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THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

Stories from American History


      *      *      *      *      *      *

[Illustration]

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK. BOSTON. CHICAGO
  ATLANTA. SAN FRANCISCO

  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
  LONDON. BOMBAY. CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
  TORONTO

      *      *      *      *      *      *


[Illustration]


THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER

by

FREDERIC LOGAN PAXSON

Junior Professor of American History in the University of Michigan

Illustrated







New York
The Macmillan Company
1910

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910,
By the Macmillan Company.

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




PREFACE


I have told here the story of the last frontier within the United
States, trying at once to preserve the picturesque atmosphere which
has given to the "Far West" a definite and well-understood meaning,
and to indicate those forces which have shaped the history of the
country beyond the Mississippi. In doing it I have had to rely largely
upon my own investigations among sources little used and relatively
inaccessible. The exact citations of authority, with which I might have
crowded my pages, would have been out of place in a book not primarily
intended for the use of scholars. But I hope, before many years, to
exploit in a larger and more elaborate form the mass of detailed
information upon which this sketch is based.

My greatest debts are to the owners of the originals from which the
illustrations for this book have been made; to Claude H. Van Tyne, who
has repeatedly aided me with his friendly criticism; and to my wife,
whose careful readings have saved me from many blunders in my text.

              FREDERIC L. PAXSON.

ANN ARBOR, August 7, 1909.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I
                                                              PAGE
  THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT                                          1


  CHAPTER II

  THE INDIAN FRONTIER                                           14


  CHAPTER III

  IOWA AND THE NEW NORTHWEST                                    33


  CHAPTER IV

  THE SANTA FE TRAIL                                            53


  CHAPTER V

  THE OREGON TRAIL                                              70


  CHAPTER VI

  OVERLAND WITH THE MORMONS                                     86


  CHAPTER VII

  CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS                              104


  CHAPTER VIII

  KANSAS AND THE INDIAN FRONTIER                               119


  CHAPTER IX

  "PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST!"                                       138


  CHAPTER X

  FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA                                      156


  CHAPTER XI

  THE OVERLAND MAIL                                            174


  CHAPTER XII

  THE ENGINEERS' FRONTIER                                      192


  CHAPTER XIII

  THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD                                   211


  CHAPTER XIV

  THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR                                  225


  CHAPTER XV

  THE CHEYENNE WAR                                             243


  CHAPTER XVI

  THE SIOUX WAR                                                264


  CHAPTER XVII

  THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY                        284


  CHAPTER XVIII

  BLACK KETTLE'S LAST RAID                                     304


  CHAPTER XIX

  THE FIRST OF THE RAILWAYS                                    324


  CHAPTER XX

  THE NEW INDIAN POLICY                                        340


  CHAPTER XXI

  THE LAST STAND: CHIEF JOSEPH AND SITTING BULL                358


  CHAPTER XXII

  LETTING IN THE POPULATION                                    372


  CHAPTER XXIII

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                                         387




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER                              _Frontispiece_

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

  CHIEF KEOKUK                                        _facing_  30

  IOWA SOD PLOW. (From a Cut belonging to the Historical
  Department of Iowa.)                                          46

  MAP: OVERLAND TRAILS                                          57

  FORT LARAMIE, 1842                                  _facing_  78

  MAP: THE WEST IN 1849                                        120

  MAP: THE WEST IN 1854                                        140

  "HO FOR THE YELLOW STONE"                          _facing_  144

  THE MINING CAMP                                        "     158

  FORT SNELLING                                          "     204

  RED CLOUD AND PROFESSOR MARSH                          "     274

  MAP: THE WEST IN 1863                                        300

  POSITION OF RENO ON THE LITTLE BIG HORN            _facing_  360

  MAP: THE PACIFIC RAILROADS, 1884                             380




THE LAST AMERICAN FRONTIER




CHAPTER I

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT


The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which
the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which
courage and foresight have gradually transformed from desert waste to
virile commonwealth. It is the story of one long struggle, fought over
different lands and by different generations, yet ever repeating the
conditions and episodes of the last period in the next. The winning of
the first frontier established in America its first white settlements.
Later struggles added the frontiers of the Alleghanies and the Ohio,
of the Mississippi and the Missouri. The winning of the last frontier
completed the conquest of the continent.

The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West.
For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas
of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to
migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness
stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.
Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails
and clearing in the valleys. The advance line of the farmsteads was
never far behind it. And out of this shifting frontier between man and
nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American
governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved
them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has
always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled
the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic
development and social organization, have in most instances originated
near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier
interest.

The controlling influence of the frontier in shaping American problems
has been possible because of the construction of civilized governments
in a new area, unhampered by institutions of the past or conservative
prejudices of the present. Each commonwealth has built from the
foundation. An institution, to exist, has had to justify itself again
and again. No force of tradition has kept the outlawed fact alive. The
settled lands behind have in each generation been forced to remodel
their older selves upon the newer growths beyond.

Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the
frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with
the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have
counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive
courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings
or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a
picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements,
but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad
man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both
have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and
initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted
an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their
strength in numbers.

The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor
in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the
earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century,
when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous
in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose
characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New
England were not too early for its shaping.

The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier,
separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness
in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the
successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations
and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended.
The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at
once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and
translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments
of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious
and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a
melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a
generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made
a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which
by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the
middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking
distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always,
determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line
of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating
link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along
its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The
extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the
contour of the seaboard along which it lay.

Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic
rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems
in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the
neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the
settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on
the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the
various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river
mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into
the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.

For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are
navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge
upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the
foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a
line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once
the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second
frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was
reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.

Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began.
English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in
growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the
needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English
in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly
to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the
similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier.
Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached,
the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism
plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.

The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an
end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing,
up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they
approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind,
the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the
combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley
routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run
parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge
among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every
reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the
pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and
meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause
against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where
the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the
Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have
common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in
which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with
talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was
already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union
than had been known before.

The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700.
By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing
down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping
backward to north and south. The French war of 1756-1763 saw the
apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the
Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and
Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river
valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and
population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both
sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested
the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian
strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was
the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by
all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the
three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.

The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started
down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed
by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the
boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed
it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi
itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The
new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations
which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties
felt the frontier pressure from the start.

Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states
appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its
advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony
Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge
to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio
entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet
the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to
till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern
communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation;
but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines
were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or
interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes,
through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as
state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war
with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.

The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad
investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military
reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was
signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern
population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt
too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result
of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was
the western accompaniment.

The westward movement has been continuous in America since the
beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have
never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession
of pioneers has marched up the <DW72>s of the Appalachians, across
the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the
Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream
has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed
the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever
before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years
following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in
the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.

Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement
down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its
junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with
states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north
and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more
apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended
the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including
New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north.
The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as
yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than
to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the
convenience of the natural route.

For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit
of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio
facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred
and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to
afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the
Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and
it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend
an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas
all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The
emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed
by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission
of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend
of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease.
Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was
simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out
to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge
began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of
population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the
northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and
Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the
apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in
1821.

There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri
than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers
were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major
of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a
tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty,
steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew
longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.

Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from
the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American
desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their
maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara
or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded
upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the <DW72>s approach
the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who
traversed the country in 1819-1820. Long reported that it could never
support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of
the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc."
A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber,
the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point
the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are
annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many
years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from
Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy
desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the
states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the
western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had
reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.

By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward
march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the
Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn.
Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached
nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the
nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert
and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which
had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War,
even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier
scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of
life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired
an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its
doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants,
threatened to become a constant quantity.

From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for
the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard
continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are
filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains
in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear
the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian
tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility
of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once.
A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of
the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the
continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and
intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the
control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out
the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian
policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period,
the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating
the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is
larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such,
before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American
history has been closed.




CHAPTER II

THE INDIAN FRONTIER


A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly
relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the
continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its
advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands,
concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating
their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed
had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly
enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements
and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every
twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never
more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it
until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt
that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual
members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable
as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the
part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and
contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the
danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not
responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries,
real or imaginary,--and too often they were real,--made him the most
dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier.
The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and
endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached
a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but
never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had
been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.

The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have
ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful
of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade
among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land,
possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase,
could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a
higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against
the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against
self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian
must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with
progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever
have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for
him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss
of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that
invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national
honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed
maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older
ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all
these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government
has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to
administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade,
punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct
not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.

The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its
responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In
theory the disposition of the government was generally bene