congress,
as early as 1780, pledged the national Government to dispose of the
western lands for the common benefit, and promised that they should be
"settled and formed into distinct republican states, which shall become
members of the federal union, and have the same rights of sovereignty,
freedom; and independence as the other states."

Finally, in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 there was mapped out a
scheme of government admirably adapted to the liberty-loving, yet
law-abiding, populations of the frontier. It was based on the broad
principles of democracy, and it was sufficiently flexible to permit
necessary changes as the scattered settlements developed into organized
Territories and then into States. Geographical conditions, as well as
racial inheritances, foreordained that the United States should be
an expanding, colonizing nation; and it was of vital importance that
wholesome precedents of territorial control should be established in the
beginning. Louisiana, Florida, the Mexican accessions, Alaska, and even
the newer tropical dependencies, owe much to the decisions that were
reached in the organizing of the Northwest a century and a quarter ago.

The Northwest Ordinance was remarkable in that it was framed for a
territory that had practically no white population and which, in a
sense, did not belong to the United States at all. Back in 1768 Sir
William Johnson's Treaty of Fort Stanwix had made the Ohio River the
boundary between the white and red races of the West. Nobody at the
close of the Revolution supposed that this division would be adhered to;
the Northwest had not been won for purposes of an Indian reserve.
None the less, the arrangements of 1768 were inherited, and the nation
considered them binding except in so far as they were modified from
time to time by new agreements. The first such agreement affecting the
Northwest was concluded in 1785, through George Rogers Clark and two
other commissioners, with the Wyandots, Delawares, Chippewas, and
Ottawas. By it the United States acquired title to the southeastern half
of the present State of Ohio, with a view to surveying the lands and
raising revenue by selling them. Successive treaties during the next
thirty years gradually transferred the whole of the Northwest from
Indian hands to the new nation.

Officially, the United States recognized the validity of the Indian
claims; but the pioneer homeseeker was not so certain to do so. From
about 1775 the country south of the Ohio filled rapidly with settlers
from Virginia and the Carolinas, so that by 1788 the white population
beyond the Blue Ridge was believed to be considerably over one hundred
thousand. For a decade the "Indian side," as the north shore was
habitually called, was trodden only by occasional hunters, traders,
and explorers. But after Clark's victories on the Mississippi and the
Wabash, the frontiersmen grew bolder. By 1780 they began to plant camps
and cabins on the rich bottom-lands of the Miamis, the Scioto, and the
Muskingum; and when they heard that the British claims in the West had
been formally yielded, they assumed that whatever they could take was
theirs. With the technicalities of Indian claims they had not much
patience. In 1785 Colonel Harmar, commanding at Fort Pitt, sent a
deputation down the river to drive the intruders back. But his agents
returned with the report that the Virginians and Kentuckians were moving
into the forbidden country "by the forties and fifties," and that
they gave every evidence of proposing to remain there. Surveyors were
forthwith set to work in the "Seven Ranges," as the tract just to the
west of the Pennsylvania boundary was called; and Fort Harmar was built
at the mouth of the Muskingum to keep the over-ardent settlers back.

The close of the Revolution brought not only a swift revival of
emigration to the West but also a remarkable outburst of speculation
in western land. March 3, 1786, General Rufus Putnam and some other
Continental officers met at the "Bunch of Grapes" Tavern in Boston and
decided that it would be to their advantage to exchange for land in
the Seven Ranges the paper certificates in which they had been paid for
their military services. Accordingly an "Ohio Company" was organized,
and Dr. Manasseh Cutler--"preacher, lawyer, doctor, statesman,
scientist, land speculator"--was sent off to New York to push the matter
in Congress. The upshot was that Congress authorized the sale of one and
a half million acres east of the Scioto to the Ohio Company, and five
million acres to a newly organized Scioto Company.

The Scioto Company fell into financial difficulties and, after making
an attempt to build up a French colony at Gallipolis, collapsed. But
General Putnam and his associates kept their affairs well in hand and
succeeded in planting the first legal white settlement in the present
State of Ohio. An arduous winter journey brought the first band of
forty-eight settlers, led by Putnam himself, to the mouth of the
Muskingum on April 7, 1788. Here, in the midst of a great forest
dotted with terraces, cones, and other fantastic memorials of the
mound-builders, they erected a blockhouse and surrounded it with cabins.
For a touch of the classical, they called the fortification the Campus
Martius; to be strictly up to date, they named the town Marietta, after
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. In July the little settlement was
honored by being made the residence of the newly arrived Governor of
the Territory, General Arthur St. Clair. Before the close of the year
Congress sold one million acres between the two Miamis to Judge Symmes
of New Jersey; and three little towns were at once laid out. To one of
them a pedantic schoolmaster gave the name L-os-anti-ville, "the town
opposite the mouth of the Licking." The name may have required too much
explanation; at all events, when, in 1790, the Governor transferred the
capital thither from Marietta, he rechristened the place Cincinnati, in
honor of the famous Revolutionary society to which he belonged.

Land speculators are confirmed optimists. But Putnam, Cutler, Symmes,
and their associates were correct in believing that the Ohio country was
at the threshold of a period of remarkable development. There was one
serious obstacle--the Indians. Repeated expeditions from Kentucky had
pushed most of the tribes northward to the headwaters of the Miami,
Scioto, and Wabash; and the Treaty of 1785 was supposed to keep them
there. But it was futile to expect such an arrangement to prove lasting
unless steadily backed up with force. In their squalid villages in the
swampy forests of northern Ohio and Indiana the redskins grew sullen
and vindictive. As they saw their favorite hunting-grounds slipping
from their grasp, those who had taken part in the cession repented their
generosity, while those who had no part in it pronounced it fraudulent
and refused to consider themselves bound by it. Swiftly the idea took
hold that the oncoming wave must be rolled back before it was too late.
"White man shall not plant corn north of the Ohio" became the rallying
cry.

Back of this rebelliousness lay a certain amount of British influence.
The Treaty of 1783 was signed in as kindly spirit as the circumstances
would permit, but its provisions were not carried out in a charitable
manner. On account of alleged shortcomings of the United States, the
British Government long refused to give up possession of eight or ten
fortified posts in the north and west. One of these was Detroit; and
the officials stationed there systematically encouraged the hordes of
redskins who had congregated about the western end of Lake Erie to make
all possible resistance to the American advance. The British no longer
had any claim to the territories south of the Lakes, but they wanted to
keep their ascendancy over the northwestern Indians, and especially to
prevent the rich fur trade from falling into American hands. Ammunition
and other supplies were lavished on the restless tribes. The post
officials insisted that these were merely the gifts which had regularly
been made in times of peace. But they were used with deadly effect
against the Ohio frontiersmen; and there can be little doubt that they
were intended so to be used.

By 1789 the situation was very serious. Marauding expeditions were
growing in frequency; and a scout sent out by Governor St. Clair came
back with the report that most of the Indians throughout the entire
Northwest had "bad hearts." Washington decided that delay would be
dangerous, and the nation forthwith prepared for its first war since
independence. Kentucky was asked to furnish a thousand militiamen and
Pennsylvania five hundred, and the forces were ordered to come together
at Fort Washington, near Cincinnati.

The rendezvous took place in the summer of 1790, and General Josiah
Harmar was put in command of a punitive expedition against the Miamis.
The recruits were raw, and Harmar was without the experience requisite
for such an enterprise. None the less, when the little army, accompanied
by three hundred regulars, and dragging three brass field-pieces,
marched out of Fort Washington on a fine September day, it created a
very good impression. All went well until the expedition reached the
Maumee country. On the site of the present city of Fort Wayne they
destroyed a number of Indian huts and burned a quantity of corn. But
in a series of scattered encounters the white men were defeated, with
a loss of nearly two hundred killed; and Harmar thought it the part
of wisdom to retreat. He had gained nothing by the expedition; on the
contrary, he had stirred the redskins to fresh aggressions, and his
retreating forces were closely followed by bands of merciless raiders.

Washington knew what the effect of this reverse would be. Accordingly
he called St. Clair to Philadelphia and ordered him to take personal
command of a new expedition, adding a special warning against ambush and
surprise. Congress aided by voting two thousand troops for six months,
besides two small regiments of regulars. But everything went wrong.
Recruiting proved slow; the men who were finally brought together were
poor material for an army, being gathered chiefly from the streets and
prisons of the seaboard cities; and supplies were shockingly inadequate.

St. Clair was a man of honest intention, but old, broken in health, and
of very limited military ability; and when finally, October 4, 1791,
he led his untrained forces slowly northwards from Fort Washington, he
utterly failed to take measures either to keep his movements secret
or to protect his men against sudden attack. The army trudged slowly
through the deep forests, chopping out its own road, and rarely
advancing more than five or six miles a day. The weather was favorable
and game was abundant, but discontent was rife and desertions became
daily occurrences. As most of the men had no taste for Indian warfare
and as their pay was but two dollars a month, not all the commander's
threats and entreaties could hold them in order.

On the night of the 3d of November the little army--now reduced to
fourteen hundred men--camped, with divisions carelessly scattered,
on the eastern fork of the Wabash, about a hundred miles north
of Cincinnati and near the Indiana border. The next morning, when
preparations were being made for a forced march against some Indian
villages near by, a horde of redskins burst unexpectedly upon the
bewildered troops, surrounded them, and threatened them with utter
destruction. A brave stand was made, but there was little chance of
victory. "After the first on set," as Roosevelt has described the
battle, "the Indians fought in silence, no sound coming from them save
the incessant rattle of their fire, as they crept from log to log, from
tree to tree, ever closer and closer. The soldiers stood in close order,
in the open; their musketry and artillery fire made a tremendous noise,
but did little damage to a foe they could hardly see. Now and then
through the hanging smoke terrible figures flitted, painted black
and red, the feathers of the hawk and eagle braided in their long
scalp-locks; but save for these glimpses, the soldiers knew the presence
of their somber enemy only from the fearful rapidity with which their
comrades fell dead and wounded in the ranks."

At last, in desperation St. Clair ordered his men to break through the
deadly cordon and save themselves as best they could. The Indians kept
up a hot pursuit for a distance of four miles. Then, surfeited with
slaughter, they turned to plunder the abandoned camp; otherwise there
would have been escape for few. As it was, almost half of the men in
the engagement were killed, and less than five hundred got off with no
injury. The survivors gradually straggled into the river settlements,
starving and disheartened.

The page on which is written the story of St. Clair's defeat is one of
the gloomiest in the history of the West. Harmar's disaster was dwarfed;
not since Braddock and his regulars were cut to pieces by an unseen
foe on the road to Fort Duquesne had the redskins inflicted upon their
hereditary enemy a blow of such proportions. It was with a heavy heart
that the Governor dispatched a messenger to Philadelphia with the news.
Congress ordered an investigation; and in view of the unhappy general's
high character and his courageous, though blundering, conduct during
the late campaign, he was exonerated. He retained the governorship, but
prudently resigned his military command.

The situation was now desperate. Everywhere the forests resounded with
the exultant cries of the victors, while the British from Detroit and
other posts actively encouraged the belief not only that they would
furnish all necessary aid but that England herself was about to declare
war on the United States. Eventually a British force from Detroit
actually invaded the disputed country and built a stockade (Fort Miami)
near the site of the present city of Toledo, with a view to giving
the redskins convincing evidence of the seriousness of the Great White
Father's intentions. Small wonder that, when St. Clair sought to obtain
by diplomacy the settlement which he had failed to secure by arms,
his commissioners were met with the ultimatum: "Brothers, we shall be
persuaded that you mean to do us justice, if you agree that the Ohio
shall remain the boundary line between us. If you will not consent
thereto, our meeting will be altogether unnecessary."

It is said that Washington's first choice for the new western command
was "Light-Horse Harry" Lee. But considerations of rank made the
appointment inexpedient, and "Mad Anthony" Wayne was named instead.
Wayne was the son of a Pennsylvania frontiersman and came honestly by
his aptitude for Indian fighting. In early life he was a surveyor,
and in the Revolution he won distinction as a dashing commander of
Pennsylvania troops at Ticonderoga, Brandywine, Germantown, Stony Point,
and other important engagements. Finally he obtained a major-general's
commission in Greene's campaign in Georgia, and at the close of the war
he settled in that State as a planter. His vanity--displayed chiefly in
a love of fine clothes--brought upon him a good deal of criticism; and
Washington, who in a Cabinet meeting characterized him as "brave and
nothing else," was frankly apprehensive lest in the present business
Wayne's impetuosity should lead to fresh disaster. Yet the qualities
that on a dozen occasions had enabled Wayne to snatch success from
almost certain defeat--alertness, decisiveness, bravery, and sheer love
of hard fighting--were those now chiefly in demand.

The first task was to create an army. A few regulars were available;
but most of the three or four thousand men who were needed had to be
gathered wheresoever they could be found. A call for recruits brought
together at Pittsburgh, in the summer of 1792, a nondescript lot of
beggars, criminals, and other cast-offs of the eastern cities, no better
and no worse than the adventurers who had taken service under St. Clair.
Few knew anything of warfare, and on one occasion a mere report of
Indians in the vicinity caused a third of the sentinels to desert their
posts. But, as rigid discipline was enforced and drilling was carried
on for eight and ten hours a day, by spring the survivors formed a very
respectable body of troops. The scene of operations was then transferred
to Fort Washington, where fresh recruits were started on a similar
course of development. Profitting by the experience of his predecessors,
Wayne insisted that campaigning should begin only after the troops were
thoroughly prepared; and no drill-master ever worked harder to get his
charges into condition for action. Going beyond the ordinary manual
of arms, he taught the men to load their rifles while running at full
speed, and to yell at the top of their voices while making a bayonet
attack.

In October, 1793, the intrepid Major-General advanced with twenty-six
hundred men into the nearer stretches of the Indian country, in order
to be in a position for an advantageous spring campaign. They built
Fort Greenville, eighty miles north of Cincinnati, and there spent the
winter, while, on St. Clair's fatal battle-field, an advance detachment
built a post which they hopefully christened Fort Recovery. Throughout
the winter unending drill was kept up; and when, in June, 1794, fourteen
hundred mounted militia arrived from Kentucky, Wayne found himself at
the head of the largest and best-trained force that had ever been turned
against the Indians west of the Alleghanies. Even before the arrival
of the Kentuckians, it proved its worth by defending its forest
headquarters, with practically no loss, against an attack by fifteen
hundred redskins.

On the 27th of July the army moved forward in the direction of the
Maumee, with closed ranks and so guarded by scouts that no chance
whatever was given for surprise attacks. Washington's admonitions had
been taken to heart, and the Indians could only wonder and admire.
News of the army's advance traveled ahead and struck terror through the
northern villages, so that many of the inhabitants fled precipitately.
When the troops reached the cultivated lands about the junction of the
Maumee and Auglaize rivers, they found only deserted huts and great
fields of corn, from which they joyfully replenished their diminished
stores. Here a fort was built and given the significant name Defiance;
and from it a final offer of peace was sent out to the hostile tribes.
Never doubting that the British would furnish all necessary aid, the
chieftains returned evasive answers. Wayne thereupon moved his troops to
the left bank of the Maumee and proceeded cautiously downstream toward
the British stronghold at Fort Miami.

A few days brought the army to a place known as Fallen Timbers, where
a tornado had piled the trunks and branches of mighty trees in
indescribable confusion. The British post was but five or six miles
distant; and there behind the breastworks which nature had provided, and
in easy reach of their allies, the Indians chose to make their stand. On
the morning of the 20th of August, Wayne, now so crippled by gout that
he had to be lifted into his saddle, gallantly led an assault. The
Indian fire was murderous, and a battalion of mounted Kentuckians was
at first hurled back. But the front line of infantry rushed up and
dislodged the savages from their covert, while the regular cavalry on
the right charged the enemy's left flank. Before the second line of
infantry could get into action the day was won. The whole engagement
lasted less than three-quarters of an hour, and not a third of Wayne's
three thousand men actually took part in it.

The fleeing redskins were pursued to the walls of the British fort, and
even there many were slain. The British soldiery not only utterly failed
to come to the relief of their hard-pressed allies, but refused to
open the gates to give them shelter. The American loss was thirty-three
killed and one hundred wounded. But the victory was the most decisive as
yet gained over the Indians of the Northwest. A warfare of forty years
was ended in as many minutes.

From the lower Maumee, Wayne marched back to Fort Defiance, and thence
to the junction of the St. Mary's and St. Joseph rivers, where he built
a fort and gave it the name still borne by the thriving city that grew
up around it--Fort Wayne. Everywhere the American soldiers destroyed the
ripened crops and burned the villages, while the terrified inhabitants
fled. In November the army took up winter quarters at Fort Greenville.

At last the Americans had the upper hand. Their arms were feared; the
British promises of help were no longer credited by the Indians; and it
was easy for Wayne to convince the tribal representatives who visited
him in large numbers during the winter that their true interest was to
win the good-will of the United States. In the summer of 1795 there
was a general pacification. Delegation after delegation arrived at
Fort Greenville, until more than a thousand chiefs and braves were in
attendance. The prestige of Wayne was still further increased when the
news came that John Jay had negotiated a treaty at London under which
the British posts on United States soil were finally to be given up;
and on August 3rd Wayne was able to announce a great treaty wherein the
natives ceded all of what is now southern Ohio and southeastern Indiana,
and numerous tracts around posts within the Indian country, such as Fort
Wayne, Detroit, and Michilimackinac--strategic points on the western
waterways. "Elder Brother," said a Chippewa chief in the course of one
of the interminable harangues delivered during the negotiation, "you
asked who were the true owners of the land now ceded to the United
States. In answer, I tell you, if any nations should call themselves
the owners of it, they would be guilty of falsehood; our claim to it
is equal; our Elder Brother has conquered it." The United States
duly recognized the Indian title to all lands not expressly ceded and
promised the Indians annual subsidies. The terms of the treaty were
faithfully observed on both sides, and for fifteen years the pioneer
lived and toiled in peace.

Wayne forthwith became a national hero. Returning to Philadelphia in
1796, he was met by a guard of honor, hailed with the ringing of bells
and a salute of fifteen guns, and treated to a dazzling display of
fireworks. Congress voted its thanks, and Washington, whose fears had
long since vanished, added his congratulations. There was one other
service on the frontier for the doughty general to render. The British
posts were at last to be surrendered, and Wayne was designated to
receive them. By midsummer he was back in the forest country, and in
the autumn he took possession of Detroit, amid acclamations of Indians,
Americans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike. But his work was done. On
the return journey he suffered a renewed attack of his old enemy, gout,
and at Presqu'isle (Erie) he died. A blockhouse modeled on the defenses
which he built during his western campaign marks his first resting-place
and bears aloft the flag which he helped plant in the heart of the
Continent.



Chapter VI. The Great Migration

While the fate of the Northwest still hung in the balance, emigration
from the eastern States became the rage. "Every small farmer whose
barren acres were covered with mortgages, whose debts pressed heavily
upon him, or whose roving spirit gave him no peace, was eager to sell
his homestead for what it would bring and begin life anew on the banks
of the Muskingum or the Ohio." * Land companies were then just as
optimistic and persuasive as they are today, and the attractions of the
western country lost nothing in the telling. Pamphlets described the
climate as luxurious, the soil as inexhaustible, the rainfall as both
abundant and well distributed, the crops as unfailingly bountiful;
paid agents went among the people assuring them that a man of push and
courage could nowhere be so prosperous and so happy as in the West.


 * McMaster, "History of the People of the United States," vol.
III, p. 461.


As early as 1787 an observer at Pittsburgh reported that in six weeks
he saw fifty flatboats set off for the downriver settlements; in 1788
forty-five hundred emigrants were said to have passed Fort Harmar
between February and June. Most of these people were bound for Kentucky
or Tennessee. But the census of 1790 gave the population north of the
Ohio as 4,280, and after Wayne's victory the proportion of newcomers who
fixed their abodes in that part of the country rapidly increased. For
a decade Ohio was the favorite goal; and within eight years after the
battle at Fallen Timbers this region was ready for admission to the
Union as a State. Southern Indiana also filled rapidly.

For a time the westward movement was regarded as of no disadvantage to
the seaboard States. It was supposed that the frontier would attract a
population of such character as could easily be spared in more settled
communities. But it became apparent that the new country did not appeal
simply to broken-down farmers, bankrupts, and ne'er-do-wells. Robust and
industrious men, with growing families, were drawn off in great numbers;
and public protest was raised against the "plots to drain the East of
its best blood." Anti-emigration pamphlets were scattered broadcast,
and, after the manner of the day, the leading western enterprises were
belabored with much bad verse. A rude cut which gained wide circulation
represented a stout, ruddy, well-dressed man on a sleek horse, with a
label, "I am going to Ohio," meeting a pale and ghastly skeleton of
a man, in rags, on the wreck of what had once been a horse, with the
label, "I have been to Ohio."

The streams of migration flowed from many sources. New England
contributed heavily. Marietta, Cincinnati, and many other rising river
towns received some of the best blood of that remote section. The
Western Reserve--a tract bordering on Lake Erie which Connecticut had
not ceded to the Federal Government--drew largely from the Nutmeg
State. A month before Wayne set out to take possession of Detroit, Moses
Cleaveland with a party of fifty Connecticut homeseekers started off to
found a settlement in the Reserve; and the town which took its name from
the leader was but the first of a score which promptly sprang up in
this inviting district. The "Seven Ranges," lying directly south of the
Reserve, drew emigrants from Pennsylvania, with some from farther
south. The Scioto valley attracted chiefly Virginians, who early made
Chillicothe their principal center. In the west, and north of the Symmes
tract, Kentuckians poured in by the thousands.

Thus in a decade Ohio became a frontier melting-pot. Puritan, Cavalier,
Irishman, Scotch-Irishman, German--all were poured into the crucible.
Ideals clashed, and differing customs grated harshly. But the product of
a hundred years of cross-breeding was a splendid type of citizenship. At
the presidential inaugural ceremonies of March 4, 1881, six men chiefly
attracted the attention of the crowd: the retiring President, Hayes;
the incoming President, Garfield; the Chief-Justice who administered the
oath, Waite; the general commanding the army, William T. Sherman; the
ex-Secretary of the Treasury, John Sherman; and "the Marshal Ney of
America," Lieutenant-General Sheridan. Five of the six were natives
of Ohio, and the sixth was a lifelong resident. Men commented on the
striking group and rightly remarked that it could have been produced
only by a singularly happy blending of the ideas and ideals that form
the warp and woof of Americanism.

Amalgamation, however, took time; for there were towering prejudices
and antipathies to be overcome. The Yankee scorned the Southerner, who
reciprocated with a double measure of dislike. The New England settlers
were, as a rule, people of some education; not one of their communities
long went without a schoolmaster. They were pious, law-abiding,
industrious; their more easygoing neighbors were likely to consider them
over-sensitive and critical. But the quality that made most impression
upon others was their shrewdness in business transactions. They could
drive a bargain and could discover loopholes in a contract in a fashion
to take the average backwoodsman off his feet. "Yankee tricks" became,
indeed, a household phrase wherever New Englander and Southerner met.
Whether the Yankee talked or kept silent, whether he was generous or
parsimonious, he was always under suspicion.

What of the "Long Knives" from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky who
also made the Ohio lands their goal? Of books they knew little; they
did not name their settlements in honor of classic heroes. They were
not "gentlemen"; many of them, indeed, had sought the West to escape a
society in which distinctions of birth and possessions had put them at a
disadvantage. They were not so pious as the New Englanders, though
they were capable of great religious enthusiasm, and their morals were
probably not inferior. Their houses were poorer; their villages were not
so well kept; their dress was more uncouth, and their ways rougher. But
they were a hardy folk--brave, industrious, hospitable, and generous to
a fault.

In the first days of westward migration the favorite gateway into
the Ohio Valley was Cumberland Gap, at the southeastern corner of the
present State of Kentucky. Thence the Virginians and Carolinians passed
easily to the Ohio in the region of Cincinnati or Louisville. Later
emigrants from more northern States found other serviceable routes.
Until the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New Englanders reached
the West by three main avenues. Some followed the Mohawk and Genesee
turnpikes across central New York to Lake Erie. This route led directly,
of course, to the Western Reserve. Some traveled along the Catskill
turnpike from the Hudson to the headwaters of the Allegheny, and thence
descended the Ohio. Still others went by boat from Boston to New York,
Philadelphia, or Baltimore, in order to approach the Ohio by a more
southerly course.

The natural outlet from Pennsylvania was the Ohio River. Emigrants from
the western parts of the State floated down the Allegheny or Monongahela
to the main stream. Those from farther east, including settlers from New
Jersey, made the journey overland by one of several well-known roads.
The best of these was a turnpike following the line that General Forbes
had cut during the French and Indian War from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh
by way of Lancaster and Bedford. Baltimore was a favorite point of
departure, and from it the route lay almost invariably along a turnpike
to Cumberland on the upper Potomac, and thence by the National Road
across the mountains to Wheeling. In later days this was the route
chiefly taken from Virginia, although more southerly passes through the
Blue Ridge were used as outlets to the Great Kanawha, the Big Sandy, and
other streams flowing into the Ohio farther down.

Thus the lines of westward travel which in the East spread fan-shape
from Maine to Georgia converged on the Ohio; and that stream became, and
for half a century remained, the great pathway of empire. Most of the
emigrants had to cover long distances in overland travel before they
reached the hospitable waterway; some, especially in earlier times,
made the entire journey by land. Hundreds of the very poor went afoot,
carrying all their earthly possessions on their backs, or dragging
them in rude carts. But the usual conveyance was the canvas-covered
wagon--ancestor of the "prairie schooner" of the western plains--drawn
over the rough and muddy roads by four, or even six, horses. In this
vehicle the emigrants stowed their provisions, household furniture and
utensils, agricultural implements, looms, seeds, medicines, and every
sort of thing that the prudent householder expected to need, and for
which he could find space. Extra horses or oxen sometimes drew an
additional load; cattle, and even flocks of sheep, were occasionally
driven ahead or behind by some member of the family.

In the years of heaviest migration the highways converging on Pittsburgh
and Wheeling were fairly crowded with westward-flowing traffic. As a
rule several families, perhaps from the same neighborhood in the old
home, traveled together; and in any case the chance acquaintances of the
road and of the wayside inns broke the loneliness of the journey.
There were wonderful things to be seen, and every day brought novel
experiences. But exposure and illness, dread of Indian attacks, mishaps
of every sort, and the awful sense of isolation and of uncertainty
of the future, caused many a man's stout heart to quail, and brought
anguish unspeakable to brave women. Of such joys and sorrows, however,
is a frontier existence compounded; and of the growing thousands who
turned their faces toward the setting sun, comparatively few yielded
to discouragement and went back East. Those who did so were usually the
land speculators and people of weak, irresolute, or shiftless character.

An English traveler, Morris Birkbeck, who passed over the National Road
through southwestern Pennsylvania in 1817, was filled with amazement
at the number, hardihood, and determination of the emigrants whom he
encountered.

"Old America seems to be breaking up [he wrote] and moving westward. We
are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the
Ohio, of family groups, behind and before us.... A small wagon (so light
that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good load of
bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young citizens--and to
sustain marvelous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights) with
two small horses; sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all; excepting
a little store of hard-earned cash for the land office of the district;
where they may obtain a title for as many acres as they possess
half-dollars, being one fourth of the purchase money. The wagon has a
tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are
seen before, behind, or within the vehicle, according to the road or the
weather, or perhaps the spirits of the party.... A cart and single
horse frequently affords the means of transfer, sometimes a horse and
pack-saddle. Often the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects,
and his wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the
family." *


 * Quoted in Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 79-80.


Arrived at the Ohio, the emigrant either engaged passage on some form of
river-craft or set to work to construct with his own hands a vessel that
would bear him and his belongings to the promised land. The styles of
river-craft that appeared on the Ohio and other western streams in
the great era of river migration make a remarkable pageant. There
were canoes, pirogues, skiffs, rafts, dugouts, scows, galleys,
arks, keelboats, flatboats, barges, "broadhorns," "sneak-boxes," and
eventually ocean-going brigs, schooners, and steamboats. The canoe
served the early explorer and trader, and even the settler whose
possessions had been carried over the Alleghanies on a single packhorse.
But after the Revolution the needs of an awakening empire led to
the introduction of new types of craft, built to afford a maximum of
capacity and safety on a downward voyage, without regard for the demands
of a round trip. The most common of these one-way vessels was the
flatboat.

A flatboat trip down the great river was likely to be filled with
excitement. The sound of the steam-dredge had never been heard on the
western waters, and the streambed was as Nature had made it, or rather
was continually remaking it. Yearly floods washed out new channels and
formed new reefs and sand-bars, while logs and brush borne from the
heavily forested banks continually built new obstructions. Consequently
the sharpest lookout had to be maintained, and the pilot was both
skilful and lucky who completed his trip without permitting his boat
to be caught on a "planter" (a log immovably fixed in the river bed),
entangled in the branches of overhanging trees, driven on an island, or
dashed on the bank at a bend. Navigation by night and on foggy days was
hazardous in the extreme and was avoided as far as possible. If all went
well, the voyage from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati could be completed in six
or eight days; but delays might easily extend the period to a month.

One grave danger has not been mentioned--the Indians. From the moment
when the slow-moving flatboat passed beyond the protection of a white
settlement, it was liable to be fired on, by day or by night, by
redskins; and the better-built boats were so constructed as to be at
least partially bullet-proof. Sometimes extra timber was used to give
safety; sometimes the cargo was specially placed with that aim in view.
The Indians rarely went beyond the water's edge. Their favorite ruse was
to cause captive or renegade whites to run along the bank imploring to
be saved. When a boat had been decoyed to shore, and perhaps a landing
had been made, the savages would pour a murderous fire on the voyagers.
This practice became so common that pioneer boats "shunned the whites
who hailed them from the shores as they would have shunned the Indians,"
and as a consequence many whites escaping from the Indians in the
interior were refused succor and left to die.

When the flatboat reached its destination, it might find service as a
floating store, or even as a schoolhouse. But it was likely to be broken
up, so that the materials in it could be used for building purposes.
Before sawmills became common, lumber was a precious commodity, and
hundreds of pioneer cabins in the Ohio Valley were built partly or
wholly of the boards and timbers taken from the flatboats of their
owners. Even the "gunnels" were sometimes used in Cincinnati as
foundations for houses. In later days the flatboat, if in reasonably
good condition, was not unlikely to be sold to persons engaged in
trading down the Mississippi. Loaded with grain, flour, meats, and other
backwoods products, it would descend to Natchez or New Orleans, where
its cargo could be transferred to ocean-going craft. But in any case
its end was the same; for it would not have been profitable, even had
it been physically possible, to move the heavy, ungainly craft upstream
over long distances, in order to keep it continuously in service.



Chapter VII. Pioneer Days And Ways

Arrived on the lower Ohio, or one of its tributaries, the pioneer looked
out upon a land of remarkable riches. It was not a Mexico or a Peru,
with emblazoned palaces and glittering temples, nor yet a California,
with gold-flecked sands. It was merely an unending stretch of wooded
hills and grassy plains, bedecked with majestic forests and fructifying
rivers and lakes. It had no treasures save for the man of courage,
industry, and patience; but for such it held home, broad acres, liberty,
and the coveted opportunity for social equality and advancement.

The new country has been commonly thought of, and referred to by writers
on the history of the West, as a "wilderness"; and offhand, one might
suppose that the settlers were obliged literally to hew their way
through densely grown vegetation to the spots which they selected for
their homes. In point of fact, there were great areas of upland--not
alone in the prairie country of northern Indiana and Illinois, but in
the hilly regions within a hundred miles of the Ohio--that were almost
treeless. On these unobstructed stretches grasses grew in profusion; and
here roamed great herds of herbivorous animal-kind--deer and elk,
and also buffalo, "filing in grave procession to drink at the rivers,
plunging and snorting among the rapids and quicksands, rolling their
huge bulk on the grass, rushing upon each other in hot encounter, like
champions under shield." Along the watercourses ducks, wild geese,
cranes, herons, and other fowl sounded their harsh cries; gray
squirrels, prairie chickens, and partridges the hunter found at every
turn.

Furthermore, the forests, as a rule, were not difficult to penetrate.
The trees stood thick, but deer paths, buffalo roads, and Indian trails
ramified in all directions, and sometimes were wide enough to allow two
or three wagons to advance abreast. Mighty poplars, beeches, sycamores,
and "sugars" pushed to great heights in quest of air and sunshine, and
often their intertwining branches were locked solidly together by a
heavy growth of grape or other vines, producing a canopy which during
the summer months permitted scarcely a ray of sunlight to reach the
ground. There was, therefore, a notable absence of undergrowth. When a
tree died and decayed, it fell apart piecemeal; it was with difficulty
that woodsmen could wrest a giant oak or poplar from its moorings and
bring it to the ground, even by severing the trunk completely at the
base. Here and there a clean swath was cut through a forest, for perhaps
dozens of miles, by a hurricane. This gave opportunity for the growth of
a thicket of bushes and small trees, and such spots were equally likely
to be the habitations of wild beasts and the hiding-places of warlike
bands of redskins.

There were always adventurous pioneers who scorned the settlements and
went off with their families to fix their abodes in isolated places.
But the average newcomer preferred to find a location in, or reasonably
near, a settlement. The choice of a site, whether by a company of
immigrants wishing to establish a settlement or by an individual
settler, was a matter of much importance. Some thought must be given to
facilities for fortification against hostile natives. There must be
an adequate supply of drinking-water; and the location of innumerable
pioneer dwellings was selected with reference to free-flowing springs.
Pasture land for immediate use was desirable; and of course the
soil must be fertile. As a rule, the settler had the alternative of
establishing himself on the lowlands along a stream and obtaining ground
of the greatest productiveness, with the almost certain prospect of
annual attacks of malaria, or of seeking the poorer but more healthful
uplands. The attractions of the "bottoms" were frequently irresistible,
and the "ague" became a feature of frontier life almost as inevitable as
the proverbial "death and taxes."

The site selected, the next task was to clear a few acres of ground
where the cabin was to stand. It was highly desirable to have a belt
of open land as a protection against Indians and wild beasts; besides,
there must be fields cleared for tillage. If the settler had neighbors,
he was likely to have their aid in cutting away the densest growth of
trees, and in raising into position the heavy timbers which formed the
framework and walls of his cabin. Splendid oaks, poplars, and sycamores
were cut into convenient lengths, and such as could not be used were
rolled into great heaps and burned. Before sawmills were introduced
lumber could not be manufactured; afterwards, it became so plentiful as
to have small market value.

Almost without exception the frontier cabins had log walls; and they
were rarely of larger size than single lengths would permit. On an
average, they were twelve or fourteen feet wide and fifteen or eighteen
feet long. Sometimes they were divided into two rooms, with an attic
above; frequently there was but one room "downstairs." The logs were
notched together at the corners, and the spaces between them were filled
with moss or clay or covered with bark. Rafters were affixed to the
uppermost logs, and to one another, with wooden pins driven through
auger holes. In earliest times the roof was of bark; later on, shingles
were used, although nails were long unknown, and the shingles, after
being laid in rows, were weighted down with straight logs.

Sometimes there was only an earth floor. But as a rule "puncheons,"
i.e., thick, rough boards split from logs, were laid crosswise on round
logs and were fastened with wooden pins. There was commonly but a single
door, which was made also of puncheons and hung on wooden hinges. A
favorite device was to construct the door in upper and lower sections,
so as to make it possible, when there came a knock or a call from the
outside, to respond without offering easy entrance to an unwelcome
visitor. In the days when there was considerable danger of Indian
attacks no windows were constructed, for the householder could defend
only one aperture. Later, square holes which could be securely barred at
night and during cold weather were made to serve as windows. Flat pieces
of sandstone, if they could be found, were used in building the great
fireplace; otherwise, thick timbers heavily covered with clay were made
to serve. In scarcely a cabin was there a trace of iron or glass; the
whole could be constructed with only two implements--an ax and an auger.

Occasionally a family carried to its new home some treasured bits
of furniture; but the difficulty of transportation was likely to be
prohibitive, and as a rule the cabins contained only such pieces
of furniture as could be fashioned on the spot. A table was made by
mounting a smoothed slab on four posts, set in auger holes. For seats
short benches and three-legged stools, constructed after the manner of
the tables, were in common use. Cooking utensils, food-supplies, seeds,
herbs for medicinal purposes, and all sorts of household appliances were
stowed away on shelves, made by laying clapboards across wooden pins
driven into the wall and mounting to the ceiling; although after sawed
lumber came into use it was a matter of no great difficulty to construct
chests and cupboards. Not infrequently the settler's family slept on
bear skins or blankets stretched on the floor. But crude bedsteads were
made by erecting a pole with a fork in such a manner that other poles
could be supported horizontally in this fork and by crevices in the
walls. Split boards served as "slats" on which the bedding was spread.
For a long time "straw-ticks"--large cloth bags filled with straw or
sometimes dry grass or leaves--were articles of luxury. Iron pots and
knives were necessities which the wise householder carried with him from
his eastern or southern home. In the West they were hard to obtain.
The chief source of supply was the iron-manufacturing districts
of Pennsylvania and Virginia, whence the wares were carried to the
entrepots of river trade by packhorses. The kitchen outfit of the
average newcomer was completed with a few pewter dishes, plates, and
spoons. But winter evenings were utilized in whittling out wooden bowls,
trenchers, and noggins or cups, while gourds and hard-shelled squashes
were turned to numerous uses. The commonest drinking utensil was a
long-handled gourd.

The dress of the pioneer long remained a curious cross between that
of the Indians and that of the white people of the older sections. In
earlier times the hunting-shirt--made of linsey, coarse nettle-bark
linen, buffalo-hair, or even dressed deerskins--was universally worn by
the men, together with breeches, leggings, and moccasins. The women and
children were dressed in simple garments of linsey. In warm weather they
went barefooted; in cold, they wore moccasins or coarse shoes.

Rarely was there lack of food for these pioneer families. The soil was
prodigal, and the forests abounded in game. The piece de resistance of
the backwoods menu was "hog an' hominy"; that is to say, pork served
with Indian corn which, after being boiled in lye to remove the hulls,
had been soaked in clear water and cooked soft. "Johnny cake" and
"pone"--two varieties of cornbread--were regularly eaten at breakfast
and dinner. The standard dish for supper was cornmeal mush and milk. As
cattle were not numerous, the housewife often lacked milk, in which case
she fell back on her one never-failing resource--hominy; or she served
the mush with sweetened water, molasses, the gravy of fried meat, or
even bear's oil. Tea and coffee were long unknown, and when introduced
they were likely to be scorned by the men as "slops" good enough perhaps
for women and children. Vegetables the settlers grew in the garden plot
which ordinarily adjoined the house, and thrifty families had also a
"truck patch" in which they raised pumpkins, squashes, potatoes, beans,
melons, and corn for "roasting ears." The forests yielded game, as well
as fruits and wild grapes, and honey for sweetening.

The first quality for which the life of the frontier called was untiring
industry. It was possible, of course, to eke out an existence by
hunting, fishing, petty trading, and garnering the fruits which Nature
supplied without man's assistance. And many pioneers in whom the roving
instinct was strong went on from year to year in this hand-to-mouth
fashion. But the settler who expected to be a real home-builder, to gain
some measure of wealth, to give his children a larger opportunity in
life, must be prepared to work, to plan, to economize, and to sacrifice.
The forests had to be felled; the great logs had to be rolled together
and burned; crops of maize, tobacco, oats, and cane needed to be
planted, cultivated, and harvested; live-stock to be housed and fed;
fences and barns to be built; pork, beef, grain, whiskey, and other
products to be prepared for market, and perhaps carried scores of miles
to a place of shipment.

All these things had to be done under conditions of exceptional
difficulty. The settler never knew what night his place would be raided
by marauding redskins, who would be lenient indeed if they merely
carried off part of his cattle or burned his barn. Any morning he might
peer out of the "port hole" above the cabin door to see skulking figures
awaiting their chance. Sickness, too, was a menace and a terror. Picture
the horrors of isolation in times of emergency--wife or child suddenly
taken desperately ill, and no physician within a hundred miles; husband
or son hovering between life and death as the result of injury by a
falling tree, a wild beast, a venomous snake, an accidental gun-shot, or
the tomahawk of a prowling Indian. Who shall describe the anxiety, the
agony, which in some measure must have been the lot of every frontier
family? The prosaic illnesses of the flesh were troublesome enough.
On account of defective protection for the feet in wet weather, almost
everybody had rheumatism; most settlers in the bottom-lands fell victims
to fever and ague at one time or another; even in the hill country few
persons wholly escaped malarial disorders. "When this home-building and
land-clearing is accomplished," wrote one whose recollections of the
frontier were vivid, "a faithful picture would reveal not only the
changes that have been wrought, but a host of prematurely brokedown men
and women, besides an undue proportion resting peacefully in country
graveyards."

The frontiersman's best friend was his trusty rifle. With it he defended
his cabin and his crops from marauders, waged warfare on hostile
redskins, and obtained the game which formed an indispensable part of
his food supply. At first the gun chiefly used on the border was the
smooth-bored musket. But toward the close of the eighteenth century a
gunsmith named Deckhard, living at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, began making
flintlock rifles of small bore, and in a short time the "Deckhard rifle"
was to be found in the hands of almost every backwoodsman. The barrel
was heavy and from three feet to three feet and a half in length,
so that the piece, when set on the ground, reached at least to the
huntsman's shoulder. The bore was cut with twisting grooves, and was so
small that seventy bullets were required to weigh a pound. In loading,
a greased linen "patch" was wrapped around the bullet; and only a small
charge of powder was needed. The grin was heavy to carry and difficult
to hold steadily upon a target; but it was economical of ammunition, and
in the hands of the strong-muscled, keen-eyed, iron-nerved frontiersman
it was an exceedingly accurate weapon, at all events within the ordinary
limits of forest ranges. He was a poor marksman who could not shoot
running deer or elk at a distance of one hundred and fifty yards, and
kill ducks and geese on the wing; and "boys of twelve hung their heads
in shame if detected in hitting a squirrel in any other part of the body
than its head."

Life on the frontier was filled with hard work, danger, and anxiety. Yet
it had its lighter side, and, indeed, it may be doubted whether people
anywhere relished sport more keenly or found more pleasure in their
everyday pursuits. The occasional family without neighbors was likely to
suffer from loneliness. But few of the settlers were thus cut off, and
as a rule community life was not only physically possible but highly
developed. Many were the opportunities that served to bring together the
frontiersmen, with their families, throughout a settlement or county.
Foremost among such occasions were the log-rollings.

After a settler had felled the thick-growing trees on a plot which he
desired to prepare for cultivation, he cut them, either by sawing or by
burning, into logs twelve or fifteen feet in length. Frequently these
were three, four, or even five feet in diameter, so that they could not
be moved by one man, even with a team of horses. In such a situation,
the settler would send word to his neighbors for miles around that on
a given day there would be a log-rolling at his place; and when the day
arrived six, or a dozen, or perhaps a score, of sturdy men, with teams
of horses and yokes of oxen, and very likely accompanied by members
of their families, would arrive on the scene with merry shouts of
anticipation. By means of handspikes and chains drawn by horses or oxen,
the great timbers were pushed, rolled, and dragged into heaps, and by
nightfall the field lay open and ready for the plough--requiring, at the
most, only the burning of the huge piles that had been gathered.

Without loss of time the fires were started; and as darkness came on,
the countryside glowed as with the light of a hundred huge torches. The
skies were reddened, and as a mighty oak or poplar log toppled and fell
to the ground, showers of sparks lent the scene volcanic splendor.
Bats and owls and other dim-eyed creatures of the night flew about in
bewilderment, sometimes bumping hard against fences or other objects,
sometimes plunging madly into the flames and contributing to the general
holocaust. For days the great fires were kept going, until the last
remnants of this section of the once imposing forest were consumed;
while smoke hung far out over the country, producing an atmospheric
effect like that of Indian summer.

Heavy exertion called for generous refreshment, and on these occasions
the host could be depended on to provide an abundance of food and drink.
The little cabin could hardly be made to accommodate so many guests,
even in relays. Accordingly, a long table was constructed with planks
and trestles in a shady spot, and at noon--and perhaps again in the
evening--the women folk served a meal which at least made up in "staying
qualities" what it lacked in variety or delicacy. The principal dish
was almost certain to be "pot-pie," consisting of boiled turkeys, geese,
chickens, grouse, veal, or venison, with an abundance of dumplings.
This, with cornbread and milk, met the demands of the occasion; but
if the host was able to furnish a cask of rum, his generosity was
thoroughly appreciated.

In the autumn, corn-huskings were a favorite form of diversion,
especially for the young people; and in the early spring neighbors
sometimes came together to make maple sugar. A wedding was an important
event and furnished diversion of a different kind. From distances of
twenty and thirty miles people came to attend the ceremony, and often
the festivities extended over two or three days. Even now there was
work to be done; for as a rule the neighbors organized a house-building
"bee," and before separating for their homes they constructed a cabin
for the newly wedded pair, or at all events brought it sufficiently near
completion to be finished by the young husband himself.

Even after a day of heavy toil at log-rolling, the young men and boys
bantered one another into foot races, wrestling matches, shooting
contests, and other feats of strength or skill. And if a fiddler could
be found, the day was sure to end with a "hoe-down"--a dance that "made
even the log-walled house tremble." No corn-husking or wedding was
complete without dancing, although members of certain of the more
straitlaced religious sects already frowned upon the diversion.

Rough conditions of living made rough men, and we need not be surprised
by the testimony of English and American travelers, that the frontier
had more than its share of boisterous fun, rowdyism, lawlessness, and
crime. The taste for whiskey was universal, and large quantities were
manufactured in rude stills, not only for shipment down the Mississippi,
but for local consumption. Frequenters of the river-town taverns called
for their favorite brands--"Race Horse," "Moral Suasion," "Vox Populi,"
"Pig and Whistle," or "Split Ticket," as the case might be. But the
average frontiersman cared little for the niceties of color or flavor so
long as his liquor was cheap and produced the desired effect. Hard work
and a monotonous diet made him continually thirsty; and while ordinarily
he drank only water and milk at home, at the taverns and at social
gatherings he often succumbed to potations which left him in happy
drunken forgetfulness of daily hardships. House-raisings and weddings
often became orgies marked by quarreling and fighting and terminating in
brutal and bloody brawls. Foreign visitors to the back country were led
to comment frequently on the number of men who had lost an eye or an
ear, or had been otherwise maimed in these rough-and-tumble contests.

The great majority of the frontiersmen, however, were sober,
industrious, and law-abiding folk; and they were by no means beyond
the pale of religion. On account of the numbers of Scotch-Irish,
Presbyterianism was in earlier days the principal creed, although there
were many Catholics and adherents of the Reformed Dutch and German
churches, and even a few Episcopalians. About the beginning of the
nineteenth century sectarian ascendancy passed to the Methodists and
Baptists, whose ranks were rapidly recruited by means of one of the most
curious and characteristic of backwoods institutions, the camp-meeting
"revival." The years 1799 and 1800 brought the first of the several
great waves of religious excitement by which the West--especially Ohio,
Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee was periodically swept until within the
memory of men still living.

Camp-meetings were usually planned and managed by Methodist
circuit-riders or Baptist itinerant preachers, who hesitated not to
carry their work into the remotest and most dangerous parts of the
back country. When the news went abroad that such a meeting was to take
place, people flocked to the scene from far and near, in wagons,
on horseback, and on foot. Pious men and women came for the sake of
religious fellowship and inspiration; others not so pious came from
motives of curiosity, or even to share in the rough sport for which the
scoffers always found opportunity. The meeting lasted days, and even
weeks; and preaching, praying, singing, "testifying," and "exhorting"
went on almost without intermission. "The preachers became frantic
in their exhortations; men, women, and children, falling as if in
catalepsy, were laid out in rows. Shouts, incoherent singing, sometimes
barking as of an unreasoning beast, rent the air. Convulsive leaps and
dancing were common; so, too, 'jerking,' stakes being driven into the
ground to jerk by, the subjects of the fit grasping them as they writhed
and grimaced in their contortions. The world, indeed, seemed demented."
* Whole communities sometimes professed conversion; and it was
considered a particularly good day's work when notorious disbelievers or
wrong-doers--"hard bats," in the phraseology of the frontier--or gangs
of young rowdies whose only object in coming was to commit acts of
deviltry, succumbed to the peculiarly compelling influences of the
occasion.


 * Hosmer, "Short History of the Mississippi Valley," p. 116.


In this sort of religion there was, of course, much wild emotionalism
and sheer hysteria; and there were always people to whom it was
repellent. Backsliders were numerous, and the person who "fell from
grace" was more than likely to revert to his earlier wickedness in its
grossest forms. None the less, in a rough, unlearned, and materialistic
society such spiritual shakings-up were bound to yield much permanent
good. Most western people, at one time or another, came under the
influence of the Methodist and Baptist revivals; and from the men and
women who were drawn by them to a new and larger view of life were
recruited the hundreds of little congregations whose meeting-houses in
the course of time dotted the hills and plains from the Alleghanies
to the Mississippi. As for the hard-working, honest-minded frontier
preachers who braved every sort of danger in the performance of their
great task, the West owes them an eternal debt of gratitude. In the
words of Roosevelt, "their prejudices and narrow dislikes, their raw
vanity and sullen distrust of all who were better schooled than they,
count for little when weighed against their intense earnestness and
heroic self-sacrifice."

Nor was education neglected. Many of the settlers, especially those who
came from the South, were illiterate. But all who made any pretense of
respectability were desirous of giving their children an opportunity
to learn to read and write. Accordingly, wherever half a dozen families
lived reasonably close together, a log schoolhouse was sure to be found.
In the days before public funds existed for the support of education
the teachers were paid directly, and usually in produce, by the patrons.
Sometimes a wandering pedagogue would find his way into a community and,
being engaged to give instruction for two or three months during
the winter, would "board around" among the residents and take such
additional pay as he could get. More often, some one of the settlers who
was fortunate enough to possess the rudiments of an education
undertook the role of schoolmaster in the interval between the autumn
corn-gathering and the spring ploughing and planting.

Instruction rarely extended beyond the three R's; but occasionally a
newcomer who had somewhere picked up a smattering of algebra, Latin,
or astronomy stirred the wonder, if not also the suspicion, of the
neighborhood. Schoolbooks were few and costly; crude slates were made
from pieces of shale; pencils were fashioned from varicolored soapstone
found in the beds of small streams. No frontier picture is more familiar
or more pleasing than that of the farmer's boy sitting or lying on the
floor during the long winter evening industriously tracing by firelight
or by candlelight the proverb or quotation assigned him as an exercise
in penmanship, or wrestling with the intricacies of least common
denominators and highest common divisors. It is in such a setting that
we get our first glimpse of the greatest of western Americans, Abraham
Lincoln.



Chapter VIII. Tecumseh

Wayne's victory in 1795, followed by the Treaty of Fort Greenville, gave
the Northwest welcome relief from Indian warfare, and within four years
the Territory was ready to be advanced to the second of the three grades
of government provided for it in the Ordinance of 1787. A Legislature
was set up at Cincinnati, and in due time it proceeded to the election
of a delegate to Congress. Choice fell on a young man whose name was
destined to a permanent place in the country's history. William Henry
Harrison was the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the
scion of one of Virginia's most honored families. Entering the army in
1791, he had served as an aide-de-camp to Wayne in the campaign which
ended at Fallen Timbers, and at the time of his election was acting as
Secretary of the Territory and ex-officio Lieutenant-Governor.

Although but twenty-six years of age, and without a vote in the House of
Representatives, Harrison succeeded in procuring from Congress in 1800
an act dividing the Territory into two distinct "governments," separated
by the old Greenville treaty line as far as Fort Recovery and then by
a line running due north to the Canadian boundary. The division to the
east was named Ohio, that to the west Indiana; and Harrison was made
Governor of the latter, with his residence at Vincennes. In 1802 the
development of the back country was freshly emphasized by the admission
of Ohio as a State.

Meanwhile the equilibrium between the white man and the red again became
unstable. In the Treaty of 1795 the natives had ceded only southern
Ohio, southeastern Indiana, and a few other small and scattered areas.
Northward and westward, their country stretched to the Lakes and the
Mississippi, unbroken except by military posts and widely scattered
settlements; and title to all of this territory had been solemnly
guaranteed. As late as 1800 the white population of what is now Indiana
was practically confined to Clark's Grant, near the falls of the
Ohio, and a small region around Vincennes. It numbered not more than
twenty-five hundred persons. But thereafter immigration from the
seaboard States, and from the nearer lands of Kentucky and Tennessee,
set in on a new scale. By 1810 Indiana had a white population of
twenty-five thousand, and the cabins of the energetic settlers dotted
river valleys and hillsides never before trodden by white man.

In this new rush of pioneers the rights of the Indians received scant
consideration. Hardy and well-armed Virginians and Kentuckians broke
across treaty boundaries and possessed themselves of fertile lands to
which they had no valid claim. White hunters trespassed far and wide
on Indian territory, until by 1810 great regions, which a quarter of
a century earlier abounded in deer, bear, and buffalo, were made as
useless for Indian purposes as barren wastes. Although entitled to the
protection of law in his person and property, the native was cheated and
overawed at every turn; he might even be murdered with impunity. Abraham
Lincoln's uncle thought it a virtuous act to shoot an Indian on sight,
and the majority of pioneers agreed with him.

"I can tell at once," wrote Harrison in 1801, "upon looking at an Indian
whom I may chance to meet whether he belongs to a neighboring or a
more distant tribe. The latter is generally well-clothed, healthy, and
vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication,
and many of them without arms excepting a knife, which they carry for
the most villainous purposes." The stronger tribes perceived quite as
clearly as did the Governor the ruinous effects of contact between the
two peoples, and the steady destruction of the border warriors became
a leading cause of discontent. Congress had passed laws intended to
prevent the sale of spiritucus liquors to the natives, but the courts
had construed these measures to be operative only outside the bounds of
States and organized Territories, and in the great unorganized Northwest
the laws were not heeded, and the ruinous traffic went on uninterrupted.
Harrison reported that when there were only six hundred warriors on the
Wabash the annual consumption of whiskey there was six thousand gallons,
and that killing each other in drunken brawls had "become so customary
that it was no longer thought criminal."

Most exasperating, however, from the red man's point of view was the
insatiable demand of the newcomers for land. In the years 1803, 1804,
and 1805 Harrison made treaties with the remnants of the Miami, Eel
River, Piankeshaw, and Delaware tribes--characterized by him as "a body
of the most depraved wretches on earth"--which gained for the settlers a
strip of territory fifty miles wide south of White River; and in 1809 he
similarly acquired, by the Treaty of Fort Wayne, three million acres,
in tracts which cut into the heart of the Indian country for almost a
hundred miles up both banks of the Wabash. The Wabash valley was richer
in game than any other region south of Lake Michigan, and its loss was
keenly felt by the Indians. Indeed, it was mainly the cession of 1809
that brought once more to a crisis the long-brewing difficulties with
the Indians.

About the year 1768 the Creek squaw of a Shawnee warrior gave birth
at one time to three boys, in the vicinity of the present city of
Springfield, Ohio. * One of the three barely left his name in aboriginal
annals. A second, known as Laulewasikaw, "the man with the loud voice,"
poses in the pages of history as "the prophet." The third brother was
Tecumseh, "the wild-cat that leaps upon its prey," or "the shooting
star," as the name has been translated. He is described as a tall,
handsome warrior--daring and energetic, of fluent and persuasive speech,
given to deep reflection, an implacable hater of the white man. Other
qualities he possessed which were not so common among his people. He had
perfect self-command, a keen insight into human motives and purposes,
and an exceptional capacity to frame plans and organize men to carry
them out. His crowning scheme for bringing together the tribes of
the Middle West into a grand democratic confederacy to regulate land
cessions and other dealings with the whites stamps him as perhaps the
most statesmanlike member of his race.


 * Authorities differ as to the facts of Tecumseh's birth. His
earliest biographer, Benjamin Drake, holds that he was "wholly a
Shawanoe" and that he was a fourth child, the Prophet and another son
being twins. William Henry Harrison spoke of Tecumseh's mother as a
Creek.


While yet hardly more than a boy, Tecumseh seems to have been stirred to
deep indignation by the persistent encroachment of the whites upon
the hunting-grounds of his fathers. The cessions of 1804 and 1805
he specially resented, and it is not unlikely that they clinched the
decision of the young warrior to take up the task which Pontiac had
left unfinished. At all events, the plan was soon well in hand. A less
far-seeing leader would have been content to call the scattered tribes
to a momentary alliance with a view to a general uprising against the
invaders. But Tecumseh's purposes ran far deeper. All of the Indian
peoples, of whatever name or relationships, from the Lakes to the Gulf
and from the Alleghanies to the Rockies, were to be organized in a
single, permanent confederacy. This union, furthermore, was to consist,
not of chieftains, but of the warriors; and its governing body was to be
a warriors' congress, an organ of genuine popular rule. Joint ownership
of all Indian lands was to be assumed by the confederacy, and the
piecemeal cession of territory by petty tribal chiefs, under pressure
of government agents, was to be made impossible. Only thus, Tecumseh
argued, could the red man hope to hold his own in the uneven contest
that was going on.

The plan was brilliant, even though impracticable. Naturally, it did
not appeal instantly to the chieftains, for it took away--tribal
independence and undermined the chieftain's authority. Besides, its
author was not a chief, and had no sanction of birth or office. Its
success was dependent on the building of an intertribal association such
as Indian history had never known. And while there was nothing in it
which contravened the professed policy of the United States, it ran
counter to the irrepressible tendency of the advancing white population
to spread at will over the great western domain.

By these obstacles Tecumseh was not deterred. With indefatigable zeal he
traveled from one end of the country to the other, arguing with chiefs,
making fervid speeches to assembled warriors, and in every possible
manner impressing his people with his great idea. The Prophet went
with him; and when the orator's logic failed to carry, conviction, the
medicine-man's imprecations were relied upon to save the day. Events,
too, played into their hands. The Leopard-Chesapeake affair, * in 1807,
roused strong feeling in the West and prompted the Governor-General of
Canada to begin intrigues looking to an alliance with the redskins in
the event of war. And when, late in the same year, Governor Hull
of Michigan Territory indiscreetly negotiated a new land cession at
Detroit, the northern tribes at once joined Tecumseh's league, muttering
threats to slay the chiefs by whom the cession had been sanctioned.


 * See "Jefferson and his Colleagues," by Allen Johnson (in "The
Chronicles of America").


In the spring of 1808 Tecumseh and his brother carried their plans
forward another step by taking up their residence at a point in
central Indiana where Tippecanoe Creek flows into the Wabash River.
The place--which soon got the name of the Prophet's Town--was almost
equidistant from Vincennes, Fort Wayne, and Fort Dearborn; from it
the warriors could paddle their canoes to any part of the Ohio or the
Mississippi, and with only a short portage, to the waters of the Maumee
and the Great Lakes. The situation was, therefore, strategic. A village
was laid out, and the population was soon numbered by the hundred.
Livestock was acquired, agriculture was begun, the use of whiskey was
prohibited, and every indication was afforded of peaceful intent.

Seasoned frontiersmen, however, were suspicious. Reports came in that
the Tippecanoe villagers engaged daily in warlike exercises; rumor had
it that emissaries of the Prophet were busily stirring the tribes, far
and near, to rebellion. Governor Harrison was not a man to be easily
frightened, but he became apprehensive, and proposed to satisfy himself
by calling Tecumseh into conference.

The interview took place at Vincennes, and was extended over a period
of two weeks. There was a show of firmness, yet of good will, on both
sides. The Governor counseled peace, orderliness, and industry; the
warrior guest professed a desire to be a friend to the United States,
but said frankly that if the country continued to deal with the tribes
singly in the purchase of land he would be obliged to ally himself with
Great Britain. To Harrison's admonition that the redskins should leave
off drinking whiskey--"that it was not made for them, but for the white
people, who alone knew how to use it"--the visitor replied pointedly by
asking that the sale of liquor be stopped.

Notwithstanding the tenseness of the situation, Harrison negotiated
the land cessions of 1809, which cost the Indians their last valuable
hunting-grounds in Indiana. The powerful Wyandots promptly joined
Tecumseh's league, and war was made inevitable. Delay followed only
because the Government at Washington postponed the military occupation
of the new purchase, and because the British authorities in Canada,
desiring Tecumseh's confederacy to attain its maximum strength before
the test came, urged the redskins to wait.

For two more years--while Great Britain and the United States hovered on
the brink of war--preparations continued. Tribe after tribe in Indiana
and Illinois elected Tecumseh as their chief, alliances reached to
regions as remote as Florida. In 1810 another conference took place at
Vincennes; and this time, notwithstanding Harrison's request that not
more than thirty redskins should attend, four hundred came in Tecumseh's
train, fully armed.

"A large portico in front of the Governor's house [says a contemporary
account] had been prepared for the purpose with seats, as well for the
Indians as for the citizens who were expected to attend. When Tecumseh
came from his camp, with about forty of his warriors, he stood off, and
on being invited by the Governor, through an interpreter, to take his
seat, refused, observing that he wished the council to be held under the
shade of some trees in front of the house. When it was objected that it
would be troublesome to remove the seats, he replied that 'it would only
be necessary to remove those intended for the whites--that the red men
were accustomed to sit upon the earth, which was their mother, and that
they were always happy to recline upon her bosom.'" *


 * James Hall, "Memoir of William Henry Harrison," pp. 113-114.


The chieftain's equivocal conduct aroused fresh suspicion, but he was
allowed to proceed with the oration which he had come to deliver. Freely
rendered, the speech ran, in part, as follows:

"I have made myself what I am; and I would that I could make the red
people as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the Great
Spirit that rules over all. I would not then come to Governor Harrison
to ask him to tear the treaty [of 1809]; but I would say to him,
Brother, you have liberty to return to your own country. Once there was
no white man in all this country: then it belonged to red men, children
of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit to keep it, to
travel over it, to eat its fruits, and fill it with the same race--once
a happy race, but now made miserable by the white people, who are never
contented, but always encroaching. They have driven us from the great
salt water, forced us over the mountains, and would shortly push us into
the lakes--but we are determined to go no further. The only way to stop
this evil is for all red men to unite in claiming a common and equal
right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now--for it never
was divided, but belongs to all.... Any sale not made by all is not
good."

In his reply Harrison declared that the Indians were not one nation,
since the Great Spirit had "put six different tongues in their heads,"
and argued that the Indiana lands had been in all respects properly
bought from their rightful owners. Tecumseh's blood boiled under this
denial of his main contention, and with the cry, "It is false," he gave
a signal to his warriors, who sprang to their feet and seized their
war-clubs. For a moment an armed clash was imminent. But Harrison's
cool manner enabled him to remain master of the situation, and a
well-directed rebuke sent the chieftain and his followers to their
quarters.

On the following morning Tecumseh apologized for his impetuosity and
asked that the conference be renewed. The request was granted, and again
the forest leader pressed for an abandonment of the policy of purchasing
land from the separate tribes. Harrison told him that the question was
for the President, rather than for, him, to decide. "As the great chief
is to determine the matter," responded the visitor grimly, "I hope the
Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to induce him to direct
you to give up this land. It is true he is so far off he will not be
injured by the war. He may sit still in his town, and drink his wine,
while you and I will have to fight it out."

Still the clash was averted. Once more, in the summer of 1811, Tecumseh
appeared at Vincennes, and again the deep issue between the two peoples
was threshed out as fruitlessly as before. Announcing his purpose to
visit the southern tribes to unite them with those of the North in a
peaceful confederacy, the chieftain asked that during his absence all
matters be left as they were, and promised that upon his return he would
go to see President Madison and "settle everything with him."

Naturally, no pledge of the kind was given, and no sooner had Tecumseh
and twenty of his warriors started southward on their mission to the
Creeks than Harrison began preparations to end the menace that had been
so long hanging over the western country. Troops were sent to Harrison;
and volunteers were called for. As fast as volunteers came in they
were sent up to the Wabash to take possession of the new purchase.
Reinforcements arrived from Pittsburgh and from Kentucky, and in a short
while the Governor was able to bring together at Fort Harrison, near
the site of the present city of Terre Haute, twenty-four companies
of regulars, militia, and Indians, aggregating about nine hundred
well-armed men.

Late in October this army, commanded by Harrison in person, set forth
for the destruction of the Tippecanoe rendezvous. On the way stray
redskins were encountered, but the advance was not resisted, and to his
surprise Harrison was enabled to lead his forces unmolested to within
a few hundred yards of the Prophet's headquarters. Emissaries now came
saying that the invasion was wholly unexpected, professing peaceful
intentions, and asking for a parley. Harrison had no idea that anything
could be settled by negotiation, but he preferred to wait until the next
day to make an attack; accordingly he agreed to a council, and the
army went into camp for the night on an oak-covered knoll about a mile
northwest of the village. No entrenchments were thrown up, but the
troops were arranged in a triangle to conform to the contour of the
hill, and a hundred sentinels under experienced officers were stationed
around the camp-fires. The night was cold, and rain fell at intervals,
although at times the moon shone brightly through the flying clouds.

The Governor was well aware of the proneness of the Indians to early
morning attacks, so that about four o'clock on the 7th of November he
rose to call the men to parade. He had barely pulled on his boots when
the forest stillness was broken by the crack of a rifle at the farthest
angle of the camp, and instantly the Indian yell, followed by a
fusillade, told that a general attack had begun. Before the militiamen
could emerge in force from their tents, the sentinel line was broken
and the red warriors were pouring into the enclosure. Desperate fighting
ensued, and when time for reloading failed, it was rifle butt and
bayonet against tomahawk and scalping knife in hand-to-hand combat. For
two hours the battle raged in the darkness, and only when daylight came
were the troops able to charge the redskins, dislodge them from behind
the trees, and drive them to a safe distance in the neighboring swamp.
Sixty-one of Harrison's officers and men were killed or mortally
wounded; one hundred and twenty-seven others suffered serious injury.
The Governor himself probably owed his life to the circumstance that in
the confusion he mounted a bay horse instead of his own white stallion,
whose rider was shot early in the contest.

The Indian losses were small, and for twenty-four hours Harrison's
forces kept their places, hourly expecting another assault. "Night,"
wrote one of the men subsequently, "found every man mounting guard,
without food, fire, or light and in a drizzling rain. The Indian dogs,
during the dark hours, produced frequent alarms by prowling in search
of carrion about the sentinels." There being no further sign of
hostilities, early on the 8th of November a body of mounted riflemen set
out for the Prophet's village, which they found deserted. The place had
evidently been abandoned in haste, for nothing--not even a fresh stock
of English guns and powder--had been destroyed or carried off. After
confiscating much-needed provisions and other valuables, Harrison
ordered the village to be burned. Then, abandoning camp furniture and
private baggage to make room in the wagons for the wounded, he set out
on the return trip to Vincennes. A company was left at Fort Harrison,
and the main force reached the capital on the 18th of November.

Throughout the western country the news of the battle was received with
delight, and it was fondly believed that the backbone of Tecumseh's
conspiracy was broken. It was even supposed that the indomitable
chieftain and his brother would be forthwith surrendered by the Indians
to the authorities of the United States. Harrison was acclaimed as a
deliverer. The legislatures of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois formally
thanked him for his services; and if, as his Federalist enemies charged,
he had planned the whole undertaking with a view to promoting his
personal fortunes, he ought to have been satisfied with the result. It
was the glamour of Tippecanoe that three decades afterwards carried him
into the President's chair.

In precipitating a clash while Tecumseh, the master-mind of the
fast-growing confederacy, was absent, the Prophet committed a capital
blunder. When reproached by his warriors, he declared that all would
have gone well but for the fact that on the night before the battle
his squaw had profanely touched the pot in which his magic charms were
brewed, so that the spell had been broken! The explanation was not very
convincing, and ominous murmurings were heard. Before the end of the
year, however, word came to Vincennes that the crafty magician was back
at Tippecanoe, that the village had been rebuilt, and that the lives
of the white settlers who were pouring into the new purchase were again
endangered.

Still more alarming was the news of Tecumseh's return in January, 1812,
from a very successful visit to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees. He
began by asking leave to make his long-projected visit to Washington to
obtain peace from the President, and he professed deep regret for "the
unfortunate transaction that took place between the white people and
a few of our young men at our village." To the British agent at
Amherstburg he declared that had he been on the spot there would have
been no fighting at Tippecanoe. It is reasonable to suppose that in
this case there would have been, at all events, no Indian attack; for
Tecumseh was thoroughly in sympathy with the British plan, which was
to unite and arm the natives, but to prevent a premature outbreak. The
chieftain's presence, however, would hardly have deterred Harrison from
carrying out his decision to break up the Tippecanoe stronghold.

The spring of 1812 brought an ominous renewal of depredations. Two
settlers were murdered within three miles of Fort Dearborn; an entire
family was massacred but five miles from Vincennes; from all directions
came reports of other bloody deeds. The frontier was thrown into panic.
A general uprising was felt to be impending; even Vincennes was thought
to be in danger. "Most of the citizens of this country," reported
Harrison, on the 6th of May, "have abandoned their farms, and taken
refuge in such temporary forts as they have been able to construct.
Scores fled to Kentucky and to even more distant regions."

Tecumseh continued to assert his friendship for his "white brothers" and
to treat the battle at Tippecanoe as a matter of no moment. The murders
on the frontier he declared to be the work of the Potawatomi, who were
not under his control, and for whose conduct he had no excuse. But it
was noted that he made no move to follow up his professed purpose to
visit Washington in quest of peace, and that he put forth no effort to
restrain his over-zealous allies. It was plain enough that he was simply
awaiting a signal from Canada, and that, as the commandant at Fort Wayne
tersely reported, if the country should have a war with Great Britain,
it must be prepared for an Indian war as well.



Chapter IX. The War Of 1812 And The New West

The spring of 1812 thus found the back country in a turmoil, and it
was with a real sense of relief that the settlers became aware of the
American declaration of war against Great Britain on the 18th of June.
More than once Governor Harrison had asked for authority to raise an
army with which to "scour" the Wabash territory. In the fear that such
a step would drive the redskins into the arms of the British, the War
Department had withheld its consent. Now that the ban was lifted,
the people could expect the necessary measures to be taken for their
defense. In no part of the country was the war more popular; nowhere did
the mass of the able-bodied population show greater eagerness to take
the field.

According to official returns, the Westerners were totally unprepared
for the contest. There were but five garrisoned posts between the Ohio
and the Canadian frontier. Fort Harrison had fifty men, Fort Wayne
eighty-five, Fort Dearborn fifty-three, Fort Mackinac eighty-eight,
and Detroit one hundred and twenty--a total force of fewer than four
hundred. The entire standing army of the United States numbered but
sixty-seven hundred men, and it was obvious that the trans-Alleghany
population would be obliged to carry almost alone the burden of their
own defense. The task would not be easy; for General Brock, commanding
in upper Canada, had at least two thousand regulars and, as soon as
hostilities began, was joined by Tecumseh and many hundred redskins.

While the question of the war was still under debate in Congress,
President Madison made a requisition on Ohio for twelve hundred militia,
and in early summer the Governors of Indiana and Illinois called
hundreds of volunteers into service. Leaving their families as far as
possible under the protection of stockades or of the towns, the patriots
flocked to the mustering-grounds; many, like Cincinnatus of old,
deserted the plough in midfield. Guns and ammunition in sufficient
quantity were lacking; even tents and blankets were often wanting. But
enthusiasm ran high, and only capable leadership was needed to make of
these frontier forces, once they were properly equipped, a formidable
foe.

The story of the leaders and battles of the war in the West has been
told in an earlier volume of this series. * It will be necessary here
merely to call to mind the stages through which this contest passed,
as a preliminary to a glimpse of the conditions under which Westerners
fought and of the new position into which their section of the country
was brought when peace was restored. So far as the regions north of the
Ohio were concerned, the war developed two phases. The first began with
General William Hull's expedition from Ohio against Fort Malden for the
relief of Detroit, and it ended with the humiliating surrender of that
important post, together with the forced abandonment of Forts Dearborn
and Mackinac, so that the Wabash and Maumee became, for all practical
purposes, the country's northern boundary. This was a story of complete
and bitter defeat. The second phase began likewise with a disaster--the
needless loss of a thousand men on the Raisin River, near Detroit. Yet
it succeeded in bringing William Henry Harrison into chief command, and
it ended in Commodore Perry's signal victory on Lake Erie and Harrison's
equally important defeat of the disheartened British land forces on
the banks of the Thames River, north of the Lake. At this Battle of the
Thames perished Tecumseh, who in point of fact was the real force behind
the British campaigns in the West. Tradition describes him on the eve
of the battle telling his comrades that his last day had come, solemnly
stripping off his British uniform before going into battle, and arraying
himself in the fighting costume of his own people.


 * See "The Fight for a Free Sea," by Ralph D. Paine (in "The
Chronicles of America").


For two-thirds of the time, the war went badly for the Westerners, and
only at the end did it turn out to be a brilliant success. The reasons
for the dreary succession of disasters are not difficult to discover.
Foremost among them is the character of the troops and officers. The
material from which the regiments were recruited was intrinsically good,
but utterly raw and untrained. The men could shoot well; they had great
powers of endurance; and they were brave. But there the list of their
military virtues ends.

The scheme of military organization relied upon throughout the West was
that of the volunteer militia. In periods of ordinary Indian warfare
the system served its purpose fairly well. Under stern necessity, the
self-willed, independence-loving backwoodsmen could be brought to act
together for a few weeks or months; but they had little systematic
training, and their impatience of restraint prevented the building up
of any real discipline. There were periodic musters for company or
regimental drill. But, as a rule, drill duty was not taken seriously.
Numbers of men failed to report; and those who came were likely to
give most of their time to horse-races, wrestling-matches, shooting
contests--not to mention drinking and brawling--which turned the
occasion into mere merrymaking or disorder. The men brought few
guns, and when drills were actually held these soldiers in the making
contented themselves with parading with cornstalks over their shoulders.
"Cornstalk drill" thus became a frontier epithet of derision. It goes
without saying that these troops were poorly officered. The captains and
colonels were chosen by the men, frequently with more regard for their
political affiliations or their general standing in the community than
for their capacity as military commanders; nor were the higher officers,
appointed by the chief executive of territory, state, or nation, more
likely to be chosen with a view to their military fitness.

So it came about, as Roosevelt has said, that the frontier people of the
second generation "had no military training whatever, and though they
possessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from
it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of
practising self-restraint or obeying orders longer than they saw fit."
* When the War of 1812 began, these backwoods troops were pitted against
British regulars who were powerfully supported by Indian allies. The
officers of these untrained American troops were, like Hull, pompous,
broken-down, political incapables; while to the men themselves may
fairly be applied Amos Kendall's disgusted characterization of a
Kentucky muster: "The soldiers are under no more restraint than a herd
of swine. Reasoning, remonstrating, threatening, and ridiculing their
officers, they show their sense of equality and their total want
of subordination." Not until the very last of the war, when under
Harrison's direction capable and experienced officers drilled them
into real soldiers, did these backwoods stalwarts become an effective
fighting force.


 * "Winning of the West," vol. IV, p. 246.


There were also shortcomings of another sort. None was more exasperating
or costly than the lack of means of transportation. Even in Ohio, the
oldest and most settled portion of the Northwest, roads were few and
poor; elsewhere there were practically none of any kind. But the regions
in which the war was carried on were far too sparsely populated to be
able to furnish the supplies, even the foodstuffs, needed by the troops;
and materials of every sort had to be transported from the East, by
river, lake, and wilderness trail. Up and down the great unbroken
stretches between the Ohio and the Lakes moved the floundering supply
trains in the vain effort to keep up with the armies, or to reach camps
or forts in time to avert starvation or disaster. Pack-horses waded
knee-deep in mud; wagons were dragged through mire up to their hubs;
even empty vehicles sometimes became so embedded that they had to be
abandoned, the drivers being glad to get off with their horses alive.
Many times a quartermaster, taking advantage of a frost, would send
off a convoy of provisions, only to hear of its being swamped by a thaw
before reaching its destination. One of the tragedies of the war was the
suffering of the troops while waiting for supplies of clothing, tents,
medicines, and food which were stuck in swamps or frozen up in rivers or
lakes.

Beset with pleurisy, pneumonia, and rheumatism in winter, with fevers
in summer, and subject to attack by the Indians at all times, these
frontier soldiers led an existence of exceptional hardship. Only the
knowledge that they were fighting for their freedom and their homes held
them to their task. An interesting sidelight on the conditions under
which their work was done is contained in the following extract from a
letter written by a volunteer in 1814:

"On the second day of our march a courier arrived from General Harrison,
ordering the artillery to advance with all possible speed. This was
rendered totally impossible by the snow which took place, it being
a complete swamp nearly all day. On the evening of the same day news
arrived that General Harrison had retreated to Portage River, eighteen
miles in the rear of the encampment at the rapids. As many men as could
be spared determined to proceed immediately to re-enforce him.... At two
o'clock the next morning our tents were struck, and in half an hour we
were on the road. I will candidly confess that on that day I regretted
being a soldier. On that day we marched thirty miles under an incessant
rain; and I am afraid you will doubt my veracity when I tell you that
in eight miles of the best of the road, it took us over the knees,
and often to the middle. The Black Swamp would have been considered
impassable by all but men determined to surmount every difficulty to
accomplish the object of their march. In this swamp you lose sight of
terra firma altogether--the water was about six inches deep on the ice,
which was very rotten, often breaking through to the depth of four or
five feet. The same night we encamped on very wet ground, but the driest
that could be found, the rain still continuing. It was with difficulty
we could raise fires; we had no tents; our clothes were wet, no axes,
nothing to cook with, and very little to eat. A brigade of pack-horses
being near us, we procured from them some flour, killed a hog (there
were plenty of THEM along the road); our bread was baked in the ashes,
and our pork we broiled on the coals--a sweeter meal I never partook of.
When we went to sleep it was on two logs laid close to each other, to
keep our bodies from the damp ground. Good God! What a pliant being is
man in adversity." *


 * Dawson. "William H. Harrison," p. 369.


The principal theater of war was the Great Lakes and the lands adjacent
to them. Prior to the campaign which culminated in Jackson's victory at
New Orleans after peace had been signed, the Mississippi Valley had been
untrodden by British soldiery. The contest, none the less, came close
home to the backwoods populations. Scores of able-bodied men from every
important community saw months or years of toilsome service; many
failed to return to their homes, or else returned crippled, weakened,
or stricken with fatal diseases; crops were neglected, or had only
such care as could be given them by old men and boys; trade languished;
Indian depredations wrought further ruin to life and property and kept
the people continually in alarm. Until 1814, reports of successive
defeats, in both the East and West, had a depressing influence and led
to solemn speculation as to whether the back country stood in danger of
falling again under British dominion.

It was, therefore, with a very great sense of relief that the West heard
in 1815 that peace had been concluded. At a stroke both the British
menace and the danger from the Indians were removed; for although
the redskins were still numerous and discontented, their spirit of
resistance was broken. Never again was there a general uprising against
the whites; never again did the Northwest witness even a local Indian
war of any degree of seriousness save Black Hawk's Rebellion in 1832.
Tecumseh manifestly realized before he made his last stand at the Thames
that the cause of his people was forever lost.

For several years the unsettled conditions on the frontiers had
restrained any general migration thither from the seaboard States. But
within a few months after the proclamation of peace the tide again set
westward, and with an unprecedented force. Men who had suffered in their
property or other interests from the war turned to Indiana and Illinois
as a promising field in which to rebuild their fortunes. The rapid
extinction of Indian titles opened up vast tracts of desirable land, and
the conditions of purchase were made so easy that any man of ordinary
industry and integrity could meet them. Speculators and promoters
industriously advertised the advantages of localities in which they
were interested, boomed new towns, and even loaned money to ambitious
emigrants.

The upshot was that the population of Indiana grew from twenty-five
thousand in 1810 to seventy thousand in 1816, when the State was
admitted to the Union. Illinois filled with equal rapidity, and attained
statehood only two years later. Then the tide swept irresistibly
westward across the Mississippi into the great regions which had
been acquired from France in 1803. As late as 1819, the Territory of
Missouri, comprising all of the Louisiana Purchase north of the present
State of Louisiana, had a population of only twenty-two thousand,
including many French and Spanish settlers and traders. But in 1818 it
had a population of more than sixty thousand, and was asking Congress
for legislation under which the most densely inhabited portion should be
set off as the State of Missouri. Thus the Old Northwest was not merely
losing its frontier character and taking its place in the nation on
a footing with the seaboard sections; it was also serving as the open
gateway to a newer, vaster, and in some respects richer American back
country.

In the main, southern Indiana and Illinois--as well as the
trans-Mississippi territory--drew from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia,
and the remoter South. North of the latitude of Indianapolis and St.
Louis the lines of migration led chiefly from New England, New York, and
Pennsylvania. But many of the settlers came, immediately or after only
a brief interval, from Europe. The decade following the close of the war
was a time of unprecedented emigration from England, Scotland, Ireland,
and Germany to the United States; and while many of the newcomers
found homes in the eastern States, where they in a measure offset the
depopulation caused by the westward exodus, a very large proportion
pressed on across the mountains in quest of the cheap lands in the
undeveloped interior. During these years the western country was
repeatedly visited by European travelers with a view to ascertaining its
resources, markets, and other attractions for settlers; and emigration
thither was powerfully stimulated by the writings of these observers, as
well as by the activities of sundry founders of agricultural colonies.

"These favorable accounts," wrote Adlard Welby, an Englishman who made a
tour of inspection through the West in 1819, "aided by a period of
real privation and discontent in Europe, caused emigration to increase
tenfold; and though various reports of unfavorable nature soon
circulated, and many who had emigrated actually returned to their
native land in disgust, yet still the trading vessels were filled with
passengers of all ages and descriptions, full of hope, looking forward
to the West as to a land of liberty and delight--a land flowing with
milk and honey--a second land of Canaan." *


 * Thwaites, "Early Western Travels," vol. XII, p. 148.


After the dangers from the Indians were overcome, the main obstacle
to western development was the lack of means of easy and cheap
transportation. The settler found it difficult to reach the Legion which
he had selected for his home. Eastern supplies of salt, iron, hardware,
and fabrics and foodstuffs could be obtained only at great expense.
The fast-increasing products of the western farms--maize, wheat, meats,
livestock--could be marketed only at a cost which left a slender margin
of profit. The experiences of the late war had already proved the need
of highways as auxiliaries of national defense. It required a month to
carry goods from Baltimore to central Ohio. None the less, even before
the War of 1812, hundreds of transportation companies were running
four-horse freight wagons between the eastern and western States; and in
1820 more than three thousand wagons--practically all carrying western
products--passed back and forth between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh,
transporting merchandise valued at eighteen million dollars.

Small wonder that western producer and eastern dealer alike became
interested in internal improvements; or that under the double stimulus
of private and public enterprise Indian trails fast gave way to rough
pioneer roadways, and they to carefully planned and durable turnpikes.
Long before the War of 1812, Jefferson, Gallatin, Clay, and other
statesmen had conceived of a great highway, or series of highways,
connecting the seaboard with the interior as the surest and best means
of promoting national unity and strength; and, in the act of Congress of
1802 admitting the State of Ohio, a promising beginning had been made
by setting aside five per cent of the money received from the sale of
public lands in the State for the building of roads extending eastward
to the navigable waters of Atlantic streams. In 1808 Secretary Gallatin
had presented to Congress a report calling for an outlay on internal
improvements of two million dollars of federal money a year for
ten years; and in 1811 the Government had entered upon the greatest
undertaking of its kind in the history of the country.

This enterprise was the building of the magnificent highway known to
the law as the Cumberland Road, but familiar to uncounted emigrants,
travelers, and traders--and deeply embedded in the traditions of
the Middle States and the West--as the National Road. Starting at
Cumberland, Maryland, this great artery of commerce and travel was
pushed slowly through the Alleghanies, even in the dark days of the war,
and by 1818 it was open for traffic as far west as Wheeling. The method
of construction was that which had lately been devised by John McAdam
in England, and involved spreading crushed limestone over a carefully
prepared road-bed in three layers, traffic being permitted for a time
over each layer in succession. This "macadamized" surface was curved to
permit drainage, and extra precautions were taken in localities where
spring freshets were likely to cause damage.

Controversy raged over proposals to extend the road to the farthest
West, to provide its upkeep by a system of tolls, and to build similar
highways farther north and south. But for a time constitutional and
legal difficulties were swept aside and construction continued. Columbus
was reached in 1833, Indianapolis about 1840; and the roadway was graded
to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, and marked out to Jefferson
City, Missouri, although it was never completed to the last-mentioned
point by federal authority. When one reads that the original cost of
construction mounted to $10,000 a mile in central Pennsylvania, and
even $13,000 a mile in the neighborhood of Wheeling, one's suspicion is
aroused that public contracts were not less dubious a hundred years ago
than they have been known to be in our own time.

The National Road has long since lost its importance as the great
connecting link of East and West. But in its day, especially before
1860, it was a teeming thoroughfare. Its course was lined with
hospitable farmhouses and was dotted with fast-growing villages and
towns. Some of the latter which once were nationally famed were left
high and dry by later shifts of the lines of traffic, and have quite
disappeared from the map. Throughout the spring and summer months there
was a steady westward stream of emigrants; hardly a day failed to bring
before the observer's eye the creaking canvas-covered wagon of the
homeseeker. Singly and in companies they went, ever toward the promised
land. Wagon-trains of merchandise from the eastern markets toiled
patiently along the way. Speculators, peddlers, and sightseers added to
the procession, and in hundreds of farmhouses the womenfolk and children
gathered in interested groups by the evening fire to hear the chance
visitor talk politics or war and retail with equal facility the
gossip of the next township and that of Washington or New York. Great
stage-coach lines--the National Road Stage Company, the Ohio National
Stage Company, and others--advertised the advantages of their services
and sought patronage with all the ingenuity of the modern railroad.
Taverns and roadhouses of which no trace remains today offered
entertainment at any figure, and of almost any character, that the
customer desired. Eastward flowed a steady stream of wagon-trains of
flour, tobacco, and pork, with great droves of cattle and hogs to be
fattened for the Philadelphia or Baltimore markets.

At almost precisely the same time that the first shovelful of earth
was turned for the Cumberland Road, people dwelling on the banks of
the upper Ohio were startled by the spectacle of a large boat moving
majestically down stream entirely devoid of sail, oar, pole, or any
other visible means of propulsion or control. This object of wonderment
was the New Orleans, the first steamboat to be launched on western
waters.

The conquest of the steamboat was speedy and complete. Already in 1819
there were sixty-three such craft on the Ohio, and in 1834--when the
total shipping tonnage, of the Atlantic seaboard was 76,064, and of the
British Empire 82,696--the tonnage afloat on the Ohio and Mississippi
was 126,278. Vessels regularly ascended the navigable tributaries of the
greater streams in quest of cargoes, and while craft of other sorts
did not disappear, the great and growing commerce of the river was
revolutionized.

In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation the thriving, bustling,
boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners vied with
one another in adorning their vessels with bowsprits, figureheads,
and all manner of tinseled decorations, and in providing elegant
accommodations for passengers; engineers and pilots gloried in speed
records and challenged one another to races which ended in some of the
most shocking steamboat disasters known to history. The unconscious
bombast of an anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's "Western
Monthly Review" in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat
business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:

"An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady
of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a
romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down
the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the
forests, and walking against the mighty current 'as things of life,'
bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, everything real,
and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos, and
stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and love-making,
and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred
fellows, who have seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor
gun-powder. A steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest
villages of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little
Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in
the minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery.... Cincinnati will soon be the centre of the 'celestial
empire,' as the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms,
the seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to
the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the opulent
southern planters will take their families, their dogs and parrots,
through a world of forests, from New Orleans to New York, giving us a
call by the way. When they are more acquainted with us, their voyage
will often terminate here." *


 * Vol. I., p. 25 (May, 1827).


The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by
no means restricted to steamboats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and
moneymaking. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the most
familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider, with his
Bible and saddlebags; and no community was so remote, or so hardened, as
not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of religious zeal by the crude
but terrifying eloquence of the revivalist. For education, likewise,
there was a growing regard. Nowhere did the devotion of the Western
people to the twin ideas of democracy and enlightenment find nobler
expression than in the clause of the Indiana constitution of 1816 making
it the duty of the Legislature to provide for "a general system of
education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a
state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to
all." This principle found general application throughout the Northwest.
By 1830 common schools existed wherever population was sufficient
to warrant the expense; academies and other secondary schools were
springing up in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and many lesser
places; state universities existed in Ohio and Indiana; and Baptists,
Methodists, and Presbyterians had begun to dot the country with small
colleges. Literature developed slowly. But newspapers appeared almost
before there were readers; and that the new society was by no means
without cultural, and even aesthetic, aspiration is indicated by the
long-continued rivalry of Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, to be
known as "the Athens of the West."



Chapter X. Sectional Cross Current

The War of 1812 did much in America to stimulate national pride and to
foster a sense of unity. None the less, the decade following the Peace
of Ghent proved the beginning of a long era in which the point of view
in politics, business, and social life was distinctly sectional. New
England, the Middle States, the South, the West all were bent upon
getting the utmost advantages from their resources; all were viewing
public questions in the light of their peculiar interests. In the days
of Clay and Calhoun and Jackson the nation's politics were essentially a
struggle for power among the sections.

There was a time when the frontier folk of the trans-Alleghany country
from Lakes to Gulf were much alike. New Englanders in the Reserve,
Pennsylvanians in central Ohio, Virginians and Carolinians in Kentucky
and southern Indiana, Georgians in Alabama and Mississippi, Kentuckians
and Tennesseeans in Illinois and Missouri--all were pioneer farmers
and stock-raiser's, absorbed in the conquest of the wilderness and all
thinking, working, and living in much the same way, but by 1820 the
situation had altered. The West was still a "section," whose interests
and characteristics contrasted sharply with those of New England or the
Middle States. Yet upon occasion it could act with very great effect,
as for instance when it rallied to the support of Jackson and bore him
triumphantly to the presidential chair. Great divergences, however, had
grown up within this western area; differences which had existed from
the beginning had been brought into sharp relief. Under play of climatic
and industrial forces, the West had itself fallen apart into sections.

Foremost was the cleavage between North and South, on a line marked
roughly by the Ohio River. Climate, soil, the cotton gin, and slavery
combined to make of the southern West a great cotton-raising area,
interested in the same things and swayed by the same impulses as the
southern seaboard. Similarly, economic conditions combined to make of
the northern West a land of small farmers, free labor, town-building,
and diversified manufactures and trade. A very large chapter of American
history hinges on this wedging apart of Southwest and Northwest. To this
day the two great divisions have never wholly come together in their
ways of thinking.

But neither of these western segments was itself entirely a unit. The
Northwest, in particular, had been settled by people drawn from every
older portion of the country, and as the frontier receded and society
took on a more matured aspect, differences of habits and ideas were
accentuated rather than obscured. Men can get along very well with one
another so long as they live apart and do not try to regulate their
everyday affairs on common lines.

The great human streams that poured into the Northwest flowed from
two main sources--the nearer South and New England. Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois were first peopled by men and women of Southern stock. Some
migrated directly from Virginia, the Carolinas, and even Georgia.
But most came from Kentucky and Tennessee and represented the second
generation of white people in those States, now impelled to move on to
a new frontier by the desire for larger and cheaper farms. Included
in this Southern element were many representatives of the well-to-do
classes, who were drawn to the new territories by the opportunity for
speculation in land and for political preferment, and by the opening
which the fast-growing communities afforded for lawyers, doctors, and
members of other professions. The number of these would have been larger
had there been less rigid restrictions upon slaveholding. It was rather,
however, the poorer whites--the more democratic, non-slaveholding
Southern element--that formed the bulk of the earlier settlers north of
the Ohio.

There was much westward migration from New England before the War
of 1812, but only a small share of it reached the Ohio country, and
practically none went beyond the Western Reserve. The common goal was
western New York. Here again there was some emigration of the well-to-do
and influential. But, as in the South, the people who moved were mainly
those who were having difficulty in making ends meet and who could see
no way of bettering their condition in their old homes. The back country
of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts was
filled with people of this sort--poor, discontented, restless, without
political influence, and needing only the incentive of cheap lands
in the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to the stony
hillsides of New England.

After 1815 New England emigration rose to astonishing proportions, and
an increasing number of the homeseekers passed--directly or after a
sojourn in the Lower Lake country of New York--into the Northwest. The
opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made the westward journey easier and
cheaper. The routes of travel led to Lakes Ontario and Erie, thence
to the Reserve in northern Ohio, thence by natural stages into other
portions of northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and eventually into
southern Michigan and Wisconsin. Not until after 1830 did the stalwart
homeseekers penetrate north of Detroit; the great stretches of prairie
between Lakes Erie and Michigan, and to the south--left quite untouched
by Southern pioneers--satisfied every desire of these restless farmers
from New England.

For a long time Southerners determined the course of history in the
Old Northwest. They occupied the field first, and they had the great
advantage of geographical proximity to their old homes. Furthermore,
they lived more compactly; the New Englanders were not only spread over
the broader prairie stretches of the north, but scattered to some extent
throughout the entire region between the Lakes and the Ohio. * But by
the middle of the century not only had the score of northern counties
been inundated by the "Yankees" but the waves were pushing far into
the interior, where they met and mingled with the counter-current. Both
Illinois and Indiana became, in a preeminent degree, melting-pots in
which was fused by slow and sometimes painful processes an amalgam which
Bryce and other keen observers have pronounced the most American thing
in America.


 * In 1820 the population of Indiana was confined almost entirely
to the southern third of the State, although the removal of the capital,
in 1825, from Corydon to Indianapolis was carried out in the confidence
that eventually that point would become the State's populational as it
was its geographical center. When, in 1818, Illinois was admitted to
the Union its population was computed at 40,000. The figure was probably
excessive; at all events, contemporaries testify that so eager were the
people for statehood that many were counted twice, and even emigrants
were counted as they passed through the Territory. But the census
of 1880 showed a population of 55,000, settled almost wholly in the
southern third of the State, with narrow tongues of inhabited land
stretching up the river valleys toward the north. Two slave States
flanked the southern end of the commonwealth; almost half of its area
lay south of a westward prolongation of Mason and Dixon's line. Save for
a few Pennsylvanians, the people were Southern; the State was for all
practical purposes a Southern State. As late as 1883 the Legislature
numbered fifty-eight members from the South, nineteen from the Middle
States, and only four from New England.


Of the great national issues in the quarter-century following the War
of 1812 there were some upon which people of the Northwest, in spite
of their differing points of view, could very well agree. Internal
improvement was one of these. Roads and canals were necessary outlets
to southern and eastern markets, and any reasonable proposal on
this subject could be assured of the Northwest's solid support. The
thirty-four successive appropriations to 1844 for the Cumberland
Road, Calhoun's "Bonus Bill" of 1816, the bill of 1822 authorizing
a continuous national jurisdiction over the Cumberland Road, the
comprehensive "Survey Bill" of 1824, the Maysville Road Bill of
1830--all were backed by the united strength of the Northwestern
senators and representatives.

So with the tariff. The cry of the East for protection to infant
industries was echoed by the struggling manufacturers of Cincinnati,
Louisville, and other towns; while a protective tariff as a means of
building up the home market for foodstuffs and raw materials seemed to
the Westerner an altogether reasonable and necessary expedient. Ohio
alone in the Northwest had an opportunity to vote on the protective bill
of 1816, and gave its enthusiastic support. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois
voted unitedly for the bills of 1820, 1824, 1828, and 1832. The
principal western champion of the protective policy was Henry Clay, a
Kentuckian; but the Northwest supported the policy more consistently
than did Clay's own State and section.

On the National Bank the position of the Northwest was no less emphatic.
The people were little troubled by the question of constitutionality;
but believing that the bank was an engine of tyranny in the hands of an
eastern aristocracy, they were fully prepared to support Jackson in his
determination to extinguish that "un-American monopoly."

There were other subjects upon which agreement was reached either with
difficulty or not at all. One of these was the form of local government
which should be adopted. Southerners and New Englanders brought to their
new homes widely differing political usages. The former were accustomed
to the county as the principal local unit of administration. It was
a relatively large division, whose affairs were managed by elective
officers, mainly a board of commissioners. The New Englanders, on the
other hand, had grown up under the town-meeting system and clung to the
notion that an indispensable feature of democratic local government is
the periodic assembling of the citizens of a community for legislative,
fiscal, and electoral purposes. The Illinois constitution of 1818 was
made by Southerners, and naturally it provided for the county system.
But protest from the "Yankee" elements became so strong that in the
new constitution of 1848 provision was made for township organization
wherever the people of a county wanted it; and this form of government,
at first prevalent only in the northern counties, is now found in most
of the central and southern counties as well.

The most deeply and continuously dividing issue in the Northwest, as in
the nation, at large, was negro slavery. Although written by Southern
men, the Ordinance of 1787 stipulated that there should be "neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise
than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted." If the government of the Northwest had been one of laws, and
not of men, this specific provision would have made the territory free
soil and would have relieved the inhabitants from all interest in the
"peculiar institution." But the laws never execute themselves--least of
all in frontier communities. In point of fact, considerable numbers of
slaves were held in the territory until the nineteenth century was far
advanced. As late as 1830 thirty-two negroes were held in servitude in
the single town of Vincennes. Slavery could and did prevail to a limited
extent because existing property rights were guaranteed in the Ordinance
itself, in the deed of cession by Virginia, in the Jay Treaty of 1794,
and in other fundamental acts. The courts of the Northwest held
that slave-owners whose property could be brought under any of
these guarantees might retain that property; and although no court
countenanced further importation, itinerant Southerners--rich
planters traveling in their family carriages, with servants, packs of
hunting-dogs, and trains of slaves, their nightly camp-fires lighting
up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had held
possession--occasionally settled in southern Indiana or Illinois and
with the connivance of the authorities kept some of their dependents in
slavery, or quasi-slavery, for decades.

Of actual slaveholders there were not enough to influence public
sentiment greatly. But the people of Southern extraction, although
neither slave holders nor desiring to become such, had no strong moral
convictions on the subject. Indeed, they were likely to feel that the
anti-slavery restriction imposed an unfortunate impediment in the way of
immigration from the South. Hence the persistent demand of citizens
of Indiana and Illinois for a relaxation of the drastic prohibition of
slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1796 Congress was petitioned from
Kaskaskia to extend relief; in 1799 the territorial Legislature was
urged to bring about a repeal; in 1802 an Indiana territorial convention
at Vincennes memorialized Congress in behalf of a suspension of the
proviso for a period of ten years. Not only were violations of the law
winked at, but both Indiana and Illinois deliberately built up a system
of indenture which partook strongly of the characteristics of slavery.
After much controversy, Indiana, in 1816, framed a state constitution
which reiterated the language of the Northwest Ordinance, but without
invalidating titles to existing slave property; while Illinois was
admitted to the Union in 1818 with seven or eight hundred slaves upon
her soil, and with a constitution which continued the old system of
indenture with slight modification.

In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of calling a
state convention to draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people
of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project.
But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit
on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By
an almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint
resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil
than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding
year the delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag
resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all petitions on
the slavery question.

Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the Northwest was
prolific of schemes of compromise, for the constant clash of Northern
and Southern elements developed an aptitude for settlement by agreement
on moderate lines. The people of the section as a whole long clung to
popular, or "squatter," sovereignty as the supremely desirable solution
of the slavery question--a device formulated and defended by two of
the Northwest's own statesmen, Cass and Douglas, and relinquished
only slowly and reluctantly under the leadership, not of a New England
abolitionist, but of a statesman of Southern birth who had come to the
conclusion that the nation could not permanently exist half slave and
half free.

Cass, Douglas, Lincoln--all were adopted sons of the Northwest, and the
career of every one illustrates not only the prodigality with which the
back country showered its opportunities upon men of industry and
talent, but the play and interplay of sectional and social forces in the
building of the newer nation. Cass and Douglas were New Englanders.
One was born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782; the other at Brandon,
Vermont, in 1813. Lincoln sprang from Virginian and Kentuckian stocks.
His father's family moved from Virginia to Kentucky at the close of the
Revolution; in 1784 his grandfather was killed by lurking Indians, and
his father, then a boy of six, was saved from captivity only by a lucky
shot of an older brother. Lincoln himself was born in 1809. Curiously
enough, Cass and Douglas, the New Englanders, played their roles on the
national stage as Jackson Democrats, while Lincoln, the Kentuckian of
Virginian ancestry, became a Whig and later a Republican.

Cass and Douglas were well-born. Cass's father was a thrifty
soldier-farmer who made for his family a comfortable home at Zanesville,
Ohio; Douglas's father was a successful physician. Lincoln was born
in obscurity and wretchedness. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was a
ne'er-do-well Kentucky carpenter, grossly illiterate, unable or
unwilling to rise above the lowest level of existence in the pioneer
settlements. His mother, Nancy Hanks, whatever her antecedents may have
been, was a woman of character, and apparently of some education. But
she died when her son was only nine years of age.

Cass and Douglas had educational opportunities which in their day were
exceptional. Both attended famous academies and received instruction
in the classics, mathematics, and philosophy. Both grew up in an
environment of enlightenment and integrity. Lincoln, on the other hand,
got a few weeks of instruction under two amateur teachers in Kentucky
and a few months more in Indiana--in all, hardly as much as one year;
and as a boy he knew only rough, coarse surroundings. When, in 1816, the
restless head of the family moved from Kentucky to southern Indiana,
his worldly belongings consisted of a parcel of carpenters' tools and
cooking utensils, a little bedding, and about four hundred gallons of
whiskey. No one who has not seen the sordidness, misery, and apparent
hopelessness of the life of the "poor whites" even today, in the
Kentucky and southern Indiana hills, can fully comprehend the chasm
which separated the boy Lincoln from every sort of progress and
distinction.

All three men prepared for public life by embracing the profession that
has always, in this country, proved the surest avenue to preferment--the
law. But, whereas Cass arrived at maturity just in time to have an
active part in the War of 1812, and in this way to make himself the most
logical selection for the governorship of the newly organized Michigan
Territory, Douglas saw no military service, and Lincoln only a few weeks
of service during the Black Hawk War, and both were obliged to seek fame
and fortune along the thorny road of politics. Following admission to
the bar at Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834, Douglas was elected public
prosecutor of the first judicial circuit in 1835; elected to the state
Legislature in 1836; appointed by President Van Buren registrar of the
land office at Springfield in 1837; made a judge of the supreme court of
the State in 1841; and elected to the national House of Representatives
in 1843. Resourceful, skilled in debate, intensely patriotic, and
favored with many winning personal qualities, he drew to himself men
of both Northern and Southern proclivities and became an influential
exponent of broad and enduring nationalism.

Meanwhile, after a first defeat, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois
Legislature in 1834, and again in 1836. When he gathered all of his
worldly belongings in a pair of saddlebags and fared forth to the new
capital, Springfield, to settle himself to the practice of law, he had
more than a local reputation for oratorical power; and events were
to prove that he had not only facility in debate and familiarity with
public questions, but incomparable devotion to lofty principles. In the
subsequent unfolding of the careers of Lincoln and Douglas--especially
in the turn of events that brought to each a nomination for the
presidency by a great party in 1860--there was no small amount of good
luck and sheer accident. But it is equally true that by prodigious
effort Kentuckian and Vermonter alike hewed out their own ways to
greatness.

It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy,
the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and of
Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true,
of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older
sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money,
and to secure larger advantages for their children. But nowhere else was
the road for talent so wide open, entirely irrespective of inheritance,
possessions, education, environment. Nowhere outside of the
trans-Alleghany country would the rise of a Lincoln have been possible.



Chapter XI. The Upper Mississippi Valley

While the Ohio country--the lower half of the States of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois--was throwing off its frontier character, the remoter
Northwest was still a wilderness frequented only by fur-traders
and daring explorers. And that far Northwest by the sources of the
Mississippi had been penetrated by few white men since the seventeenth
century. The earliest white visitors to the upper Mississippi are
not clearly known. They may have been Pierre Radisson and his
brother-in-law, Menard des Grosseilliers, who are alleged to have
covered the long portage from Lake Superior to the Mississippi in
or about 1665; but the matter rests entirely on how one interprets
Radisson's vague account of their western perambulations. At all events,
in 1680--seven years after the descent of the river from the Wisconsin
to the Arkansas by Marquette and Joliet--Louis Hennepin, under
instructions from La Salle, explored the stream from the mouth of the
Illinois to the Falls of St. Anthony, where the city of Minneapolis now
stands, five hundred miles from the true source.

There the matter of exploration rested until the days of Thomas
Jefferson, when the purchase of Louisiana lent fresh interest to
northwestern geography. In 1805 General James Wilkinson, in military
command in the West, dispatched Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike with a party
of twenty men from St. Louis to explore the headwaters of the great
river, make peace with the Indians, and select sites for fortified
posts. From his winter quarters near the Falls, Pike pushed northward
over the snow and ice until, early in 1806, he reached Leech Lake, in
Cass County, Minnesota, which he wrongly took to be the source of the
Father of Waters. It is little wonder that, at a time when the river and
lake surfaces were frozen over and the whole country heavily blanketed
with snow, he should have found it difficult to disentangle the maze of
streams and lakes which fill the low-lying region around the headwaters
of the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Lake of the Woods. In 1820
General Cass, Governor of Michigan, which then had the Mississippi for
its western boundary, led an expedition into the same region as far
as Cass Lake, where the Indians told him that the true source lay
some fifty miles to the northwest. It remained for the traveler and
ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, twelve years later, to discover Lake
Itasca, in modern Clearwater County, which occupies a depression near
the center of the rock-rimmed basin in which the river takes its rise.

It was not these infrequent explorers, however, who opened paths for
pioneers into the remote Northwest, but traders in search of furs and
pelts--those commercial pathfinders of western civilization. There is
scarcely a town or city in the State of Wisconsin that does not owe its
origin, directly or indirectly, to these men. Cheap and tawdry enough
were the commodities bartered for these wonderful beaver and otter
pelts--ribbons and gewgaws, looking-glasses and combs, blankets and
shawls of gaudy color. But scissors and knives, gunpowder and shot,
tobacco and whiskey, went also in the traders' packs, though traffic in
fire-water was forbidden. These goods, upon arrival at Mackinac, were
sent out by canoes and bateaux to the different posts, where they were
dealt out to the savages directly or were dispatched to the winter camps
along the far-reaching waterways. Returning home in the spring, the
bucks would set their squaws and children at making maple sugar or
planting corn, watermelons, potatoes, and squash, while they themselves
either dawdled their time away or hunted for summer furs. In the autumn,
the wild rice was garnered along the sloughs and the river mouths, and
the straggling field crops were gathered in--some of the product being
hidden in skillfully covered pits, as a reserve, and some dried for
transportation in the winter's campaign. The villagers were now ready to
depart for their hunting-grounds, often hundreds of miles away. It was
then that the trader came and credits were wrangled over and extended,
each side endeavoring to get the better of the other. *


 * Thwaites, "Story of Wisconsin," p. 156.


This traffic was largely managed by the British in Canada until 1816,
when an act of Congress forbade foreign traders to operate on United
States soil. But a heavier blow was inflicted in the establishment of
John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, which was given a substantial
monopoly of Indian commerce. From its headquarters on Mackinac Island
this great corporation rapidly squeezed the clandestine British agents
out of the American trade, introduced improved methods, and built up a
system which covered the entire fur-bearing Northwest.

Of this remoter Northwest, the region between Lakes Erie and Michigan
was the most accessible from the East; yet it was avoided by the first
pioneers, who labored under a strange misapprehension about its
climate and resources. In spite of the fact that it abounded in rich
bottom-lands and fertile prairies and was destined to become one of
the most bountiful orchards of the world, it was reported by early
prospectors to be swampy and unfit for cultivation. Though Governor Cass
did his best to overcome this prejudice, for years settlers preferred to
gather mainly about Detroit, leaving the rich interior to fur-traders.
When enlightenment eventually came, population poured in with a rush.
Detroit--which was a village in 1820--became ten years later a thriving
city of thirty thousand and the western terminus of a steamboat line
from Buffalo, which year after year multiplied its traffic. By the
year 1837 the great territory lying east of Lake Michigan was ready for
statehood.

Almost simultaneously the region to the west of Lake Michigan began to
emerge from the fur-trading stage. The place of the picturesque trader,
however, was not taken at once by the prosaic farmer. The next figure
in the pageant was the miner. The presence of lead in the stretch of
country between the Wisconsin and Illinois rivers was known to the
Indians before the coming of the white man, but they began to appreciate
its value only after the introduction of firearms by the French. The
ore lay at no great depth in the Galena limestone, and the aborigines
collected it either by stripping it from the surface or by sinking
shallow shafts from which it was hoisted, in deerskin bags. Shortly
after the War of 1812 American prospectors pushed into the region, and
the Government began granting leases on easy terms to operators. In 1823
one of these men arrived with soldiers, supplies, skilled miners, and
one hundred and fifty slaves; and thereafter the "diggings" fast became
a mecca for miners, smelters, speculators, merchants, gamblers, and
get-rich-quick folk of every sort, who swarmed thither by thousands from
every part of the United States, especially the South, and even from
Europe. "Mushroom towns sprang up all over the district; deep-worn
native paths became ore roads between the burrows and the
river-landings; sink-holes abandoned by the Sauk and Foxes, when no
longer to be operated with their crude tools, were reopened and found to
be exceptionally rich, while new diggings and smelting-furnaces, fitted
out with modern appliances, fairly dotted the map of the country." *


 * Thwaites, "Story of Wisconsin". p. 163.


Galena was the entrepot of the region. A trail cut thither from Peoria
soon became a well-worn coach road; roads were early opened to Chicago
and Milwaukee. In 1822 Galena was visited by a Mississippi River
steamboat, and a few years later regular steamboat traffic was
established. And it was by these roadways and waterways that homeseekers
soon began to arrive.


The invasion of the white man, accompanied though it was by treaties,
was bitterly resented by the Indian tribes who occupied the Northwest
above the Illinois River. These Sioux, Sauk and Foxes, and Winnebagoes,
with remnants of other tribes, carried on an intermittent warfare for
years, despite the efforts of the Federal Government to define tribal
boundaries; and between red men and white men coveting the same lands
causes of irritation were never wanting. In 1827 trouble which had been
steadily brewing came to the boiling-point. Predatory expeditions in the
north were reported; the Winnebagoes were excited by rumors that
another war between the United States and Great Britain was imminent;
an incident or even an accident was certain to provoke hostilities. The
incident occurred. When Red Bird, a petty Winnebago chieftain dwelling
in a "town" on the Black River, was incorrectly informed that two
Winnebago braves who had been imprisoned at Prairie du Chien had been
executed, he promptly instituted vengeance. A farmer's family in the
neighborhood of Prairie du Chien was massacred, and two keel-boats
returning down stream from Fort Snelling were attacked, with some loss
of life. The settlers hastily repaired the old fort and also dispatched
messengers to give the alarm. Galena sent a hundred militiamen; a
battalion came down from Fort Snelling; Governor Cass arrived on the
spot by way of Green Bay; General Atkinson brought up a full regiment
from Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis; and finally Major Whistler
proceeded up the Fox with a portion of the troops stationed at Fort
Howard, on Green Bay.

When all was in readiness, the Winnebagoes were notified that, unless
Red Bird and his principal accomplice, Wekau, were promptly surrendered,
the tribe would be exterminated. The threat had its intended effect,
and the two culprits duly presented themselves at Whistler's camp on
the Fox-Wisconsin portage, in full savage regalia, and singing their war
dirges. Red Bird, who was an Indian of magnificent physique and lofty
bearing, had but one request to make--that he be not committed to
irons--and this request was granted. At Prairie du Chien, whither the
two were sent for trial, he had opportunities to escape, but he refused
to violate his word by taking advantage of them. Following their trial,
the redskins were condemned to be hanged. Unused to captivity, however,
Red Bird languished and soon died, while his accomplice was pardoned by
President Adams. In 1828 Fort Winnebago was erected on the site of Red
Bird's surrender.

The Winnebagoes now agreed to renounce forever their claims to the lead
mines. Furthermore, in the same year, the site of the principal Sauk
village and burying-ground, on Rock River, three miles south of the
present city of Rock Island, was sold by the Government, and the Sauk
and Foxes resident in the vicinity were given notice to leave. Under
the Sauk chieftain Keokuk most of the dispossessed warriors withdrew
peacefully beyond the Mississippi, and two years later the tribal
representatives formally yielded all claims to lands east of that
stream. Some members of the tribe, however, established themselves on
the high bluff which has since been known as Black Hawk's Watch Tower
and defied the Government to remove them.

The leading spirit in this protest was Black Hawk, who though neither
born a chief nor elected to that dignity, had long been influential in
the village and among his people at large. During the War of 1812 he
became an implacable enemy of the Americans, and, after fighting with
the British at the battles of Frenchtown and the Thames, he returned
to Illinois and carried on a border warfare which ended only with the
signing of a special treaty of peace in 1816. For years thereafter he
was accustomed to lead his "British band" periodically across northern
Illinois and southern Michigan to the British Indian agency to receive
presents of arms, ammunition, provisions, and trinkets; and he was a
principal intermediary in the British intrigues which gave Cass, as
superintendent of Indian affairs in the Northwest, many uneasy days. He
was ever a restless spirit and a promoter of trouble, although one must
admit that he had some justice on his side and that he was probably
honest and sincere. Tall, spare, with pinched features, exceptionally
high cheekbones, and a prominent Roman nose, he was a figure to command
attention--the more so by reason of the fact that he had practically no
eyebrows and no hair except a scalp-lock, in which on state occasions he
fastened a flaming bunch of dyed eagle feathers.

Returning from their hunt in the spring of 1830, Black Hawk and his
warriors found the site of their town preempted by white settlers and
their ancestral burying-ground ploughed over. In deep rage, they set
off for Malden, where they were liberally entertained and encouraged to
rebel. Coming again to the site of their village a year later, they
were peremptorily ordered away. This time they resolved to stand their
ground, and Black Hawk ordered the squatters themselves to withdraw
and gave them until the middle of the next day to do so. Black Hawk
subsequently maintained that he did not mean to threaten bloodshed. But
the settlers so construed his command and deluged Governor Reynolds with
petitions for help. With all possible speed, sixteen hundred volunteers
and ten companies of United States regulars were dispatched to the
scene, and on the 25th of June, they made an impressive demonstration
within view of the village. In the face of such odds discretion seemed
the better part of valor, and during the succeeding night Black Hawk and
his followers quietly paddled across the Mississippi. Four days later
they signed an agreement never to return to the eastern banks without
express permission from the United States Government.

On the Indian side this compact was not meant to be kept. Against the
urgent advice of Keokuk and other leaders, Black Hawk immediately
began preparations for a campaign of vengeance. British intrigue lent
stimulus, and a crafty "prophet," who was chief of a village some
thirty-five miles up the Rock, made it appear that aid would be given by
the Potawatomi, Winnebagoes, and perhaps other powerful peoples. In the
first week of April, 1832, the disgruntled leader and about five hundred
braves, with their wives and children, crossed the Mississippi at Yellow
Banks and ascended the Rock River to the prophet's town, with a view to
raising a crop of corn during the summer and taking the war-path in the
fall.

The invasion created much alarm throughout the frontier country. The
settlers drew together about the larger villages, which were put as
rapidly as possible in a state of defense. Again the Governor called for
volunteers, and again the response more than met the expectation. Four
regiments were organized, and to them were joined four hundred regulars.
One of the first persons to come forward with an offer of his services
was a tall, ungainly, but powerful young man from Sangamon County,
who had but two years before settled in the State, and who was at once
honored with the captaincy of his company. This man was Abraham Lincoln.
Other men whose names loom large in American history were with the
little army also. The commander of the regulars was Colonel Zachary
Taylor. Among his lieutenants were Jefferson Davis and Albert Sidney
Johnston, and Robert Anderson, the defender of Fort Sumter in 1860, was
a colonel of Illinois volunteers. It is said that the oath of allegiance
was administered to young Lincoln by Lieutenant Jefferson Davis!

Over marshy trails and across streams swollen by the spring thaws the
army advanced to Dixon's Ferry, ninety miles up the Rock, whence a
detachment of three hundred men was sent out, under Major Stillman,
to reconnoitre. Unluckily, this force seized three messengers of peace
dispatched by Black Hawk and, in the clash which followed, was cut
to pieces and driven into headlong flight by a mere handful of red
warriors. The effect of this unexpected affray was both to stiffen
the Indians to further resistance and to precipitate a fresh panic
throughout the frontier. All sorts of atrocities ensued, and Black
Hawk's name became a household bugaboo the country over.

Finally a new levy was made ready and sent north. Pushing across the
overflowed wilderness stretches, past the sites of modern Beloit and
Madison, this army, four thousand strong, came upon the fleeing enemy
on the banks of the Wisconsin River, and at Wisconsin Heights, near the
present town of Prairie du Sac, it inflicted a severe defeat upon
the Indians. Again Black Hawk desired to make peace, but again he was
frustrated, this time by the lack of an interpreter. The redskins'
flight was continued in the direction of the Mississippi, which they
reached in midsummer. They were prevented from crossing by lack of
canoes, and finally the half-starved band found itself caught between
the fire of a force of regulars on the land side and a government supply
steamer, the Warrior, on the water side, and between these two the
Indian band was practically annihilated.

 Thus ended the war--a contest originating in no general uprising
or far-reaching plan, such as marked the rebellions instigated by
Pontiac and Tecumseh, but which none the less taxed the strength of
the border populations and opened a new chapter in the history of the
remoter northwestern territories. Black Hawk himself took refuge with
the Winnebagoes in the Dells of the Wisconsin, only to be treacherously
delivered over to General Street at Prairie du Chien. Under the terms of
a treaty of peace signed at Fort Armstrong (Rock Island) in September,
the fallen leader and some of his accomplices were held as hostages,
and during the ensuing winter they were kept at Jefferson Barracks (St.
Louis) under the surveillance of Jefferson Davis. In the spring of
1833 they were taken to Washington, where they had an interview with
President Jackson. "We did not expect to conquer the whites," Black Hawk
told the President; "they had too many houses, too many men. I took up
the hatchet, for my part, to revenge injuries which my people could no
longer endure. Had I borne them longer without striking, my people would
have said, 'Black Hawk is a woman--he is too old to be a chief he is no
Sauk.'" After a brief imprisonment at Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson
Davis was himself confined at the close of the Civil War, the captives
were set free, and were taken to Philadelphia, New York, up the Hudson,
and finally back to the Rock River country.

For some years Black Hawk lived quietly on a small reservation near Des
Moines. In 1837 the peace-loving Keokuk took him with a party of Sauk
and Fox chiefs again to Washington, and on this trip he made a visit to
Boston. The officials of the city received the august warrior and his
companions in Faneuil Hall, and the Governor of the commonwealth paid
them similar honor at the State House. Some war-dances were performed on
the Common for the amusement of the populace, and afterwards the party
was taken to see a performance by Edwin Forrest at the Tremont Theatre.
Here all went well, except that at an exciting point in the play where
one of the characters fell dying the Indians burst out into a war-whoop,
to the considerable consternation of the women and children present.

A few months after returning to his Iowa home, Black Hawk, now
seventy-one years of age, was gathered to his fathers. He was buried
about half a mile from his cabin, in a sitting posture, his left hand
grasping a cane presented to him by Henry Clay, and at his side a supply
of food and tobacco sufficient to last him to the spirit land, supposed
to be three days' travel. "Rock River," he said in a speech at a Fourth
of July celebration shortly before his death, "was a beautiful country.
I liked my town, my cornfields, and the home of my people. I fought
for it. It is now yours. Keep it, as we did. It will produce you good
crops."


The Black Hawk War opened a new chapter in the history of the Northwest.
The soldiers carried to their homes remarkable stories of the richness
and attractiveness of the northern country, and the eastern newspapers
printed not only detailed accounts of the several expeditions but highly
colored descriptions of the charms of the region. Books and pamphlets by
the score helped to attract the attention of the country. The result
was a heavy influx of settlers, many of them coming all the way from
New England and New York, others from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Lands
were rapidly surveyed and placed on sale, and surviving Indian
hunting-grounds were purchased. Northern Illinois filled rapidly with a
thrifty farming population, and the town of Chicago became an entrepot.
Further north, Wisconsin had been organized, in 1836, as a Territory,
including not only the present State of that name but Iowa, Minnesota,
and most of North and South Dakota. As yet the Iowa country, however,
had been visited by few white people; and such as came were only hunters
and trappers, agents of the American Fur and other trading companies,
or independent traders. Two of the most active of these free-lances
of early days--the French Canadian Dubuque and the Englishman
Davenport--have left their names to flourishing cities.

To recount the successive purchases by which the Government freed Iowa
soil from Indian domination would be wearisome. The Treaty of 1842 with
the Sauks and Foxes is typical. After a sojourn of hardly more than a
decade in the Iowa country, these luckless folk were now persuaded to
yield all their lands to the United States and retire to a reservation
in Kansas. The negotiations were carried out with all due regard for
Indian susceptibilities. Governor Chambers, resplendent in the uniform
of a brigadier-general of the United States army, repaired with his
aides to the appointed rendezvous, and there the chiefs presented
themselves, arrayed in new blankets and white deerskin leggings, with
full paraphernalia of paint, feathers, beads, and elaborately decorated
war clubs. Oratory ran freely, although through the enforced medium
of an interpreter. The chiefs harangued for hours not only upon the
beautiful meadows, the running streams, the stately trees, and the other
beloved objects which they were called upon to surrender to the white
man, but upon the moon and stars and rain and hail and wind, all of
which were alleged to be more attractive and beneficent in Iowa than
anywhere else. The Governor, in turn, gave the Indians some good advice,
urging them to live peaceably in their new homes, to be industrious and
self-supporting, to leave liquor alone, and, in general, to "be a credit
to the country." When every one had talked as much as he liked, the
treaty was solemnly signed.

The "New Purchase" was thrown open to settlers in the following spring;
and the opening brought scenes of a kind destined to be reenacted scores
of times in the great West during succeeding decades--the borders of the
new district lined, on the eve of the opening, with encamped settlers
and their families ready to race for the best claims; horses saddled
and runners picked for the rush; a midnight signal from the soldiery,
releasing a flood of eager land-hunters armed with torches, axes,
stakes, and every sort of implement for the laying out of claims with
all possible speed; by daybreak, many scores of families "squatting" on
the best pieces of ground which they had been able to reach; innumerable
disputes, with a general readjustment following the intervention of the
government surveyors.

The marvelous progress of the upper Mississippi Valley is briefly told
by a succession of dates. In 1838 Iowa was organized as a Territory;
in 1846 it was admitted as a State; in 1848 Wisconsin was granted
statehood; and in 1849 Minnesota was given territorial organization with
boundaries extending westward to the Missouri.


Thus the Old Northwest had arrived at the goal set for it by the
large-visioned men who framed the Ordinance of 1787; every foot of
its soil was included in some one of the five thriving, democratic
commonwealths that had taken their places in the Union on a common
basis with the older States of the East and the South. Furthermore, the
Mississippi had ceased to be a boundary. A magnificent vista reaching
off to the remoter West and Northwest had been opened up; the frontier
had been pushed far out upon the plains of Minnesota and Iowa. Decade
after decade the powerful epic of westward expansion, shot through with
countless tales of heroism and sacrifice, had steadily unfolded before
the gaze of an astonished world; and the end was not yet in sight.



Bibliographical Note


There is no general history of the Northwest covering the whole of
the period dealt with in this book except Burke A. Hinsdale, The Old
Northwest (1888). This is a volume of substantial scholarship, though
it reflects but faintly the life and spirit of the people. The nearest
approach to a moving narrative is James K. Hosmer, "Short History of
the Mississippi Valley" (1901), which tells the story of the Middle West
from the earliest explorations to the close of the nineteenth century,
within a brief space, yet in a manner to arouse the reader's interest
and sympathy. A fuller and very readable narrative to 1796 will be found
in Charles Moore, "The Northwest under Three Flags" (1900). Still more
detailed, and enlivened by many contemporary rasps and plans, is Justin
Winsor, "The Westward Movement" (1899), covering the period from the
pacification of 1763 to the close of the eighteenth century. Frederick
J. Turner, "Rise of the New West" (1906) contains several interesting
and authoritative chapters on western development after the War of 1812;
and John B. McMaster, "History of the People of the United States" (8
vols., 1883-1913), gives in the fourth and fifth volumes a very good
account of westward migration.

An excellent detailed account of the settlement and development of a
single section of the Northwest is G. N. Fuller, "Economic and Social
Beginnings of Michigan," Michigan Historical Publications, Univ. Series,
No.1 (1916). A very readable book is R. G. Thwaites, "The Story of
Wisconsin" (rev. ed., 1899), containing a full account of the early
relations of white men and red men, and of the Black Hawk War. Mention
may be made, too, of H. E. Legler, "Leading Events of Wisconsin History"
(1898).

Among the volumes dealing with the diplomatic history of the Northwest,
mention should be made of two recent studies: C. W. Alvord, "The
Mississippi Valley in British Politics" (2 vols., 1917), and E. S.
Corwin, "French Policy and the American Alliance" (1916).

Aside from Lincoln, few men of the earlier Northwest have been made the
subjects of well-written biographies. Curiously, there are no modern
biographies, good or bad, of George Rogers Clark, General St. Clair,
or William Henry Harrison. John R. Spears, "Anthony Wayne" (1903) is
an interesting book; and Andrew C. McLaughlin, "Lewis Cass" (1891),
and Allen Johnson, "Stephen A. Douglas" (1908) are excellent. Lives
of Lincoln that have importance for their portrayal of western society
include: John T. Morse, Jr., "Abraham Lincoln" (2 vols., 1893); John G.
Nicolay and John Hay, "Abraham Lincoln, a History" (10 vols., 1890); and
Ida M. Tarbell, "Life of Abraham Lincoln" (new ed., 2vols., 1917).

The reader will do well, however, to turn early to some of the works
within the field which, by reason of their literary quality as well as
their scholarly worth, have attained the dignity of classics. Foremost
are the writings of Francis Parkman. Most of these, it is true, deal
with the history of the American interior prior to 1763. But "Frontenac
and New France under Louis XIV" (Frontenac edition, 1915), and "A
Half-Century of Conflict" (2 vols., same ed.) furnish the necessary
background; and "The Conspiracy of Pontiac" (2 vols., same ed.) is
indispensable. Parkman's work closes with the Indian war following the
Treaty of 1763. Theodore Roosevelt's "Winning of the West" (4 vols.,
1889-96) takes up the story at that point and carries it to the collapse
of the Burr intrigues during the second administration of Thomas
Jefferson. This work was a pioneer in the field. In the light of recent
scholarship it is subject to criticism at some points; but it is based
on careful study of the sources, and for vividness and interest it
has perhaps not been surpassed in American historical writing. A third
extensive work is Archer B. Hulbert, "Historic Highways of America"
(16 vols., 1902-05). In writing the history of the great land and
water routes of trade and travel between East and West the author found
occasion to describe, in interesting fashion, most phases of western
life. The volumes most closely related to the subject matter of the
present book are: "Military Roads of the Mississippi Valley" (VIII);
"Waterways of Western Expansion" (IX); "The Cumberland Road" (X); and
"Pioneer Roads and Experiences of Travellers" (XIXII). Mention should be
made also of Mr. Hulbert's "The Ohio River, a Course of Empire" (1906).

Further references will be found appended to the articles on Illinois,
Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin in "The Encyclopaedia Britannica"
(11th edition).

Opportunity to get the flavor of the period by reading contemporary
literature is afforded by two principal kinds of books. One is
reminiscences, letters, and histories written by the Westerners
themselves. Timothy Flint's "Recollections of the Last Ten Years" (1826)
will be found interesting; as also J. Hall, "Letters from the West"
(1828), and T. Ford, "History of Illinois" (1854).

The second type of materials is books of travel written by visitors
from the East or from Europe. Works of this nature are always subject
to limitations. Even when the author tries to be accurate and fair,
his information is likely to be hastily gathered and incomplete and
his judgments unsound. Between 1800 and 1840 the Northwest was visited,
however, by many educated and fair-minded persons who wrote readable
and trustworthy descriptions of what they saw and heard. A complete
list cannot be given here, but some of the best of these books are: John
Melish, "Travels in the United States of America in the Years 1806 &
1807 and 1809, 1810 & 1811" (2 vols., 1810; William Cobbett, A Year's
Residence in the United States of America (1818); Henry B. Fearon,
Sketches of America (1818); Morris Birkbeck, Letters from Illinois
(1818); John Bradbury, "Travels in the Interior of America in the Years
1809, 1810, and 1811" (1819); Thomas Hulme, "Journal made during a Tour
in the Western Countries of America, 1818-1819" (1828); and Michael
Chevalier, "Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States" (1839).
Copies of early editions of some of these works will be found in
most large libraries. But the reader is happily not dependent on this
resource. Almost all of the really important books of the kind are
reprinted, with introductions and explanatory matter, in Reuben G.
Thwaites, "Early Western Travels, 1714-1846" (32 vols., 1904-07), which
is one of our chief collections of historical materials.





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