Yale University Library 39002028241322 >¦ 1 »i. ¦'. 1 _ J From the library of Prof. Henry Crosby Emery 1924 31Boofe0 bp 31amtsf Ji* i^ofifmen SAMUEL ADAMS. In the Series of American States men. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25; half morocco $2.50 YOUNG SIR HENRY VANE. With a portrait of Vane engraved on Wood, Plans of the Battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, a fac-simile of a letter by Vane and a copy of the Great Seal of the Com monwealth under CromwelL i vol. 8vo 4.00 THE LIFE OF THOMAS HUTCHINSON, ROYAL GOVERNOR OF THE PROVINCE OF MASSA CHU S ETTS BAY. Portrait and Illustrations, i vol. 8vo, gilt top 4.00 A SHORT HISTORY OFTHE MISSISSIPPI VAL LEY. Illustrated. i2mo, Jtet. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. Publishers^ Boston and New York. ../V^Uyk^ca-^. From an original, unretouched negative, made in 1864, at the time the President commissioned Ulysses Grant Lieutenant- General and Commander of all the armies of the Republic. It is said that this negative, with that of General Grant (see page 200), was made in commemoration of that event. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MISSISSIPPI YALLEY BY JAMES K. HOSMER, Ph. D., LL. D. MEMEEK OP THE MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AUTHOR OF BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUNG SIR HENRY VANE, SAMUEL ADAMS, AND THOMAS HUTCHINSON, ETC. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, JAMES K. HOSMER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November, igor To his friends The Directors of the Minneapolis Public Library This book, based on materials obtained in their col lection, and intended primarily for the public vrhom we serve, Is Respectfully Dedicated by Their most obedient THE LIBRARIAN PEEFACE The centenary of the Louisiana purchase, now close at hand, about to be commemorated by the St. Louis Exposition, is turning the thoughts of men to the region in which lies the heart of the Union. At the present moment, too, the Mississippi Valley is about to become, so to speak, politically complete. Oklahoma possesses every requisite for statehood; and will, so says report, probably with the Indian Territory make application for admission as a State at the next session of Congress. Should the application be granted, the last unorganized fragment of the area of the Mississippi Valley will receive a formal constitution. Such an event marks an epoch. In view of these circumstances, it is hoped that this little book may seem timely and prove useful. The writer believes that his best qualification for the task he has undertaken lies in the fact that he has spent most of his life in the Missis- vi PREFACE sippi Valley or close upon its border, and has his memory charged with what has happened there during the lapse of nearly two generations, from the administration of Van Buren to that of Roosevelt. He has traversed the basin from the mouth of the river to northern Minnesota, — from the head-springs of the Ohio on the east to the head-springs of the Missouri on the west. He has dwelt on the main stream, on its most impor tant affluents, and on some of its smaller tribu taries. He has had some experience of the aboriginal peoples, as well as of the race which has displaced them. He has been cognizant not only of the peaceful development, but has marched over a portion of its area rifle on shoulder, and had some hand in loosing the Confederate clutch which sought to close the river to the Union. He may claim to have had good opportu^ nity to absorb all that may come to a historian through long and intimate acquaintance with the country he sets out to describe. The literature of the subject is, of course, of vast amount, and the writer has had close at hand during the preparation of his work a good proportion of that literature. To enumerate the authorities whom he has consulted, more or less PREFACE vii thoroughly, would take long ; but a few works may be mentioned upon which especial depend ence has been placed. For the few geological ref erences, Geikie's " Great Ice Age " and Russell's " Rivers of North America " have been helpful ; for the Indians, Lewis H. Morgan's " Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines," and the monumental " Relations des Jesuites," as edited by Mr. R. G. Thwaites ; for the early ex plorations, besides Parkman's histories, the narra tives of Hennepin, Carver, Lewis and Clark, and Zebulon M. Pike ; for the Louisiana purchase, the works of Barbe-Marbois, Binger Herman, and the Memoirs of Lucien Bonaparte ; for the time of the Rebellion, " The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War." As to the general development of the Valley, the story has been followed as told by Bancroft, Henry Adams, McMaster, and Rhodes. Of the great men of the Mississippi Valley, numerous biographies have been con sulted, of especial value being those of the American Statesmen Series commemorating men of the West. Among all his authorities, the writer is under most obligation to his good friends and brethren in the pleasant Harvard bond, Justin Winsor ("Narrative and Criti- viii PREFACE cal History of America," " Mississippi Basin," "Westward Movement"), John Fiske ("Dis covery of America," the opening chapter, and the " Mississippi Valley during the Civil War "), and Theodore Roosevelt ("The Winning of the West " ). The writer desires to make special acknow ledgment of the courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway in furnishing the plate for the interest ing picture of " Lewis and Clark among the Mandans," one of the chief ornaments of the book. JAMES K. HOSMER. MnrNBAPOLis Public Libbaby, October 31, 1901. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE prehistoric MISSISSIPPI VALLBT The river much larger in pre-glacial time. — Physical character of the present Valley. — Dimensions of the Basin. — How far available for man's use. — Num ber and influence of its population. — Antiquity of man in the Valley. — The Indians. — Status of the Indians. — Number and distribution of the tribes. — Variety in their condition. — Indian life that of the clan. — House life. — Sachems and chiefs. — Com munal customs. — Totems. — Tribes and confeder acies. — Great councils. — Mound-building done by Indians, not by a different race. — Sparseness of In dian population. — Constant warfare. — Cruelty and cause for it. — Folk-lore. — Eloquence at councils. — Methods of oratory. — Wampum belts and their function. — Use of pantomime. — Aptness of the Jesuits in Indian methods. — Physical characteris tics of Indians. — In no proper sense occupants of the country, but only scattered wanderers . . . 1-19 CHAPTER n the COMING OF THE EUROPEANS Displacement of primitive Americans by a higher type only a repetition of what has happened in Old World. — The Aryan march westward. — Indians not exter minated but shifted. — Their spirit not quenched. X CONTENTS — Appearance of the Spaniards at the south. — Al varez de Pineda. — Panfllo de Narvaez. — Este- vanico the first negro. — Fray Marcos de Nizza. — Estevanico's death. — Coronado's march. — De Soto pushes from Florida westward. — His death and burial. — Decay of Spanish energy. — French enter the valley from the north. — Their adaptability. — Ancient portages and waterways. — Jean Nicolet at Green Bay. — Groseilliers and Radisson. — AUouez. — Marquette. — La Salle. — Discovers the Ohio. — Reaches the Illinois country. — Tonti. — La Salle's persistency. — Destruction of Illinois by Iroquois. — La Salle goes down the Mississippi. — Louisiana named. — Expedition to mouth of Mississippi. — Misfortunes and death of La Salle. — The Recollets. — Hennepin at the Falls of St. Anthony. — His books. — His lies. — Iberville founds New Orleans. — Bienville. — Explorers to the west. — La Veren- drye and his sons. — They reach the Rocky Moun tains. — French settlements in Louisiana. — Life and character of the hahitans. — Vague boundaries of Loi.isiana. — New Orleans. — Filles k la cassette. — Number of population. — The fur-trade . . 20-50 CHAPTER III the ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE English-speaking men enter Valley from the east. — Walker at Cumberland Gap. — Washington on head waters of the Alleghany. — Building of Fort Du quesne. — Braddock's defeat. — English seize valley of the Ohio. — Cession by France to Spain of Louisiana west of the river and New Orleans. — Question as to Indian right to soil. — Their dispos session inevitable. — Pontiac's conspiracy. — His burial at St. Louis. — Scotch-Irish immigration. — CONTENTS xi Its origin. — Leadership in the westward advance. — Country about the sources of the Tennessee occu pied. — Character. — The rifle and the axe. — Con ditions of wilderness life. — How they affected the pioneer. — Daniel Boon sets out for Kentucky. — His adventures. — Washington on the Ohio. — Right of whites to the country. — Settlers prefer Virginia to North Carolina. — James Robertson and John Sevier. — Watauga Association formed. — Colonial disputes. — Advance along the Tennessee easier than along the Ohio. — Lord Dunmore's War. — Robertson at the great bend of the Cumberland. — Henderson's land speculations. — Kentucky set tled. — Transylvania. — Jonathan Carver in the Northwest. — Founding of Lexington, Ky. . . 51-74 CHAPTER IV HOW THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD The Revolution in the Mississippi Valley. — Boon in the war. — Simon Kenton's adventures. — French settlements in the Valley. — George Rogers Clark commissioned to capture them. — Starts for Kas kaskia. — Captures the town. — Vincennes surren ders. — The conquest secured. — The Indians dealt with at Cahokia. — Clark's speech. — His ascendency over them. — The British counter-stroke. — Expedi tion against Vincennes. — In the drowned lands of the Wabash. — The town seized. — Complete suc cess. — Importance of Clark's achievement. — Watauga and Holston River men at King's Moun tain. — Sevier's activity. — Progress of settlement. — Flatboats. — State of Franklin. — Separatist feel ing. — Under the Confederation. — Resignation by States of their Western claims. — Absurd nomencla ture. — Life of Abraham Lincoln's father saved 75-99 xii CONTENTS CHAPTER V THE CONSTITUTION AND THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 Formation of the Ohio Company. — Provisions of the Ordinance. — Section 16 of townships devoted to school use. — Rufus Putnam and his party. — Mari etta founded. — St. Clair governor. — Cincinnati founded. — Unwise ways of opening public domain. — The Scioto Company. — French at Gallipolis. — Indian hostility. — Effects of adoption of Constitu tion. — Expedition of St. Clair. — His defeat. — Wrath of Washington. — Expedition of Wayne. — His victory. — Kentucky and Tennessee States. — Bad relations with Spain as to Mississippi naviga tion. — Northwest Territory. — Indiana. — Immi gration thither from South. — Whitney's cotton-gin and its influence. — Life in the backwoods. — Camp- meetings. — Good influence of schools . . . 100-117 CHAPTER VI LOUISIANA PURCHASED AND EXPLORED Separatist feeling. — Irritation as to mouth of Missis sippi. — Designs of Napoleon as to Louisiana. — Effect upon him of misfortunes in San Domingo. — Determines to sell Louisiana to Americans. — Sur prise and embarrassment of negotiators. — The pur chase effected. — Wrath of the Federalists. — Cere mony of . the cession. — New Orleans in 1803. — Discontent of people at the cession. — Jefferson orders Lewis and Clark to explore Louisiana. — Expedition organized and dispatched. — High char acter and skill of the leaders. — Mandan village reached. — The Bird-woman. — Life on the plains. — The Pacific reached. — The return. to St. Louis. CONTENTS xiii — Fate of Lewis and Clark. — Pike commipsioned to explore. — He reaches northern Minnesota. — Dispatched westward. — Reaches Pike's Peak. — Sufferings in the mountains. — Captured by Spaniards. — His ultimate fate 118-137 CHAPTER VII THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HELD AGAINST HOME CONSPIRA TORS AND FOREIGN ASSAILANTS Complications growing out of Louisiana purchase. — Aaron Burr. — His character and career. — Plots for a great Western empire. — Vists the West in 1805. — Meets Gen. James Wilkinson. — Returns to Washington. — Again goes West. — At Blennerhas- sett's Island. — Arrested and defended by Henry Clay. — Seized and brought to Richmond. — His trial. — Tecumseh. — Andrew Jackson. — His char acter and career. — War of 1812. — Pakenham's expedition against New Orleans. — Jackson's pre parations to meet it. — Energy of British com mander. — Battle on the plain of Chalmette. — Movement of population westward. — Introduction of steamboats. — Life of the settlers. — Education. — Religion. — Finance. — Administration of justice. — Roughness of frontier life. — Missouri organ ized. — Pro and anti-slavery men. — Struggle be tween them in the Northwest Territory . . . 138-160 CHAPTER VIII THE BLACK SHADOW Human bondage in the past. — Negro slavery recog nized as an evil only slowly. — Decay of slavery at the North. — Influence of the cotton-gin at the South. — Negroes perhaps helped rather than bin- xiv CONTENTS dered by slavery. — Whites the sinners and also the sufferers. — Missouri in 1819. — The Missouri Com promise. — Henry Clay the great pacificator. — Foreign immigration. — Stephen A. Douglas. — Squatter Sovereignty. — The Nebraska bill. — The Free-Soilers. — Their able leaders. — Struggle in Congress. — Nebraska bill becomes a law. — Excite ment in the North. — Immigration into Kansas. — Border ruf&ans. — Struggle between them and free- state men. — Topeka and Lecompton Constitutions. — John Brown of Ossawatomie. — His character and career. — His blood-shedding. — The Dred Scott decision. — Taney's opinion. — Curtis's opinion. — Admission of Kansas as a free State. — Lincoln- Douglas debate in Illinois 161-182 CHAPTER IX THE CIVIL WAR St. Louis a centre of interest. — Nathaniel Lyon and Frank P. Blair seize the initiative. — First appear ance of U. S. Grant and W. T. Sherman. — Death of Lyon at Wilson's Creek. — Pea Ridge. — Early career of Grant. — He seizes Paducah, Belmont. — Fall of Fort Henry. — Fort Donelson invested. — Breaking of Confederate line. — Grant at Pittsburg Landing. — Battle of the first day. — Of the second day. — Island No. 10. — David Glasgow Farragut. — New Orleans captured. — Farragut before Vicks burg. — Bragg's march northward. — W. A. Rose crans. — Battle of Stone River. — Vicksburg and Port Hudson fortified. — Campaign against Vicks burg. — River crossed below Grand Gulf. — Grant penetrates between PembertoA and Johnston. — Surrender of Vicksburg. — Operations against Port Hudson. — The River clear. — Rosecrans seizes CONTENTS XV Chattanooga. — Bragg reinforced by Longstreet. — Battle of Chickamauga. — Thomas at the Horseshoe Ridge. — Greatness of the struggle. — Grant super sedes Rosecrans. — Capture of Missionary Ridge. — Sherman starts for the sea. — Hood marches north. — Battle of Franklin. — Thomas blamed for slowness. — Battle of Nashville. — Character of the Civil War in the Mississippi Valley . . . 183-203 CHAPTER X THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AT THE CLOSE OF THE 19TH CENTURY How the Mississippi River baffles engineering skill. — James B. Eads. — The St. Louis bridge. — The jettie% at the River's mouth. — Resources of the Basin. — Its great commonwealths. — Assimilation of foreign elements. — Difficulties from Indians. — Hopeful outlook as to the latter. — Railroad build ing. — Rapid development. — Harm from railroads. — Problems of the situation. — Hopeful signs. — Advantages of association and movement. — Stimu lating influence. — Railroads as helpers and educa tors. — How harmony comes about. — Problems of city administration. — Favorable signs. — The black shadow still present. — Public schools threatened. — Labor problems. — Superior sensitiveness of modern conscience. — Promise for the future . . . 204r-223 Index 225-230 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Abraham Lincoln .... .... Frontispiece From an original, unretouched negative, made in 1864, at the time the President commissioned Ulysses Grant Lieutenant-General and Commander of all the armies of the Republic. It is said that this negative, with that of General Grant (see page 200), was made in com memoration of that event. Map showing the Extent op the Mississippi Vallef 2 Map showing portages between Great Lakes and Mississippi 32 La Salle After a design given in Gravier, which is said to he based on an engraving preserved in the Bibliothfeque de Rouen 40 Daniel Boon 64 From a picture by Chester Harding in the Massachusetts Historical Society's gallery. A French House among the Illinois 80 From Callot's Atlas Ohio Flatboat .... 96 From Callot's Atlas Thomas Jefferson in 1805 122 From the drawing by C. B. J. F^vret de St. M^min in the possession of John C. Bancroft, Esq., Boston. Lewis and Clark meeting the Mandan Indians . . 130 Prom a painting by C. M. Russell in the possession of Robert Vaughn. By courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway. Andrew Jackson ... 148 From a daguerreotype. Tennessee and Kentucky in the Civil War . . . 184 Ulysses S. Grant 200 From a photograph in 1864. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY CHAPTER I THE PEEHISTOEIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY The Mississippi River is believed to have been flowing as far back in geological time as what is known as the cretaceous era. Its volume then was much greater than at present. Lake Michi gan discharged into it by a channel now closely followed by the Chicago drainage canal; Lake Erie by the valley of the Maumee; and a vast sheet of water long since disappeared known to geologists as Lake Agassiz, by channels farther north. The river wore its way through strata of limestone depositing in its bed alluvium to the depth of hundreds of feet, tbe layer thickening as the Gulf was approached. At length came an age when the surface of our continent as far south as the Ohio River, and a line running in continua tion of it into the remote west, was covered by ice many feet in thickness, the action of which caused great changes in the area underneath. The Mis- 2 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY sissippi after the glacial age shrank much in vol ume. Lake Agassiz disappeared, while Lake Michigan and the others of its chain discharged through the St. Lawrence instead of southward. Within the broad channel scooped out of the lime stone in pre-glacial time, the river cut an interior channel from the mouth of the Ohio downward, the soft alluvium making the work not difficult. This is the channel of to-day. The enclosing uplands to east and west are faced with bluffs of light-colored clay, between which the river goes looping along its course, in summer much attenu ated, but in times of flood a wide torrent breaking new and ever new paths for itself through the soft soil which lets it wander as it will. At New Or leans, where the alluvial deposit is a thousand feet deep, the Mississippi runs in a trench along an elevated ridge, having raised itself by deposits on its bed until it flows above the level of the coun try it is traversing. Sometimes breaking through its banks here, banks which man has tried to strengthen by levees, the river pours over the land in crevasses, submerging broad regions. The fin ger-like extensions into the Gulf are prolongations of the embankments, the main stream reaching the sea in several outlets. Before each mouth, or pass, lie broad shallows, built up from the bot tom of the Gulf by the outpouring sediment, and thus the land grows on and on as the centu ries go. GLACIAL CONDITIONS 3 Above the mouth of the Ohio, near which the ice terminated in the glacial age, the character of the river-channel is quite different from its lower course. It soon narrows, and precipitous bluffs often border it right and left. Now and then a limestone ledge thrown across its bed gives rise to a languid rapid. In its upper course the bluffs become often ranges of bordering hills, crested sometimes with outcropping rock that might al most be mistaken for ruined towers and pinnacles, like those of the Rhine or Danube. The ice age everywhere wrought changes in the river and its valley ; but the pre and post-glacial conditions are contrasted nowhere more interestingly than at the Falls of St. Anthony, where the river, having been turned by the deposit of drift from its first course, was made to flow over a thin sheet of hard lime stone supported on a bed of softer rock. Here first was a cataract one hundred feet high, which has cut its way backward forming a gorge of eight miles. The height of the faU has gradually dimin ished, until at present it has subsided into a long- drawn tumbling rapid. The breadth to-day of the Mississippi Valley in its widest part, from the head-waters of the Ohio to the head-waters of the Missouri, is fully eigh teen hundred miles ; the length of the valley from the lakes and rills where the river takes its origin to the tips of the strange fingers which its delta thrusts out into the Gulf of Mexico, is twenty-five 4 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY hundred miles. The area of the basin may be set down as a million and a quarter square miles. Such a river with such a valley can be found no where else in the world. While the Amazon may surpass the Mississippi in volume and perhaps also drains a basin of richer fertility, its situa^ tion nearly under the equator renders its basin less habitable for the better breeds of men. Not in Europe, Asia, or Africa, can a rival as to ser viceability be found for the Mississippi ; for the streams that approach it in size wander through long stretches of desert, or are beset by pestilen tial swamps, or are lost in frozen regions within the Arctic Circle. Scarcely a square mile, how ever, of the Mississippi Valley but welcomes hu man habitation. No rugged mountains emSaxrass the main stream or the tributaries, except about their remote sources; there are few sand-wastes or morasses which cannot be reclaimed to human uses. Almost every rood of the space can be made to furnish a home and sustenance, if not to the farmer, at any rate to the ranchman or the miner. For its friendly cherishing the river, with its afflu ents, deserves to be called the great mother-stream of the world. Half the States of the American Union pour their waters into these currents. No other region of the earth's surface contains, per haps, so many of the great English-speaking race. The centre of the valley is at the same time nearly the centre of population and of influence of the PRIMEVAL MAN 6 United States. For what it is, and what it is to be, the story of the Mississippi Valley deserves to be told ; and the epoch when its spaces become occupied with commonwealths thoroughly organ ized and equipped offers a fitting moment. For the first traces of man in the Mississippi VaUey we must go back to what is called in geol ogy the Pleistocene age. It was then that the gla cial phenomena were in evidence, and coeval with them plainly human life went forward. Old stone (palseo-lithic) implements are found which may be referred undoubtedly to the age of ice. Quite possibly, for the first man it would be necessary to ascend to the pliocene ; at any rate he was con temporary with the " Dragons of the prime That tare each other in their slime." This primeval man is believed to have resembled the Esquimaux, a race ever fighting with cold; while the Indians, who were in possession of the continent when recorded history begins, were of a type quite different. As to the origin of the In dians fanciful theories abound, one interesting to many being that they are descended from the " Lost Tribes of the House of Israel," dispossessed by Asiatic conquerors to wander as far as America across Bering Straits. Who shall tell us whence they came ? When history begins, at any rate, this one race is in possession from the Arctic Cir cle to Cape Horn, red in hue, their physical char- 6 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY acteristics in general pointing to a common origin, their languages allied. This widely-spread popu lation had attained to various stages of culture. Following the conclusions of the most philo sophical students, among whom the name of Lewis H. Morgan ^ holds an honorable place, it must be said that below civilization there are two stages — savagery and barbarism ; and that each of these stages contains three subdivisions. If the power of articulate speech be taken as marking the line between the brute and the savage, the capacity to catch fish and to utilize fire may be taken as a second step lifting the possessor into middle savagery. That in turn is passed with the inven tion of the bow and arrow, armed with which evolving man stands in higher savagery. With the acquirement of the art of making pottery, as we trace him forward, he passes from savagery into lower barbarism ; and middle barbarism is reached when the power is attained to domesticate other animals than the dog. Predatory life, that of the hunter, now takes the second place, while pastoral life comes into the foreground. In this stage is attained the power of smelting copper. Still another rise, into higher barbarism, comes with the capacity to till the soil, making use of irrigation. To higher barbarism also belongs the capacity to build with stone and adobe brick, and to smelt iron. Finally the leap to the possession ^ Souses and House-Life qf the American Aborigines. INDIAN STAGES OF CULTURE 7 of an alphabet and of written records marks the attainment of the lowest stage of civilization. The Indians of America, though of a common origin, varied in their condition, attaining now to one, now to another, of these stages of culture. No tribe, however, has gone beyond middle bar barism. Capacity to work iron has never been reached among them ; much less the possession of an alphabet and written records. Picture-writing, indeed, was widely practiced ; also a curious mne monic use of wampum-belts and strings of beads ; and these went far to take the place of the pen of the scribe. All these peoples were pottery-makers, and so had passed at least from upper savagery into lower barbarism ; their weapons and tools were new- stone (neo-lithic) and therefore not the rudest. Some tribes of the Muscogees, and perhaps the Mandans and Minnetarees, had attained the middle stage of barbarism, having domesticated animals other than the dog ; they reached pastoral life and rudimentary tillage. Of a lower and fiercer type were the Dacotas and the Huron-Iroquois. On the other hand the Aztecs and pueblo-dwellers of New Mexico were higher, having reached tillage with irrigation, and the art of building with adobe brick ; these, however, are scarcely within our ken, their outskirts barely reaching the remot est sources of the Arkansas. It is quite possible, thinks Mr. John Fiske,^ that maize, the gift of 1 Discovery of America, ch. i. 8 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY the god Mondamin, the plant so full of use and beauty, to such an extent the basis of life in America, both ancient and modern, exercised a retarding influence upon the tribes of our valley. It grew everywhere, requiring only the rudest care for its production. Since an abundant and palatable form of sustenance was thus always right at hand, there being no necessity for careful agri culture, the tribes were content to be slothful. Beans, pumpkins, tobacco, also, crops of less value but held in esteem, were in like manner easy to raise ; so that the squaw with her clumsy hoe of stone sufficed unassisted, from generation to gen eration, to furnish the livelihood. How primitive the status of the Indian was is proved by the fact that throughout the valley, throughout America, in fact, kinship was reckoned through the female only. There was no adum bration in those dim minds of any sacredness in the marriage tie : the " extension of infancy " producing family life and giving rise to humane altruism had scarcely begun to affect aboriginal society. Exogamy, the law that a man must marry out of his clan, was the rule, and the clan was the ultimate social unit. A group of clans formed, in anthropological parlance a phratry ; a group of phratries a tribe, — the tribes being in some cases farther grouped into confederacies. It is a momentous change, thinks Mr. Fiske, when kinship comes to be reckoned by the male instead PRIMITIVE ABORIGINAL LIFE 9 of the female line. Only the Aryans and Semites have risen to this, the change probably coming in upper, or possibly late in middle barbarism. After the domestication of animals property (in Latin peculium, derived from pecus, a flock) became possible as never before, for flocks and herds were the first extensive forms of property. Exclusive possession of the wife was part of the system of private property. First, it was poly gamy, the system of many wives, the patriarchal father then becoming the link in the numerous family. It was a great advance on what had pre ceded, and to this, scholars think, is largely due the dominance in the world of Aryan and Semite. In America this state was far from being realized, kinship being reckoned only through the mother, while marriage could be terminated at will. A study of the Indian dwelling lets one into aboriginal domestic life most readily.^ The " long house " of the Iroquois, the type most carefuUy studied, was an enclosure of stakes and bark, the apertures covered with skins. Along the interior, from fifty to one hundred feet in length, stalls were contrived to right and left, an aisle running be tween. These stalls contained platforms or bunks raised from the ground for sleeping ; from the ceiling hung corn, pumpkins, tobacco, the products on which the savage depended. Along the aisle at 1 Morgan : Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigi- 10 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY intervals fires were kindled, the smoke ascending through holes in the roof, each fire sufficing for four stalls as each stall sufficed for a domestic group. In the groups thus collected in the long house the mothers were all of one clan, but the fathers came from other clans. In each house hold a large community of goods prevailed, the mother presiding over the distribution of food, and the life of the house in general. The bride brought her mate home with her ; if shiftless and worthless the women turned him out to go back to his own clan or to be chosen by another woman ; for the woman ruled the house, although at the same time she was the drudge. What children were born were counted with their mother's clan, family life in our sense being unknown. Each clan had at its head certain elective officials, the sachems who were chosen for peace, and chiefs who were chosen for war. The sachem or chief could not succeed his father, but might succeed any uterine brother (son of the same mother) or his uncle on his mother's side. The clans might number fifty or sixty ; property was transmitted in the female line ; upon every member of a clan lay the duty to defend and avenge his clansmen. Though the habitation was not always a " long house," still the variations from that type were not important, the Indian dwelling universally being adapted, like that, to clan and communal life. Among the Mandans the structure was cir- THE LONG HOUSE AND THE CLAN 11 cular ; among the Southern Indians, the Musco gees, the clan dwelt in small clustered cabins ; else where there were tepees of irregular shape ; while in the far west the more elaborate pueblo, a con struction of adobe brick was reared by the races that had reached middle barbarism. All the con structions, however, were only modifications of one idea — an arrangement suited to a time when as yet the modern family was not, and a most primi tive status was to be provided for. In aU this house-life one interesting trait was universal, — hospitality. Both to tribesmen and strangers who appeared within the rude shelter, kindness must be shown ; all were to be fed and cherished. Among the Indians of the Great Valley every where the names of persons were significant ; often they were grotesque, often wildly picturesque. The clan itself always had a name, usually that of some animal, the wolf, the turtle, the salmon ; of this some rude representation was either drawn or carved, called the totem. Each clan had its council of which women might be members ; in deed women might compose the council entirely ; for their position in aboriginal society was a more dignified one than has often been supposed ; squaw sachems were not uncommon, who sometimes be came persons of note. The number of clans making up a tribe varied greatly. Among the Chippewas it might be twenty, though the more usual number was eight 12 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY or ten. The phratry, intermediate between the clan and tribe, was less distinct in Indian society, though it plainly appears as a grouping together of two or three clans. The tribes were marked out by a common dialect ; there were sometimes tribal chiefs higher than clan chiefs, though these never developed into kings. The grouping of tribes into confederacies was rather rare, though the Iroquois and the Aztecs, to the right and left of the valley, showed marked organizations of this kind. In a group of tribes the clan organizations ran through all, the brothers and sisters of the wolf, bear, or turtle, whatever the totem might be, recognizing one another by subtle, freemasonry, whether Senecas, Onondagos, or Mohawks, the recognition forming a bond of immense strength. The great council of a confederacy could not con vene itself, but could be convened by any tribal council. At such times the voting went by tribes, the sachems from the clans of each tribe being obliged to make a unit. Among the Six Nations there were two prominent chieftainships, one in the clan of the wolf, the other in that of the turtle, and both in the tribe of the Senecas ; for when history begins, the Senecas as touching the lakes and reaching out toward the Mississippi Valley were in the fore-front, bearing the brunt in many a foray of rapine and extermination which might reach even to the far western prairies. There is no reason to suppose that during pre- THE MOUND BUILDERS 13 historic time any race different from or more advanced than the Indians played any part. Throughout the basin, but particularly between the river and the Alleghanies, a feature which has caused wonder is the mounds, the constructions amounting to thousands in number, ranging from tumuli scarcely noticeable to extensive terraces, to long lines of earthworks, to outlines of the forms of serpents and other creatures embossed upon the plain in ridges that run for great dis tances. The town of Marietta, in Ohio, stands on terraces and ramparts which must have required in constructing thousands of busy hands and many years. The rings at Circleville and elsewhere and the great ramparts at Fort Ancient it would daunt a capable modern engineer to imitate. In the city of St. Louis formerly towered an artificial hill to rear which might have taxed the power of Che ops or Rameses. The conclusion, however, seems at present to be, that there was no special race of mound builders : that the mounds came from the ancestors of the Indians, and from a time probably no further back than the thirteenth or fourteenth century of our era. Excavations have revealed no finds indicating any superior civiliza tion; since Europeans have appeared, mounds have been constructed. It is believed that the Mandans, a link between the lower tribes and the pueblo races, may not long since have been mound builders. So, too, the Shawnees in Ohio and the 14 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY Cherokees farther south, races which when his tory begins had progressed far enough to have a somewhat stable agriculture, and to have domes ticated the horse and the ox. The purpose of the terraces is believed to have been to furnish sites for council-houses, or indeed for the communal dwellings, such as have been described. The cones were probably intended for burial places ; the ramparts, perhaps, for defense. The work presupposes a vast population instead of the scat tered handfuls of men which made up the Indian race at the European coming, even in the most populous areas. It implies, however, no capability of which the Indian was not possessed. Throughout the Mississippi Valley then, based on the social frame-work just outlined, went for ward for no one can say how many ages a vigor ous life. The forests hung heavy on the slopes of the Alleghanies to the east, rolling thence west ward over the areas threaded by the Ohio and its tributaries. Before the great river was reached the prairies formed a break in the leafy world ; and beyond the river, after new forests, the valley at last ran on into great plains, with timber belts along the streams indeed, but for the most part grass-covered lands, the pastures of countless wild herds. The Indian races were scattered sparsely throughout wood and plain. War was an almost constant condition, the life of the men being spent in the most energetic fighting, with intervals of INDIAN "WARFARE 15 sloth broken only by an occasional hunt. In the campaigns the risks and hardships encountered went to the utmost power of human endurance. No race has ever shown more courage, both active and passive, than the Indians have shown in their way; and, as regards skill, the deftness of the panther in pursuit of its prey was paralleled. The cruelty of the warfare was most ruthless and horrible. Indian life being that of the clan, with the family most rudimentary, the " extension of infancy," and family life in general, had done no thing to soften it. But we are taught that in the human evolution it is influences from these sources that lead to gentleness and humanity. It was in evitable then that the Indian's heart should know not the quality of mercy. In the thicket and on prairie went forward ceaseless fighting between combatants pitiless as tigers ; while energetic stocks, like the Iroquois, butchered whole nations remorselessly. Every camping ground was the scene of such tortures as no civilized man can bear to hear described. Vast tracts were unin habited because out of them the population had been killed ; these were visited only now and then by hunters, or swept across by war-parties bent on some dreadful errand of extermination to tribes living beyond. The sparseness of the Indian pop ulation at the time when history in America begins is often overlooked. The tribes, in fact, were only encamped here and there in the country ; in no proper sense did they occupy it. 16 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY The Indian's mind in its dim consciousness worked often in interesting ways. His folk-lore was abundant and charged with picturesque poetry. At the councils, it was often the case that the ora tors thrilled the white spectators present with wild and beautiful outbursts of eloquence. There it is, perhaps, that the Indian appears at his best. The council-fire was kindled, and close at hand to it, decked out with feathers of the hawk and eagle, with skins of the elk or the bear, the naked, pow erful breasts painted in vermilion, in yellow, in black, or in white, sat the savage auditory. Close at hand on the river-margin, the canoes that had brought them were drawn up. These, the master pieces of Indian handicraft, were broad sheets of birch-bark, cinnamon-brown, as if to match the skin of their owners, rolled up about a light framework, stitched with deer sinews or liga ments of pliant wood, and embroidered with beads or quills of the porcupine. The pipe of peace, set off with plumes, was passed from hand to hand. The saturnine crowd sat in stolid rows, no face betraying a sign of what thought might be passing within. The orator advanced to the front where sat the old chief whose function it was, in the absence of writing, to preserve a record of all that might be said. Belts of wampum, bits of shell, or beads affixed to leather strips, variously colored, and sometimes objects of beauty, lay in a pile close at hand ; each had a mnemonic signifi- INDIAN ORATORY 17 cance, the orator handing one for each point, as the speech proceeded, to the record-keeper, who strung them in turn upon a pole. He marked with care what each denoted, charging his memory that the point might be recalled upon occasion in the future. " Brothers, with this belt I open your ears that you may hear. I remove grief and sorrow from your hearts. I draw from your feet the thorns that have pierced them on your journey hither. I sweep the seats about the council-fire that you may sit at ease. I wash y6ur heads and bodies that your spirits may be refreshed. I condole with you on the loss of your friends who have died. I wipe out any blood that may have been spilt between us." Some such exordium as this, a stated formula, is [said to have regularly preceded the address. This being finished, and the wampum-belt to com memorate it delivered, the orator was ready to proceed with his special message. The language was sure to be intensely figurative. If the speaker earnestly desired peace, he might say : " Brothers, in my country grows a lofty pine. I seize it and pluck it up by the roots. Looking into the hole I discern a dark, swift-flowing stream. Into this I throw the hatchet, and it is swept away for ever." The words were helped out by an extraordinary use of pantomime, and in this respect the Indian 18 THE PREHISTORIC MISSISSIPPI VALLEY orators are said to have possessed sometimes mar velous dramatic power. It might be that a chief was invited to the home of a remote tribe. His journey thither would be acted out in all its de tails by the orator. Now he would be presented sailing along a smooth stream, his arms plying the paddle ; anon he would be struggling in a rapid, the surges hurling his canoe upon the ledges ; again, he would be toiling through heavy snow, his legs clogged with the encumbering burden ; still again, he would be fighting off human enemies with war-whoop and weapons. At length, how ever, would come the arrival, the welcome to the hospitality of the long house, the clustered cabins, or the tepees, after the protracted striving. While the description in words would be vivid, at the same time the story would be acted out, — each feature, each limb, each muscle of the lithe body being pressed into service to make vivid the por trayal. As the delivery of the message proceeded, partly vehement speech, partly intervals of silence filled with dramatic action, the delivery of a wam pum-belt to the recorder marked each important point. Meanwhile the auditory, in rows about the council-fire, squatted with knees drawn up to their chins, would sometimes, if the orator were skillful, lose their impassiveness, start to their feet with deep guttural exclamations, caught away from their stolidity by the power of the speaker and actor. While in this wild rhetoric the savages INDIAN CHARACTERISTICS 19 unquestionably were matchless, some among the Europeans who first encountered them showed here a marvelous skill in imitation, none more so than the able and intrepid Jesuits, whose minute records in their " Relations," are by far our best authorities as regards the life and character of the forest races.^ Such were the main features of primitive life in the Mississippi Valley, going on from immemorial antiquity, the aborigine never rising above the middle status of barbarism. The race possessed bodies lithe, powerful, of vast endurance ; under their hard conditions there could be survival only of the fittest ; those marked by defect or weak ness fell out through the working of the inexora ble law. It was a race characterized by energy passing into unmitigated ferocity ; that it should be so was inevitable ; for man stiU in the stage of barbarism has not been subjected to the influences which soften and humanize. It was a race most sparsely scattered over a vast area : it cannot be said to have at all occupied the continent ; much less was there any utilizing of its resources, which indeed were scarcely touched. We have now to tell how the new era came. 1 Jesuit Belations, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. CHAPTER n THE COMmG OF THE EUROPEANS What has happened in the new world but re peats what happened in the old. In the old world, too, there was an ice age, when an arctic tempera ture prevailed as far south as the Mediterranean. In the Mediterranean, as in the White Sea to-day, sounded the crashing of wave-tossed floes ; icebergs scraped the isles of Greece; the slopes devoted now to the vine and the olive were smoothed for their present function by the sliding avalanche. In the ice age man existed in the old world just as in the new, and the evidence makes it certain that the type of man in both hemispheres was the same. The weapons and utensils of the old and of the new stone age correspond in the two hemi spheres ; to a large extent the extinct brutes with whom primitive man contended for his foothold upon the earth are the same in the old world as in the new. A museum of aboriginal European relics offers to view the same flint arrowheads and spears, the same rude hammers and axes, as are found in America. At some immensely distant time an aboriginal tribe began to grow refined. The scholarship of COURSE OF ARYAN CONQUEST 21 the present moment speaks much less confidently than did that of forty years ago with regard to these earliest civilized men. Still the evidence of language cannot be discredited, and this seems to show that the dominant races of India and Per sia, on the one hand, and of Europe on the other, run back to common forefathers whose mysterious home, once confidently placed in the highlands of central Asia, no cautious student now ventures to assign. Westward, however, they appear to have swept, — westward with no retreat. These Ary ans, to adopt what has been the most convenient designation, displaced the aborigines of Greece, then of Italy. They passed over central Europe, and in Scandinavia replaced the squalor of primi tive man with the vigor of the Viking. When history begins they had paused, stopped by the At lantic surf. Greek, Roman, Teuton, Sclave, Kelt, and Norseman were in possession throughout the length and breadth of Europe, — races which the scholar knows by the unerring evidence of words to be brethren of the great Aryan household; races, too, which had exterminated the cave dwell ers and their congeners, to whom they were dis tinctly superior. Did the impulse die when Europe was possessed ? We do not know when it was that the Aryan van guard pressing westward was stopped at the ocean shore ; but one night in October, 1492, a sea- tossed son of the Aryan race, looking westward 22 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1492 from the deck of his little caravel, beheld a light. It was a torch of grass, perhaps, swung for a mo ment high in air by some Indian fisherman, busy with his nets. It was the first clear signal from the new world to the race of masters advancing to its dominion. Westward across they came by tens, then by fifties, then by thousands. Like the flint arrowhead makers of the old world, Massa soit, Philip, Powhatan, disappeared along the coast. By the interior streams the Algonquin was displaced, and at last the fierce Iroquois. Far inland the highway replaced the Indian trail. Westward past the Lakes, across the Mississippi, westward still. In our own times in the far hunting grounds of Cheyenne and Arapahoe have gone up flames from burning communal lodges, and the cry of savages whose blood was being spiUed. It is seventy years since it sounded on the Mississippi, a century since it sounded on the western slope of the AUeghanies, two thou sand years, perhaps, since western Europe heard it. And so backward to that mysterious primeval home the hills have blazed with conflagration, the ravines have echoed cries of anguish, the streams have been dyed red with massacre along the Aryan track. The cry will grow still, the blaze die down, the stream run pure from its blood-stain ; but to-day the Aryan pioneer steps forward, as he always has stepped forward, over graves. The course of Aryan conquest only illustrates 1492] THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 23 the great universal law that in the struggle for life the fittest must survive. It is a tragic story, that of the displacement of the aboriginal race of America ; but it ought not to be lost sight of that what the tribes of this valley endured from their European foes bore no comparison to the suffer ings which the tribes inflicted upon each other. Take the worst of the enormities committed by the whites and compare them with the extermina tion of the Illinois by the Six Nations of which La Salle was a witness, or the destruction of the Hu rons described in the " Jesuit Relations," events which were only in the ordinary course of savage warfare, and the contrast is great indeed. It is confidently asserted that the number of Indians in America has not decreased, that while the tribes have been shifted to reservations and new territories they have really not become less nu merous ; that in some instances they have multi plied under the peaceful conditions of the later era. It is not beyond hope that they may rise in the scale and take a place among civilized men. As to spirit and energy their fire is not quenched. On Soldiers' Field at Harvard, at Yale, at Colum bia, at Princeton, where the flower of American youth exhibit in competitive struggle the best that can be brought to bear of lithencss and strength of body, of swiftness of mind as well, the Car lisle Indians are formidable rivals. Though the general direction of the Aryan 24 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1519 advance was from the east, the Mississippi Valley was entered from every other quarter of the com pass before it was entered from the east. The first approach was from the south ; almost at once vigorous expeditions struck in from the west ; somewhat later the basin was assailed from the north. Not until it had been often traversed and thoroughly mapped did a stream of European immigration come through the Alleghanies by the path which was really most direct. The first Europeans who sailed on the river and trod the valley were the Spaniards, who, having possessed the great outlying islands, proceeded to the continent. In 1519, just as Cortez was found ing Vera Cruz, Alvarez de Pineda, turning back from there, entered the mouth of a great river to which he gave the name Rio de Santo Espiritu. He breasted the current, or lay at anchor, for six weeks, finding one large Indian town and some forty hamlets, with whose people he traded. How far he ascended cannot be told. Nine years later Panfilo de Narvaez, commissioned to explore and govern the north shore of the Gulf, leaving Cuba with four hundred men and eighty horses con veyed in four ships, landed at Apalache Bay near the western end of what is now Florida. Being unable to regain his ships, he made his way west ward along the coast, building five frail boats. He reached at last the mouths of a great river whose flood seemed to freshen the sea. Here fur- 1528] THE FIRST NEGRO 25 ther disasters occurred. Part of his boats cap sizing, Narvaez himself was lost. A few of the party reached the shore, but only four finally sur vived. Of these, three were Spaniards, and the fourth a person upon whom it is quite worth while to dwell for a moment. He was a negro, the first of his race to reach the valley, contemporary thus with the earliest Europeans in the region in which the two races were henceforth to dwell together, a conjunction so fateful to both. The negro's name was Estevanico, " Little Steve ; " and mea gre as the record of him is, it affords some grounds for a guess that the diminutive fell to him because he was a jolly character made a pet of by his fel lows, rather than because he was small of stature. Little Steve, as things turned out, became one of the most remarkable of American explorers, though he could not set down what he saw and underwent. He and his companions, captured again and again by the Indians, roamed far and wide, at first through western Louisiana and eastern Texas. They were treated well, and held in awe as medicine men, the strange black skin perhaps proving a passport to favor. At last they were carried up the Rio Grande, and thence across to the Gulf of California. They turned up at last at a Spanish post in Mexico in May, 1536. But Little Steve's adventures were not yet ended. Fray Marcos de Nizza, a Franciscan monk who had had a South American experience 26 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1536 with Pizarro, being commissioned to search north ward for the " Seven Cities of Cibola," of which a tradition had come down, took for his compan ion Little Steve, whose life of eight years among the tribes had no doubt made him an expert and interpreter worth having at hand. As the party of Fray Marcos proceeded northward, they were well received, hearing from the Indians many stories which confirmed their belief that the cities they sought were not far off. Towns were de scribed containing buildings from two to five stories high, whose thresholds were set with tur quoises ; their inhabitants were said to be a peo ple well clothed, and as the friar judged from the reports, possessed of much refinement. They were in fact drawing near to the pueblos of the Zunis in New Mexico, at the present day to some extent preserved and inhabited. Little Steve had de clined in favor with the priestly leader, who had been scandalized by freedoms and gayeties which cavaliers might wink at, but not a churchman. Fray Marcos, however, as they approached the first pueblo, sent the negro forward, as better fitted than any one, to prepare the way. Little Steve went boldly, displaying his gifts and his retinue. But his time had come. The Zunis looked askance upon the black man, refusing him admittance. Little Steve alarmed, ran off, but was pursued and slain by an arrow. Fray Marcos, terrified, satis fied himself with a glimpse from a distant hill of 1540] FRANCESCO DE CORONADO 27 the pueblo, then retreating, made his report to the viceroy. Most interestingly, the Zunis have preserved to this day the tradition of the visit of Little Steve, their legend being that the precursor of the first white man was a black Mexican, who came to their first pueblo. He was bold, cheerful and ready, but the people distrusted and killed him. Afterwards numbers came, and the Zunis were conquered. The expedition of Fray Marcos de Nizza and Estevanico, though not touching fairly the Missis sippi Basin, deserves the mention here given, as being the forerunner of the more memorable march of Francesco de Coronado, a well born cavalier whose wife was reputed to be a granddaughter of no less mighty a personage than Ferdinand the Catholic. In the spring of 1540, with three hun dred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians, Coro nado struck north from the Pacific coast, visited the pueblos, described, first of white men, the Colo rado Canon, and went much farther eastward. He penetrated the Mississippi Basin, without doubt, though it is quite uncertain how far he may have wandered. He is believed to have reached the south fork of the Platte, and quite possibly the boundary line between Kansas and Nebraska. Some of his parties, for he sent his men out far and wide, may even have attained the Missouri River, somewhere between Kansas City and Omaha. He was disgusted at finding nothing but 28 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1540 barbarism ; the " Seven Cities of Cibola " were as unsubstantial as a mirage. He returned dis appointed, after two years of most energetic ex ploration, penetrating the Mississippi Valley by paths wliich to this day are unknown and difficult. He met only with disgrace on his retum, being deprived of the government of New Galicia which he had held. It is believed at the present day that not one of the great path-breakers that fol lowed him in laying open North America, whether French, English, or American, surpassed this in trepid Castilian in the boldness and scope of his enterprise. While Coronado, though most undeservedly los ing reputation, yet got off with a whole skin, indeed suffered apparently little hardship, the game everywhere being abundant and the Indians friendly or easily subdued, Fernando de Soto, who at the same time was in the field in another part of the valley, met only with disaster and death. He had been a companion of Pizarro, and had won in Peru great wealth and reputation. Thus as governor of Cuba, and holding the supreme rank of adelantado, he obtained a patent to extensive lands on the continent. Crossing to Florida with nearly six hundred men and more than two hundred horses, he landed with great pomp and with the highest hopes. The best blood and chivalry of Spain were profusely represented in his ranks. With unshrinking courage they marched north- 1541] FERNANDO DE SOTO 29 ward to the Savannah River, then turned west ward. Showing the customary Spanish cruelty and want of tact, De Soto enraged the Indians and at the same time was disappointed in his search for gold. The expedition pushed on with hardihood across what is now Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. At the junction of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers a great battle was fought, no doubt with Indians whose descendants we have known as Creeks. Seventy Spaniards fell, and many horses whose loss was mourned almost as if they had been cavaliers. Of the savages the annalist claims the destruction of twenty-five hun dred. Not daunted, De Soto continued to press westward, until in the fall of 1541 he reached the Yazoo. Next spring, striking the Mississippi, he embarked his company close at hand probably to Haines' Bluff, which as wiU be seen, was to behold still other expeditions after three hundred years. Crossing the stream, the band marched fearlessly through the forest, nearly to the mouth of the Ohio. His search still proving vain, De Soto returned southward, and on May 21, 1542, worn out with wandering, near the mouth of the Arkansas, he died, and was buried in the Mis sissippi. It was the most romantic, the most important, and also the last attempt of Spain to discover and possess the land, until after the lapse of two hundred years. A kindred race, after an interval, was to appear on the scene, destined to 30 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1543 strive for mastery with even greater energy ; but destined to fail also, as Spain had failed. De Soto's followers, under Luis de Moscoso, after descending the Mississippi, and making their way along the coast of Texas, reached, diminished by nearly half, the town of Tampico, September 16, 1543. The exploring and colonizing energy of Spain was exhausted. Before the end of the century the power of the nation was broken by its own intolerance. Individuality was crushed out by the Inquisition until character and spirit largely disappeared. As John Fiske says, the sys tem of Spain seemed especially adapted to bring to pass the survival of the Mnfittest. Since the time of Philip II. the life of the nation has been slowly departing, and we, at the close of the nine teenth century, have beheld one of the most marked and memorable phases of the decline. The chapter of Spanish enterprise having closed, it remained for another great Latin race to play its part. As the Spaniards had tried from the south and west, the French first entered the val ley far to the north, coming up from Canada through the great waterways. The rise of France was coincident with Spanish decay. In the seven teenth century the power of the kings was con firmed, Richelieu contributing to the might of Louis XIII., and Louis XIV. acceding to a dig nity in which the entire power of the state was concentrated. " L''etat c'est moi." France became 1630] FRENCH ACHIEVEMENT 31 a world-power as never before, and her vigor affected greatly the western continent. A secure foothold having been early gained in Canada, she pushed constantly farther west, the French much preferring the roving life of hunters and explorers to the cultivation of the soil in fixed settlements. They adapted themselves with remarkable facility to Indian ways, sinking themselves sometimes al most into Indians. The voyageurs and coureurs de hois danced the war-dance, whistled through the wing-bone of the eagle to keep off thunder storms, learned the most elaborate modulations of the war-whoop, — thus in ferocity, superstition, and general savagery becoming scarcely distinguishable from the wildest men. They mated with savage women until every tribe with which they came in contact was dashed with French blood. Compan ions, often precursors, of the most daring adven turers were the black-robed Jesuit missionaries. If the traders and hunters showed little tenacity, giving up readily such civilization as they had possessed, not so the priests ; they held to the faith, and with fanatical persistence and courage pressed it, encountering cheerfully, for its spread, the extremest torture and even martyrdom. As we enter now on the splendid story of French achievement in the Mississippi Valley, it will be well to consider for a moment the paths into the wilderness by which they came. The obvious route, of course, was by the St. Lawrence to the 32 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1630 Lakes ; though at an early time the difficult pas sage by the rapid-broken Ottawa, thence through the French River to what is now Georgian Bay in Lake Huron, was often followed. The shores of Lake Superior were early traced, and probably the trails stretching westward toward the Lake of the Woods were by no means unknown. A much more famous and frequented approach was that by Green Bay. Starting here, a short passage up the lower Fox, broken by rapids, carried the adventurer into Lake Winnebago ; thence the upper Fox led to the narrow portage where the Wisconsin could be reached ; sometimes it was scarcely necessary to lift the canoe out of the water, the lowlands covered with wild rice becom ing for the time a shallow lake. At the southern end of Lake Michigan, on the western side, the Chehakou afforded an entrance to the Illinois country ; a narrow portage, sometimes flooded until it offered no obstacle, as in the previous case, alone barring the way to a broad affluent of the Mississippi. Again, on the eastern side of the lake, by going up the St. Joseph, a point could be reached where one could easily transfer him self to the Kankakee, a stream black and wind ing, traversing swamps by a current scarcely perceptible, but delivering its waters and all that floated on them in due time to the Great River. Farther east, near the western end of Lake Erie, the head-streams of the Maumee interlocked with MAP SHOWING PORTAGES BETWEEN GREAT LAKES AND MISSISSIPPI BASIN 1634] THE OLD WATERWAYS 33 those of the Wabash. Still farther east by the Cuyahoga the Muskingum could be approached. Lastly, from Presqu' Isle the peninsula which now shelters the harbor of Erie, in the domain of the Senecas watching at the western gate of the Six Nations, a short carry was enough to convey bark and burden to the rills which form presently the Al leghany, a river reaching the Mississippi through the Ohio, after a course of a thousand miles. These historic waterways still persist, flowing on forever, though men may come and men may go. In some cases the circumstances are greatly changed. The old Chekahou is now marked by a city of two millions; and the little primitive currents, manipulated by wonderful engineering, have been utilized for a " drainage canal," a work so colossal as almost to change the water-shed of a vast area, making the Lakes discharge to the Gulf, as in pre-glacial times. In the case of others, however, the wilderness stiU to a large extent per sists ; and canoe-men of to-day who have become imbued and fascinated with the old stories, like Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites,' track the pathfinders from camping-ground to camping-ground. The French were within easy reach of the Mis sissippi as early as 1634, in which year the trader, Jean Nicolet at Green Bay, dressing up in a Chi nese robe of flowered silk, and firing off pistols, awed the Indians into friendship. He reached 1 Historic Waterways, by K. G. Thwaites. 34 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1673 the Fox River, and might easily have gone on to the " great water " which he heard of as being not far beyond, and which he supposed was the Paci fic Ocean. He turned back, however, to the Que bec neighborhood, being a guest not long after at the wedding of the wagon-maker, Joliet. The Mis sissippi was to remain a mystery until Louis Joliet, a son of that marriage, had grown to manhood. Father AUouez also at his mission at the Apostle Islands, at Chequamagou Bay, of Lake Superior, heard from the Sioux of the Messepi, but did not go thither. Radisson and GroseUliers, fur- traders, actually reached the river in 1654. Jacques Marquette, companion and successor of AUouez, having become familiar with the Sault Sainte Marie, with the district of AUouez, and with the island of Michilimackinac, resolved to go farther. Leaving the mission of St. Ignace, which he had established opposite Mackinac, with Joliet for a companion, the son of the wagon- maker, on May 17, 1673, he set out for the great water of which so much had been heard, but which was still so uncertain. The passage to the "Baie des Puans," as tbe French caUed Green Bay, was short. The lower Fox was ascended, the explorers carrying their canoes on their shoul ders about the rapids : the tranquil expanse of Lake Winnebago and the upper Fox offered little hindrance. Once over the portage, the Wiscon sin, at flood, bore them on smoothly, until one day 1675.] MARQUETTE AND LA SALLE 35 in the early summer they saw the sun set beyond the stream which had been a mystery since the burial of De Soto, a century and a quarter before. Marquette found the Indians friendly. Said a chief, shading his eyes as if from too great light : " How bright the sun shines when the French visit our country ! " They floated down to the mouth of the Arkansas, satisfying themselves that the river did not flow into the Pacific. Thence they returned ; the trader to persist in his wandering, the priest to resume his work, until dying in his prime by a forest-stream, his body was laid under the chapel at St. Ignace, where he had minis tered. A still more noteworthy figure in the line of the great pathfinders now stepped upon the scene. Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was born of a noble family of Rouen, and obtaining from the king the grant of a seigneurie, he embarked early for the new world. Like so many of the early adventurers, he dreamed of a northwest passage to the Orient until the world laughed at him. Obtaining a grant just above Montreal, where the St. Lawrence in its broken course throws itself for the last time over the ledges, the people called it La Chine. It was the only China he was des tined to reach, though his foot pressed far on the road which two centuries later, has been found to be the most direct way thither. In his portrait his face, the eye keen, the nose strongly aquiline. 36 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1679 is marked by manly energy and an air of high breeding. He is said to have been in disposition cold and haughty, and during his career constantly stirred up violent enmities, the consequence of one being his death at last. But he was a man of iron nerve and persistency, whom no misfortune could daunt ; one of the foremost of the brave and bril liant race who came so near to the possession of the new world. Frontenac, the most picturesque of the French governors, at one time a figure robed in velvet and lace reflected from the mirrors of the Qalerie des Glaces, at VersaiUes, at another time painted and plumed to dance the war-dance with savages in the heart of the wilderness, recognized in La Salle a valuable instrument ; the Indians, too, felt his njasterf ul character and gave way to him readily. Early in his career he is believed to have discovered the Ohio, though no definite re cord of it remains. But it is weU known that, in 1679, he landed on the bank of the Niagara, just where the lower Whirlpool Rapids flow into calm water, and climbed with his men the high ridge, where the cataract, ages ago, began its task of cut ting backward. Making his way with his packs past the FaHs and the Gorge for six miles, he pitched his camp among the reeds, the line of surge just visible below that marked the first plunge of the river toward its gulf. Here, at a spot now called by his name, he built the Griffin, 1680] LA SALLE AND TONTI 37 the first ship to sail the Lakes, embarking in which he made his way to the St. Joseph's River. From here the party passed to the lUinois, on which he built Fort Crevecceur. In March, 1680, La SaUe, left the little stockade in command of Henri de Tonti, his brave and faithful lieutenant, son of the Italian financier from whom we derive the word tontine, a personage only less interesting than La SaUe himself. Tonti's commanding qualities were curiously reinforced, for the work he was set to do, by a certain defect ; he had lost one hand by ac cident, and had in place of it an iron hook. This, among the Indians was a great " medicine," lend ing to the maimed Tonti a prestige which, proba bly more than made good his misfortune. La SaUe himself returned to the lake to await the Griffin, which had gone back to Niagara for sup plies. The ship, however, was never heard of after. Tired of waiting at last, La Salle with four Frenchmen and a Mohegan guide, set out to reach Montreal on foot. Arriving after great hardships at Niagara, he met only bad news. Besides the loss of the Griffin, a ship from France belonging to him, with freight valued at twenty thousand livres, had been wrecked in the lower St. Lawrence with a loss of everything. Taking three fresh men La SaUe went on to Mont real, whence after obtaining reinforcements and supplies, he started back nothing daunted. La SaUe's iU-luck, however, was not broken. 38 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1681 At Fort Frontenac, where the St. Lawrence flows from Lake Ontario, he heard of a mutiny at Fort Crfevecceur. Having puUed the fort to pieces, the mutineers, abandoning Tonti, had made their way to Niagara, which post they also destroyed. The word was that the mutineers, with their plunder, were making their way down the lake, hoping to meet and murder La SaUe. By prompt action, on the other hand. La Salle captured them, and sent them in chains to the viceroy, Frontenac. Then he pursued his journey to find the lUinois country a scene of devastation. The Iroquois, tigers of the human race, "the scourge of God upon the wilderness," now at the height of their power and activity, had been there, inflicting a slaughter which scarcely fell short of exterminar tion. Seeking Tonti, whom he had left in charge. La Salle followed the Illinois to the Mississippi. He returned unsuccessful, for the resolute Tonti, with the little band that had been faithful to him during the mutiny, forced to abandon his ruined fort, had made his way northward along the shore of Lake Michigan to Green Bay, well out of the danger. Nothing was left in the Illinois country but ash-heaps and skeletons, where had stood the populous villages. La Salle's heart rose to the situation. RaUying as he could the tribes to the right and left, he sought to inspirit them on the basis of enmity to the Iroquois. In May, 1681, he set out again for Canada, pur- 1682.] LOUISIANA 39 suing a more northerly route than before, on which, somewhere near Green Bay or Mackinac, he en countered Tonti whom he confirmed in his attach ment. He paddled a thousand miles to Fort Frontenac again ; and ever restless and uncon quered, made a new start in the fall, from which at last came success. Reaching the Illinois by routes now well known, he followed it to the Mis sissippi and proceeded to surpass the achievement of Marquette, eight years before. He pushed be yond the mouth of the Arkansas, down and still down, his boats at last floating out of one of the passes into the Gulf of Mexico. Of Alonzo de Pineda, and Panfilo de Narvaez, not to speak of the far-wandering " Little Steve," his predecessors by one hundred and forty years, scarcely a tradi tion remained. Heedless of the Spanish preoccu pation, on the 9th of April, 1682, he planted the banner of thefleur de lis to establish the claim of France, and bestowed upon the country the me morable name Louisiana. La SaUe, on his return, which took place at once, built in the lUinois country Fort St. Louis, a more substantial post than the former one ; leav ing this in Tonti's hands, traversing the wilder ness still again, he set sail from Quebec for France. Exchanging his deerskin dress for the silk attire of a courtier, he bent the knees, so sturdy through continental journeyings, by the chair of the great Louis ; and modulating the voice grown stern and 40 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1687 powerful through wilderness shoutings, to the tone of a humble petitioner, he begged for means to possess the great country he had found. The king had a liking for brave men, and the plea of La SaUe proved persuasive. In due time a fleet was despatched with men and means for a set tlement at the mouth of the Mississippi ; and a line of posts was projected to extend thence to the fortresses of Canada. But luck, which for a time had smiled, again grew frowning. Through the incompetency or misfortune of Beaujeu, commander of the fleet, the mouth of the river was missed, and of the fine expedition, some of the ships passing to the west were wrecked on the coast. With the rest Beaujeu sailed away, leaving La Salle, in one of the wrecks, to his fate. The ill-fated hero reaching land with a few other survivors, wandered lost for two years. In March, 1687, the end came for him. StiU hop ing to reach the Mississippi, on which he trusted to find means to make his way up to Tonti, on the Illinois, he started out on foot, but was shot from ambush by some of his followers. One feels in reading the story of La SaUe, that there must have been in him some marked unamiability to account for the steady treachery and hatred which beset his path from first to last, whether he had to do with high or low. For all the qualities of rugged manhood however, courage, persistency that could not be broken, contempt of pain and hardship, in •»* 'i c** LA SALLE 1680] HENNEPIN'S EXPLORATIONS 41 the story of America he has never been surpassed, and seldom paralleled. Although among the churchmen it was the Jesuits who played by far the larger part in attempts to explore and christianize America, they were not alone. The Franciscans, known also as Recollets, were also active until the jeal ousy of their black-robed rivals drove them out. Their garb was the coarse gray robe of St. Francis, girt about the waist with a knotted cord. One, at least, among them had a career as picturesque and full of adventure as that of any Jesuit. In the train of La Salle, when he built the Griffin on the Niagara, and made the voyage to the port age from Lake Michigan to the Illinois, was the Belgian Father, Louis de Hennepin, who, at Fort Crevecceur, received a commission from La Salle to undertake an independent expedition. Henne pin set out at the end of February, 1680, with two companions, to explore the Illinois to its mouth. They were captured about the middle of AprU by a party of Sioux, whom, after undergo ing much terror, they had the address to propi tiate. A pocket compass which the Father car ried seemed to the Indians great medicine, and under the idea that a touch of the supernatural characterized them, their captors treated them weU, Hennepin being adopted by a chief and held in high esteem. In this company Hennepin ascended to the Falls of St. Anthony, wandering 42 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1697 widely also in Minnesota. Thus he covered a part of the river which Marquette had not trav ersed, and was the first European to give a clear account of the great Northwest. He was not the first white man to visit this region, for fur-traders had reached the upper Mississippi as early as 1655. Escaping at last, Hennepin made his way to Mont real, and thence to France, where he published an interesting account of his adventures. The Indian life is graphically depicted; and though the foibles of the Father are very apparent, it is plain that he met the exigencies of a hard situa tion with resolution and skiU. His drawings are curious, and sometimes surprisingly accurate. His map, also, giving the whole territory east of the Mississippi to the Atlantic and the Gulf, is cor rect to a remarkable degree. The coast-line, for a rough delineation, is fairly accurate ; the course of the Mississippi from source to mouth is sub- stantiaUy the true one. Although the Great Lakes are grotesque in size and shape, besides crowding too much the valley of the Ohio, one feels that the old friar caught with wonderful quickness the topography of the regions into which he pene trated. In 1697, when La Salle had been dead ten years, Hennepin published a second lying narra tive, in which he declared that before his capture by the Sioux he went down the Mississippi to its mouth and returned, romancing about his experi- 1699] IBERVILLE 43 ences during his fabricated excursion. Though La Salle was not alive to contradict him, his tale was not believed. His credit departed even in his lifetime, and his is but a tarnished name in our early story. La SaUe had conceived that the fur trade, the most important trade of New France, might be carried on to better advantage from the mouth of the Mississippi than from Montreal and Quebec. This, no doubt, he had purposed to demonstrate, had not premature ruin befallen him ; but before the century ended another Frenchman came for ward to take up his work. Iberville was of Cana dian extraction, and in early manhood had become known through exploits in Hudson's Bay. Turn ing from the far north, he had interest enough to be able to gather in France two hundred emi grants, men, women, and children, who embarked in a small fleet, June, 1698, and, convoyed by the Francois of fifty guns, reached Louisiana in the spring of 1699. Ascending the river they established their settlement on the east bank, thus founding a new colony. The Spaniards, inactive since the days of De Soto, one hun dred and fifty years before, were still close at hand both east and west, — in the West Indies, Florida and Mexico ; and a party of them now appeared at Biloxi, close by, protesting against the violation of their territory. But the French were not disconcerted. Iberville remained among 44 THE COMING OP THE EUROPEANS [1720 them until 1702, causing the roots of his colony to strike deep, then went back to France never to return. His successor was his brother Bienville, scarcely beyond boyhood, but possessed of much prudence and tenacity, who guided the fortunes of the colony until far along in the century. As the eighteenth century progressed, the en ergy of France showed no diminution ; explorers as bold as their predecessors continued the work. Before 1700 Le Sueur had ascended the Missis sippi from its mouth to Minnesota. Juchereau and La Harpe, in the southwest, before 1720, had penetrated far into the country about the Red and Arkansas Rivers. About the same time du Tisne, ascending by the Missouri, struck across ' through the Osages to the Pawnees; and soon after Bourgmont made his way to the Comanches. Somewhat later the brothers Mallet reached the south fork of the Platte, and crossing Coronado's track reached Santa Y6 through Colorado, return ing down the Arkansas. The heroic line may be said to close with the family of La Verendrye which nobly sustained the credit of the lilies. A lieutenant of the regiment Carignan-Salieres, a body of regular French troops which did fine service in the new country, marry ing a girl of the colony, and being established in a post of danger on the Iroquois frontier, became parent of a numerous family, after the Canadian fashion. One son went to France, held a commis- 1742] THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 45 sion in the army, and at Malplaquet, after being shot through the body and receiving six sabre-cuts, was left for dead on that terrible field. He lived to return to America, however, and with body and spirit unbroken, founded posts and traveled far and wide north and west of Lake Superior, in Minnesota, North Dakota, and modern Manitoba. He took with him into the woods two sons of his own fibre, who even went beyond their father. Striking westward in the hope of reaching the Pacific, of which they constantly heard from Sioux and Assiniboins, the savages with whom they lived, they reached the upper Missouri, at the country of the Mandans. Hence they pene trated still farther along the path followed sixty- two years later by Lewis and Clark, fairly reach ing, in 1742, the Rocky Mountains. Like so many of their predecessors, father and sons re ceived neither acknowledgment nor reward, dying in obscurity and poverty. While the pioneers thus pushed westward, the area of the basin behind them became during the first half of the eighteenth century weU ascertained and mapped. France had the field to herself ; as yet the English had not found the valley ; and though the Spaniards were not far off, in Florida and Mexico, and regarded the French as interlop ers, Spain fallen into decadence could easily be reckoned with. The vast country was far enough from being occupied. Stockade forts held by a 46 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1750 few men guarded generally the portages by which it was possible to penetrate from the Lakes. In the way of settlement three little groups assem bled, one named Vincennes, on the Wabash, with a few tributary hamlets ; one at Kaskaskia, in the Illinois country, which also had its outlying vil lages ; and most important of aU, New Orleans, with the viUages and plantations scattered among the bayous and swamps. To these Uttle nuclei of civilization, the great river, or some affluent of it, close at hand, afforded a highway. Log-cabins with broad verandas stood irregularly along the village street, the interstices plastered with clay, the chimneys standing outside. In each little centre the priest and the notary took care of reli gion and civil order, officials quite adequate in the simple society. To some extent the clearing off of the dark overshadowing forest went forward and there was a certain smaU amount of tiUage ; but the men were far more prone to hunt and trade, than to chop and delve. The simple housekeep ing taxed the women but little ; the skins of beasts, with blankets and fabrics brought now and then across the portages or up the river, sufficed for clothing. A crucifix, the hide of a black bear nailed against the logs, or a pair of antlers, gave decoration. Life was in a high degree social and genial; christenings and weddings, the planting, the harvest, the husking, saints' days, — every possible occasion was made a festival. The fiddle 1750] FRENCH CIVILIZATION 47 squeaked and the dancing was long and boister ous. The French knew how to fight Indians, none better ; but the bond between the races was often fraternal, and in every settlement plumed and painted braves lounged about, much at home. In the life there was a curious blending of com plete despotism and wild individual freedom run ning out into license. Not a soul would have dared to stand against the slightest nod of the great Louis, or his representative, the military commandant, or the intendant who superintended the traffic. That authority once recognized how ever, there was little interference with the daily doings of men or women, who wen*t and came, played, hunted, bartered, fought as they pleased, or more rarely engaged in fitful labor. The sys tem was a complete paternalism in which the authority of the head was unquestioned ; but the bonds in which the children were held were usu ally light, though they might at any time be tigrhtened into cruel restraint. The number of women was much smaUer than of men, a fact lead ing to frequent mating, more or less irregular, with Indians, until it often happened that the little half-breeds about a post far outnumbered the urchins of pure blood. The isolated French, indeed, showed always a tendency to fall away into the savagery which surrounded them ; even when there was in the veins no trace of wild blood, the coureur de bois or voyageur, more 48 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1717 often than not was ready to sink without reluc tance to the forest level. Louisiana in those days had the vaguest possi ble boundaries, being held broadly to comprise not only the territory west of the river, but also the region east, which at the same time was south of Canada and west of the English colonies, neighbors whom the proud French purposed not long to tolerate. A chain of posts was in contem plation, and soon partially established, designed to block the westward advance of the English. Behind such a chain, too, as population increased, a power might gather which before long would be able to drive the English into the sea. But things went slowly. In 1713 the prominent man at Detroit, Cadillac, going thence by Montreal and France to New Orleans, found there a dis couraged handful, perhaps four hundred whites and a few score negroes, and this was by far the most numerous body of French in the Mississippi basin. Prospects soon after brightened, the incu bus of a monopoly in the interest of one Crozat being removed. Just here what proved a great calamity in Europe turned out to be a wind blow ing good to the colony. In 1717 John Law set the world in a whirl with his Mississippi scheme, — a curious delusion turning the heads of high and low and creating a fever of specula tion. The Mississippi Company sent out ip five years seven thousand settlers and seven hundred 1750] GROWTH OF NEW ORLEANS 49 slaves. While in Europe ruin fell broadcast as the bubble exploded, in America the outcome was at last good. Though disappointment was at first universal, and though the outcry was loud against the cheats who had misled them into hardship, the immigrants learned at last to face the situa tion ; the colony finally got upon its feet. Naturally in the immigration men had largely predominated. As things took shape, and it be came plain that the new world must hereafter be their home, the question grew pressing where should wives come from for the pioneers ? The problem was solved as it had been before in Can ada. Ship-loads of "king's maids," '¦'¦filles a la cassette,^'' girls with little trunks, marriageable young women, were sent over by the paternal government. An earlier experiment of this kind had turned out disastrously ; such a ship-load had stopped at San Domingo, where the girls con tracted yellow fever, and brought it with them, giving rise to a sad epidemic, one victim of which was the hero Tonti, the lieutenant of La Salle. Better luck, however, attended the later ventures. The girls were mated at once on landing, after a fashion rough and ready, but quite adequate. A happy and proper union was the usual result ; and to this day some of the best families of Louisi ana are said to have their origin in matches made in a few minutes on the levee at New Orleans, as the enterprising girls landed after their voyage. 50 THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS [1750 By the middle of the century, it is estimated, there were in the lower Mississippi VaUey about six thousand French, though to make up this number their slaves must be counted. In the upper country were perhaps twenty-five hundred more. How many rovers of the wilderness there may have been besides, it is impossible to say. To give stability to the hold on the upper region, Fort Chartres, a substantial stronghold of masonry, had been buUt some distance above the mouth of the Ohio. North and South were not altogether in har mony, the fur-traders from Quebec and from New Orleans contending sometimes sharply. In the little clusters of settlement the population was light-hearted, polite, capable of terrible deeds, but generaUy on good terms among themselves, and not inconsiderate of others. The habitans and voyageurs pursued their way with little thought of the future. The great people in France, and their servants the governor and soldiers at Quebec, schemed for the peopling of the vast territory, and for using it as a vantage ground for further con quests. But new men were beginning to push in ; the story of the intrusion is a momentous one and must now engage us. CHAPTER ni THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE The Spaniards had approached the Mississippi VaUey from the south and west ; the French had approached from the north ; the east, where the on coming European wave might have been expected to strike first, was, in fact, the last quarter to be assailed. In the middle of the eighteenth cen tury the great basin had been scarcely disturbed. No trace remained of Spanish occupation ; the few thousand French scattered from the mouth of the river to the Lakes had made small impression. The forests were unfelled, the prairies unploughed. The wild beasts probably had hardly begun to diminish, though the activity of the hunters to be sure had been stimulated. As to the Indians, the habitans seemed far more likely to melt away into the tribes, than to displace them in the vast area by a French occupancy. But the transform ers were now at hand. While the first distinct path-breaker into the region beyond the Alleghanies was Walker, who in 1748 penetrated to a mountain gap and a west ward flowing stream which he named Cumberland, 62 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1753 after the hero of CuUoden, then much in the minds of men, that "was but an obscure reaching out. The real harbinger of the Anglo-Saxon day beyond the mountains was no other than the youth ful Washington, who, twenty-one years old, in 1753 made his memorable winter journey into the wilderness as the messenger of Dinwiddle, governor of Virginia. With Gist as a companion his party reached Venango, on French Creek; then pushed on to Le Bceuf, fifteen miles south of Lake Erie, just back of Presqu' Isle. There he interrogated the commander as to French inten tions, and set forth strenuously the claim of Vir ginia to the valley of the Ohio. Washington had been introduced to the wilderness in the Shenan doah Valley by Lord Fairfax, the eccentric noble man who lived there secluded, like the Banished Duke in the Forest of Arden ; the young sur veyor was well-fitted to be the forerunner of the immigration which the colonies, restless now down to tide-water, were on the point of pouring forth. As the French awoke to their danger from the east and took measures against it, establishing Fort Duquesne at the very point which Washing ton on his journey had noted as the place of all others to be held, he passed easily from civil func tions to military, appearing in due time at the side of Braddock, where his masterful quality first became conspicuous. The first battle of the Anglo-Saxon advance 1765] THE FRENCH DISPOSSESSED 63 into the Mississippi Valley was most disastrous. As so often before and since, "from the days when our forefathers confronted the Danes to the days when our English brothers are confronting the Boers, at the beginning was frightful defeat, lead ing to loss of prestige and loudest lamentation ; to be followed by success, as slow tenacity at last grasps the problem by its proper handle. The French and Indians in ambush are believed to have been scarcely half the number of the bat talions which they so boldly attacked. Their own loss was trifling, although it included at the very first their skillful leader Beaujeu. Of Braddock's army three fourths of the officers and two thirds of the men were presently disposed of, an aver age perhaps of two apiece to the party of assail ants. But, as a hundred times before and since, the bad beginning was amply atoned for ; the way was learned at last. Fort Duquesne was cap tured, the French on the Ohio dispossessed with out long delay ; and in 1759, when Quebec was captured, all was over for France. In November, 1762, all Louisiana west of the Mississippi, to gether with New Orleans on the east bank, was ceded to Spain, to conciliate the Spanish court. October 10, 1765, came for France the last hu miliation. One hundred Highlanders of the Black Watch stood drawn up at Fort Chartres, and to these St. Ange turned over the post ; France in this act relinquishing its hold entirely upon what had been won through such effort and heroism. 54 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1765 And now once more as to dispossession of the Indians. Was it right that they should be dis possessed ? The usual tone as regards this matter is that of self-reproach ; that in this dis possession our race has committed a sad injustice. The wrongs of the Indian have been bemoaned by historians, poets, and novelists, until the " cen tury of dishonor " has come to be regarded as a count against us which could not be denied or atoned for. Against this view the strenuous and unshrinking historian of the winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, makes protest. The war against the savage, he claims, was inevitable. The Indians had no valid ownership of the land. Every good hunting-ground was claimed by many tribes. Vast regions were entirely unoccupied both east and west ; where there was occupancy, the right more frequently than not rested upon some previous butchery through which former occupants had been exterminated. Each great confederacy had about it wide wastes, which it had depopulated. To the east of the Iroquois, western Massachusetts and Vermont were an utter soli tude ; so, also, what had been the country of the Eries and the Hurons to the west and northwest. Kentucky and much of Tennessee were unten anted, except as now and then crossed by war and hunting parties. The reader has just seen with what a besom of wrath the prairies of Illinois had been swept clean of men. Passing beyond the river, the Sioux were no more merciful. Lewis 1765] OUR INDIAN POLICY 65 and Clark could march for months without meet ing a living soul. If the whites have often destroyed, they have also sometimes shielded. It seems likely that but for them. the entire Algon quin race would have disappeared; in the far west, also, weaker peoples have been protected against their fiercer foes. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs reports at the present moment that the numbers of the tribes have probably diminished but little since the time of Columbus. They have undoubtedly suffered less at white hands than they suffered before through warfare and torture among themselves. Tribes have been shifted, sometimes harshly and unjustly. But when left to themselves they were ever shifting ; and the gov ernment has by no means always been unmindful of its wards ; often they have been helped forward to better things. There is reason to think that our Indian policy, while sometimes gravely wrong, as in the movement of the Creeks and Cherokees from Georgia, and the treatment of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces at a later time, has erred generaUy on the side of weakness and sentiment ality rather than inhumanity; and that the In dian agent is a character greatly traduced, being more prone to treat the white settler unjustly than the savage. The pioneer always receives blame from those who, behind him and sheltered by him, are in such leisure and security that they can cherish sentimentalism. 56 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1765 Such is the tone of Theodore Roosevelt. ShaU we say it is just ? At any rate the dispossession of the Indians was a thing inevitable, if the higher race was to have a footing. The Aryan advance did in America only what had been done before in Europe in sweeping off the primeval man whom it found in its path. The frontiersman is always rude of necessity, and his work, too, is rude of necessity ; high forbearance and humanity are likely to receive scant honor while he performs his task. His foe had the wild beast's energy, — the wild beast's craft as well, and utter pitiless- ness. The invariable incidents of the warfare were the burning of solitary homes, the scalping of mothers and children, the torture of captives. The present writer rejoices that in a " short history " details of such horrors may be spared. It must be remembered that the winning of the West from the savage was a most desperate enterprise, in which the whites, though of a stock most intrepid and tenacious, were often on the brink of failure. Never was final victory more hardly wrung out from deadly combat. Under such conditions the strivers cannot be nice as to methods. The clear ing of the Mississippi Valley of its primeval in habitants is a terrible story, as regards both the savage and the pioneer. In spite of our rawness and roughness, the outcome has been smiUng farms, busy cities, a regulated land full of homes with a hopeful outlook toward sweetness and light, — 176&] PONTIAC 57 something better than the gloom of the wilder ness, wandered over by men in whose hearts God's discipline had as yet evolved no trace of gentle ness. When, in 1759, through the fall of Quebec, the French ceased to be formidable and the westward advance of the English was opposed only by the Indians, the figure that stood in the foreground to block the path was very noteworthy. Perhaps no other member of his race has exhibited such marks of greatness as Pontiac, chief of the Otta- was, who, although his friends the French were irretrievably ruined, fought against the victors with a skiU and vigor in which Indian heroism cul minates. The story of Pontiac belongs rather to the region of the Lakes than to the VaUey of the Mississippi, though his far-reaching conspiracy embraced tribes roving to the south and west, and there was everywhere unrest. Just at the farthest eastern limit of the basin, Henry Bou quet, on July 3 and 4, 1763, beat off the Indians in the hard-fought battle of Bushy Run, — a vic tory which prepared the way for important things. By the side of the great river, too, Pontiac found his grave. KiUed at Cahokia in a savage brawl, in 1769, St. Ange, commandant at St. Louis, clothing the dead chief in his French uniform, the gift of Montcalm, gave him burial near to the fort. The grave has been obliterated by the great city reared on the spot by the children of his foes. 58 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1763 Indeed it was a grave which should have been marked. For several years just after 1725, averaging about twelve thousand a year, the Scotch-Irish im migration had been pouring in. The stock had originated in both the Highlands and the Low lands ; they had crossed into Ireland in the early times of the Stuarts, maintaining the sturdy Pro testantism in which they had been nurtured. In the years of the expulsion of James II. and the accession of William of Orange, they gave clear evidence of the toughness of their fibre, the siege of Londonderry in especial furnishing illustra tion. Very prolific, they became crowded ; they felt hampered, too, by old world traditions. These causes brought about a second overflow, this time into America, where they were, to play a most im portant part. Some of these people came to New England, contributing power to a stock already strong ; for the most part, however, they landed further south, at ports in a line stretching from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. They did not remain on the seaboard, but struck out for the backwoods, pausing first near the mountains which until now had hemmed in the colonies. Stern and virile race that they were, they took in on the frontier a number of good elements, — Huguenot, English, German, — as here and there an enterpris ing group from these stocks pushed out toward the forest. One generation was sufficient to as- 1763] THE SCOTCH-IRISH 69 similate aU into a mass homogeneous enough to be thoroughly effective. They hated popery and pre lacy to the point of fanaticism. The rigid Pres byterianism of their covenanting forefathers fell to some extent out of mind in their remoteness, but the prejudices it had nurtured remained. Above aU, they cherished the passion for freedom. At a synod in Philadelphia the grandfather of John Caldwell Calhoun, John Caldwell by name, had led the Scotch-Irish in offering to the gover nor of Virginia protection for the province from dangers towards the west, provided freedom of conscience were guaranteed to them. The offer was accepted, and the Scotch-Irish, feeling that a suitable equivalent had been received, at once interposed such a wall that the people of the tide-water regions could ever after sleep in peace. The part which the Scotch-Irish henceforth played is a memorable one. Through the long valley between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies they spread downward, through southwest Pennsylva nia, Virginia, and North Carolina, in a swarm little marked at the time on the seaboard, but whose activity was about to change the face of the continent. The Alleghanies, not easy to pen etrate, made the southwestward path the line of least resistance for them. In rugged western North Carolina they met an immigration of similar people pushing westward from their landing-place at Charleston. As in an axe the softer metal has 60 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1763 welded upon the front of it a wedge of the hardest steel, capable of taking on a fine cutting edge, hard to dull or to fracture no matter what it may strike, so the Anglo-Saxon advance against the savagery of the great basin was faced with a mass which nothing could bend or dint. As this forlorn hope of civilization pauses for a moment in the back country before it goes out into the wilderness beyond the mountains, it is well worth a little study. The figures were for the most part tall and gaunt, with reddish close curling hair and frames in which the bone and sinew appeared plainly under the scant flesh. In dress they took points from the Indians, favoring especially, besides moccasins and leggings, the fringed deer-skin hunting shirt, which Roosevelt declares to be " the most distinctive and pictur esque national dress ever worn in America." For headgear, a broad-brimmed felt hat, or more often a coon-skin cap, with the tail depending, sufficed. The aids nearest at hand were always the axe and the rifle, in the use of which tools the world has never seen better adepts. The rifle and the axe, looking at the part they have played in the history of America, are indeed implements of note. The barrel of the rifle was long, with a small bore, admitting balls weighing thirty or forty to the pound, though sometimes lighter ; and was forged out of thick soft iron. Into the short stock, with butt scooped out for the shoulder, the flint-lock was 1769] FRONTIER LIFE 61 fitted. It was clumsy and ill-balanced as a weapon, but in skillful hands most accurate. It was made commonly in the woods, the frontier forges being quite capable of good work here. A tall hunter, folding his hands across the muzzle, could conve niently rest his chin there as he stood. In the little settlements there was thorough equality. The nimble axes speedily made a clear ing, within which rose at once a cluster of cabins with a stockade fort, into which all might flee in case of an alarm. The settlement could be estab lished in a few days ; it could be abandoned, too, almost as easily as the Arabs fold their tents ; for the frontiersman was always ready to strike out farther ; rifle, axe, and such other simple utensils as their life required being borne at the girdle or on the back. In the simple commerce, barter was the usual method. The men were tanners as well as hunters, providing especially good store of tough and supple deer-skins, which the women made into clothing. They ate from wooden bowls and trenchers ; the food, aside from game, being largely maize ground in handmills, or roughly beaten into hominy on a block. While salt was scarce, sugar could easily be made from maple- trees. When the yield of the hunt was abundant the meat was " jerked," — dried in the sun and smoked, — and so roughly preserved. The hunter could imitate the calls of the beasts and birds with which he lived in close intimacy. At certain sea- 62 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1769 sons the heavens were fairly darkened by flocks of migrating wild fowl. Black and gray squirrels were so numerous as to be great pests ; so, too, mosquitoes and gnats ; while snakes, panthers, wolves, and bears exposed them to more formida ble dangers. The Indians were a still greater terror. In the midst of all, however, life went bravely on on the little mountain rills that flowed Missis sippi-ward. They married and gave in marriage ; and when children came, many a baby rocked in a sap-trough for the time being out of use, grew up to be a famous man. The sports of the men were rough, often to brutality. The transition from play to gouging or fighting to the death was quite too easy, the frontiersman here showing a side most repulsive. As religion decayed among them in their remoteness from civilization, they became profane and low, though never sinking into degeneracy beyond recovery. At the worst, there always remained a manful core of character on which, if circumstances grew favoring, a good structure could be built. It was a rough multi tude, and it had the roughest work to do. A boy at twelve was given a rifle and a loophole in the stockade to defend ; henceforth through life the weapon was scarcely less a part of him than his own hands or feet. But for such backwoodsmen the West could not have been won. Peaceful farmers and regular soldiers could never have 1769] DANIEL BOON 63 coped with the difficulties. In the absence of law, Judge Lynch was in his element. The whip ping-post and hangman's noose brought swift judgment to thief and murderer, and in the hasty scrutiny the innocent too often became the victims. The mass, however, was full of grit and substance as it took in hand a task as trying as pioneer ever tackled. At a later time when the task was accomplished, the rudeness flowered often into a fair civilization. Thus, soon after the middle of the century, the subduers stood upon the threshold of the land they were to conquer. The hour for the ad vance had arrived, and with the hour came the man for the leadership. Daniel Boon was born in Pennsylvania, in 1734, of English stock, and went as a boy down the long valley between the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge to western North Carolina with the stream of immigration which was prevailingly Scotch-Irish. There in due time he married and tried to settle. He is said to have been tall, gaunt, sinewy, with keen eyes. His physical force was extraordinary, carrying him to the age of eighty-six, through such hardships as few men have ever faced. His portrait pre sents a quiet, thoughtful, genial countenance with little hint of the hankering after solitude which characterized him, for he was never easy except when far in the advance. The sound of a white man's footfall near at hand was to him always an 64 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1769 alarm to decamp, and plunge into deeper shades. On Boon's Creek, a little tributary of the Wa tauga, which in turn is a tributary through the Holston of the Tennessee, has stood until recently — perhaps it still stands — an old beech-tree, into the bark of which was cut this inscription : " D. Boon ciUed a bar on tree in the year 1760." Per haps the young hunter, about to become a famous man, cut here the record of an exploit. It was not, however, until he was a mature man of thirty-five that he fairly set out on his work. May 1, 1769, calling himself with a certain religious consecra tion an instrument ordained of God to people this wilderness, he struck out. into the best-known and easiest opening. With five companions he passed through Cumberland Gap northwestward, foUow ing the Warrior's or Wilderness trail, reaching spots ascertained and named by Walker twenty- one years before. Early in June he reached the blue-grass region of Kentucky, where in a solitude unbroken by any suggestion of man, civilized or wild, he was thoroughly happy. Yet in a certain way he was in the midst of life. There were wood- paths through which the wild game went con stantly to and fro ; such paths were especiaUy marked about the salt-licks, where they had existed for ages ; for the mammoth and many another su perseded beast had sought the same licks through many a century before. Here he reveled through out the summer ; but in December, having been DANIEL BOON 1770] WASHINGTON AS SURVEYOR 65 attacked by roving Indians, he experienced his first Indian captivity, which this time he speedily escaped from. Next year his companions left Boon to himself for three months, lone as a Cru soe in his isolation. They returned, however, with others ; and we find Boon the centre of a group of pioneers, some of them scarcely less marked and picturesque than Boon himself. Neely, Mansker, Simon Kenton, McAfee, and the rest, — the names reveal their stock, — German, English, especially Scotch-Irish, — men of sinews of iron and invin cible spirits, matching the Indians in forest prow ess, becoming sometimes as cruel, but constituting the effective cutting edge with which the wilder ness was to be cleft and cleared. But about Boon, who above all others was the type and chief of the pioneers, milder associations gather. He was a surveyor, as weU as hunter, mapping the land for peaceful occupancy ; and if he became a great Indian fighter, it was only because the inex orable conditions made peaceful living with the tribes an impossibility. Not far off Washington, too, was active as a surveyor. He had easily become inured to wilderness hardships and Indian fighting, as we have seen. Now, starting from Fort Pitt while Boon was laying hands on the blue-grass country, this other measurer of the land sailed down the Ohio to the mouth of the Kanawa. But his career as a winner of the West was soon ended; his energies were soon to find a field elsewhere. 66 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1770 The scouts and surveyors having preceded, the regular settlers were not slow to follow. They had little reason to be troubled in conscience as to their right to go forward. There were the colonial charters, according to which the several provinces possessed each its strip of territory stretching indefinitely westward ; and if there was any question as to the king of England's right to make such a grant, the great Six Nations in 1768, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, had solemnly ceded to the English the vast tract lying between the Ohio and the Tennessee, which they claimed to own, receiving in return compensation that they valued. The title of the Six Nations to the tract, to be sure, was shadowy to the last degree ; but no Indian Nation had any better title. The intend ing settlers might have reared their cabins with the freest conscience, had they been ever so scru pulous about their right ; but few indeed were there among them who were scrupulous. Before them lay the land of promise ; they would gain and hold it if they could, as if it were no man's land. Through the labyrinth of vales and glens into which the immigrants had penetrated, run the streams, the Clinch, the French Broad, the Holston, with little tributaries like the Noli- chucky and the Watauga, streams which uniting at last form the Tennessee. The noble river, turning back upon itself at the Moccasin Bend below Lookout Mountain, as if loth to leave the 1770] JAMES ROBERTSON 67 highlands, flows on slowly at last through the lower levels on its long way to the Ohio. The region was claimed by North Carolina, a colony always turbulent and ill ordered. The mountain men preferred a connection with Virginia, through whose outskirts they had passed on their long southwestward march. It was indeed much easier to get to Virginia or Pennsylvania, if a little longer, than to cross the rugged heights which shut off from them the more southern colony. As the settlers advanced, it was the warpath of the Cherokees which they followed at first, a branch of which was the Warrior's Trail that had taken Boon through Cumberland Gap. The Cherokees having made a small concession in 1769 on the Watauga, a restless group presently went toward it. The hunters had carried their own burdens ; now came the era of the pack- horse, axes working to the right and left of the trail, that the burdened beasts might make their way unobstructed. Some of the group were of poor quality, " redemptioners " and outcasts from the coast towns ; but for the most part they were of the best possible quality for the work to be done. Two men among them stand out as the most typical and conspicuous, — the first to ap pear James Robertson. He came to the Watauga in 1770, a young man lately married who learned to read and write from his better educated wife. A tall florid, blue-eyed Scotch-Irishman, he was 68 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1771 in character cautious but full of daring ; a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, of course, for to be that was a condition of existence ; but as he ma tured hunting and fighting became secondary. He was to lead in other and higher work. Though his education was so long postponed and so simple, his mind was good, and he soon stood out as a political and intellectual guide. In 1771 he established a little nucleus of settlement on an island in the Watauga, biding his time. John Sevier came into the country in 1772 from the Shenandoah Valley. He was of Huguenot blood, possessed of a fair education, and a gentleman by birth, as Robertson was not. He was a man of fine presence, and of bearing that smoothed his way in any environment. He was a correspond ent of Franklin, Madison, and other famous men, and yet associated through life with backwoodsmen of the rudest. He was quite capable of playing a part in refined surroundings, but through his conditions, it was another side of him that devel oped ; he became a terror to the savage beyond any man in the southwest, and on one memorable field showed his prowess against a civilized foe. The pioneers, among whom Robertson and Se vier were the conspicuous men, formed in 1772 the Watauga Association, whose written consti tution was the first document of that kind drawn up in the Mississippi Valley. All was done in the best Anglo-Saxon way. In properly ordered 1772] WATAUGA ASSOCIATION 69 folk-motes delegates were elected to a legislative body which met at Robertson's cabins, on the island in the Watauga. The legislature in turn chose a committee or court of five men, two among whom were Robertson and Sevier, the functions of which body were both judicial and executive. A chairman, clerk, and sheriff were the instru ments through whom the court acted. For the procedure of this court, and its functionaries, rules simple but adequate were laid down, — a code thoroughly practical, with nothing doctrinaire. It was level-headed and according to the best tra ditions. It continued in force for six years, when^ North Carolina, moving more energetically to establish her claim to the country beyond the mountains, superseded the Watauga Association with " Washington County." The five old com mitteemen remained in office, however, and there was little change except in name until a time long after. The Watauga Association, the first Anglo- Saxon political organization of the Mississippi Valley, should be kept in mind. As the thoughts of men began to turn toward the west, the vagueness of the colonial charters became more and more a source of embarrassment. Virginia in particular, which in the few years immediately before her change from province to state had as governor Lord Dunmore, an energetic servant of the crown and upholder of the rights of his colony, was in strifie with North Carolina 70 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1772 on one side and Pennsylvania on the other. To the north Virginia claimed Fort Pitt, now merging into Pittsburg as settlers gathered, and the valley of the Monongahela ; to the south she was not at aU unresponsive to the Watauga people, who so much preferred a connection with the more acces sible and less turbulent Virginia, causing umbrage to North Carolina by thus turning the back. What might have happened in the end had not the great change intervened that was now close at hand it is impossible to say. Lord Dunmore was diverted from strife with his white neighbors by a fierce outbreak of Indian hostility which re quired to be met by all the force he could sum mon. Of the Indians in the Mississippi basin, those toward the south, of the Muscogee race, were often far along toward the earliest stage of civili zation. The Cherokees, in particular, with whom the Watauga men were immediately in contact, were herdsmen and even farmers, rearing cabins scarcely less elaborate than the frontiersmen's, showing a certain refinement in their sports and dances, and practicing arts that require patience and skill. With their elevation they had become less wolfish, and so less formidable. They were still sufficiently ferocious, but it was certainly the case that the white advance by the Tennessee had a warfare to meet somewhat less desperate than the immigration farther north. Kentucky, as we know, was untenanted, a land simply roamed over 1774] LORD DUNMORE'S WAR 71 transitorily by war and hunting parties. But between the Ohio and the Lakes lay many tribes, a population numerous, and so low in their sav agery that their fierceness was unmitigated. These tribes had become fully alive to the danger threat ening them from the new whites, who, displacing the French, were now thrusting in upon them from the east; and Cornstalk, an able chief of the Shawnees, organizing the Indian attack, drove against the intruders with all possible craft and fury. In what is known as Lord Dunmore's War, the principal incident was the bloody bat tle at the mouth of the Kanawha,, at Pleasant Point, where the backwoodsmen, though brave and ably led, only doubtfully held their own. It was a bitter fight, the details of which form an especially grewsome page in frontier annals. We need dwell upon it no farther than to note that here appeared first conspicuously young George Rogers Clark, a figure of the first rank in the winning of the West. In the battle of the great Kanawha, the Indians, though hardly defeated, were somewhat cowed by the prowess of the frontiersmen, which was now shown for the first time on a considerable scale. Their forays were for a few years less en ergetic, and the work of settlement was pushed in the lull. Robertson, leaving his island in the Watauga, pressed on to the Cumberland in cen tral Tennessee, where some of his comrades became 72 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1775 the founders of Nashville ; Clark visited the Illi nois country ; while Boon laid strong foundations for a commonwealth in Kentucky. Henderson, a land speculator, a type of a class who in these days were beginning to figure, for the most part with baleful effect, bought of the Cherokees the tract between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers, paying £10,000 in goods which the Indians prized. The chief. Dragging Canoe, led an op position to the sale, but he was overruled ; the price was coveted and the Indians no doubt well knew that their ownership of what they were transferring was very shadowy. They told the buyers that it was a dark and bloody ground and predicted much trouble for those who should try to hold it. Henderson, however, was energetic, and employed Boon as his agent, who went at once with thirty men to smooth and widen the Warrior's Trail, from the Holston toward the northwest. April 1, Boonsboro was founded, and almost at the same moment three other little clus ters, Harrodsburg, Boiling Springs, and Logan's Station. They were in each case a little group of cabins under the shelter of a block-house. Rows of palisades sometimes connected house with house about a square so that all were inclosed, each door opening upon a central space, a little strong hold which it was quite certain would need to be defended. Of tbe settlers who began to come in, many became discouraged, and the trail was some- 1775] TRANSYLVANIA 73 times blocked, as advancing and retreating par ties encountered each ot^er with no space for passing to the right or left. But Boon and others were stout-hearted; the name Transylvania was given to the grant ; and representatives gathered in orderly fashion the first year, 1775, from the four stations — seventeen men — under a great elm in a field of white clover, to pass laws. Transylvania lasted no longer than the Watauga Association, for in a few years Virginia annulled the organization. But in the Transylvania days came in a number of men who played a fine part and handed down their names in important families. Henderson, to be sure, had only mer cenary motives. His settlers he abhorred, call ing backwoodsmen in general " a set of scoundrels who scarcely believed in God or feared the devil." But Todd, Harrod, Logan, were men of different temper, cementing the foundations of the new state with their blood and tears, then taking care for a proper civU and social order. Glancing toward the Northwest, the solitude penetrated for a moment by Hennepin had re mained until these years broken only by the four traders. The English path-breaker came in 1 1 66, in the person of Jonathan Carver, a Connecticut Yankee, who, leaving Boston the year before, reached Mackinac in time to start in September by the Green Bay route for the Mississippi. Making his way in the track of Marquette, up the 74 THE ANGLO-SAXON ADVANCE [1775 Fox, and down the Wisconsin, he reached in due time the Mississippi. This he ascended, passing the Falls of St. Anthony, to the mouth of the St. Francis. He was a man of far-reaching views, foreseeing remarkably what was afterward to come. After exploring the Minnesota VaUey, and taking up a claim on the site of St. Paul, which caused disquiet in the real estate market, more than a hundred years later, he returned to Boston in 1767, and published soon after his remarkable travels, the book containing the first known picture of the Falls of St. Anthony and the first detailed account of what is now Minnesota. While the Northwest waited, before the close of 1775 three hundred settlers had fixed their homes in Kentucky. An event had just before occurred which showed that the newcomers, while pushing onward, had their eyes out for what was happening beyond the mountains behind them. A little party, reading one day in a news sheet which some late recruit had brought the tidings of the 19th of April of that year, baptized their bivouac "Lexington." And here a new chapter in oui- story begins. CHAPTER IV how the united states TOOK HOLD The Declaration of Independence came, and the great war was defibaitely entered upon. The energetic British government attacked from the west as weU as from the east. Henry Hamilton, the capable officer in command at Detroit, caUed the " hair-buyer," on account of his complicity in many a scalping raid, — though indeed be was humane to captives, and only the instrument of his superiors in employing the savage, — pushed matters ruthlessly, until the whole frontier, from the headwaters of the Ohio far down the valley, was aflame. The effort was to drive back the advancing line of settlement, and every frontier champion with his following fought on one side or the other. The Tories in many cases betook themselves to Hamilton at Detroit, becoming flercer foes of their old neighbors than the British themselves. Many of the French took up arms for the new masters, who had conquered them in 1759. Beyond all, the Indians, the Delawares alone showing hesitation, rushed into blood-shed ding with the zest of tigers. There were no bat- 76 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1777 ties of moment, but parties, often of not more than two or three on a side, grappled in the death- struggle. Cabins everywhere were consumed ; through every wood-path were driven groups of disconsolate captives, guarded front and rear by painted demons, at whose belts hung the reeking scalps of neighbors, perhaps of parents or chil dren, of the captives. They were fortunate souls who escaped torture through the door of bloody death. All the leaders with whom we have been concerned — Robertson and Sevier in the south, in the north Boon, Kenton, George Rogers Clark — thinned with their own unfailing rifles the number of their wild assailants, and directed and heartened the little groups of settlers struggling so desperately to keep their foothold. AU mourned close comrades or kindred overtaken on the trail or in the clearing. Probably no Indian ever quite attained with the rifle the skill of the best white marksmen ,; as, on the other hand, no white ever quite reached Indian skill in tracking a foe or finding cover when pursued. The onset seemed at first likely to succeed. In the spring of 1777, Boon himself, while making salt with compan ions at the Blue Licks, was badly worsted and carried captive up the Little Miami. He won his captors at last by good nature and tact, taking care to keep concealed his real strength and skUl. He was taken to Detroit, where Hamilton tried to buy him for £100, but the Indians wished to 1762] BOON AND KENTON 77 adopt him, and would not let him go. Watching his chance, he at last darted for the woods, run ning in four days one hundred and sixty miles, during which flight he broke his fast but once. His speed saved his settlement, Boonsboro ; he reached it just at the moment of an Indian at tack which he was able to foil. No less remarkable than the experiences of Boon were those of his friend Simon Kenton, like his comrade a calm, pleasant-natured, well-poised character, with a reserve of force and courage which in desperate circumstances could dare and do to the point of the miraculous. He was taU, in the highest degree vigorous, and without bod ily defect. He saved Boon's life by shooting an Indian foe just as his tomahawk was descending. He captured, while off on a raid in Indian fash ion with but two companions, two hundred and sixty horses ; but while trying to get them across the Ohio, he was himself captured. He was beaten with ramrods ; four posts being driven into the ground flrm and far apart, a hand or a foot was tied to each, and thus he was " staked out." By day he was forced along on an unbroken horse, his hands bound behind his back, his feet tied under the horse's belly. Being tortured from town to town, he ran the gauntlet eight times, four times by dexterous dodging and strength escaping with but few blows. His face was painted black, a sign that he was to be burned ; and he was in fact 78 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1705 tied three times to the stake. He was, however, ransomed at last at Detroit, and reached home apparently with vigor unbroken. Let this outline serve as a fair sample of pioneer experience in those dreadful years. Boon and Ken ton were leaders ; of the deeds and hardships of lesser men and of the wives and children, there is no lack of record. We pass now to the career of the man who in brain and force was superior to them all, the real history-maker of the period and the region. In 1763, defeated France ceded to Spain New Orleans and its neighborhood, containing possibly ten thousand people, and gave up also the vast undefined territory west of the Mississippi, the motive being to propitiate a power whose help she greatly needed. In 1765, St. Ange, giving up Fort Chartres to the Highlanders, surrendered the last French post in the Mississippi Valley. St. Ange withdrew to St. Louis, where the year before Laclede had established himself. At St. Louis and at Ste. Genevieve to the south of it, a settlement near lead mines which had come to be worked, there soon gathered a population of perhaps a thousand French, many of them refugees who retired beyond the river to escape British domination. Kaskaskia and Cahokia, however, on the eastern bank, in the immensely fertile " American Bottom," maintained their existence, as did also Vincennes farther east on 1777] FRENCH IN ILLINOIS 79 the Wabash. Some trace, also, of the French occupancy remained on the Illinois, in the old haunts of La Salle and Tonti. Altogether there may have been scattered about east of the river twenty-five hundred French. At New Orleans and also in the upper settlements there was a considerable element of negro slaves ; the upper settlements, too, contained a large Indian admix ture. At the outbreak of the Revolution these Creole clusters had changed little from their old condition. The British government had sought to pursue toward them a conciliatory policy. The Quebec Act, which was in force in the West as well as in Canada, left the French undisturbed in their religion, their local government, and their social life. The viUage priest retained all his former authority ; the notary was still at hand for all civU transactions ; and though the French com mandant was replaced by a military officer who flew the English flag, the officer was sometimes a Frenchman who had taken the oath of aUegiance to Great Britain and was therefore trusted. The old idyllic life went forward unchanged from what it was when the Bourbon lilies were float ing. The verandahed cabins stood irregularly along the village streets, on the prairie, or in the clearing. Always close at hand ran the great river, or some full affluent of it, the highway for aU. Barter, hunting, and trapping were the seri ous pursuits more often than agriculture. On the 80 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1777 saints' days came service and procession ; and later, to the sound of violins and flutes, the dancers swayed and tripped until late into the night. The War of the Revolution in the West was destined to be by no means one of defense entirely. George Rogers Clark, who had fixed his station at the rapid known as the Falls of the Ohio, where Louisville now stands, conceiving that something might be done to win the great country stretching north and west, then the seat of powerful Indian confederacies, with the Creole villages scattered among them, heard in 1777, from spies whom he had sent out, that the French were lukewarm to the English, and might perhaps be won by a bold course to the new government. Hard-pressed Ken tucky could spare no men for an expedition ; so Clark, taking the Wilderness Trail in the com pany of a crowd of disheartened settlers who were returning, made his way in the fall of 1777 to Virginia, where he submitted to Governor Patrick Henry a scheme for northwestern conquest. Bur goyne's surrender made the world hopeful. Clark was commissioned colonel and authorized to raise seven companies of fifty men each for his enter prise. His recruiting-ground, however, must be west of the Blue Ridge, the demands of the war in the East making the restriction necessary. Clark with difficulty mustered four small companies, about half of the authorized number. But with these he embarked on " broad-horns," the square- A FRENCH HOUSE AMONG THE ILLINOIS 1778] GEORGE ROGERS CLARK 81 bowed scows of the period, at Red Stone Old Fort on the Monongahela ; and taking on stores at Pitts burg, twenty miles below, and again at Wheeling, reached at last the Falls of the Ohio. The French alUance, news of which came to him just in time, was a most fortunate circumstance. The habi tans would certainly not be disinclined to strike hands with those whom King Louis had taken into friendship. Clark pressed forward with great energy. Weeding out of his command all poor and muti nous material, on a June day in 1778, with two hundred picked men, he shot the Falls of the Ohio, and sailed downward to the mouth of the Tennessee. Fearing to ascend the Mississippi to Kaskaskia, the point to be first assailed, lest trad ing boats might give warning of his approach, Clark marched northward through the woods from the Ohio. He had four good captains, and the prestige of the commander increased with each day. With scouts well ahead he pushed through the heavy woods out at last on to the prairie, where obstacles were fewer, and on July 4, reached the Kaskaskia only three miles from the French town. The British commandant, the Creole Roche blave, who was sturdily faithful to his new aUe giance, had four times as many men, French and Indians, as had Clark. The emergency demanded a surprise; after which, Rocheblave being once disposed of, a bold face on the part of the assail- 82 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1778 ants, and the lukewarmness of the French in their allegiance, might be reckoned on to bring about for the Americans a happy issue. Clark's management was a mixture of address and audacity. According to the picturesque story, after surrounding the town with part of his little army, he advanced with the rest directly upon it. A dance was going on, strangers having come in from the hamlets about. Clark went within the pali sade entirely alone, and, guided by the music and laughter, made his way to the place of assembly. He took up his post in the doorway, his figure, though unfamiliar, not at first attracting attention. But before long, as the young leader's tall, gaunt frame stood revealed in the light, an Indian crouching on the floor, after a sharp scrutiny, sprang to his feet with a war-whoop and pointed out the intruder. All was panic at once ; but Clark, unmoved, with arms folded, in a voice of command, bade the crowd to go on with their dancing, but to take note that they now danced not as subjects of King George, but as Virginians. Clark's men now rushed up with aU promptness ; the head-men were seized, chief of all Rocheblave, who was taken in bed ; the weapons were captured, and the town was at the mercy of the assailants. Father Gibault, the priest, a man of force and influence, having been assured that the Catholic faith should be respected, became an active friend of the Americans, inducing his flock to accept the 1778] ILLINOIS CAPTURED 83 change of masters without regret. Rocheblave alone stood firm amidst the general yielding, being sent as a prisoner to Virginia ; his property was confiscated, his slaves seUing for £500, which went as prize money to Clark's soldiers. A detachment pushing north to Cahokia, that settlement was won with equal ease. Father Gi bault himself undertook to gain over Vincennes, which had been committed by the British to a Creole garrison. Making his way across the coun try to the Wabash, and gathering the people into the church, he announced what had been done at Kaskaskia and recommended a similar course. Why should the French adhere to the British ? At Saratoga, the preceding October, their Gen eral Burgoyne had met with a great disaster. The French king had taken America into his friend ship and protection. With the Americans all Frenchmen should cast in their lot. Father Gibault's eloquence carried the day at once ; the American flag was hoisted joyfully, and by the beginning of August the priest himself brought back to Clark, news of his success. All had gone weU with Clark, but his situa tion demanded prudent management. The term of his men was about to expire ; at best they were but a handful. There was no chance of reinforce ment from Kentucky or Virginia ; the govern ment of the new territory was to be provided for where the British and Indians threatened, and the 84 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1778 French were friends very new and untried. But Clark's astuteness was as marked as his valor. By gifts and promises he succeeded in retaining about one hundred of his Virginians. To the Creoles he pretended that he was about to return to the Falls of the Ohio, being confident that the French could protect themselves against the English vengeance sure to fall upon them for the course they had taken. They were panic-stricken at the thought of his going, and entreated him urgently to re main. Clark yielded at last with pretended reluc tance, exacting beforehand pledges of faithful support. He recruited his companies with young Creoles, so leavening the mass with his Virginia veterans, and disciplining all so rigidly, that his composite army became in a high degree effective. One of his captains, Leonard Helm, put in com mand at Vincennes, managed the Wabash region with great address. On the other side the Span ish commander at St. Louis was very cordial to the new order, as it was established close at hand to him across the river at Cahokia. As far as the French were concerned, the Northwest seemed to be thoroughly gained in those few summer weeks. So far Clark's campaign had been a promenade. The Indians were now to be dealt with, a much more difficult problem than Clark had yet con fronted. The tribes had hated the Americans, the " Long Knives " as they called them, but had been friendly to the French and Spaniards. 1778] THE INDIANS WON 85 Should they now, like their friends, go over to the Long Knives, or persist in their hatred ? In their embarrassment the savages assembled in great numbers at Cahokia, representatives coming from regions far distant. From the East came warriors neighbors of the Iroquois ; from the West Paw nees, the terrible horse Indians of the plains ; while from the North, Sauks, Winnebagoes, finally Ojibways and Sioux, convened about the council- fire. So it was that the confederacies holding a vast extent of country, running far up into the northwest, sat down together for a solemn talk. Clark met them at Cahokia, having behind him but a handful of men. Were the savages to be friends or foes ? All was in indecision : a breath might sway them to one side or the other. Clark's management of the situation was a marvel, — a combination of bravado and of the deftest tact. On the third day of the council certain of the sav ages set out to seize upon him. Clark, however, anticipated them, snatching out the offenders as they stood in the midst of the hesitating crowd, and casting them straightway into chains. A sign of timidity would have brought upon his little company a rain of tomahawks. With assumed indifference, he would not even seek the shelter of the fort, but gave directions for a dance out side, to which he invited the Cahokians, good care being taken to have at hand a picked guard with rifles ready. How much mirth surpassed appre- 86 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1778 hension in " the company of gentlemen and ladies " is nowhere stated; but the bravado prevailed. Next day the council proceeded with all the circum stance of a savage ceremonial. Clark tossed among them a bloody war-belt, defying the multi tude. Dragging part of his chained captives into the ring, he contemptuously set them free, shout ing that he scorned them all. He said he came not as a councilor but as a warrior. To those who were friendly he too would be friendly ; but if they chose war, he would call from the Thirteen Council - Fires warriors so numerous that they would darken the land ; from that time on the red people would hear no sound but that of the birds which lived on blood. There had been a mist before their eyes, but he would clear away the cloud and show them the rights of the quarrel be tween the Long Knives and the king who lived across the great sea. For three days longer they might have food ; then he should enter upon the war-path, and let them beware his wrath. The bold front carried the day. A peace-belt and a war-belt being now offered, the Indians were eager to accept the former. Clark, however, refused to smoke the calumet with them. He de clined to surrender all his captives, declaring that two must die. Two young braves with stoical fortitude seated themselves on the ground and with heads muffled in their blankets awaited the death-stroke. At the last moment their lives were 1778] THE BRITISH AROUSED 87 magnanimously spared. His purpose having been achieved and a deep impression made, Clark haughtily accepted peace and a feast cemented the bond. Long as he lived, Clark preserved his authority. His name was one to conjure with. In future councils, whatever dignitaries might be on the ground, if Clark were present the Indians would address no one but him. In the history of the frontier, probably no other man ever attained an ascendency over the Indians so deep and so far- reaching. After Clark's time, indeed, there were bloody wars, — wars lasting down almost to the present hour ; but from the day of the Cahokia council the dominance of the Americans over the tribes became fixed and definite. From that time it ceased to be doubtful that the whites would prevail. The French and Indians had been won by this fine blending of astuteness and courage, but Clark had much more to do. Hamilton at Detroit had been astounded at the news from the Kaskaskia and the Wabash ; he was, however, resourceful and energetic, and delivered his coun ter-stroke without delay. Mustering a force of several hundred Detroit Indians, with five or six score whites, for the most part Creoles of Detroit, but including thirty-six British regulars, he set out for Vincennes in October, 1778, by the portage of the Maumee. At the first news of his coming. 88 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1779 Helm, Clark's captain at Vincennes, was aban doned by his company of Frenchmen. He was utterly alone and straightway captured with the post, which he had no means to defend. The ha bitans professed the utmost penitence, and Hamil ton felt entirely secure. The Illinois French, too, were panic-struck ; and as winter came on, Clark's conquest seemed on the point of being canceled as easily as it had come about. Hamilton looked forward to driving in the American posts as soon as spring should come, and destroying everything west of the Alleghanies. War-belts were sent to the southern Indians inviting cooperation. In January, 1779, Clark himself was nearly cap tured by one of Hamilton's parties on the road between Kaskaskia and Cahokia. How Clark met the crisis is an interesting story. Now appears on the scene a pleasant figure, Francois Vigo, an Italian, who had come to New Orleans in a Spanish regiment, and who after wards went northward to become one of the most enterprising traders of the time. His name, for a number of years, occurs in connection with vari ous friendly services done to Americans, — a kind and cordial ally, whose important help, rendered often at great cost and peril to himself, did not receive proper recognition until 1876, when a long law-suit was finally decided at St. Louis in favor of his heirs. It was almost a century before that, January 27, 1779, that Vigo, escaping from 1779] CLARK ATTACKS 89 captivity at Vincennes, brought word to Clark that Hamilton at the moment had but eighty men upon whom he could rely, though in the spring a large reinforcement would come for the purposed reconquest. Clark acted with aU promptness. In spite of the panic of the Illinois settlements, he had maintained his hold on the bolder French. It is said also that the handsome young leader — he was but twenty-seven — was strongly upheld by the Creole girls, who wrought upon their sweethearts to stand by him. Each recruit re ceived a little flag, which Clark afterward put to good use. He set out at once in February with a force of one hundred and seventy, mostly French, but with his Virginia veteranship distributed through the ranks to give strength, as a wire gives strength sometimes when run through a cord of cotton. Father Gibault, a constant and power ful support, blessed the little army as it set out on its march of two hundred and forty miles across country. Before setting out, Clark had built and dispatched the Willing, a sort of flat-bottomed gal ley, armed with small cannon and manned by a crew of forty, whose work was to be through row ing to patrol the Ohio, preventing help from ascend ing the Wabash to the British, and cooperating with the land enterprise as circumstances might determine. With the middle of February, Clark's army reached the " drowned lands " of the Wabash, — 90 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1779 a tract low and flat, which, as the snow melted in the breaking up of winter, had become transformed into shaUow lakes, stretching sometimes for miles, with only here and there a protruding patch of earth. The details of the comfortless, desperate march are extraordinary. They waded for days through the ice-cold flood, the water coming to their waists, to their breasts, sometimes to their necks. Those short in stature or too weak to bear it were packed into the few canoes or pirogues which they laid hands on. If by chance they reached a protruding bank, the fear of exciting alarm at Vincennes, now close at hand, forbade the kindling of fire or shooting at game. Birds and beasts, indeed, had pretty much disappeared. Noah's dove returned to the ark from passage over a deluge less dismal than this. Clark's tact and resource were never more remarkably displayed than here. As he had managed the Indians, so now he knew just how to manage the Creoles. He laughed at the hardships ; he played the buffoon, blacking his face and breaking in upon the dis consolate crowd with horse-play. Mounting "a little antic drummer," a valuable aUy with his pranks in the strait, on the shoulders of a tall sergeant, the sergeant dashed ahead into depths where the little fellow would have found no bottom. Meantime the drum rattled on merrily, and Clark, striking up a song or a cheer, plunged after, making light of everything. But behind 1779] AT VINCENNES 91 the forced lightness there was a stern hand. Twenty-five picked men formed a rear-guard with orders to slay any one that faltered. After some days of such progress, when sometimes it had been necessary to put the weaker ones between strong men and hurry them back and forth on the shore to keep the blood in motion, and when starvation seemed close at hand, the prospect began to brighten. Certain Frenchmen taken captive made it known that Clark's approach was utterly unsuspected, and that the habitans of Vincennes might easily be won if they were sure of protection. A canoe paddled by squaws being overtaken, part of the carcase of a buffalo, with corn, taUow, and kettles, reinforced the commis sariat. They had heard for some days Hamil ton's morning and evening guns, and now they saw the townspeople outside the palisade. Clark here threw off concealment, sending in one of his captives among the French with a letter threat ening vengeance to aU who did not remain in their houses, but promising all favor to those who submitted. He now marched directly on the town, the depression of his soldiers having yielded to high spirits. " Every man now feasted his eyes and forgot that he had suffered anything, saying that all that had passed was owing to good policy, and nothing but what a man could bear, and that soldiers had no right to think, etc." As the army advanced among trees and over ridges, a shrewd 92 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1779 ruse made the number appear much larger than it really was. The little flags, given the Creoles at Kaskaskia when they enlisted, were paraded as ensigns of companies ; the ranks marched and countermarched so as to be counted three or four times over ; w,hile Clark and his captains, mounted on horses they had seized, galloped hither and thither as if ordering a vast array. At the last minute Hamilton had been aroused. He sent out a scouting party, which, however, embarrassed by the floods, did not get back. The French all went promptly over to Clark, supplying him with food, ammunition, and recruits. Hamil ton undertook to defend the fort, but the siege was short and decisive. Clark's marksmen picked off the gunners through the port-holes until the cannon were silenced. An Indian scalping party having returned at the moment of the attack from a raid on the American settlements, bringing their scalps at their girdles, Clark seized them all. Leading out nine of the savages in sight of the fort, he caused them to be tomahawked and their bodies thrown into the river. Besides that, in the capture of Vincennes there was little shedding of blood. Hamilton surrendered, going as a captive to Vir ginia. The Willing soon appeared, too late to help, but in time to take part in the rejoicing. To crown all, Clark's doughty captain, Leonard Helm, who had been a prisoner of the British, taking a party northward, encountered on the march the 1779] CLARK'S SUCCESS 93 reinforcements that were coming down from De troit. These were defeated, and supplies, £10,000 in value, taken. All this was distributed as prize- money, making the success complete. Clark re ceived the thanks of Virginia through Governor Patrick Henry ; but his best reward was an im mense influence and popularity among French, Indians, and backwoodsmen, throughout the West. Before the year 1779 ended, he was once more settled at the Falls of the Ohio. The story is an extraordinary record of courage, address, and endurance. Clark's means were insignificant, but it would be hard to match his achievement in American history. The bloodshed was but trifling ; the forces of nature were over come in a marvelous way ; tact and a bold front, rather than the rifle, carried the day when it came to the opposition of men. To the tale of danger runs parallel a curious obligate of dance, high spirits, and laughter. It was that note largely that won the Creoles, and it seems to have come natural to him. His conviviality led to drunk enness, which wrecked his later life. There was yet to be much difficulty in the Northwest. The French constantly yearned to put off the burden of self-government which the new order imposed, and go back to the priest, the notary, and the despotic commandant of their old estate. The British did not cease from troubling until near the end of the century, when the Jay treaty settled 94 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1780 the boundary. The Indians have continued to be a source of danger even to the present moment. But from the time of Clark there has been no question as to our mastery over the Northwest throughout its whole extent. To the north of Lake Superior and the sources of the Mississippi the dominion of the United States had been made to extend, never afterward to be seriously ques tioned. In Monument Square, Indianapolis, stands the statue of Clark, an athletic figure, scarcely past youth, taU and sinewy, with a drawn sword, in an attitude of energetic encouragement, as if get ting his army through the drowned lands of the Wabash. He may be called our first expan sionist, spreading as he did the authority of the Union through tracts far outside the patents of the Thirteen Colonies. During these years the Watauga men had been manifesting a fine prowess, though the results were less brilliant than in the Northwest. The battle of King's Mountain, in 1780, though taking place on the Atlantic watershed, on the frontier between North and South Carolina, was reaUy decided by Holston River men, who, under Sevier and Isaac Shelby, going eastward through the passes, struck the blow that revived the failing cause in the South. Sevier shows greater activity than ever in these years, against both British and Indians ; while Robertson, a character calmer and 1782] FRONTIER HARDSHIPS 95 steadier, in 1779, conducts westward the party that founds Nashville in the great bend of the Cumberland. As yet for the borderers there was little break in the gloom. The tomahawk was always busy about the trails and settlements. But a better time was coming. In 1779, Spain de clared war against England, and a force from New Orleans, underthe energetic young governor, Galvez, campaigned effectively against the British about Pensacola. Though the winter of 1779- 1780 was so severe that the buffalo herded with the cattle about the hay-stacks, and along the trails the line of disheartened and returning set tlers choked the way, the tide of settlement rose. At the beginning of the Revolution, there were but a few hundred west of the Alleghanies ; at the close, the number had risen to twenty-five thousand. After 1782, the British grip relaxed. Clark made reprisals in the Miami country for what had been suffered, and Kentucky was never after seriously invaded. The highway westward had now become the Ohio River, the Wilderness Trail through Cum berland Gap proving a less convenient thorough fare ; and the usual vehicle of conveyance was the flatboat. A typical flatboat of these early years was fifty-five feet long, sixteen feet broad, with a draught of three feet, the capacious hull accommodating under its roof horses, cattle, and wagons, as weU as their owners. With a good 96 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1786 stage of water the voyage from Pittsburg, or Red Stone Old Fort, twenty miles above on the Monon gahela, to the Falls of the Ohio, now becoming a lively centre, occupied a week or ten days; with low water, when sandbars might obstruct, a month might be required. The sides required to be built high, to be loopholed, and made bullet proof either by heavy timbering or the disposition of the cargo, for at many points there was danger of Indian attack. Of course, for these " broad- horns " there was no return against the current ; they were broken up when the downstream voy age was ended, the material doing service in a thousand ways. The critical period of American history, the years between the peace of 1783 and the adoption of the Constitution, was not less disorderly and threat ening in the Mississippi Valley than in the East. In 1784, the Watauga settlement, which had been merged in North Carolina, constituted itself into the State of Franklin, whose existence was chiefly signalized by violent quarrels among its leaders : at the head of one faction was Sevier, ever com bative. At the adoption of the Constitution, Franklin disappeared, the State of Tennessee soon taking shape, with Sevier, who became an ardent Federalist, for its first governor. No one can be blamed that in those days loyalty to the feeble Union was languid and a strong separatist feeling rife. The Union being a jelly, what credit or OHIO FLATBOAT 1786] WEAKNESS OF THE NATION 97 protection could it offer to win adherents? In these Western communities, some favored com plete independence ; some would have gone back with equanimity to England ; some, again, were ready to connect themselves with Spain, which held New Orleans and the world beyond the river. The redoubtable Clark and the well-poised Rob ertson, even, showed Spanish sympathies ; while Daniel Boon, Binding the air contaminated by the swelling immigration, pushing across into a new wilderness, became a Spanish official, far up the Missouri. New Madrid sprang up, composed of American colonists submitting to live under the Spanish flag. The dawn of a better day was seen in the resig nation by the States to the general government of their Western claims. Seven of the thirteen origi nal States laid claim to tracts extending westward to the Mississippi River, — New York, Massa chusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina. New York's assertion was that she was the heir of the Iroquois, — a claim indeed shadowy, — while the remaining six rested their right upon their original charters. Mary land had early demanded that the States should give up their separate claims, a suggestion which at first met with no favor. In 1780, however. New York resigned her tract, an example followed in 1784 by Virginia, in 1785 by Massachusetts, in 1786 by Connecticut and South Carolina. 98 THE UNITED STATES TOOK HOLD [1786 North Carolina held out tiU 1790. The United States thus came into possession of land amount ing to 200,000,000 of acres, recognized even then as property of immense value. It formed a noble resource for the new nation, giving it means to pay its debts, an enormous burden after the war, and affording a chance for expansion. Coeval with the beneficent change in the tenure of the territory were the adoption of the federal Consti tution and the passage by Congress at once of the Ordinance of 1787, events pregnant with good. As early as 1784, a division of this new public domain, which at that time had become only partly federal, was projected, chiefly interesting, perhaps, for the naming of the commonwealths to be, — a naming curiously reflecting the feebleness that prevailed. Miehigania was to extend 'from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi ; Assenipia lay south of this ; Metropotamia was to extend along Lake Erie ; Polypotamia was to lie south of this ; while Pelisipia was still further down. But the map was to be saved from such a nomenclature. The men who were to shape the greatness of the Mississippi Valley were now at hand. A rough young pioneer was making himself felt in the Watauga and Cumberland country, Andrew Jackson. The son of a backwoods preacher in southwestern Virginia, Henry Clay, was getting growth and experience to go presently to Lexing ton to begin a memorable life-work. In Ken- 1784] LINCOLN'S FATHER 99 tucky the father of Chief Justice Marshall was opposing separatism. In 1784, a boy six years old belonging to a poor white family just arrived at a little palisaded hamlet was saved from the tomahawk of a prowling savage by a lucky shot from the rifle of an elder brother. The boy thus saved grew up to become the father of Abraham Lincoln. CHAPTER V THE CONSTITUTION AND THE OEDINANCE OF 1787 The " Bunch of Grapes " tavern in Boston, and the little town of Rutland, in Worcester County, Mass., are places to be remembered as the scenes of the meetings which led to forming the Ohio Company, the earUest beginning of which is referred to the spring of 1786. Conti nental officers, more than half of them from Massachusetts, desired to change the paper certifi cates in which they had been paid, for wild lands. General Rufus Putnam, a man of good sense and with a good record of service, was most prominent ; they memorialized Congress at once, and Manas seh Cutler, — preacher, lawyer, doctor, statesman, scientist, land speculator, — a character of extraor dinary versatility, arrived in New York in July of that year, to push the matter. Eight States only were represented in the feeble Congress. The grant of land was made with only one dissent ing vote. Slavery was to be prohibited, although a majority of the committee were Southern men, Grayson and Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, pressing the matter with especial vigor. No such 1787] NORTHWEST ORDINANCE 101 important attempt at settlement beyond the Alle ghanies had ever before been attempted, and it became the occasion in the following year of the famous Ordinance of 1787, which ranks among the most momentous of American enactments, and must be carefully outlined. For each Territory into which the Northwest should be divided, an organization was laid down with governor, secretary, and judges. When the population reached five thousand free males, a General Assembly was to be constituted, the lower house elective, the upper house appointive. This body was to have power to elect a delegate to Congress. All officials must be landholders in the Territory ; a small property qualification was also to be a condition of the franchise. There were six articles in the compact laid down by the United States to be observed by the people to whom it granted its lands, to be held unalterable except by the consent of both. 1. Complete freedom of worship and religion was extended to all peaceable and orderly persons. 2. Trial by jury, habeas corpus, privilege of the common law, the right of proportionate legis lative representation were established. 3. Faith was to be kept with the Indians, and means of education were to be encouraged. 4. All new States must forever form part of the United States. 6. Here provision was made for the formation 102 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1787 of not less than three or more than five new States out of the Northwest territory. A condi tion of admission to the Union must be a popula tion of not less than 60,000 ; the government must be republican, and the new States were to be in all respects equal with the others. 6. It was ordained that there should never be slavery or involuntary servitude, otherwise than for the punishment of convicted criminals. Slaves fugitive from the South, however, could be lawfully claimed by their owners. Mr. Roosevelt declares the sixth article to be the greatest blow ever struck in behalf of free dom in our whole history, except the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. The docu ment throughout is generaUy esteemed as worthy to stand in the class with the Declaration of In dependence, the Constitution itself, and Wash ington's Farewell Address. The conjunction in the same year of two enactments so memorable was indeed auspicious of good ; and it was the Mississippi Valley that was in especial to reap the harvest from this fortunate sowing. A fort night after its passage a million and a half acres were sold to the Ohio Company, which straight way proceeded to establish a settlement in accord- dance with the six provisions. Two years before the passage of the Ordinance, a providential basis for it had been prepared in a happy enactment of the Congress of the Confed- 1788] MARIETTA FOUNDED 103 eracy. According to this, surveys of the great region were to be conducted by a corps of govern ment engineers, who were to divide the country into ranges of townships six miles square. These again were to be subdivided into square mile sec tions, all to be carefully numbered ; and section sixteen in each township was set apart for schools. The rest of the land was open for sale at a mini mum price of one dollar per acre. The first party of the Ohio Company, Revolu tionary soldiers who had exchanged their certifi cates for lands beyond the mountains, were on their way west before 1787 expired. It was an admirable company, sturdy and intelligent in the rank and file, and well led. By February of 1788 they had reached the Youghiogheny, where, building boats forty-eight in number, they started downstream with the spring flood. On the 7th of April, they reached the mouth of the Muskin gum, about which their patent lay, and Rufus Putnam with the advance party stepped ashore. Fort Harmar, an important post, close by, across the narrow river, afforded protection. The spot where the adventurers landed was occupied by remarkable and mysterious constructions of the mound-builders, — terraces, embankments, steep- sided cones, — all of which the forest had covered. Here they feUed trees and built their cabins, call ing the place Marietta after Queen Marie Antoi nette. In July appeared the governor of the 104 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1788 Territory, Arthur St. Clair, a brave and high- minded, but never fortunate soldier, admitted to the friendship and confidence of Washington, — a man who resolutely grappled with problems for which his capacity was quite inadequate, — who was never dishonored, though undergoing great disaster. In the faU, the Symmes purchase was laid out farther down the stream, a small set tlement upon which was named by a pedantic schoolmaster L-os-anti-viUe, the town opposite the mouth of the Licking. This, rechristened by St. Clair Cincinnati, became the first capital of the Territory. Shortly after Putnam's arrival, Manas seh Cutler, too, journeyed thither, noting in his diary as indicative of permanence that the women were coming with the men, that the fields were already sown, that homes were forming. One is glad to encounter in Cutler's record Francois Vigo, the old friend of George Rogers Clark. Vigo took Cutler into his ten-oared barge, which at the same time had a sail. With the rowers and an occasional favoring breeze, they made their way for three weeks upstream. Cutler's pages give a pleasant picture of the wealth and hospi tality of the friendly Creole trader. Though, from the first, results were happy in the case of the Ohio Company, much misery and iniquity foUowed from unwise ways of opening the public domain. The practice of making large grants to individuals or private corporations in 1789] GALLIPOLIS POUNDED 105 return for insignificant sums, or for services often alleged rather than real, has from the foundation of the country led to trouble. It has proved far better to part with the public land in small quan tities, at reasonable prices, to actual settlers ; but the lesson has been learned only slowly. Now almost contemporary with the establishment of the Ohio Company, one of the worst of such schemes was exploited, which may stand as a type. The Scioto Company having obtained a vast tract about the river of that name, its agents appeared in France just after the outbreak of the French Revolution. The chief promoter was Joel Barlow, a name little honored in literature, and still less in the world of affairs. Loquacious and plausi ble, he impressed many Frenchmen, the disposi tion toward America in those days being espe cially favorable. Some hundreds, won by the golden picture, emigrated, enriching the unscru pulous managers with the purchase-money. In great part they were to the last degree ill adapted to life in the woods, — carvers, gilders, dancing- masters, barbers, men trained only in arts suited to an elaborate, indeed a finical, civilization. When dropped at last, after great hardships and losses, near the mouth of the Scioto, the story of their struggle with the harsh conditions would be comical if it were not so pathetic. They melted away at last, for the most part, — a few reaching France once more, a larger number, the French 106 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1789 settlements in the Wabash and Illinois country. The name Gallipolis survives as a souvenir of a swindling enterprise which caused much wretched ness, though the government did what it could by way of reHef . The frontier society was slowly becoming better ordered and more stable, but the terrible enemy still pressed. Year after year, with dreadful monotony, the war-whoop sounded far and wide. In the seven years preceding 1790, fifteen hun dred are said to have been slain in Kentucky alone, and on the roads leading thither. Where the settlers escaped death, they were often stripped of means ; an item of the rapine is that twenty thousand horses went to the thieves. Trail and stream were equally unsafe. From any thicket might come a rifle-shot ; for war-parties, perhaps of only two or three, crept with a stealth that eluded every sentinel far within the line of outposts. The flatboats, as they floated down the Ohio, were sometimes lashed together three abreast ; in the centre one the women and children and the more precious freight : outside, the fighting men, pro tected through high bulwarks from shots from either shore, aimed their own rifles through port holes blocked with timbers, or bales or boxes taken from the cargo. Sometimes on the bank would stand a wretched white man or woman, tattered, starved, apparently a captive just escaped from the savages, who held out hands imploringly to be 1790] UNDER THE CONSTITUTION 107 rescued. If, however, the boatmen yielded to humane feelings and turned their craft toward the suppliant, a sudden rain of lead from an ambush close by would sweep the deck, and a score of painted fiends board the craft for its capture. The miserable suppliant on the shore, it would appear, had been the savage's decoy, forced at the knife's point to lure his fellows to destruction ; then doomed to go back to a bondage whose hor rors were in no way relieved. The persistence, the cunning, the boldness, the ferocity of the foe seemed to have no limits. After the adoption of the Constitution, the war fare of the whites gradually became more system atic and effective. The country was beginning to stand on its legs ; the regular army entered on the scene, at first with staggering, meeting much dis aster, but growing without break in might and resolution, until, reaching full efficiency, it gained complete success. The names of Harmar and St. Clair, the earliest commanders under the Constitu tion, are associated with defeat ; they were, how ever, brave, if not skillful, officers ; and their ill success was due to the fact that they were set to do work for which they were not trained. 1791 was the year of St. Clair's defeat, a most gloomy page in the history of the Mississippi Valley. The Indians, stimulated no doubt by British agents, — for Great Britain claimed, long after the peace, that treaty conditions were not observed, and much 108 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1791 preferred to have the West remain a fur-yielding wilderness rather than become the seat of Anglo- Saxon civilization, — abated no whit in their fury. After a lame attempt by Harmar, St. Clair was set to repel and punish. His force was of the poorest, two weak regiments of regulars recruited east of the mountains, — often men disabled by vice, often unused to arms, the entire mass without fron tier experience ; besides these a horde of militia enlisted for a short term, undisciplined and some times mutinous. The entire army at the start did not reach two thousand in number. Frontiers men of the militia and regulars were on the worst possible terms. Though game abounded, the force in general were too poor marksmen to obtain it, and hunters had to be detailed to procure sup plies. St. Clair himself was elderly and sick; Butler, his second in command, was brave enough, but otherwise incompetent. Through the energy mainly of Winthrop Sargent, adjutant-general, the expedition, which had rendezvoused in the Miami country, was able in November to stumble northward toward the watershed drained on the south by the Wabash and on the north by the Maumee. No scouts were thrown forward. When far advanced in the forest, sixty militia, deserting, set out for home ; whereupon St. Clair, blind to his dangers, sent back after them one of his regi ments of regulars, half of the only body of troops on which he could at aU rely. On November 4, 1791] ST. CLAIR'S DEFEAT 109 having reached the east fork of the Wabash, the army, reduced now to fourteen hundred, paraded at dawn, for St. Clair meditated a stroke upon the Indian towns now not far off. The stroke fell, but the gallant incompetent did not adminis ter it. The woods of a sudden were alive with foes, who smote as adroitly and boldly as those who annihilated Braddock. The army fought well, both officers and men. If only courage had been enough ! Surrounded upon all sides, the troops were forced back on to a hillock in the centre. They stood at last in two ranks, back to back, facing their enemy on either side. Butler paced back and forth in front of one rank, St. Clair in front of the other. The respectable old general in the cocked hat of the Continentals, with his gray hair gathered in a queue, stemmed misfortune as stubbornly and as impotently as he had stemmed misfortune before on Revolutionary fields. But ler was soon mortally wounded, laughing, it is said, as he lay dying, at a young cadet who cried at a light touch from a spent baU. The clothes of St. Clair were shot through eight times, and a lock of his hair, escaped from his pigtail, was car ried away ; but his body was unharmed. All be ing lost, with the third of his men that remained, the general broke his way back to the road by which he had approached. Fortunately the In dians, surfeited for the moment with slaughter, preferred to plunder the abandoned camp rather 110 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1791 than to pursue. The survivors of the battle, therefore, reached the settlements, starving and disheartened. Probably the Indian assailants did not number half the force of St. Clair ; their loss probably was not one twentieth of what he suffered. The misfortune of Braddock was par alleled ; an American army never underwent de feat more mortifying. When word at last reached President Washington, it is said to have called out from him one of those volcanic explosions of wrath of which he was capable. The commanding chief of the foe was probably Little Turtle, a Miami ; besides Miamis, Delawares, Shawnees, and Wy- andots were present ; a few Iroquois, too, may have given edge to the sharpness of the stroke. St. Clair's defeat, in which ended the first mili tary enterprise of the newly constituted Union, was a sad shock and seemed full of ill omen. The Eastern communities were quite indifferent to what happened beyond the mountains, and ready to patch up peace on almost any terms. Recourse was had at first to negotiations and treaties, al ways with savages productive of unsatisfactory results ; the envoys were in some instances slain. Meantime the irregular war of the frontier raged on. Relations with Great Britain became much strained, both sides alleging that the conditions of the peace of 1783 were not observed. The Indians, made arrogant by success, were supplied at British posts with weapons and powder ; while 1794] WAYNE'S VICTORY 111 their ruthless activity was connived at, if not di rectly stimulated. A new effort to suppress them became imperative, and this time it was Wayne, " Mad Anthony " of Stony Point, who was to lead, — a man no braver than St. Clair, but full of native power, developed in the best school. Profiting in every step that he took by the dismal experience of his predecessor, he first trained his army of three thousand by discipline steady and severe. Landing from the flatboats that brought his army from Pittsburg, he marched in the track of St. Clair through the Miami country until he reached the spot where his predecessor had suffered. Here Wayne built Fort Recovery, the name betokening the new heart which was being put into the cause. Continuing northward untU he had passed just beyond the Mississippi water shed into the valley of the Maumee, he fought, August 20, 1794, the battle of FaUen Timbers, completely annihilating the Indian strength. A British post was close by, from the walls of which the garrison were sullen spectators of a victory which they could hardly rejoice over. The pun ishment was most thorough. A war of forty years came to a close. The pioneer and his wife could at last sleep in peace, turning from the loophole and the rifle to plough, loom, and anvil. Now came pleasanter days. The savages, to be sure, made new attempts, but these were easily thwarted. The Indian power in the eastern Mississippi Val ley had been completely broken. 112 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1796 Population now rapidly increased, and life be came better ordered. Kentucky had become a State in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796, seventy-six thousand people having now filled up the country. The first governor of Tennessee was no other than old John Sevier, unbroken yet after long fightings with Indians, with British, and with his fellow backwoodsmen. A raw and fiery young man, with hair always bristling like the comb of an irate game-cock above a thin, intense face, Andrew Jackson became the first representative in Con gress. In 1796, the treaty negotiated with Eng land by John Jay was promulgated, a treaty bit terly denounced in its time, both East and West ; but it assigned to us definitely the line of the Lakes on the north, and brought to an end the uncertainty as to boundary which had caused so much discomfort and peril. Pinckney about the same time, by treaty with Spain, established the southern boundary, making definitely Ameri can the tract along the great river on which in 1798 was organized the Territory of Mississippi. Beyond the stream aU was in Spanish hands ; at the extreme south also. New Orleans, on the east ern shore, was a strongly maintained Spanish post. At St. Louis, the Spanish commandant, when George Rogers Clark was operating on the oppo site shore, had been friendly. The mood had now changed, the Spanish governors, notably Caron delet, showing a hostile spirit. A pressure, in fact. 1796] MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI 113 was beginning, out of which was to come a great result. It was growing plain that so long as the mouth of the Mississippi was in foreign hands, the increasing multitude in the valley which found through that its natural pathway to the sea and the world must suffer. The commerce ready to pour toward the Gulf was hampered by Spanish interference. A right to search was claimed ; cus toms were exacted ; the passage might be barred by a magistrate's caprice. Exasperation grew, and again and again one finds record of enterprises, more or less definite, for getting rid of the hin drance, with which sometimes names of note are connected. Blount, United States senator from Tennessee, a most worthy figure, was expelled from the Senate for intriguing against Spain. His State, however, received him at his home-coming with open arms. George Rogers Clark projected the conquest of Louisiana in behalf of France. France was to gain Louisiana before long, indeed, and the United States was to gain it from France. All was to be done, however, through other agency than that of Clark. But for that story we are not yet quite ready. William Henry Harrison, aide of Wayne at Fallen Timbers, son of a Virginia signer of the Declaration of Independence, himself destined to become President of the United States and the grandfather of still another President, was the first governor of Indiana, — so the great expanse 114 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1796 was named, the Assenipia and Pelisipia of the days of the Confederation being discarded. It comprehended the vast Northwest which Clark had conquered, running up to the sources of the Mississippi. Unfortunately, ways of disposing of the public land injured, sometimes permanently, considerable areas. Southeastern Ohio probably feels, even to the present day, an ill effect from the monopolies which, grasping rapaciously, forced many good immigrants to look elsewhere for homes. Sometimes there was rascality, as in the case of the cruel swindle at Gallipolis ; sometimes simple ignorance of the best methods, due to want of ex perience in managing a vast domain, was a cause of trouble. But in spite of aU, the country grew and throve. By 1794, a regular line of packets had been established between Pittsburg and Cin cinnati, some of which carried as many as six cannon, for the Indians stiU lurked on the shores. At first the connection of the Northwest with the South was much closer than with the North east. We have seen how at first Virginia and North Carolina fiUed up Tennessee and Kentucky : thence an overflow was now beginning into In diana, and acrdss the river into Spanish ter ritory. Naturally, indifference to slavery pre vailed, though it is interesting to remember that the clause in the Ordinance of 1787 which made the Northwest anti-slavery came from Southern 1799] BACKWOODS LIFE 115 men. In 1793 came Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin, that contrivance of a Yankee's brain of such enormous economic value, but so calamitous in certain other ways Now first negro slavery became distinctly profitable ; from a de caying institution, it grew to be the corner-stone of the Southern social structure. From the reminiscences of old backwoodsmen may be gained vivid pictures of pioneer life at the time when the eighteenth century ended. The cabin hearth afforded a primitive scene. In the morning it upheld a buckeye backlog, a hickory fore-stick, with smaller wood between, resting on stones or rude andirons, while a johnny-cake on a clean ash-board was set before the fire to bake. The frying-pan, also, with its long handle, was sure to be too conveniently at hand, the sputtering of its boiling grease heard morning, noon, and night. The mother cooked, nursed the baby between- times, and ruled the younger children. She was an adept at the loom and the spinning-wheel. At meal times a conch-shell would be blown for father in the field, the old dog would howl, and presently would come the clatter of pewter spoons and basins, or possibly of the wooden trenchers. Always on convenient pegs within easy reach lay the rifle, often an arm that had been carried by the side of Boon or Kenton, and that had deliv ered death to many a savage. As times grew more peaceful, it was stiU indispensable, for the 116 THE ORDINANCE OF 1787 [1800 bear and the wildcat gave up their haunts only slowly. How rude the people had become while facing, as they had been forced to do for so many years, their hard conditions, is perhaps best shown by the religious extravagances into which they fell. In the earliest day, the dominance of the Scotch- Irish had brought into favor Presbyterianism, and sturdy expounders of the doctrines of the Cove nant had tramped with their flocks through the Cumberland Gap or floated down the Tennessee. But a wilder form of faith came later to prevail. At the end of the eighteenth century, it some times happened that the crops would be left and the shops abandoned, whole settlements being forsaken while the people swarmed to some camp ground. There a temporary town would be laid out, with a population estimated sometimes as high as twenty thousand. The preachers became fran tic in their exhortations ; men, women, and chil dren, falling as if in catalepsy, wfere laid out in rows. Shouts, incoherent singing, sometimes bark ing as of an unreasoning beast, rent the air. Con vulsive 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. It was, how ever, an aberration that gradually passed away. As population grew, settled schools sprang up, the 1800] EDUCATION 117 provision of the enactment of 1785, setting apart the sixteenth section of each township for educa tion, working in the Northwest especial advan tage. Where education prevailed, the frenzy soon departed. An end was now at hand for the day of smaU things. For the settlers, so pinched and baffled and peril-beset, the conditions were about to soften and the horizon to broaden. CHAPTER VI LOUISIANA PURCHASED AND EXPLOEED It is not at aU strange that separatist feeling should long have been rife in the Mississippi VaUey. Everywhere in the country in those days the Union was less sacred than it afterwards became. In 1798, Jefferson, then Vice-President, wrote the Kentucky Resolutions, the eighth one of which favored nuUification, fearing that the Federalists, by the Alien 'and Sedition Laws, would set up arbitrary power. Madison soon fol lowed these with the Virginia Resolutions, which were not less disunionist in temper; and the Federalists, on their side, before the new century was well begun, talked secession without conceal ment. Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, the two men who before all others caused the Union to be regarded as an indissoluble compact, were as yet on the threshold. When the nineteenth century opened, however, an affair was in train which was destined to promote the bond, and to increase immensely the domain and the power of the United States. The chronic irritation about the mouth of the 1802] NAPOLEON 119 Mississippi reached, at this time, an acute stage. The Spaniards held New Orleans, now elabo rately fortified, with a strong garrison, and in spite of Pinckney's treaty were slow in giving up Natchez. Immigration was pouring across the river into Spanish territory, a fact which the Spaniards viewed with alarm. A symptom of their uneasiness was a closer and more annoy ing dealing with the cargoes which the Western States, becoming each year more populous and enterprising, were sending down to the outlet into the great world. Napoleon had now come into the foreground, and the consequences were to be not less momentous in America than in Europe. The campaigns of Italy, of Egypt, and of Marengo had set him upon a pinnacle. As First Consul, he was at the head of France, which now held Spain in her grip. In 1800, young Lu cien Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, negotiated the treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain, a pro vision of which was that Spain should restore to France, in return for Tuscany, the vast undefined territory, known as Louisiana, ceded by France to Spain in 1762. In these years Napoleon eagerly desired to restore to France all she had lost ; and although the treaty was for some time kept secret, he began at once to scheme for making the most of what he had gained. In 1802, the peace of Amiens leaving his hands for a time free, he planned at once a great expedition for Louisiana. 120 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1803 A general of division, no other than the impetu ous Victor, was to command. He was to have under him three brigadier-generals, five battal ions of infantry, and artiUery and cavalry in pro portion. To be sure, there was for the moment peace with England ; and with America there was a traditionary friendship, which President Jef ferson, the particular admirer of revolutionary France, was not likely to disturb. But Victor's force was to be ready in case of a change ; and a formidable nucleus it would have been for an army of Creoles and Spaniards bent on restoring New France. Neither Victor nor his army ever sailed, but a civil official, M. Laussat, was dis patched to make things ready, who reached New Orleans early in 1803. But just at this moment France received a stroke of ill-luck. In San Domingo, the negro chief, Toussaint I'Ouverture, and his successors held their own against the French in the field. More baleful still, yeUow fever swept off the French by thousands, LeClerc, the commander. Napoleon's brother-in-law, among the number. It was costing quite too much to try to con quer San Domingo. Was an expedition to New Orleans likely to fare any better? Moreover, though for the moment peace might prevail in Europe, Napoleon's keen eye saw war in the near future. Could he afford to embarrass himself with a campaign in America when every avail- 1803] LOUISIANA SOLD 121 able man and doUar were needed at home? With perfect worldly wisdom. Napoleon threw up his first project and entered upon a new policy. This action resulted momentously, not only to the United States : it was a very memorable crisis in the career of Napoleon. The French Chambers, the nation at large, his own family (in Napoleon's eyes by no means an element of small account), were strongly opposed to the sudden alienation of the vast and beautiful province which had just been regained. In determining of his own will to sell Louisiana to the Americans, the First Consul for the first time grasped at im perialism. The full consummation was to come a few months later in the assuming of the sceptre and the purple ; but Napoleon's first declaration of autocracy was in connection with the sale of Louisiana in spite of aU opposition, constitutional or otherwise. With the shrewdest prudence, a quality which he possessed no less than impetu osity, he plainly saw he could not expect to keep Louisiana out of the hands of the English ; he saw, too, that by transferring it to the Americans he was making strong a power which was destined to rival England ; at the same time he obtained for his treasury a sum of money much needed for the oncoming wars which threatened near at hand. So it was that Louisiana was sold. It was a piece of French statesmanship. Napoleon doubling, as it were, with his first imperial nod, the 122 LOUISLA.NA PURCHASED [1803 area of the United States. Though the United States profited so much, her agency in the trans action was secondary. On the American side the principal figures in the great transaction are of course Jefferson and his Secretary of State, Madison. Jefferson's party was strongest in the South and West, the regions that especially felt the need of possessing the mouth of the Mississippi. It was the mouth only, with the stronghold of New Orleans which guarded it, that they much cared to secure. That the Spaniards had been there at the mouth had been a source of friction which constantly became more exasperating, a trouble that must be got rid of, — nothing could be plainer than that. But as to the enormous wilderness lying west and north, who knew or cared anything about that ? What likelihood that the United States, already in possession of millions of wild acres east of the Mississippi, would require for its expansion those illimitable deserts and forests ! Robert R. Livingston, minister to France, intrusted by the administration to negotiate for the possession of New Orleans, for many months found nothing encouraging. In the spring of 1803, however, to his astonishment there came a sudden change in the tone of the French negotiators. All that he had asked was offered, and far more than aU. He was overwhelmed at the demand that the Union must take the whole of Louisiana, — some- 1803] ^ FEDERALISTS OPPOSE 123 thing not provided for in his instructions, an accession not to be contemplated without shrink ing. Nothing was to be done, however. In April, James Monroe arrived in Paris commis sioned especially to push the bargain. The very night of his coming all was arranged. As the two Americans were sitting down to dinner, Barbe- Marbois, the French Secretary of the Treasury, was seen walking in the garden near. He had just received peremptory instructions from Na poleon, and before the little party separated it was settled. In a week or two details were ar ranged, the price to be fl5,000,000. The Amer ican envoys had exceeded their instructions in consenting to take the whole territory, an acqui sition not dreamed of. They hoped it would be overlooked. What could be done when it was Napoleon who dictated ! The treaty of cession was signed in May, an act which Spain highly resented, because at San Ildefonso a condition had been that Louisiana should not be alienated to a foreign power. Na poleon was quite heedless as to this protest ; and in America, too, the dominant party was quite heedless of the protests of the Federalists, who, foreseeing a diminution of the importance of the Northeast, fiercely opposed the ratification, not hesitating to threaten secession. In this stormy warfare Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, was a leader. Perhaps on both continents no one 124 LOUISLANA PURCHASED [1803 was more surprised than the civil agent, M. Laus sat, who, at New Orleans, having no idea of- the sale, had made energetic preparations for an active policy as soon as General Victor should arrive with his soldiers. Like a loyal subject, however, he obeyed orders, turning over Louisiana to the United States, December 20, 1803, in a ceremony pathetic rather than joyous. The two representatives of the Union were Wilkinson, commander-in-chief of the army, and Claiborne, governor of the adjoining Mississippi Territory, a young Marylander, who had already been a member of CongTcss. A body of American troops advanced to the city gates, playing the airs alter nately of France and the United States. Here they were received by the Spanish garrison, which had not yet been displaced, and escorted to the Cabildo, the administration building on the Place d' Armes, in the centre of the town. Then, standing on a balcony, the commissioners ex hibited their credentials to Laussat, documents on both sides were read to the crowd in the square, and the cession of Louisiana in return for the purchase-money was proclaimed. The keys of the city were then delivered to Claiborne, and the people, absolved from their old allegiance, received welcome and the promise of freedom under the new order. The tricolor of France, which had floated for only twenty days, was then slowly lowered, while the crowd looked on rue- 1803] OLD NEW ORLEANS 125 fully. Though New Orleans had been in Span ish hands for forty years, the people were mainly French, and had rejoiced on Laussat's arrival at the thought of returning to France. As the tricolor descended, the stars and stripes were slowly raised. Midway of the staff they paused, becoming entangled and waving together. Then while the Union signal rose to the summit, a French officer wrapped the French emblem about his body and carried it to the barracks. A ban quet ended all, given by Laussat in the hall of the Cabildo. The relative importance of New Orleans was greater at the time of the cession than now : to the South and West it seemed, as it was, a great acquisition. The flatboat men of those days from the FaUs of the Ohio, or indeed from Pittsburg, borne on the yellow torrent flowing between its levees well above the country to the right and left, beheld at last on the eastern side the high- sloping ramparts. The gate of France, which pierced them to the north, was a mile from the gate of Tchoupitoulas to the south; the Place d' Armes was equidistant from both within the city. The western waU was a third of a mile from the river, which swept in a majestic crescent before the city's front. The streets within were named after the princes and nobles of France ; but though so pompously entitled, they were narrow and ill-drained, breeding-places of pesti- 126 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1803 lence. The defenses were formidable : there had been soldiers there, notably Galvez, who, after foiling the British about Pensacola, had become viceroy of Mexico. The commerce had been made remarkable, two hundred craft sometimes lying together along the levee, three deep. The archi tecture had a certain tropical quality, — steep, red- tiled Spanish roofs ; walls broken picturesquely with balconies and verandas ; delicate wrought ironwork in gateways and lattices. The cathedral and the Cabildo were among the finest buildings on the continent. Into the French and Spanish population had come already a large Ethiopian admixture. While there was certainly a Latin element that had maintained itself pure, there was also a numerous hybrid class ranging from blackness quite Nubian, through various mulatto grades, to quadroons scarcely distinguishable from Creoles of purest blood. They were very different from the rough race into companionship with which they had now been so suddenly thrust, and often regretted the change. Claiborne, made governor of Orleans, as the city with its environment was named, though honest and able, could neither speak the tongue nor join in the ways of those he was set to rule, and was quite without tact. Dislike of Americans long persisted among their descend ants ; and soldiers of the civil war recall how often in the city and in marching along the 1804] UNKNOWN LOUISIANA 127 Teche or La Fourche, they encountered before homes and plantations the flag of France. For hope was high then in many a breast that in the upturning some chance might carry them back to the bosom that had rejected them. And, indeed, it might easily have come to pass ! The northern part of the purchase, under the name of Upper Louisiana, was assigned to In diana. What lay within this vast unknown it was now high time to find out. The spaces east of the river were becoming filled with a popula tion stable and ever improving. In 1802, Ohio followed Kentucky and Tennessee into statehood. Since the purchase the river was less than ever a barrier for pioneers thrusting west. Next to the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana pur chase is Jefferson's highest title to distinction, though it has been quite too much overlooked that the principal figure in the transaction is that of Napoleon. It was of a piece with Jefferson's good statesmanship at that crisis that he now con ceived the idea of having the new possession thor oughly explored. It was, indeed, an unknown region. The continent had been crossed by the Spaniards to the south, two hundred years before ; and Mackenzie and Hearne, in British service, agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, had pene trated regions which have scarcely been visited since. But the great central mass of the continent 128 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1804 from the river westward and northward was as yet untraversed. By a fortunate choice two young officers were selected to conduct the expedition. Captain Meriwether Lewis, a kinsman of Jeffer son, and at one time his private secretary ; and Lieutenant, by courtesy Captain, WiUiam Clark, a younger brother of George Rogers Clark, and perhaps his equal in courage and resource. Both Lewis and Clark had seen service under Wayne ; they knew the forests and their people : they proved to be most brave and capable leaders; Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis in May, 1804, as soon after the winning of Louisi ana by the Union as the season allowed. In the party, comprising twenty-seven men, were a half- breed, who was expected to serve as an interpre ter and hunter, two French voyageurs, a negro servant belonging to Clark, nine Kentucky volun teers, and fourteen regular soldiers. Before starting, all were duly enlisted for the sake of discipline. Sixteen more men joined the party temporarily, intending to go no farther than the Mandan villages, on the upper Missouri. By way of equipment three large boats were provided by the government, well stocked with arms, am munition, presents for the Indians, — all, in fact, that forethought could suggest. For food, it was believed that game would be plenty, and that corn might be bought of the tribes. The Mississippi was swelling from the snows 1804] LEWIS AND CLARK SET OUT 129 melting in the mountains far away, when the three well-laden boats pushed off from the levee, and by oar and sail labored upstream. The torrent of the Missouri shouldered aside the smaUer flood of the Mississippi, thrusting with its waters against the eastern bank, which con stantly crumbled under the pressure ; then it flowed southward in a turbid stream distinctly marked for many miles. Turning into the Mis souri, the adventurers were soon at St. Charles ; then passed the most outlying hamlets and clear ings, in one of which old Daniel Boon had se cluded himself, the remotest of the settlers. The detailed record of Lewis and Clark is a model of what such a record should be. While by no means men of scientific attainments, they were respectably schooled according to the standards of the time, possessed sharp observation and good judgment, and let no important thing escape them. They refer with old-fashioned quaintness to the girls they have left behind them, after whom they sometimes name localities. Wisdom, Philosophy, and Philanthropy rivers show plainly that the sojourn of Lewis in the household of Jefferson had left a mark on him. But the entire account commands respect. Cheerful and alert, they lent their hands now at the oar, now at bearing the burden, not shrinking from the labors and risks which they exacted of their men. A perfect understanding soon came about 130 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1804 between the captains and the rank and file. From first to last, each man in the party seems to have done his best, flinching from no ex posure, never dreaming of mutiny. As they made their slow way up the Missouri, game was plentiful, and also Indians. The latter never daunted them. Among the Sioux they were unquestionably in peril; but a mixture of tact and boldness, quite of a piece with the de meanor of George Rogers Clark in similar cir cumstances, always brought them through. They spread far and wide the news of the purchase of Louisiana, proclaimed the greatness of Uncle Sam, and distributed presents. With humane zeal somewhat naive and superfluous, — and here again perhaps we see the touch of Jefferson, — they labored to swear the tribes to peace among themselves. They toiled on through summer and autumn, and as the cool fall weather came, they approached the Mandan viUages, far toward the Hudson's Bay territory, and were now on the track followed half a century before by the brothers La Verendrye, young men of a spirit like their own. Here they passed the winter near the present site of Bismarck, meeting enter prising St. Louis and Hudson's Bay men, with whom they got on amicably. The Mandans, a superior tribe, well advanced in the higher stage of barbarism, skiUful as builders, potters, and weavers, lacking perhaps only the ability to smelt 1805] THE GREAT PLAINS 131 iron and the use of an alphabet to emerge into the lower stage of civilization, showed them great hospitality, which the guests paid back with gifts and friendship. With the spring of 1805, Lewis and Clark reorganized their force. Some returned down the Missouri, carrying the record made up to this time. A few new people were taken on, of especial value being the squaw Sacajawea, the " Bird woman," wife of the half-breed Chabonneau, without whose help the expedition in the later stages might have ended in failure. She had been captured some years before from a mountain tribe, and spoke Shoshone, a dialect prevailing in the remote West. The Bird woman carried at her back her papoose, only a few weeks old. She was, however, equal to all the party encountered ; and as interpreter and friendly intercessor in the more distant deserts, became invaluable. Setting out in good time, the two captains pushed through the heart of the continent, which, as far as human beings were concerned, seemed to them an utter solitude. They saw no trace of man until they reached the continental divide. The country, however, swarmed with game, especially buffalo, the enormous herds of which hid the plain and choked the shallow streams to the hindrance of the boats. Deer and bears also abounded. First of white men they beheld and experienced the grizzly bear, whose hide would 132 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1805 almost turn a rifle-ball, and who sometimes held the hunters treed until rescued at great risk. The conditions of the explorer's life were never more ideal than throughout this second summer. Their rifles gave them supplies bounteous and varied ; with each day's progress new tracts of this unknown world opened to their vision, teem ing with life, while there was enough of adven ture to give rest to the journey. The approach of the second winter found them near the divide of the continent. Here they encountered the mountain tribes, and in winning their good-will, the help of the Bird woman was worth much. She recovered after a long absence her own kindred, who recognized and received her joy fully, and were fuU of kindness toward the strangers who had brought their sister back. The student of Lewis and Clark feels that this wild mother with her papoose on her back, so friendly and useful, deserves to be in some way commemorated. The young captains speculated, amused, as to what kind of a representation it was which finally reached the tribes whom they met in council, when their message, filtered from English into French, and from that into this, that, and the other savage dialect, at last came out into the tongue of those remote gorges and peaks. But some kind of a message was con veyed. With medals and beads in their hands, and courage and frank good nature in their 1806] LEWIS AND CLARK RETURN 133 faces, they won their way. Exchanging their boats, which they cached, for horses bought of their new friends, they were led by guides, who served them well, through a pass of the Bitter- Root range to the Pacific slope. Here striking a tributary of the Snake River, they speedily floated to the Columbia, and on that to the Western ocean. As they set out to return in 1806, hardships multipUed. The game, so abundant on the plains, was now scarce, and starvation threatened. They had recourse to strange food, and there was a dearth of that. Before spring ended, however, they struggled across the divide, their mountain friends standing fast to them. Their boats and stores were found unharmed. Henceforth their journey homeward was speedy and easy. The party separated, Clark descending by the Yellow stone, while Lewis followed the Missouri. On their return they encountered hostile In dians whom it was necessary to meet boldly and promptly. With the dangerous Blackfeet at last nothing but war was possible. When it became inevitable, Lewis paralyzed the savages by a bold initiative. Lewis himself shot one of them, the only bloodshed found necessary during the entire term of their absence. He was, however, soon after badly wounded himself by an accidental shot from one of his own men, recovering only with difficulty. The two parties, uniting, floated quietly 134 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1806 down to St. Louis, justly exultant over their ac complishment. The end was reached in Septem ber, 1806, and the journal forwarded to Jefferson. The conduct of all was creditable in a high degree. In the party but one man died. Sergeant Floyd, whose grave, on a bluff of the upper Missouri, has been of late years carefully marked. Of the savages encountered, but one suffered harm, the Blackfoot Indian shot by Lewis. Lewis and Clark were the first of the American pathfinders west of the river, the precursors of a resolute company who almost to the present have been sweeping mystery from the face of the Great West. They were weU rewarded. Lewis soon after was made governor of Upper Louisiana, but died mysteri ously two years later on a journey through Ten nessee, whether by murder or suicide has never been explained. Clark succeeded him, retaining the position after the change of name from Upper Louisiana to Missouri, administering his charge for many years from St. Louis. Not less worthy than Lewis and Clark was their comrade in the army. Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike ; who, however, was less fortu nate than they in receiving his commission to explore from the worthless Wilkinson, commander- in-chief of the army, instead of from the President himself, a fact that brought him trouble. Leaving St. Louis in August, 1805, with twenty regular soldiers, he pushed upstream like his predecessors 1806] PIKE EXPLORES 135 fifteen months before. Instead of turning into the Missouri, he steered for the great bluffs at Alton, then passed the mouth of the Illinois and still onward. His men respected him : he man aged the Indians with great success : he was a master of the rifle, that prime requisite of a fron tier leader. Late in the fall he reached Minne sota, where he spent the winter exploring far and wide with dog-sleds, in one expedition reaching the remote Leech Lake, though not Lake Itasca. At the Falls of St. Anthony, of which there had been little mention since the time of Carver, thirty years before, he held a great council with the Sioux. These he contrived to placate ; and also the British traders, even while he hoisted the American flag at their posts. By the end of April, 1806, he had returned to St. Louis, whence in July Wilkinson sent him out again, nominally to explore the indefinite boundary between the American and Spanish possessions, though Wilkinson, at whose career we must pre sently look more carefully, probably had in view some filibustering. Pike's party this time con sisted of twenty-three soldiers and fifty Osage captives, mostly women and children, whom the government, having taken from the Pottawato- mies, wished to restore to their tribe. From the Missouri, Pike ascended the Osage, his errand propitiating the Indians, so that his way was at first made very smooth. From here he struck 136 LOUISIANA PURCHASED [1807 across the plains of the Pawnee country, reaching at last the Arkansas. He had now to deal with the terrible horse-Indians of the Plains, Black feet at the north, Comanches at the south, peers of the Iroquois in the east in ferocious prowess. Pike and his men had chance enough to see them both on the hunt aud war-path ; but by prudent conduct they escaped all harm. They ascended the Arkansas well toward its head, striking across country in November for the mountains, until through the wintry air rose before them the sum mit which rightly bears the name Pike's Peak. But here misfortune began. The winter set in cold, and the game in the mountains, as Lewis and Clark had just before found, by no means equaled the abundance of the plains. Finding in January a canon containing deer. Pike built a fort, left behind his horses with a guard, and with twelve of his hardiest men struck out for the Rio Grande. The little troop was soon in desperate straits through cold and famine. Nine of the number had their feet frozen. In Wet Mountain VaUey, in mid-January, 1807, the party had been four days without food, but a buffalo was at last killed. Two men lost their feet through frost, and had to be temporarily left behind. But neither discipline nor resolution failed. A second rush for the Rio Grande was successful. They encountered milder weather : game grew more plenty. They were now on Spanish territory, but 1807] HIS RETURN 137 Pike built a fort and hoisted the American flag. This was no doubt Wilkinson's instruction, but the encroachment cost him dear. Pike and his men were presently after captured by the com mandant at Santa F^, who had heard of the in trusion. He courteously overlooked it, however, as a probable mistake, sending Pike home by a circuitous route through Chihuahua and Texas, during which journey he made interesting notes as to people and country. On reaching home he found his superior, Wilkinson, in disgrace for treasonable conduct, and himseK compromised as having submitted to be his tool. He was able, however, to vindicate his good name, rose in the service, and fell at last as a brigadier-general, in the attack on York, now Toronto, in the War of 1812, — from first to last a brave and strenuous soldier. CHAPTER VII THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HELD AGAINST HOME CONSPIKATOKS AND EOEEIGN ASSAILANTS Napoleon's proceeding in the sale of Louisi ana to the United States had no doubt been a piece of rough-riding. He went against the feel ings of his brothers and of the French Cham bers ; the population of the alienated province were not at all consulted ; the promise made to Spain, in 1800, that the retroceded province should never be given up to a foreign power, was quite disregarded. After the purchase complica tions and soreness remained, out of which, before many years, came embarrassment and danger for America. When, in 1763, France had surren dered Louisiana to Spain, the boundary of Or leans, the southern province, ran along the river Iberville to Lake Maurepas ; thence, foUowing the north shore, it ran to Lake Pontchartrain, along the north shore of which again it reached the Gulf. All to the east of this line France gave, in 1763, to England: all to the west to Spain. England, now taking up the matter, had drawn a line from the junction of the Yazoo with the Mis- 1805] AARON BURR 139 sissippi due east to Appalachicola, thence south to the Gulf, and named the territory included West Florida. In 1783, England made the 31st parallel the northern boundary of West Florida, giving both Floridas, East and West, back to Spain. When, in 1800, Spain retroceded Louisi ana to France, she held on to West Florida as not having been given her by France, but by England. But the United States, perhaps too cavalierly, claimed it as part of the purchase, the uncertainty leading to years of bickering. Spain held Natchez as territory she had never resigned ; while the United States showed stormy discon tent, resulting at last in the concoction of a scheme at the time very noteworthy. Contemporary with the great explorations, cheering at the time in their revelation of a magnificent domain, — so cheering a page in our history to whoever reviews the story, because the pathfinders showed such efficiency and manly worth, — the Mississippi Valley was the scene of a discreditable episode, the main part in which was played by that bete noire of the early nine teenth century in America, Aaron Burr. This fascinating but unscrupulous figure was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and in briUiant power probably the equal of any son of the famous line descended from the great preacher. Bold and selfish, his magnetism was extraordinary. He subjected to his will both men and women 140 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1805 until they became completely his victims. His dominance became so marked that at one time he stood among the two or three leading men of the land. He sank at last into a dishonored grave ; and the visitor who stands by its side at Princeton, New Jersey, with the ashes of his stern Puritan kindred close at hand, marvels that one so nobly fathered, so amply dowered with gifts and graces, should have left in the story of America only a name of infamy. Burr had been Vice-President of the United States, and in 1800, when the election was thrown into the House, Jefferson won the Presidency from him by only one vote. Jefferson naturaUy disliked him, but he was a great Democratic leader, and as such he fought in New York, tooth and nail, the famous Federalist, Alexander Hamilton. The bitterness became so marked that one day the two men stood front to front, at Weehawken on the Hudson, with the result that the young nation was robbed untimely of perhaps the most valu able life which it then contained. When it was that Aaron Burr began plotting for power in the Mississippi VaUey is uncertain. Exactly what he schemed also cannot certainly be told ; for he presented now one face, now another, as he crept on his tortuous way. Prob ably even when . he was Vice-President his thoughts were treasonable. From corrupt politics in New York, where he was the prototype of the 1805] BURR GOES WEST 141 evil-minded bosses of later years, he passed to corrupt the politics of the nation. He is believed to have schemed to invade the Spanish territory in Texas and Mexico : to have contemplated also the separation of the West from the East, his ambitious dream being perhaps to make an em pire for himself out of the general wreck. He planned the seizure of Washington and the Presi dent, the mutiny in his interest of the navy, and intrigued for the support of an English fleet, which was to attack New Orleans. The British Minister at Washington was captivated by the idea, but the government in England would take no part in it. It was in April, 1805, that he first set out for the West. Committing himself to the Ohio, his first stop was at an island, where Blennerhassett, an Irish gentleman of some property, and his wife had established themselves in a pleasant seclusion. These at once melted under his arts, giving themselves and all they had, and Burr passed on to other conquests. No man so dis tinguished had up to that time ever visited the West. As a great Democratic leader he drew about him the party that was most powerful be yond the mountains. The fact that he had killed Alexander Hamilton did not discredit him. On the frontier the duel was recognized, and Ham ilton, moreover, was a hated Federalist. As Aaron Burr hinted obscurely at his ideas in this 142 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1805 or that little group in which he ventured to talk, it shocked no one that he decried the East. The West disliked the East, and had some good cause for doing so. Had not the East just opposed with aU its power the Louisiana purchase; and had it not always been quite too ready to hamper Western development while it cherished its own narrow circle of interests ? So Burr made warm friends in Cincinnati ; then in Kentucky, into which he presently crossed. In Tennessee he won a formidable ally in Andrew Jackson, major- general of the Tennessee militia, already noted as Indian fighter and head of the anti-Spanish sentiment that was fierce in those regions. The Spaniards, greatly dissatisfied over the Louisiana purchase, withdrew only slowly and sullenly from their old holdings, — a course which exasperated the frontiersmen, who brooked no delay. From NashviUe Burr went down the Cumberland to Fort Massac on the Ohio, just above the present site of Cairo. Here Burr met no less a personage than James Wilkinson, commander-in-chief of the army, whom we have already more than once encountered, but at whose discreditable fig ure we must now look more closely. As a young man, good-looking, plausible, and energetic, he appears first in history as the messenger sent by Gates to convey to Congress the news of Bur goyne's defeat. Lagging somewhat, his news ar rived before him, whereupon Sam Adams grimly 1805] JAMES WILKINSON 143 moved, making his only recorded joke, that the young officer's service be acknowledged by the gift of a pair of spurs. In after years his fault was not that of slowness, though his alacrity was seldom in a good direction. In the critical period when the Union was weak, he sometimes intrigued against America in the Spanish interest, receiv ing Spanish pay; then against Spain, which he cajoled, attaining influence by putting forth bra zen claims and stooping to underhand trickery, tiU his career became mean and treacherous to the last degree. He had influence and address enough to become chief of the army, and as such figured in the ceremony at New Orleans when Louisiana was received from France. He was now again deep in treasonable plottings. As the two men encountered each other on the Ohio shore, it was indeed an iU-omened conjunction of the darkest and most dangerous spirits which the young republic contained. Wilkinson, general of the army, and yet in Spanish pay, listened eagerly to the plots of Burr. With the most involved duplicity, he was prepared off-hand to cast over both Spain and the United States, if Burr's scheme seemed more likely to turn out to his selfish advantage. En couraged by a contact so congenial. Burr pushed off at last for New Orleans, where he received much sympathy among the people, who liked neither Spain nor America. Claiborne, however, 144 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1806 honest and loyal, while showing him respect as a man of distinction, would connive at no trea son. Returning to St. Louis, he found the zeal of Wilkinson had cooled. The latter had sounded his officers and the public generaUy, and found they rang true. They could not be misled, and Wilkinson saw his interest in another quarter. Burr now made his way back to Washington. To a conspirator so buoyant and audacious the situation seemed full of hope in spite of the occa sional rebuffs. If he could only get means ! Now it was that with a refinement of hypocrisy he tried to obtain money from Spain, the power he expected to ruin. In August, 1806, he was again on his way West.. His beautiful daughter Theo- dosia, Mrs. AUston, about whose history and sub sequent fate lies so tragic a shadow, was his com panion as far as Blennerhassett's Island. The impulsive Irish pair, completely overcome, sur rendered their entire substance, and became blind tools. However, they were the only persons so far overcome. The Irishman's effort among his Ohio neighbors to rouse interest was an utter failure ; so Burr proceeded onward with the boats and resources provided by his victim. In Kentucky United States Senator John J. Adair took up his cause with ardor : but Humphrey Marshall and Jo. Daviess, United States District Attorney, old Federalists, and staunch and loyal men, opposed him, twice causing his arrest for treason. Burr's 1807] BURR'S FAILURE 145 counsel at this time was young Henry Clay, who, however, exacted from Burr an oath of loyalty before he would undertake his case. In Tennes see, Jackson was more alive than ever, going so far as to call out the miUtia for the invasion of Texas and Mexico. He, too, thorough patriot that he was, exacted from Burr a strict oath of loyalty to the United States. But Aaron Burr had reached his limit. Wil kinson, making up his mind that the plot was too desperate, resolved to turn it to his own profit by betraying the man who had trusted and been en couraged by him. He denounced Burr and his schemes to Jefferson in a tone of great alarm. The danger had never been and was not then seri ous : aU strong and important men who for a time feU under Burr's spell, like Clay and Jackson, stopped short at definite treason ; but it was Wil kinson's wish to excite alarm. Burr was forced to flee with a few followers down the Mississippi in Blennerhassett's boats, which he abandoned at Natchez, hurrying himself eastward disguised as a boatman. This was in January, 1807. Arrested at last, he was brought to Richmond to undergo trial, one of the most remarkable processes in the history of the country. John MarshaU, greatest of the chief justices, presided : the speeches of the lawyers, notably of WiUiam Wirt, have been since that day household words in America. Wilkinson turned state's evidence, and as the leading witness 146 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1811 presented a contemptible figure, — a traitor to his friend, as he was ready to be a traitor to his country, aud to every land and cause which had ever put faith in him. Yet by the strange fatuity of Jefferson he remained at the head of the army of the United States, his career culminating in a climax of inefficiency and ill-fortune, on the northern frontier, in the War of 1812. Louisiana, purchased, explored, and now for the moment quiet after the fiasco of Aaron Burr, in vited and received heavy immigration, the river being less than ever a barrier. For the moment there was little to disturb the peace of the Missis sippi basin, though just south of it, in the region soon to become Georgia and Alabama, the Creeks were undergoing an experience which the present writer is glad to be relieved from narrating. Farther north the savage discontent against white encroachment came to a head in 1 811, high up on the Wabash, in the same forests where St. Clair and Wayne had fought a score of years before. Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, added their names to the list of able Indians who had confronted the inevitable doom. But their power was broken at Tippecanoe, and a frontier general stepped easily from the field, after some years of .waiting, into the Presidency. The tongues of men were becoming familiar with names among those best known in American story. Thomas Hart Benton, Tennessee-born , but early carried 1812] ANDREW JACKSON 147 beyond the Mississippi, began now a career of vigorous and independent statesmanship, one of the longest and on the whole most creditable in our history. Henry Clay, the young Virginian, who, adopting Kentucky, had forthwith subdued his State by his masterful qualities, was gettiug ready to make a larger conquest in the federal field. More remarkable than any other character was Andrew Jackson, — in his strength and weak ness, in the blending in him of dark and light, of wisdom, force, and f oUy, — a bundle of sharp est contrasts, and one of the most extraordinary figures in American history. A Scotch-Irish man of the toughest and most unmitigated kind, he was old enough to have borne arms against Tarleton and Ferguson in the Revolution. As a young man he had been the companion of Sevier and Robertson in the Holston and Cumberland country. As Tennessee came forward after 1796 in statehood, he soon stood in the foremost place. He was thoroughly a child and a type of the fron tier. He was a stranger to fear, chivalrous to women, — a very dynamo of energy, with a power of command which fairly prostrated all wills about him. He was, too, honest and truthful ; but ignorant and prejudiced to the last degree, and did not shrink on occasion from any bloodshed. That cardinal point of a backwoodsman's creed, " No good Indian but a dead one," he fully professed. 148 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1812 For a Spaniard he had no hospitality but that of the buUet and the bayonet. Toward Federalists his thoughts were scarcely kinder. He rose till he became one of the most important influences that have ever affected America, an influence in which it is hard to tell whether good or evil has most prevailed. He was the main promoter of the spoils system, a mischief-maker in finance, a coarse bully with a chip on his shoulder toward foreign nations : yet he initiated the policy to which is due the preservation of the Union, and in general set an example of strenuous, virUe pur pose, which, though so often rough in striking out, helped much toward securing a sound core in the great unfixed, inchoate nation. Of Jackson's early career we need say no more. With the coming on of the War of 1812 he was weU up in the eyes of men. The incident, however, wliich first lifted him upon a national pedestal belongs especially to the Mississippi VaUey, and must receive our attention. The War of 1812, which we could not have avoided in the conditions then prevailing, had had for its theatre the high seas ; the Lakes, where Perry and Macdonough found their opportunity, with the border-land adjacent ; and Washington, which underwent a foray from an English fleet. Though the sons of the Mississippi Valley had played a part on the Northern fields, the soil of the basin was not touched by the war untU at the 1814] PAKENHAM'S FORCE 149 very end : then happened an event which dwarfed by its importance almost everything which had gone before, the battle of New Orleans. England has rarely sent out such an expedition as that which saUed in 1814 from the south of Ireland to seize the mouth of the Mississippi. Fifty of the best ships set sail, bearing nearly twenty thousand fighting men, soldiers and sailors, under Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law of WeUing- ton. There were one thousand guns. The flag ship of the admiral. Sir Alexander Cochrane, was the Tonnant, of eighty guns, captured from the French by Nelson at the Nile. There were five seventy-fours, one commanded by Sir Thomas Hardy, Nelson's bosom friend. Twenty smaUer ships ranged from fifty to sixteen guns each, and there were besides sixteen transports. These contained four veteran regiments just set free from the Peninsular war, and other thousands of troops scarcely less formidable. There was no thought of failure. Civil officials had been pro vided, that when the easy work of conquest was over, the country might at once receive a British administration, and become part of the empire. If Napoleon, then in Elba, could follow matters, he must have felt that his purpose in selling Louisiana, to keep it out of the hands of the English, had come to naught. During the war no American army or general had won great success : on the sea, to oppose the ruler of the waves, there 150 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1814 was only here and there an isolated frigate. Only success could be expected for the British. The people of Louisiana were but half-heartedly American. From the valley above, what force of moment could be raUied among the tattered backwoodsmen to face the invasion ? A short campaign, and Louisiana might be won as Can ada had been won ; and the upstart States, cut off north, west, and south, might feel at last the mistake of their rebellion. At the beginning of winter the fleet entered the Gulf, reaching the anchorage at Ship Island, December 10, 1814. The plan was weU laid. New Orleans was to be attacked, not from the river's mouth, but on the flank by way of Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain, — a scheme devised "by able captains well acquainted with the coast. Within the city aU had been apathetic. The sprinkling of patriotic Americans among the Creoles, who for twelve years now, without will of their own and with many mortifications and hardships, had lived under the stars and stripes, could do little to diffuse a sentiment of loyalty. All lay on Jackson, and he met the emergency with pecuUar and extraordinary power. He seems to have had at first little apprehension of danger. In November, marching out from Mobile, he had stormed the British post at Pensacola, a cam paign of a week. In the middle of November he grew listless, fell ill, indeed ; but the news of the 1814] NEW ORLEANS ATTACKED 151 approach of the great armament roused all his spirit. He did not reach New Orleans until December 2, at which time nothing had been done ; but the rudest energy now transformed the face of things. Martial law was proclaimed : the strangest, most incongruous elements were forced and combined into a motley army. Near the river's mouth, at Barataria, had been a nest of pirates led by Jean and Pierre Lafitte, the latter of whom had been in the French navy. They had long been well known and dreaded as bold and lawless. The British had tried to win them in advance, but at the critical moment the unkempt but most effective miscreants rallied to Jackson's side. There were, besides negroes and Spaniards, Creoles, with here and there among them an old soldier of Napoleon, diffusing hate of the British and a flash of the flre of the great fields across the ocean. But the core of Jackson's army was a body of Tennessee and Kentucky riflemen under Coffee and Carroll, fighters really as formidable in their way as the world could show. These marched down from Baton Rouge, where they had been in camp, with orders from Jackson not to sleep till they had reported. On the side of the British there was no slack ness. Pakenham, who had broken the centre of Marmont at Salamanca, and been schooled in warfare against Soult, Victor, and Massena as well, despised the rags and tags that were flut- 152 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1815 tering about the backwoods leader ; but he neglected nothing. Lake Borgne was swept of American gunboats ; and guided by Spanish fisher men a heavy force was landed at Isle aux Poix, the southeastern corner of Louisiana. This soon made its way by lake and bayou to the Mis sissippi, striking the stream only six miles from the city. Here they destroyed with red-hot shot American river craft that opposed them, and by New Year's day were on the plain of Chalmette. Within the following week, reinforced to eight thousand men, with the city close at hand, their cause seemed secure. They were to be most sternly confronted. Jackson had few cotton bales in his intrench- ment, — but rails, earth, and whatever else the resourceful American, in times before and since then, has found adequate to bullet-stopping. There mustered Creoles, Spaniards, negroes, and pirates; best of aU, there mustered the back woodsmen, knee-deep in swamp, — a few cannon now and then, but with good store of unerring rifles. This was Jackson's line. It was a con spicuous case of what one finds so often in the gloomy story of war, — untimely depreciation of the enemy, an impatient front attack instead of a cautious flank approach, a terrific slaughter and overthrow. It was Bunker Hill over again, except that the American ammunition did not give out. It was Cold Harbor and Fredericks- 1815] JACKSON'S VICTORY 153 burg and Franklin. It was many a bloody field of South Africa. The Peninsular veterans came on in a column of sixty front, and withered to the earth under the steady, unquailing marks manship ; for it was the Tennessee and Kentucky line which they especially faced. They tried it a second time, but that was enough. Pakenham and two generals beside were among the slain ; seven colonels, seventy-five officers of lesser rank, and rank and file by the thousand. TiU the time of the civil war no other such slaughter took place on American soil. The English bur ied their dead, and withdrew sullen and silent. Peace was soon after announced : indeed, the battle was fought after peace was declared. It made Andrew Jackson, for good and for ill, the foremost man of America. The volume of immigration into the Mississippi Valley, slackening if times were good, swelling if times were bad, — the movement always the product of discontent with existing conditions, — found as time went on new means of rolling forward. In the seaboard States, along every westward road went long trains of canvas-covered wagons, drawn by oxen or horses, the dog chained to the axle, the peripatetic domestic hearth, as like as not, smoking up through a funnel pro jecting through the white arch, the husband guiding the team, while the wife and younger 154 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1816 brood looked out from inside as they slowly fared forward. But not all had the "prairie- schooner ; " many a tramper continued to trudge under his pack as in the primitive days ; the pack-horse was not entirely displaced ; wheel barrows sometimes appeared; now and then there was a hand-cart with wheels made of planks fitted and sawn into circles, after which, while the father pushed the load, the mother and children trooped in the dust. When the westward flowing rivers were reached, an important change from the earlier methods was seen. As early as 1809, Nicholas J. Roose velt, impelled by Fulton's success on the Hudson, had surveyed the waters from Pittsburg to New Orleans, obtaining depths, studying the direct current and the eddies, examining as to resources of fuel. Returning East with a favorable report, he was commissioned in 1810 to build a steamer, and presently the New Orleans made her way successfully down the long path to the city after which she was named. Others followed at once. It was the dawn of a new epoch, the reveille of which was the throbbing beat of the pad dles through the forest depths. In 1815, the ..3l)tna led the way in stemming the stream from New Orleans to Louisville. The Enter prise was the second to perform the feat : after carrying down to General Jackson a cargo of ammunition, she made her way back in twenty- 1817] BROAD-HORN AND CABIN 155 five days. All doubt was now dispeUed. Not only the great river, but the tributaries became speedily alive with the constant patrol, and set tlement was everywhere quickened. Not that the old ways were speedily superseded. The broad-horns and the simpler rafts long persisted. On these the trader carried down his cargo of pork or flour or whiskey ; to these the settler often committed his family, his stock, and his household goods. And always when the jour ney's end was reached, whether it were trader or settler, the bark that had borne the burden, knocked apart at the shore into a pile of timber, went into houses, fences, or furniture, as the exigency might demand. When the newcomer had reached his point, a claim would be entered at the nearest land office and a clearing begun. A " half-faced camp," a three-sided shelter of saplings and boughs, with a deer-skin hung in the front for the fourth side, was often the first habitation: the log-cabin came in a few days' time, its win dows of greased paper at first, its loft reached by a ladder, its chimney of sticks cemented by mud. The elaborate home, carefully framed, or built of stone or brick, belonged in the distant future. This was the time of the corn-husk broom, the wooden grindstone with grit and gravel driven into the circumference, the latch- string always out, the clothes of leather or of homespun dyed butternut at the fireside. 156 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1817 As far as the territory affected by the Ordi nance of 1787 was concerned, the fine provision for schools, the reservation of the sixteenth section of each township, was nobly useful ; but in practice the good sought sometimes feU short. The six teenth section was sometimes swamp, sometimes under water. At first there was much indifference to schools throughout the whole wide area of the valley, except where New Englanders were be ginning to make themselves felt. There was a disposition also to build from the top. Weak uni versities and academies abounded while common schools were few, the funds meant for them hav ing been misappropriated or deliberately stolen. Ohio had no good common-school law until 1826. Indiana followed no better course. It was sought to foster the higher culture, but the children suf fered. While in education in this forming world things assumed a good shape somewhat slowly, as regards religion, calmness and reason did not appear at first. The excesses of the camp-meet ings graduaUy abated ; but religion over large areas was supervised by circuit -riders, — men often heroicaUy devoted, but often, also, holding a supposed " call from God " as quite superseding the necessity of education and every other quali fication, and employing methods the reverse of sober and proper. In finance, " wildcat banking " worked no end of mischief, trouble due less to scoundrelism 1817] LAWLESSNESS 157 than to ignorance and inexperience. As regards the administration of the law, even when Judge Lynch with his hurried and indiscriminate pro cedure did not intervene, the ways were naive and simple to the last degree. McMaster ^ gives a story which we may be sure is no caricature. " Mr. Green," said the judge to a criminal, " the jury says you are guilty of murder, and the law says you are to be hung. Now, I want you and all your friends down to Injun Creek to know that it ain't me, but the jury that finds you guilty. Mr. Green, you can have time for pre paration, and the court wants to know what time you would like to be hung." Four weeks there after was fixed upon as " agreeable " to the prisoner. Throughout the Southwest in these days, — indeed, throughout Ohio, Indiana, Illi nois, and in Louisiana west of the river, so far as settlers had come, — legal institutions were of the simplest and rudest, a rough justice being enforced here and there by vigilance committees. His own good rifle and his unerring eye were often the isolated settler's only sure guarantee. The roughness and brutality in the river towns now coming into being — in the clusters of population in general about mill-privileges, salt springs, mining-camps, or tracts of special fer tility — could be only feebly coped with by the 1 History ofthe People ofthe United States from the Bevolution to the Civil War. 158 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1819 forces in the new society making for order and refinement. As yet such forces are in too many places inadequate : this inadequacy even at the present day we find quite too often. In 1804, Congress had made the 33d parallel of latitude the line between Orleans and Upper Louisiana, the names first given to the tracts ac quired by the great purchase. Upper Louisiana had at first formed part of Indiana, but as early as 1805, it became a territory by itself under the name Louisiana. Seven years later had come another change. The present State of Louisiana was admitted to the Union in 1812, whereupon all north of it became the Territory of Missouri, in which as early as 1810 there was a population of twenty thousand whites and many slaves. In 1816 Indiana became a State, in 1817 Mississippi, in 1818 Illinois. Arkansas, in 1819, was taken off from Missouri, and constituted a Territory. Up to these years immigration from the Northeast had been little felt beyond Ohio. Indiana and Illinois had been filling up from the South, a current pouring from Kentucky, Tennessee, and even as far back as North Carolina. And now as the first score of years of the nine teenth century are ending, we encounter a crisis in the highest degree fateful for the Valley of the Mississippi, for the United States, for the world in general. Recalling the establishment of the Ordinance of 1787, it wUl be remembered 1819] THE COTTON-GIN 159 that that instrument throughout, including the momentous prohibition of slavery, was especially the work of the Southern men. Anti-slavery sentiment at the time of the adoption of the Con stitution was no more marked in the North than in the South. But Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin had been exercising its influence through a quarter of a century, and a most im portant change had taken place. That smaU engine has shaped our ends almost as if it were a divinity, instead of a mere construction of matter. The population coming up from the South into Indiana and Illinois brought with them many slaves, who had now become numerous in the South. Since the anti-slavery provision of the Ordinance of 1787 shut them out, they preferred to pass on and cross the river into Missouri, where there was no hammering provision. Large num bers followed this course, while their brethren who remained in Indiana and Illinois chafed under a restriction which had come to seem hateful. Just at this time the tide from New England and New York began to flow through Ohio and up the Lakes in heavy numbers into northern Indiana and lUinois. As the South had become in a marked way pro-slavery, lo, it appeared that these Northern men, in a way just as marked, had become anti-slavery. A fierce struggle arose in these States between the North and South. Should the anti-slavery provision of the Ordi- 160 CONSPIRATORS AND ASSAILANTS [1819 nance be disregarded and repealed ; or should it stand ? It was the first grapple of the combatants in a contest destined to be bitter and bloody to the last degree. As we come under the black shadow which in past years has so clouded American skies, and which continues so to cloud them, it is proper to look at the thing from the beginning. CHAPTER VIII THE BLACK SHADOW Theoughout history, no fact is more plain than the persistency of human bondage down to a period close at hand. In antiquity all races may be said to have been thus subjected to a greater or less extent. War had been universal and constant in the savage state from which man slowly rose. The captive at first killed was at last preserved, becoming thus the servus ; and the preserved men, the servi, were forced to work. It is believed by many philosophic students that this labor to which the servile class was forced has played a beneficent part in the evo lution of humanity, becoming the harsh school in which man learned to use his hands otherwise than in wielding weapons. In the modern era human bondage has relaxed slowly. Multitudes in Europe until a recent time were more or less distinctly in fetters. In the colonial period of America, with the " indentured servants " and the " redemptioners," white men who were prac tically enslaved abounded.^ This being the con- 1 For a scholarly study of this topic, see Diffenderffer, German 162 THE BLACK SHADOW [1800 dition of the world, it is not strange that no man's conscience was troubled at the idea of holding in servitude barbarous races, — Indians, negroes, peoples of the East, with whom at the era of dis covery civilization was thrown into contact. At the time of the American Revolution, few con sciences North or South were troubled with com punctions as to slave-holding. In Boston and Newport the ships built so numerously were largely used without disguise in slave-trading : no man lost repute through holding slaves. The newspapers teem with advertisements of slaves to seU, and offers of reward for the recovery of fugi tives. It is said to be a tradition in an honora ble Massachusetts family that an ancestor, a respected minister, needing a servant, sent a hogshead of rum to the West Coast and had it exchanged there for a kidnapped negro, whom he made his chattel, while neither his parishion ers nor the community at large thought the pro ceeding objectionable, or even eccentric. At the end of the eighteenth century slavery seemed to be dying in America, less because the consciences of men were roused as to its enormity, than because it was economically unprofitable. Extinction in fact came at the North, and the South was in such mood that her representatives in the First Congress, as we have seen, brought to Immigration into Pennsylvania, Part II., p. 143, etc., 1900. The sufferings of English, Scotch, and Irish are also detailed. 1819] SLAVERY 163 pass the anti-slavery clause in the Ordinance of 1787. Where slaves were retained, it was often less from motives of profit than motives of hu manity, Washington, Jefferson, and many other leaders looking to gradual emancipation as a thing certain and desirable. But all at once, in 1793, the cotton-gin made economically profitable in a high degree the labor of slaves in raising cotton. As the North was not affected, events followed the course upon which they had entered and slavery became extinct ; at the South it be came the corner-stone of the social structure. In the clash in Indiana and Illinois, just ad mitted to statehood, we have the first premonition of an oncoming tempest, one of the most tre mendous that has ever descended upon humanity. We have glanced at the story of the negro race in America from the beginning. Its pioneer was Estevanico, little Steve, who crossed the continent in Cortez's time, and was the forerunner of Coro nado in deserts which to this day remain pathless. They came with the Spaniards ; they came with the French ; with the Dutch and English. They came through no will of their own, but forced by sordid captors who had no thought but for their own selfish advantage. Did they gain or lose in the transfer ? The sin was not theirs ; in God's justice the punishment did not fall upon them. They have multiplied by many millions ; they have been subjected to a harsh discipline, which. 164 THE BLACK SHADOW [1819 however, is the school through which many an other race has risen into civilization, and which has made of negroes something better than sav ages ; they have heard, often only in some feeble and far-off way, to be sure, of the better reli- gion.i The punishment should faU upon those who have sinned ; and it has so fallen. What has been the punishment ? a nation divided against itself with the fiercest hatred ; a war in which miUions of our noblest were sacrificed; problems at the present moment which defy settlement, and yet which press for settlement, each hour making the pressure more urgent. The black shadow wraps the continent as it has done for eighty years, and the darkness is felt in the Valley of the Mississippi. Missouri, in 1819, comprehending the whole of the vast Louisiana purchase north of Arkansas, had a population of 56,000 whites and 10,000 slaves, and desired to be admitted to the Union. It was becoming an unwritten law that the States should come in in pairs, one free and one slave. It was only by chance, perhaps, that Vermont and Kentucky had thus come in together ; also Ten- ^ " We must acknowledge that notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of islarery, the 10,000,000 negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe." B, T. Washington, Up from Slavery, p. 16. 1820] MISSOURI COMPROMISE 165 nessee and Ohio. But it meant much more when, as the rift was appearing, Indiana was soon made to follow Louisiana, and Mississippi was bracketed with Illinois. Missouri, now knocking for admission, her destined mate seemed to be Maine, which was equally anxious. At this time Tallmadge, a representative from New York, proposed that when Missouri was admitted (whose limits as a State were to be much restricted from its territorial area), any further introduction of slavery into the Union should be prohibited ; and that all slave children born in Missouri after its admission as a State should receive freedom at the age of twenty-five. Tallmadge's sugges tion, which a quarter of a century before would hardly have been opposed, now roused a fierce debate, in which Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, was prominent in opposition, who argued that it was unconstitutional ; and also that such a determination would be cruel to the blacks themselves. Other speakers claimed that the conditions of the cession at the time of the Lou isiana purchase were violated. Tallmadge's plan, however, went through the House by the close vote of 87 to 76 ; but in the Senate there was a small majority the other way. Congress adjourned leaving the matter thus hung up, whereupon the country took it up. North and South. Daniel Webster came out as a determined opponent of slavery. In January, 1820, the Senate resumed 166 THE BLACK SHADOW [1821 the discussion, Rufus King of New York and Pinckney of South Carolina leading the two sides. At last Thomas of Illinois, restating the sug gestion of Tallmadge, moved that slavery should be abolished north of the line 36° 30', the south ern line of Missouri, except in Missouri. This was carried in the Senate ; and also in the House, where thirty-seven Southerners opposed. Mis souri was admitted August 10, 1821, Maine com ing in as her mate. The arrangement preceding the admission is famous in history as the Mis souri Compromise. Missouri thus came in as a slave State, and it was sure that Arkansas, to the south, in due time would come in in the same way. She did so in 1836. The settlement of the area north of Mis souri was in 1821 held to be a matter very re mote. The North regarded the Missouri Com promise as an act in the Southern interest, and a surrender. A large majority of Congress, repre sentatives from the South as well as from the North, went on record as holding the doctrine that Congress had power to prohibit slavery in the Territories. The Cabinet of Monroe, then President, John Quincy Adams, Crawford of Georgia, Calhoun, McLean of Ohio, Thompson of Virginia, and Wirt of Maryland, were unani mously of that view. What conflict was to come in the future over the point we shall before long see ; but for the time being the air was stiU. The 1830] COMMUNISTS AND MORMONS 167 Missouri Compromise was felt to have saved the Union. While Henry Clay cannot be regarded as its originator, his figure towered in the debates of the time ; and he more than any other was the great leader of the hour. He was hailed as the " pacificator." His eloquently proclaimed theory, that to spread slavery was humanity to the slave, was shared by Madison and the aged Jeffer son, the latter of whom declared that spreading the slaves " over a large surface will dilute the evil everywhere and facilitate the means of finally getting rid of it." For a generation now, the thirty-three years from 1821 to 1854, the Valley of the Mississippi was a happy land, or at any rate had little his tory. The monotonous inflow of populatiou never intermitted. New England and the Middle States overcame the South in these years in the outpouring of men. With the prosaic crowd came now and then picturesque elements. Social reformers, of whom Robert Dale Owen in his model colony at New Harmony, Indiana, is a good type, established here and there communities, whence the iUs of life were to be banished. Re ligious fanatics came, above all the Mormons : these, aglow like the tribes of Israel, through the exhortations of their prophets, paused for a brief sojourn at Nauvoo, in Illinois ; but the Gentiles proving inhospitable, they passed on presently to establish their shrines in remoter wildernesses. 168 THE BLACK SHADOW [1854 The places of those who struck out westward were promptly fiUed, as time went on, by a for eign tide, Irish and German particularly. The latter often made little pause on the coast, but came almost at once into the heart of the country, pass ing up the Lakes, and down the Ohio ; passing up also from New Orleans, until Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri, as weU as the older North west, became dotted with German viUages. Mean time Doniphan, Emory, Stevens, Fremont, and other pathfinders, working out from the old tracks of Lewis and Clark and Pike, brought to light vast new habitable areas in what had once been believed to be a "great American desert." Slowly the everlasting warfare with the savage abated. Black Hawk and his bands succumbed : Sioux, Blackfeet, and Comanches slowly ceased to be terrible. In the States already constituted, the prairies were ploughed and the forests feUed. Stockaded hamlets grew into cities, the wilderness blossomed, harsh conditions became mitigated. In 1846, the wrenching of Texas from the weak hands of Mexico affected strongly the future of the basin, as it did that of all America. But upon the quiet now broke, as it were, the sound of an alarm-bell. On January 4, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, a Vermonter who had gone West and was now a senator from Illinois, chairman of the committee on Territories, made a report on Nebraska, the beginning of something 1854] SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY 169 most important. The Territory of Nebraska com prised then, besides the present State of that name, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Mon tana, Wyoming, and part of Colorado. Within its 485,000 square miles, scarcely a thousand whites had as yet settled. But the time had come for fixing its status. In spite of the fact that in 1820 the greatly preponderant opinion had been, as we have stated, that Congress had power to prohibit slavery in the Territories, Douglas enun ciated the doctrine that it was unconstitutional, and that the Missouri Compromise was, therefore, a wrong. Citing the cases of New Mexico and Utah, which had been admitted as Territories in 1850, with the provision that the people living there should decide whether or not slavery should exist, Douglas declared that this procedure recog nized and established the principle that the peo ple of a Territory, not Congress, had power to decide as to its institutions. Nebraska, or any portion of it, ought to be admitted with or with out slavery as its people might determine. For thirty-four years the Missouri Compromise had been held to be something fixed. It had been hallowed and commended especially by the ad vocacy of Henry Clay, who had stood between North and South as beyond every other the pacificator. Now suddenly it was called in ques tion ; the whole country shook : it was felt, that a dispute of the gravest sort was opened. 170 THE BLACK SHADOW [1864 January 23, 1854, Douglas offered a second bill, affirming that the slavery restriction of the Missouri Compromise was superseded by the legislation of 1850 relating to New Mexico and Utah : the people should decide as to whether or not there should be slavery; and the great Territory was to be divided into a smaller Ne braska and a division to be caUed Kansas, whose western limit was the Rocky Mountains. The Southerners in Congress were coming to favor largely the view of Douglas. But on January 24 appeared " The Appeal of the In dependent Democrats to the People of the United States," adapted by Salmon P. Chase of Ohio from a document prepared by Joshua R. Giddings, of the same State, and corrected by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Gerrit Smith of New York. The appeal was signed by them and two more, all " Free-soilers," for that memorable name had now appeared. As might have been expected from such authorship, the appeal was a noble document, and it received the attention of the country. Douglas was incensed, lashing Chase with vehemence. At once began in the Senate an extraordinary debate. Of the Free-soilers, Chase was the leader, who, though somewhat lacking in alert fluency, was clear and strong. As he made his plea, he was the ideal of manly beauty and dignity. His able seconds were great historic figures, already or soon to 1854] THE NEBRASKA BILL 171 be famous, — Seward, Sumner, old Ben Wade of Ohio, the rough-hewn block of granite, and Edward Everett of Massachusetts, the polished Grecian column. The latter in particular argued effectively that the measure of 1850, respecting Utah and New Mexico, had to do with those Ter ritories alone, and was not a precedent for a general policy. On the opposing side Douglas had helpers, but he was far and away the leading champion. The present writer remembers those chief figures as they stood in life. How picturesque was the con trast ! Men of finer presence or greater dignity of bearing than Chase, Sumner, and Everett never sat in a legislative body. Seward, though inferior to them in personal graces, was equally impressive when on fire with intellectual excitement. Over against this imposing group stood the sturdy figure of the " Little Giant," " with his coat-tails very near the ground," the face ruddy, the chin resolute, the brow ample, the voice full of virile power. He had a way of throwing off collar and cravat and unbuttoning his vest that throat and chest might have free play. Through February the contest went on, the attention of the country being at the sharpest both North and South. The journals on both sides were all alive. It was tumultuous, but vigorous and thoroughly American, the popular disputants everywhere showing knowledge and acuteness. The doctrine of Douglas, which really 172 THE BLACK SHADOW [1854 originated with Lewis Cass of Michigan (just as the Missouri Compromise originated otherwise than with Henry Clay, its great upholder), was at first looked on askance by the South, but later adopted widely. It received its most significant enuncia tion during the night between March 3 and 4, 1854. The vote was about to be taken, and an hour before midnight the Little Giant rose in the Senate for his last effort. He rehearsed in all its details the doctrine of popular, or, as Cass had called it, " squatter " sovereignty, claiming that it favored neither North nor South, but that it sim ply put slavery out of politics. As the night wore on his able opponents constantly interposed questions, which he answered or parried with courtesy and address. He spoke till daybreak, the crowd remaining for his last word. The vote when taken stood in his favor thirty-seven to four teen. Cannon boomed from the navy-yard, and his victory seemed complete. But the House was to be heard from, in which the dissatisfaction of the North was plainly re flected. A fierce forensic battle went on through the spring, words now and then being on the very point of giving way to blows. The House once remained in session thirty-six hours. The vote came at last at midnight of May 22, standing in favor of the bill one hundred twelve to one hun dred. Among the nays were nine Southerners, at their head the stout veteran, Thomas H. Benton, 1854] ABRAHAM LINCOLN 173 now in the House, who refused to take part in the shelving of the great compromise which he believed had been his shelter for thirty-three years. Signed by President Pierce, the biU be came law May 30, 1854, the most momentous congressional measure, according to Rhodes,^ between the adoption of the Constitution and the civil war. Douglas claimed the victory as a personal tri umph, and was not arrogant. " I had," said he, " the authority of a dictator in both Houses," and it was hardly saying too much. Rhodes thinks him to have resembled in many ways Henry Clay ; in none more than in his power of attaching men to himself. From 1854 to 1858, he was the central figure in the politics of the country. However, he had won for the moment only. The North was profoundly stirred. Horace Greeley declared that Pierce and Douglas had made more Abolitionists than Garrison and Wendell Phillips could make in a century. The South was happy, but the omens were ill for it. Of eighty-eight German newspapers in the country only eight favored the Nebraska bill. A new party, the Republican, straightway began to organize. On his own Illinois prairies the victor beheld suddenly confronting him a foe. still more adroit, magnetic, " gigantic " than himself, — Abraham Lincoln. The revulsion of feeling in the North appeared 1 History ofthe United States from the Compromise of 1850. 174 THE BLACK SHADOW [1854 significantly in the new Congress, where the Dem ocrats stood in a minority of seventy-five, though before they had had a majority of one hundred and eighty-four. Douglas's own State sent to the Senate Lyman Trumbull. The long-drawn-out Kansas trouble began. In July, 1854, Eli Thayer, the moving spirit of the " Emigrant Aid Society," sent his first party to Kansas, people not thinking at first of Sharpe's rifles, but obeying with most peaceful intent the law of westward movement. The South at once scented danger. The new law was in force : Kansas would be free or slave as its settlers decreed. A fact which had not been well realized suddenly became plain : the new law which the South had so generally upheld was going to put the South at a great disadvantage. With its thinner population, largely fixed upon plantations, it was far less easy for it to furnish bands of emigrants than for the North, a region so much better peopled, and with so many in its communities loosely attached to their homes. As the Northern inflow began, there being nothing to offset it from the South, the alarmed South set in motion a series of inroads from the border, par ticularly from Missouri : parties passed over into Kansas, taking up land and claiming possession, but retained all the time their old holdings and citizenship, to which they proposed presently to return. The feeling at the North at once grew hot that such temporary intruders could in no 1855] KANSAS TROUBLES 175 fairness be caUed settlers, or allowed a voice in the " squatter sovereignty." Edwin Reeder, a Douglas Democrat from Penn sylvania, who had been made Governor of Kan sas by President Pierce, was a pro-slavery man, declaring that " he would as soon buy a slave as a horse." He proved himself, however, a brave and fair-minded official. When a mob of border ruffians, unkempt, armed to the teeth, soaked in whiskey, insisted upon voting, threatening with death all who should protest against the result of the election, Reeder quietly faced the crowd. Sitting behind his desk, on which lay a cocked pistol, he threw out the vote as illegal in seven districts where protest had been made, and ordered new elections. President Pierce, much under the influence of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, whose name now rises, had hoped for a different course on Reeder's part. He tried to transfer him to something more briUiant, but Reeder held stoutly to his Kansas work, until he was at last forced out. He now threw in his lot with the free-state men, the element largely preponderating among the real settlers, a body headed by a cool and prudent leader, Charles Robinson. The free-state men, assembling in convention at the hamlet of Topeka, adopted a constitution and elected officials. The border men followed a like course at Lecompton, receiving countenance sometimes from men high in place, like Atchison, 176 THE BLACK SHADOW [1855 the federal senator from Missouri. Federal troops came in in the slavery interest: congressional committees visited and reported. There was much warfare of words, but so far no bloodshed, though Sharpe's rifles were coming in with the Northern inflow ; and from as deep in the South as Mont gomery, Alabama, a troop well furnished with arms, and also with Bibles by the ministers and pious women of the churches, came in on the other side. Two hostile parties stood over against each other in Kansas, and violence could not be averted. Lawrence, headquarters of the free-state men, was sacked. So far, however, it was but the muttering of something impending. At this point enters into our story probably the most picturesque and fateful figure of Ameri can history, John Brown, of Ossawatomie. He had come to Kansas in October, 1855, a man taU and gaunt, with steady gray eyes beneath a high, rather narrow forehead, a fixed mouth and chin, his hair gray but unthinned, showing that he was' well past middle life. After forty-five years, dur ing which John Brown has been decried on the one hand as an insane and bloodthirsty fanatic, and on the other hand exalted as preeminently the saint and martyr of his time, we probably may read the judgment of impartial history in the calm pages of Rhodes. His mind, by no means strong, had become to some extent unbalanced. He was the votary of a stern theology, " a belated Puri- 1856] JOHN BROWN 177 tan," who could have found his counterpart only in some Lilburne or Wildman, of Cromwell's Iron sides. ""Without shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins," was a favorite text with him. Now this old man, after an obscure and unsuccessful life as farmer and trader, surren dering himself to the uncompromising following out of a single idea, heralded and precipitated one of the sternest conflicts the earth has ever seen, riding on the fore-front of the storm, his soul marching on through weapon-gleams and battle- smoke long after his body had mouldered. Five free-state men had laid down their lives. According to John Brown's logic, five of the other side must make the balance square. In his own family his ascendency was complete : four sons, a son-in-law, and two others made up, under his imperious wiU, an unquestioning band for a secret expedition. To one who demurred when the bloody scheme was unfolded, he replied that he had no choice, — that it had been decreed from all eternity ; he was the instrument of the ven geance of God. Three Southern men, a father and two sons named Doyle, men inoffensive, against whom no charge could be brought, were com pelled, it was May 24, 1856, to go with them ; and the three next morning were found murdered. The weapon evidently had been a short cutlass which Brown had brought with him from Ohio. A Southern man named Wilkinson, forced from 178 THE BLACK SHADOW [1856 his home in spite of the entreaties of his sick wife, was next day found murdered, evidently by the same means. The tale of victims still lacked one : he was found in William Sherman, slain in like fashion. Like the Doyles, the other vic tims were blameless except in being from the South. Twenty-three years after, one of the band, Townsley, told the story, how the old man gave the signal and the sons and followers did the deeds, though in the case of the elder Doyle the old man himself did not withhold his hand. At prayer the next morning, he lifted up hands still bloody from the fearful work. Of course the effect of the massacres was to exasperate the con flict. Though the free-staters promptly disavowed Brown's actions, the Southerners were for re prisals, and an armed band set out to destroy Os sawatomie. Guerrilla warfare became rife, while United States troops tried to maintain order ; but before the year 1856 ended, fully two hun dred lives had been lost, and $2,000,000 in pro perty destroyed; and it was hard to tell which side had been the more lawless. An episode of this seething time was the Dred Scott decision, through which the Supreme Court, for the first time, rendered an opinion on the great matter which had been in dispute. Dred Scott had been the slave of an army sur geon, who took him and his family from Mis souri, where he had for the most part lived, to 1857] DRED SCOTT DECISION 179 Fort Snelling, in Minnesota, where he remained two years. By the Missouri Compromise slavery was interdicted in Minnesota, and Dred Scott sued at the Supreme Court for the freedom of himself and family, on the ground that his resi dence in Minnesota gave them that right. At the head of the Supreme Court was Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Marylander appointed by Jackson, a judge of ability, whose great age had not impaired his powers. The majority of the court were Southern men : but two were from the North, one Benjamin R. Curtis, a judge among the ablest. The question as argued was twofold : 1st. Could a slave, whose ancestors were slaves, be a citizen of the United States, and so be com petent to sue at the Supreme Court ? 2d. Was the Missouri Compromise constitutional, or was the doctrine of the Nebraska biU the true one, that not Congress but the settlers must decide as to slavery ? If the latter doctrine were true, since the Minnesota squatters were few and far between, and had never passed on the matter, Dred Scott had nothing to stand on. The memo rable decision was rendered, after long expecta tion, March 6, 1857, two days after the inaugura tion of President Buchanan. It was ably stated by Taney, all the court concurring but two. As to the first question, the right of one who had been a slave to sue was denied. As to the second question, the doctrine of the Nebraska biU was 180 THE BLACK SHADOW [1858 fully sustained. Justice Curtis, however, for the minority maintained, 1st, that negroes were citi zens of States at the adoption of the Constitution : if citizens of States, they became citizens of the United States ; 2d, as to the power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories, he cited eight instances where it had been done, the bills being signed by all the Presidents from Washing ton to John Quincy Adams. Besides, slavery " being contrary to natural right is created by municipal law, which an enactment of Congress might contravene." Meantime the Kansas conflict went forward. Buchanan, who, no less than Pierce, was greatly under the influence of Jefferson Davis, threw the weight of the government, so far as he could and dared, against the free-staters. These increased continually in numbers and importance, until it became plain even to the blindest zealots that if popular sovereignty was to rule, they must carry the day. In 1858, John Brown appeared once more in Kansas, a long white beard, which he had not worn before, imparting a new touch of weird- ness to his grim, set countenance. He presently led a raid into Missouri for the liberation of slaves, during which a man was slain, conducting his party of law-breakers afterward by the ferry at Detroit into Canada. So he passed on to the tragic days at Harper's Ferry ; and thence to his lonely, mountain-guarded, northern grave. The 1858] LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS 181 Southern men in desperation sought at Lecomp ton to force upon Kansas, now seeking admission to the Union, a constitution in their interest. When it came to a vote, out of 13,088, 11,300 were opposed, and the matter was decided. Now it was that Douglas acted bravely and consistently, declaring that the case was plain, that the people had decided for freedom. At last, in 1861, Kan sas was admitted as a free State. Before the cyclone of civil war burst out of the black shadow, ever broadening and deepening, one last episode, of highest significance and in terest, found its scene in the Valley of the Mis sissippi. When Douglas, flushed with his triumph in Congress, holding in the hollow of his hand the decision in both Houses, came home to Illi nois to find the North frowning ominously and his own State estranged, one voice it was beyond all others that bore him down with disapproval. Now it was, during 1858, that the prolonged de bate, adjourned and again adjourned from place to place until the area of a great State became its theatre, went forward in the sight and hearing of many thousands of men. Of the contestants Douglas possessed. ability, if we may trust Horace Greeley, to which it would be hard to assign limits : his opponent, second only to Washington in civic virtues, has come to be held for wisdom and capacity perhaps the chief of Americans. As the intellectual wrestle went forward, now on 182 THE BLACK SHADOW [1860 the prairie, now in the grove, now on the hillside, the open heavens alone furnishing a canopy wide enough to cover the crowds that gathered, the world first began to know the power and worth of Abraham Lincoln. That debate made him President ; and that he became President was the signal to the cannon. CHAPTER IX THE CIVIL WAR The centre and focus of the civil war was un mistakably on the soil of Virginia, where the North and the South fought back and forth for four years, on the one hand trying to seize Wash ington, on the other hand, Richmond. There the armies were largest ; there the leaders, on the Southern side at least, were the ablest. The civil war in the Mississippi VaUey was subsidiary to this : but it must be understood that it was not for that reason of small account. Rarely in history has there been a more impressive display of military energy ; rarely have armies been larger ; and only such battles as Borodino and Leipsic surpass in gloomy grandeur the more im portant engagements. Following the remark of John Fiske (whose " Mississippi VaUey in the Civil War " has helped much the old veteran of that time who writes these pages), it is to be noted that although the war began in the East, with the firing on Sumter, the commencement of victory was in the West, in holding Missouri to the Union in 184 THE CIVIL WAR [1861 1861. That State, largely peopled from the South, and established as a slave State by the Missouri- Compromise, had latterly received a strong Northern infusion ; numerous Germans had also come in, who to a man were anti-slavery: the population was therefore much divided. That Missouri was saved to the Union was due to the courage and ability of two men, Frank P. Blair, a St. Louis lawyer, afterwards a major- general, but in this early day chairman of the Union committee of safety, and Nathaniel Lyon, captain of the 2d Infantry, and afterwards a general, in command at first of a few troops at the St. Louis arsenal. When the governor of Missouri had schemed to use the state troops at Camp Jackson, in St. Louis, to swing the State over to the South, Blair and Lyon, May 9, 1861, promptly captured them. Lyon foUowed up the blow by an energetic campaign in which the Con federate force was worsted and in a fair way to be utterly driven out of. Missouri. He was displaced, however, by the incapable Fremont. Left with out reinforcements or resources, he threw him self, August 10, upon a hostile army of twice his number at Wilson's Creek, and died gloriously at the head of his men, — the extinction of a life of the brightest promise. A Union victory soon after at Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, practically ended all serious warfare west of the Mississippi. There were battles, indeed, but in comparison with the THE CAMPAIGNS IN TENNESSEE AND KENTUCKY 1861] GRANT AND SHERMAN 185 fierce campaigning to the east of the river, all were of small account, and need no mention here. On the 9th of May, 1861, in the Camp Jack son time, in St. Louis, while a voluble young Southerner, in a street-car, excited over an order to take down a rebel flag which had been dis played in Pine Street, was declaiming over the intolerance which forbade people to fly whatso ever flag they chose, a small, shabbily dressed, middle-aged man in a corner of the car inter rupted him with the remark, that " perhaps the intolerance was not so great after all. Although there had been much flying of rebel flags of late, he had noticed that so far no one had been hanged for it, though many deserved to be." It was the first shot fired during the war by Ulysses Simp son Grant. William Tecumseh Sherman, then president of the Fifth Street Railroad Company, also had the war for the first time brought home to him in those days : the present writer once got the story, long after, from Sherman himself, driv ing past the site of Camp Jackson. Within a few days both men had crossed the river, one to take command of the 21st Illinois, the other of the 1 3th regulars, at Washington. The career of Grant is one of the most singular in history. Up to middle life he was a failure. Though doing his duty well in Mexico as a sub altern of infantry, he could afterwards make his living neither as a farmer nor a business man ; 186 THE CIVIL WAR [1862 and at thirty-nine, with a taste for drink, and an anxious wife and family to be supported, he had been taken by his perplexed father into the little leather store at Galena, Illinois, where he sank into obscurity so deep that few knew of his ex istence. But with the outbreak of war the fish found at last its water. As colonel of the 21st Illinois, he soon showed that he could discipline and organize. Stationed at Cairo, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, as a brigadier he showed presently his strategic eye by the seizure of Paducah, a town commanding the mouths of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, pathways into the heart of the Confederacy. The action at Belmont, which, though not brilliantly successful, owing to the rawness of the troops, yet showed Grant to be cool, energetic, and resourceful, made his name generally known. In February of 1862, the capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson made the world sure that a leader had come at last. His audacity here was powerfully helped by the cowardice and incompetency of the rebel leaders, who when Fort Henry, the less important post, on the Tennessee, had sur rendered after a combined attack by army and gunboats, remained inactive in Fort Donelson, twelve miles distant on the Cumberland, while Grant in the wintry weather drew his lines about their works. The chief, Floyd, lately Buchanan's Secretary of War, and the second in command. 1862] SHILOH 187 Pillow, seemed to have no thought but for their personal safety, and fled up the stream in a small steamer. Simon B. Buckner, third in com mand, was a soldier of different stamp, but it was now too late. His left was assaulted by C. F. Smith, a most capable soldier, and his centre was broken by Lew Wallace. The place presently fell, with a loss to the Confederacy of 15,000 men and 65 cannon. The Confederate line of defense, running from eastern Kentucky to the Missis sippi, feU in as an arch falls when the keystone is knocked out. The rising fame of Grant gained little from the great battle of Shiloh, which followed in April. Success had, perhaps, made him over-confident : the great general must learn his trade like a common man ; and he stationed his army unin- trenched at Pittsburg Landing, intent upon the assault of Corinth, twenty miles distant, where Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate com mander, lay with his host. Grant's cardinal and most excellent principle was, "not to be over anxious yourself about what your enemy is going to do, but to make him anxious about what you are going to do." He believed thoroughly in holding the initiative, and was from first to last always the assailant. Intent on his projected attack, he left his front open, quite forgetting that where his army could get out it was quite pos sible for his enemy to get in. On the 7th of 188 THE CIVIL WAR [1862 April, 1862, Grant being at Savannah some miles away, the blow fell. Hardee, Bragg, Brecken ridge, and Polk, soldiers of different temper from Floyd and PiUow, led the rush of 40,000 men upon their unexpectant adversaries, and for many hours things looked dark for the cause of the Union. " General Sherman, was there not great de moralization the first day at Shiloh, and was there not much confusion at the rear ? " We were a party of a dozen met at a quiet dinner many years after, to hear Sherman teU John Fiske the story of his campaigns. " I saw no demoralization," was the reply. " At the front, where I was, every man was do ing his best. The rear of a fighting army, with the wounded coming back, and the cowards skulk ing, who are always in some proportion, is always a bad place from which to judge of results." Unquestionably, however, the outlook for the Union was bad throughout the forenoon. The positions held by Grant's front were all captured, the divisions driven back and dislocated, and a fearful loss inflicted. Prentiss, after a brave resistance at a place which came to be known as the Hornet's Nest, was captured at last with the 2200 survivors of his division, and the fate of Sherman and the other commanders seemed very Soubtful. But at half-past two, Johnston re ceived a mortal wound, and fortune changed. 1862] SHILOH 189 In the afternoon the gunboats began to find their opportunity, and the army of Don Carlos Buell, 27,000 strong, marching in hot haste, began to cross the river to Grant's help. Beauregard, a soldier tried and skiUful, who had succeeded Johnston, failed in no point of conduct. The second day the fierceness of the battle did not abate ; but it became plain that the chance was gone, and Beauregard slowly withdrew. Out of 90,000 engaged, 20,000 had fallen dead and wounded. There is no report that Grant failed in any way in courage. He was at many points of danger: neither, on the other hand, does it appear that he directed any important movement, or could manage to stem in any considerable way the imminent danger. His subordinates acted apparently for the most part by and for them selves. Moreover, there was no pursuit, though some of Buell's divisions had scarcely been en gaged, and an officer like George H. Thomas, already famous, was right at hand for the work. Grant's fame after Shiloh underwent some eclipse : fortunately it was only temporary ; and when his opportunity came again, he showed that in his harsh schooling he had been an apt and attentive pupil. In this spring of 1862, there was enterprise elsewhere than in Tennessee. Island No. 10, on the Mississippi, was captured, with 7000 men, with accompaniments of cannonading and midnight 190 THE CIVIL WAR [1862 running of batteries more melodramatic than really terrible. In the far South, too, Farragut, one of the few men of Spanish blood who in the history of the United States have attained great fame, captured New Orleans by a series of opera tions full of daring and skill ; after which feat he dashed up the river to a point above Vicksburg. In the early summer of 1862, he might easily have seized Vicksburg with the help of a small land force ; but HaUeck, in command of 100,000 men lying practially idle within easy reach, could not spare a detachment. Soon Van Dorn, sent by Braxton Bragg,.Beauregard's successor, turned Vicksburg into a veritable Gibraltar, against which Grant, at last restored to his command and in a measure rid of Halleck, now in Washington, began in the late faU of 1862 an ever memorable campaign. Other good soldiers were now thrusting to the front. Bragg, marching rapidly northward, hop ing to seize Louisville and Cincinnati, was fol lowed hard by Buell, and forced to turn back after a fruitless effort. Buell was now unjustly displaced, the Union losing thereby the service of a good sword and a loyal spirit. One would like to think that W. S. Rosecrans, who was put in his place, was a soldier as skillful as he was brave and chivalrous. But he was not a favorite of fortune, and in his first trial came but lamely off. At the end of 1862, Federals and Confederates, each 1862]- STONE RIVER 191 army some 40,000 strong, confronted each other on Stone River, in central Tennessee, both armies eager for battle after their wearisome marching of the fall, and urged on to activity by impatience both North and South. On the last day of the year the commanders were ready. The armies faced each other in opposing lines running about three miles north and south, and both command ers hit upon the same plan of attack, — to strike by the left wing. Perhaps it was the fault of McCook, whose corps held the Union right, that the position was negligently guarded. Rosecrans was at the left preparing his blow, but Bragg was the prompter. When morning dawned, the bri gade commander at the extreme Federal right was absent from his post; so, too, the division commander ; the battery horses had been ridden off to water. A sad remissness, for with the first light Patrick Cleburne, a meteoric soldier, with two divisions, dashed impetuously against the slum bering line. McCook's corps, for the most part, all unready, was put to flight at once, and the assailants sped on like prairie-fire in the hope to seize the NashviUe road, to keep which was for Rosecrans most imperative. But iti the path of the foe stood a young Irish officer, whose quality on that day, for the first time, became clearly re vealed, Philip H. Sheridan. With bayonet and volley he breasted the charge, while Thomas, just behind in command of the Federal centre, always 192 THE CIVIL WAR [1862 immovable however headlong the hostile assault, stood thoroughly ready. Rosecrans, giving up re luctantly his own attack, which he felt sure had promise of the best, formed a new line of battle, while Van Cleve and Palmer in the "Round Forest " rivaled the spirit of Sheridan. There was to be no further retreat. Next day the com bat was but listless, an intermission of serious strife, though the Federal commander seized the heights he had coveted at first : these he held the next day against Bragg's most impetuous efforts. Rosecrans maintained his ground, Bragg retiring unmolested. The battle was indecisive, the Con federates being no nearer to NashvUle than before, the Federals no nearer to Chattanooga. In the history of warfare strife has seldom been more stubborn than at Stone River. Meantime Grant, intent on Vicksburg, had turned southward, and was knitting his brow over a knotty problem. History does not record that he ever received a lesson from any persistent spider; but it is certain that not until the sev enth trial did he find success, and Robert Bruce himself was not more pertinacious. He tried from the east ; but a cowardly subordinate sur rendered to raiders his main depot at Holly Springs with $1,500,000 worth of stores, and his approach there was baffled. He sent Sherman down with 32,000 men from the north, but they fell back beaten December 29, at Chickasaw 1863] VICKSBURG 193 Bayou. Grant tried twice more from the north, pushing with gunboats and infantry through forest, swamp, and bayou in the water-logged country to find a practicable point of attack. He tried from the west with pick and spade, attempting a canal across the bend opposite the town ; and again working at a remoter channel through Lake Providence. But the enemy, more numerous than he, remained unassailable on the forbidding bluff ; and the great river, as if in league with the foe, bursting by its spring floods new paths not to be reckoned on, swept off his constructions and drowned his beasts and men. Meantime the nation muttered impatiently be cause " nothing was done." Why not try from the south ? thought Grant ; and an attempt was made, audacious to the last degree. Are the batteries after all so dan gerous? We will see. So the batteries were run, not only by armored gunboats, but by un armed transports. Really, the bark of Vicksburg was worse than its bite. Straightway 45,000 men, sustaining and sustained by the fleet, now below the town, pushed across the river, and dashed into the interior, quite careless of a base. Sherman followed presently with another corps, and every man was needed. Pemberton poured out his superior numbers upon Grant from Vicks burg, and the capable Joseph E. Johnston was collecting rapidly at Jackson, fifty iniles back, a 194 THE "CIVIL WAR [1863 new and powerful force. It was like the leap of a trapeze performer through air alive with swords and flame from bar to distant bar. For saking his hold at Grand Gulf, with four days' rations in his soldiers' haversacks. Grant plunged between the two hostUe armies, fighting five pitched battles in a fortnight, living off the coun try, clutching at last the hold upon his new base at Haines's Bluff with complete success. On the 20th of May, Grant, with Sherman, whose corps was in the advance, rode to the brink of the bluff, at the base of which, close to the scene of Sher man's defeat the preceding winter, the Federal transports lay ready to discharge supplies. The generous subordinate was loud in his confession and tribute : till that moment he had had no faith that his leader's scheme would succeed. Success, however, was triumphant ; few achievements in warfare could parallel it ; to Grant alone belonged the glory. The imperturbable little man, says the story, the " Mr. Grant," whom Abraham Lincoln " rather liked," and had stubbornly retained, thougb the cry for his dismissal had been loud, smiled and said nothing. The fall of Vicksburg was now but a question of a few weeks. It came July 4, 1863, with the rendering up of 37,000 men, 172 cannon, and the strongest fortress in the land. The rebel grip at Port Hudson, 250 miles below, was soon after loosed, and the Mississippi was opened. The present writer remembers how. 1863] PORT HUDSON 195 after a month's work in the rifle-pits, close under the enemy's rampart, we, 9. company tattered, wasted by heat and malaria, inured to the sight of wounds and death, were withdrawn to the woods in the rear for a short rest out of rifle range. An orderly with a document hurried through the camp ; it was the Sth of July, and the cry presently broke forth, " Vicksburg surrendered on the 4th ! " The preceding De cember we had sailed into the harbor at Ship Island, the anchors catching where those of the great fleet caught which brought Pakenham to his doom in 1815. Next morning we entered the southwest pass of the Mississippi, following in the track of Farragut the preceding spring, past the forts to the city he captured. There his fleet still lay, the decks alive with blue jackets, the heavy cannon trained upon the town which only their open muzzles could hold in submission. They saluted our coming and we heard the stern voices. The following March, while the column was sleeping in the road within range of the Port Hudson guns, we were startled at midnight by those same warlike voices. Farragut was forcing his way past the batteries, a terrible battle in the darkness, to which we hearkened from the river's brink, — intermittent flashes and thunders, then at last a steadier gleam as a great ship on .fire floated slowly downstream. But the Hartford got past, and Farragut extended a hand to Grant 196 THE CIVIL WAR [1863 struggling with his problems. Since that night we had marched and fought. Port Hudson had beaten back two assaults, with a loss to us of many hundreds. We had burrowed into the hard clay of the bluff, driving the sap against the obstinate rampart, and were ready for another spring ; but Vicksburg had surrendered and our work was done. We went up the river on the first unarmed boat that made the journey. Vicksburg frowned as we passed from the long line of batteries on the height. The gunboats lay anchored in front with curving, turtle-like backs, the muzzles visi ble through the ports that had so often broken a way for the Union advance. They were silent now and friendly ; nor was there hostile scene or sound as we went northward between banks green with the summer. Memphis, Island No. 10, Co lumbus, — these now offered no bar, and we landed at last at Cairo, whence only eighteen months before the unknown brigadier had started out against Forts Henry and Donelson. Scarcely even in Napoleon's career had there been such a year and a half. The spirit of neither army — Federal nor Con federate — in Tennessee had been broken by the sharp experience of Stone River. The spring and summer of 1863 were spent in wide manoeu vring, the consequence being that early in Septem ber, Rosecrans was in possession of Chattanooga, 1863] CHICKAMAUGA 197 quite too confident that he had worsted Bragg, who had for the moment retired southward. The Federal corps were widely scattered in a difficult mountain country ; and on the other side the Rich mond authorities, determined upon holding East Tennessee, dispatched thither James Longstreet with a force of the best soldiers of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. These began to arrive on the 20th of September, just at the moment when Rosecrans, after concentration, was forming his line of battle in the Chickamauga valley, opposite Bragg, who on his part was quite ready once more to try conclusions. September 19, Bragg tried, as at Stone River, to roll up a Federal wing, — this time the left. He met with no success, and it was not until noon of the 20th that the disaster befell that was the beginning of the end. Perhaps it was aU due to the blunder of an aide-de-camp. One would like to think so, rather than to believe there was in competency in the general or want of conduct in the troops. The story is that as Rosecrans stood arrayed, three good generals, Wood, Brannan, and Reynolds, held with their divisions the right cen tre of his line. Brannan lay between the others, his line being " refused," thrown back nearly at right angles to the general direction, and for the most part concealed by bushes. An aide of Thomas gaUoping along the front just before the moment of attack, not seeing Brannan's men, re- 198 THE CIVIL WAR [1863 ported to his chief a gap in the line of battle at that point. Thomas reported at once to his supe rior ; and post haste went the order from Rosecrans to Wood " to close up on Reynolds." Wood could not close up on Reynolds without marching around behind Brannan ; this he promptly and faithfully did ; it is not for a subordinate in the moment of danger to ask the why and wherefore. Now, in deed, there was a gap in the line, into which the quick-eyed Longstreet threw immediately eight brigades under Hood and McLaws, soldiers as fierce as fire. The confusion on the Federal right became utter and maddening. Leaders and men were of the best. PhU Sheridan was in the midst of it, and others scarcely less able and courageous than he ; but all order was soon completely bro ken, and two thirds of the Union army, with Rose crans among them, in hot flight for Chattanooga, ten miles distant. But all did not flee. Thomas, retiring with his corps of 25,000, cool, precise, weU-ordered, took up his position at Horseshoe Ridge, and throughout the dismal afternoon stemmed the victorious rebel rush with a stub bornness that has caused him to pass into history as the " Rock of Chickamauga." The levels at the base of the limestone ledges on which he stood planted were heaped before nightfall with such piles of the dead as even the gloomiest battlefields have rarely shown. When all was over, Thomas retiring unmolested into the town which his stand 1863] CHATTANOOGA 199 had made tenable, 37,000 lay fallen in the valley behind him. It was indeed Chickamauga, the valley of death ! Was it due to the blunder of an aide? In a similar way, according to Mr. John C. Ropes, the mistaken order of an irresponsible aide, on the 16th of June, 1815, paralyzed between Ligny and Quatre Bras the splendid corps of D'Erlon, a consequence of which was that Napoleon, two days later, lost Waterloo. At any rate, when Wood closed up on Reynolds, it was the closing up of Rosecrans. He sank forthwith out of sight ; and only Grant, it was felt, could cope with the situation. Two months later, the assemblage of leaders and forces about Chattanooga was a memorable one. Hooker had brought in a strong body from the Army of the Potomac. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, the four great soldiers of the war (though at that time their titles to supreme fame were not yet fully indicated), were there, — at the head of corps schooled in the most difficult campaigns. The achievement at last was worthy of such a conjunction. On November 26, the Army of the Cumberland, the Chickamauga men, charged up the almost bee tling Missionary Ridge, four hundred feet, " with out orders." The Army of the Potomac, Gettys burg men, having won Lookout Mountain, rolled up the Confederate left ; meantime the Confed- 200 THE CIVIL WAR [1864 erate right was beaten in by the Army of the Tennessee, Vicksburg men. So the year closed in triumph. Grant's success at Chattanooga raised him to the pinnacle. His career henceforth, it does not belong to us now to consider. Matched in Vir ginia against Lee, he had such generalship to cope with as he had not before encountered, and his final success was due more perhaps to tenacity and boundless resources in men and means than to superior skill. Sherman, too, who succeeded Grant at Chattanooga, as he had done before at Vicksburg, passes now beyond our horizon, march ing south out of the VaUey, in 1864, to the strug gle about Atlanta, and thence on to the sea. The fortunes of Thomas, however, belong to our story, who, left on guard behind, closed most worthily and memorably the mighty drama of the civU war in the Mississippi Valley. Bragg had disappeared from sight, and also Joseph E. Johnston, who had baffled the advance of Sherman with an energy which his superiors did not appreciate. In their place now stood J. B. Hood, the bravest of the brave, whom the shot of Gaines's Mill, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga had reduced to a mere fragment of a man, with scarcely body enough to retain his impetuous spirit. From Alabama, in November, 1864, Hood marched rapidly into Tennessee, driving before him J. M. Schofield, who, with the 4th and 23d 1864] FRANKLIN 201 corps, formed the advance guard of Thomas, lying at NashviUe. Schofield, cool and wary, retreated in good order before his greatly supe rior foe. If Hood's skill had equaled his valor, Schofield might have been caught aud ruined. But the latter escaped all perils, and on the morning of November 30, daringly intrenched himself at Franklin on the Harpeth River, resolved to delay, if he could, the onward rush of the enemy, that Thomas might have time to complete his plans. A notable battle was fought in the afternoon, in a high degree creditable to the Union army, which repulsed with terrible effect the charge of the Confederates. In the dusk of that short autumn day fell nearly 9000 men, more than two thirds Confederate ; among them eleven general officers. When darkness fell, Schofield quietly withdrew with men and baggage, marching into Nashville with thirty-three captured flags and a considerable body of prisoners. Hood was not delayed, but followed close upon the track of Schofield, reaching Nashville Decem ber 2, and intrenching himself on irregular hills south of the city. Washington was in a panic over the possibility of a defeat ; and Grant per haps never as a soldier appeared to less advan tage than in his distrust at this time of Thomas, whose quality he should have known. Most for tunately he was not superseded. It is plain now that his means were quite inadequate to the task 202 THE CIVIL WAR [1864 set for him. Besides the 27,000 of Schofield, his army during November had been little better than in the air. A good reinforcement, however, came in at last from Missouri ; and the odds and ends, white and colored, whom he could pick up in outlying camps, and on the road as they re turned from furlough and hospital, were rapidly compacted and drilled. Horses were pressed throughout Tennessee and Kentucky, and at last in the three arms, infantry, artillery, and cavalry, he stood fairly ready, — reaUy outnumbering Hood ; though in quality the Southern force, schooled in battle and long - concerted action, might well have been thought superior. When the impatient North was at the utmost point of tension, Thomas, now standing ready, was still further delayed by a wintry storm which left the ground covered with a glare of ice on which neither horse nor man could find secure footing. But on the morning of December 15, the ice being gone, leaving a surface of mud which fortunately was not deep, the battle began. While one of the Union wings occupied the Con federates with a strong demonstration, the other wheeled resistlessly southward, then eastward, dis lodging from their hiUs the sternly resisting foe. On the 16th, the battle continued further back, and at closer quarters, until by evening Hood was in full flight, with the Union cavalry in close pursuit. No victory of the war was more vigor- 1865] APPOMATTOX 203 ously followed up : the retreating masses were broken into fragments and the fragments fairly pulverized. The army of Hood practically van ished, and with its disappearance, so far as the Mississippi Valley was concerned, the stubborn Confederacy succumbed. In the spring of 1865, the Confederate army in Virginia had become an isolated nucleus of war like energy, from which at last every supporting connection and attachment had been knocked away. On the east was the sea swept by the ships of their foes ; on the west lowered Thomas, pre pared to descend upon them through the passes of the Alleghanies. Sherman rolled up from the south, a tempest that gathered fury as it sped. On the north Grant smote implacably. Not until then was the mighty Lee fairly beaten to his knees. Appomattox became inevitable : the Union was saved. CHAPTER X THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AT THE CLOSE OF THE 19TH CENTURY Has human skill been able to tame in any de gree the Western streams and make them more serviceable to man? Probably they vary not greatly from what they were when the country was wild. Probably iu an earlier day the floods were not much higher than now ; nor is the sum mer diminution at the present time much greater than formerly. From Pittsburg the " broad- horns " used to come down to Louisville in high water within a week; in low water the course would be three times as long, their draught of three feet requiring careful avoidance of sand bars. It would take as long now. Standing to-day on the shore of the main river or any one of its important affiuents, at a time of flood, one sees the broad, turbid, swirling stream bearing upon its surface uprooted trees, possibly cabins or barns, borne off from the overflowed bottoms. Let the spectator take heed as to his footing. The bank, apparently firm, may have been sapped by the mighty shouldering current; and at any time a RIVER ENGINEERING 205 square rod, or indeed an acre or two, may cave in without warning, sliding in a moment with all it holds, tree, house, beast, or man, under the wa ters. While the river thus devours one shore, it builds up another shore farther down, one farmer thus undergoing robbery from the lordly free-, booter, while his neighbor on the opposite bank receives largess. There is no better engineering skiU than that which has tried to cope with the Western rivers, but in some respects they have proved so far quite beyond human control. The complexity of the problem is baffiing. How to arrange a sys tem of works which shall hold the country pro tected from overflow when the river is at flood ; and at the same time secure a practicable channel for boats through the ever-shifting shallows when the river is low ? The axe, the shovel, the dredge, the crowbar, the crane, with all they can bring to pass, — mattresses of willow loaded with stone, great timber-cribs, the most elaborate masonry, — all that hands numerous, patient, skiUful, backed by the best brains and a lavish govern ment, — aU that they can do has been done again and again ; but the giant, rising in its power, has swept everything away without trace. The cur rent to-day a quarter of a mile wide may be next week ten miles wide : as it subsides, the river may choose a channel entirely new ; such con structions as are attempted must rest upon a 206 CLOSE OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY base, not of ropk, but of shifting alluvium, on which no dependence can be placed. Though the problem is so difficult, and in great part not yet solved, the engineers have done some remarkable things. It has been possible to bridge the Mississippi even in its lower course as far down as Memphis, and the achievement in this kind of James B. Eads at St. Louis has ranked as a noteworthy triumph. Eads, a self-taught man, at work on the river from boyhood until at last he be came a " wrecker," saving craft that got into diffi culty, and removing the snags and sawyers which from the first have been sources of perU, became a well-known man in the days of the war through the construction of the gunboats which seconded so weU the work of the Western armies. Turning his versatile genius to the task of spanning the river, he sank his vast piers that were to support the structure not only through the water, but through the soil below the water, until the bed-rock was at last reached. In one case the foundation layer of the pier was one hundred and ten feet below the water surface and ninety feet below the river- bottom, the masonry being laid upon a caisson, a turtle-like metal contrivance which, as the layers were imposed, sank and sank, first through water, then through mud. The soil underneath was scooped out and carried up by ingenious " sand- pumps," until at last the contrivance rested squarely upon the immovable stone. The four EADS BRIDGE AND JETTIES 207 piers having been reared, mighty constructions like cliffs, three arches of steel, with a span each of five hundred or more feet, were thrown across. In the case of each, the metal framework shot out into the air above the stream, entirely unsupported from below, until, the two parts meeting, the curve was made perfect. The final result was a sup port for broad, smooth highways over which pass day and night the heaviest trains and laden wagons in a multitude ; a support so secure that even the cyclone of 1896 could not disturb it. More remarkable even than the St. Louis bridge are the jetties constructed afterward by Eads at the South Pass of the Mississippi. As the river pours out through its passes into the Gulf of Mexido, the current growing sluggish deposits the sediment with which it is heavily laden on the bottom, so that at each mouth and for some distance beyond the water is shoal, making it impossible for ships of heavy draught to enter. Driving lines of piles from the mouth of the South Pass out over the shallows, Eads found a means of holding fast mattresses of willow loaded with stone. The two long, slender lines of work not far apart have narrowed much the channel, with the effect that the current is quick ened and the silt scoured out and carried away into deep water. The expedient has proved en tirely successful, the jetties bringing to pass and making permanent a channel through which 208 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY almost the heaviest of sea-going ships may move. The benefit to the city of New Orleans and to the commerce of the Mississippi VaUey in general is almost incalculable. Turning from the river to the area which it drains, the material resources which have been brought to light in the Mississippi Valley, as the twentieth century begins, are of surpassing rich ness. It would be an endless task to describe in detail the fertility of the soil of one region, the great forests of another, the coal and metals of a third. It is quite certain that scarcely a square mile of the basin is unavailable for human uses. If the farmer in some parts fails of rain, irrigation will go a long way toward making good the lack ; and where this is impracticable, the ranchman can ply his vocation on plains and hiUs covered by the hardy grasses that require little moisture. The timber of the river vaUeys and the hiU-slopes attracts the lumberman too powerfully. In the arid and rocky districts, where aU else fails, there is scarcely a metal which the miner may not hope to find. This teeming region has been possessed by civilized men with unexampled rapidity. In the portion east of the river the advance was not slow ; but west of the river it has been far swifter. What our grandfathers believed to be a country not needing to be thought of or reckoned with, a wilderness not likely to be invaded until the STATES ADMITTED 209 remote future, is at the present moment about to be entirely occupied by properly constituted States of the American Union, throbbing and vigorous throughout with life. Arkansas was admitted in 1835 ; Iowa in 1845 ; Wisconsin in 1847 ; Min nesota in 1857 ; West Virginia in 1862. Since the civil war the procession of commonwealths has entered in the following order, — Nebraska, 1867 ; Colorado, 1875 ; North and South Dakota, 1889; Montana, 1889; Wyoming, 1890. As the new century begins, Oklahoma stands at the door with every requisite ; and in company with Ari zona and New Mexico, Territories lying just out side of our Valley, wiU without doubt soon be a member of the sisterhood. That wisdom has always been shown in the admission of these communities may certainly be questioned. In one or two cases the population to start with was scant, and has increased but little. It is manifestly unfair that a State which is merely a " cluster of mining camps " should weigh as powerfully in the Senate of the United States as New York or Illinois. But our system has had that inequality from the beginning. In the main, however, the course of things has been as it should be. The new States for the most part are seats of communities numerous and energetic in a high degree : if in some instances the infusion of In dian, Mexican, and old Spanish blood has been considerable, the older States of the Union are in 210 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY no position to find fault. To receive new and ever new foreign strains has long been the rule : the alien elements in the far West are no more likely to dominate or affect disastrously the Anglo-Saxon core, than are the alien elements in the far East. It is probable that in both regions Anglo-Saxondom will have the force happily to assimilate the stranger masses that are poured in upon it so abundantly, gaining perhaps new energy from the infusion, as the heat and light of the sun are believed to be quickened by the con stant absorption of streams of matter from outer space. The coming into being of the great New West has been a process tumultuous, but in the main peaceful. Frontier life, always to a certain extent brutal and repulsive, is not different here. It has been necessary for the frontiersman to cope with the Indians of the plains and mountains ; and the savage foes have been not less formidable than were the Indians whom his forerunner was forced to meet on the " dark and bloody ground " a century ago. Of all Indian triumphs, not one has ever been more signal than the utter blot ting out of Custer, in the YeUowstone country, in 1876. The inevitable has happened in the West as in the East. The tribes have been borne down ; it is only here and there that, at the present day, they can be said to be dangerous. Nor can the policy of the whites in general, as THE LOCOMOTIVE 211 regards the wild tribes, be severely censured. The outlook is hopeful for all such as possess the capacity to rise above the barbarism into which they were born.^ It is almost "right to say that the Great West, the America beyond the Mississippi, is the crea tion of the locomotive ; and as regards the VaUey east of the river, its condition has been profoundly modified, if not absolutely shaped, by the same mighty agency. In the eastern Valley the era of railroad building had come in not long before the civil war ; in the western Valley it scarcely began until the war closed. Except on the mountainous rims east and west, the basin is not a difficult coun try for the railroad builders. A flat region offers little obstruction ; while forests, and latterly iron mines, close at hand, supply readily aU necessary material. The conditions have encouraged such building ; it has been pushed with characteristic American energy, the lines stretching forward sometimes at the rate of a mile or even two miles a day. The Union Pacific became a continuous road to San Francisco from the river in 1869. Southern Pacific, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern have broken their paths since, with no long intermission, through the old feeding-grounds of the buffalo and the gorges of the Rocky Moun tains. Wherever a mountain valley has possessed especial fertility, or a range has proved to be rich 1 See pages 54-56. 212 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY in ore beds, or timber has grown heavily, or a waterfall has offered power, to all such spots the railroads have gone, until the face of the land. West as weU as East, is becoming spun across, as it were, with an immense steel net. The Great West has come into being with a rapidity hitherto unexampled in the history of new lands. In 1805, Lewis and Clark, first of white men, saw the Great Falls of the Missouri, in Montana. Captain Lewis, seated on a rock near a leap of the river, describes a large cottonwood- tree on an island close by, from among the branches of which, out of its nest, a great eagle soars upward. In a year quite recent, another traveler sat in the same place : the cottonwood- tree still stood on the island ; and as the trav eler looked, lo, again from his nest among the branches a great eagle soared aloft! It was a bird evidently old, with pinions bruised and worn. The visitor conjectured that it might be the veritable eagle of Lewis and Clark. The lifetime of a bird almost spans the period during which all this vast development has gone forward ! Perhaps we have gone too fast in the exploita tion of our national domain. Our grandchildren may wish we had gone slower. The locomotive is the agent which has made it possible. Shall we look at it askance on that account, — or with approval ? In other ways the locomotive seems to many a INFLUENCE OF RAILROADS 213 doubtful blessing. The air East as well as West is full of outcry against the subjection of whole States to the domination of great lines thab have pooled their powers into vast trusts. By unfair discrimination in rates, one set of communities will see their prosperity crushed, perhaps their very existence destroyed ; while favored points become gorged with wealth and life. In count less cases it is believed that the individual is enslaved or ruined, while the corporation thrives. Again, the influence of railroads is unmistakably toward the building up of great centres, gathering into cities population taken from the villages and the farms. Each census shows, as the decades pass, that the urban population of the United States is increasing, while the proportion re maining under rural conditions ever grows smaller. Since in America the government of cities is the despair of good people generally, it is naturally questioned whether the instrumentality mainly responsible for building up cities can rightly be regarded as a boon. If one by chance penetrates into intimacy with some great railroad official whom he has heard cursed as a hard-hearted unscrupulous oppressor, very likely he will find a man thoroughly weU- meaning, perhaps of the most humane instincts, most anxious to do his duty by his fellows. Very likely the directors of the road in general wiU prove to be men of similar temper ; and perhaps 214 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both president and directors, who seem to the world to pursue a selfish and unprincipled poUcy, are perplexed at finding in their hands power of which they never dreamed, harassed with the fear of seeing the interests committed to their manage ment ruined, and following what seems to them the only feasible course to prevent catastrophe. The fact really is that our age is grappling with problems which man has not yet learned to solve. Of such problems this great new agency has been a most prolific source. Who shall say what is best to be done ? Can able and high-minded in dividuals be found upon whom such a weight of responsibility may be imposed ? Can it any more safely be imposed upon great corporations ? or in the end will it be necessary for society to assume the burden itself, — the government administer ing the railroads, as it does the post-office, thor oughly in the interest of the great public, which it represents ? The function of the historian is not to discuss present problems, but to record ; and it is plea sant to be able to record in connection with rail roads in the Mississippi VaUey some facts which in men properly eupeptic and resolute inspire hope. While possibly a certain restlessness of spirit may be begotten of the frequent moving to and fro which now is a condition of almost every man's life, it is undoubtedly the case that the mind thereby becomes quickened and broadened. INFLUENCE OF RAILROADS 215 that prejudices diminish, that knowledge grows, and that general harmony is promoted through acquaintance with many men and many places. Philosophic students have believed that the rea son why Greece came forward so rapidly and brilliantly, while kindred lands remained in dark ness, was because her territory, deeply indented by bays, gave access in every nook and corner to the sea, in antiquity the only path by which man could go forth to meet man. What ships did for ancient Greece, railroads do for the modern State, — all that, and more. For they make it possible even for the dwellers in the hearts of continents to go forth into the world, to receive the world in their own homes, thereby partaking in the benefi cent attrition which so brightens and humanizes. Again, in the management of these complex machines and intricate affairs, a higher type of man seems to be demanded ; and such a man will surely be evolved. The man fitted to cope with modern life must be more patient, temperate, punctual, watchful, judicious than were his fathers, who under their simpler conditions might with safety be slow, careless, and dull. From the switchman who, in his tower, applying with a heave on his levers compressed air to the maze of shifting rails below him, thereby shunting from track to track trains bearing millions of property or hundreds of human beings, — work that must be done witb aU swiftness and accuracy or 216 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CEJSTURY dreadful calamities would result, — from such a switchman, or from an engine-driver, with his burden of responsibility, up to the chief of some great combination who has a controlling hand upon the mines, the factories, the shops, the entire activities of a whole group of States, — in such positions, and they are coming to abound, what a call there is for a type of man such as the world has not heretofore seen ! And again, though, as railroads have developed, there has often been uncomfortable jarring between them and the communities through which they pass, the great corporation on the one hand being accused of selfish heartlessness, and the communi ties on the other hand being accused of folly and ingratitude, it is pleasant to be able to record cer tain signs of harmony as appearing here and there. Such a token of coming harmony may be found, perhaps, in enterprises undertaken by railroads of the Mississippi Valley, for the sake of educat ing and stimulating the populations through which they go.^ Certain counties in the Southwest had been raising wheat, a crop in that region scarcely profitable. The general freight agent of the rail road, anxious to build up the road's business, and knowing that business will not come unless the country tributary to it is prosperous, informs him self as to what better thing can be done than ^ "Railroads and the People," Dreiser, Harper's Magazine, vol. 100, pp. 479, etc. HARMONY PROMOTED 217 wheat raising. Taking the results of analyses of soil made by the agricultural department in Wash ington, he finds the backward counties are adapted to raising tomatoes. He sends out agents to towns, hamlets, and cross-roads, who gather to gether the farmers and make plain to them the advantages of tomato raising, and the best means for doing it. The general freight agent offers to find a market for the crop when it has been pro duced, and to convey the product to the market at a rate easy to the shipper. As a result, the coun ties undertake the raising of tomatoes, instructed and helped by the railroad ; become well-to-do ; and enjoy in due time the fruits of prosperity, — a finer, happier, more abundant life in every way. Soon the railroad meets its reward in hav ing to answer, instead of the needs of a population feeble and poverty-stricken, the full and constant requirements of a population buoyant and rich of resources. Instead of tomatoes, it may be that cabbages, or onions, or potatoes are the desirable crop. Whatever it be, according to this new plan the railroad management, with its superior facilities for finding out what is best, arouses and guides the activities of the farmers, helping them to knowledge of the best ways of exploiting their farms, ways which they could not find out them selves, and then helping them to markets. One road of the Mississippi Valley has promoted the 218 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY wholesale production of eggs and poultry to the enrichment of multitudes along its line, reaping meanwhile for itself a fine revenue out of the pros perity it has created. Still other roads have de veloped marvelously in their territory the matter of dairying, — instructing their communities as to the best breeds of cows, the erection and running of creameries, the neat and profitable ways of handling milk, butter, and cheese, — then making sure a fine market for it all. AU the time the road's own traffic reports have told a happy tale, and the value of the stock has risen high. In activity of this kind sentimental philanthropy is by no means the spring. The railroad professes to have an eye merely to its ovra interest. It has discovered that in working for the general good it is working for its own welfare. On both sides the lesson is being learned that conflict does not pay : that harmony is the expedient thing. Peace ful and pleasant cooperation spreads, and the out look for the future grows fair. Unmistakably, the influence of the railroad is to build up great centres, gathering population into cities, while the viUage and the farm are depleted. The government of the city is a matter not as yet successfully grasped in America, and many are not hopeful about it. Is the agency which perhaps is mainly responsible for swelling the size of cities to be looked on as a blessing ? Somewhere Carlyle speaks of a seventy-four THE GREAT CITY 219 of the old time. It will be built, he says, by a swindling contractor : it will be manned by a crew taken drunk from the slums of seaport towns by press-gangs : it will be officered, not by trained sailors, who get their places through merit, but by men who get their places through purchase, or because they are favorites of nobles, or be cause they are ready to render some degrading service. What more hopeless, says Carlyle, than such a conjunction ! And yet, somehow or other, that ship will go into Nelson's line of battle at Trafalgar and be a marvel of effective power. Somewhere there is saving grace. So of the typi cal American city ; it will be controUed, accord ing to common report, by a corrupt machine, headed by a disreputable boss ; charges of fraud follow every election, and a suspicion of pecula tion floats about every branch of administration ; its good citizens are accused of folding their hands supinely, while the ignorant and vicious are always out and at work. What more hopeless than the state of an American city ! And yet there wiU not be found upon the face of the earth a spot into which is gathered more of sweetness and light; for it wiU possess a noble system of public schools scattering knowledge broadcast, a public library offering good books to all, perhaps a university of renown, wide parks full of the utmost beauty, churches, hospitals, galleries of art, institutes for music, — these set in the midst 220 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTDRY of thousands of happy and virtuous homes, sus taining them and sustained by them. Most, or all, of these noble things may be found in each one of the great cities of the Mississippi Valley, — in New Orleans, St. Louis, St. Paul, and Min neapolis ; in Pittsburg and Cincinnati to the east ; in Kansas City and Denver to the west. Some where there is saving grace ; somehow we may hope to pull through. For the Mississippi VaUey the skies are indeed clouded in the ways that have been suggested, and in other ways ; but in the case of everything that threatens, a resolute heart will see some hope of meeting the danger. In some half-dozen States of the far South the black shadow stiU lowers very ominously. Slavery is destroyed, but a way has by no means yet been found through which black and white, two races in different stages of culture, may live in peace side by side. But Booker T. Washington is at work. The public schools are inestimably important, the main assimilating machinery to which for the most part we must trust to make homogeneous and intelligent and nobly Americanize the rude, incongruous masses of our population. The pub lic schools have enemies, who, if they should pre vail, would truly set back the hands on the dial- plate of time. But these enemies are a minority, and American common sense is not likely ever to suffer them to come into control. SIGNS OF HOPE 221 Labor and capital are often at war ; and some times the very foundations of social order seem imperiled. The railroads, as has just been de scribed, are working out a way of living in har mony with the communities with which they have to do. May it not be hoped that labor and capital will work out schemes of adjustment? One may to-day go into great factories and find a scene of beauty.^ The great buUdings and the homes of the working-people are embowered in flowers and surrounded by lovely lawns. A kin dergarten for the children, a public library for the employes, a fine auditorium for dramas and music ; baths, retiring-rooms, spotless dining-haUs, meals well cooked and served for a few cents. All these things are provided by the company ; and living among and using these pleasant things is the small army of working men and women, bright- faced, neatly dressed, apparently seK-respecting and contented. The visitor wiU be told that philanthropy has nothing to do with this fine provision : it is made by the capitalist simply be cause it pays to treat the work-people well. If their minds and their finer natures can be brought out, their efficiency will be greater. In the suburbs of certain cities may be found industrial vUlages, where the shops stand in gar dens and the workmen's cottages dot the green of a ^ Factory People and Their Employers : How Their Relations are made Pleasant and Profitable. L. Shuey. 1901. 222 CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY charming landscape. Each employe is a partner in the concern, receiving, according to a carefully studied plan of profit-sharing, his due percentage of aU the money made. It is sought to do justice, to promote brotherhood ; and the visitor wUl be told that it all pays. With harmony and justice as the basis, prosperity comes. Again, what a theme wiU that biographer have who sets out some day to write the life of that citizen of the Missis sippi Valley, Andrew Carnegie ! We are appaUed at our shortcomings, and, of course, have reason to be. Still it is worth while to remember how much of the wrong-doing of our day in any other age would not have been recognized as wrong-doing. GambUng, for in stance, is now under the severest ban; but our grandfathers, if money were wanted for a coUege or even a church, saw no harm in raising the funds by a lottery. Strong drink excites horror, and Kansas grows frantic because her towns con tain grog-shops. In such a town as Boston, how ever, in the last century, a leading business seems to have been the distilling of rum ; and at the ordi nation of pastors, even, if it became necessary when services were over to put the ministerial council to bed overcome by the ordination punch, no one thought the worse of them. To hold men in slavery is at the present moment the very sin of sins, to rid the land of which untold sacrifices have been made of treasure and life: but in a THE VALLEY ORGANIZED 223 former time the moral sense of even the more scrupulous was quite unvexed though men were kidnapped and bought and sold before their very eyes. I The Mississippi VaUey organized, — thirty-five miUion of English-speaking men, into whose mass elements from all the better human breeds are assimilated, occupying a region of unexampled resources, enjoying the blessing of the ancient, well-ordered Anglo-Saxon freedom! More than twenty commonwealths which are politically com plete I The constitutional frames are all in place. As a vine expands and becomes luxuriant upon its treUis, so the life of these millions clings to and is upheld by these constructions, whose pillars, old even in Alfred's day, have been confirmed and perfected and enlarged during the centuries by liberty-loving peoples. Here is, indeed, a page of history which should possess interest; here, indeed, are communities which may face the future with hope. INDEX Alloubz, Father, on Lake Superior, 34. Alvarez de Pineda, 24. Appomattox, Lee at, 203. Arkansas admitted to statehood, 209. Aryans, origin and migrations of, 21 ; they sweep over America, 22 ; displace Indians, 23. Backwoods life, features of, 115. Barbarism, stages in, 6. Barb^Marbois negotiates sale of Louisiana, 123. Barlow, Joel, his connection with the Scioto Company, 105. Beaujeu conmiaiida against Brad dock, 53. Beauregard at Shiloh, 189. Benton, Thos. H., his career, 146; votes against Nebraska bUl, 172. Bienville in Louisiana, 44. Black Hawk War, 168. Blair, Frank P., at St. Louis in 1861, 184. Blennerhassett, Harman, visited hy Burr, 142 ; overcome by him, 144. Blount, of Tennessee, intrigues against Spain, 113. Bonaparte, Lucien, makes treaty of San Ildefonso, 119. Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon. Boon, Daniel, his birth, in westem North Carolina, 63 ; goes to Ken tucky, 64 ; his companions, sur veyor, 65; captive in 1777, 76; goes beyond Mississippi, 97, 129. Border ruffians in Kansas, 174. Bouquet, Henry, his victory of Bushy Run, 67. Bourgmont exploret. in Southwest, 44. Braddock defeated, 62. Bragg, Braxton, succeeds Beaure gard, marches north in 1862, 190 ; at Stone River, 191, 192 ; at Chickamauga, 197, etc. Brown, John, of Ossawatomie, ap pears in Kansas, his character, 176, 177 ; at Harper's Ferry, 180. Buell, Don Carlos, arrives at Shiloh, 189 ; succeeded by Rosecrans, 190. Burr, Aaron, his descent, 139 ; his career, 140 ; his intrigues, goes West, 141 ; meets Jackson and Wil kinson, 142 ; reaches New Orleans, 143 ; wins Blennerhassett, 144 ; defended by Henry Clay, failure and trial, 145. Bushy Run, victory of, 57. Butler, second in command to St. Clair, 108, 109. Cabildo, in New Orleans, scene of cession of Louisiana to the United States, 124. Cadillac goes to Louisiana in 1713, 48. Caldwell, John, Scotch Irishman, 59. Camp-meetings, 116. Carver, Jonathan, in Minnesota, 73, 74. Cass, Lewis, originates doctrine of " squatter sovereignty," 172. Chase, Salmon P., Free-Soil leader, 170, 171. Chattanooga, seized by Rosecrans, 196 ; battle of, 199. Chekakou, old portage at, 32. Cherokees of a h^h type among savages, 70. Chickamauga, battle of, 197, etc. Cincinnati founded, 104. City, the American, 219. Claiborne, commissioner to receive Louisiana, 124 ; govemor of Or leans, 126. Clark, George Rogers, sets out to conquer Northwest, 80 ; attacks Kaskaskia, 81, 82 ; at Cahokia and Vincennes, S5 ; wins the Indians, 84-86 ; expedition against Vin cennes, 88, etc. Clark, William. See Lewis and Clark. Clay, Henry, his beginnings, 98 ; de fends Aaron Burr, 145 ; advocates Missouri Compromise, 167. Cleburne, Patrick, at Stone River, 191. Colorado becomes a State, 209. Connecticut resigns her Western claims, 97. 226 INDEX Constitution adopted, 98. Cornstalk, Shawnee chief, in Lord Dunmore's war, 71. Coronado, Francesco de, his march from the West, 27 ; his boldness and misfortunes, 28. Cortez in Mexico, 24. Cotton-gin, its effect on slavery, 159. Crozat, his monopoly in Louisiana, 1717, 48. Curtis, B. R., and the Dred Scott decision, 179. Custer defeated and slain by La- dians, 210, Cutler, Manasseh, and Ohio Com pany, 100 ; encounters Francois Vigo, 104. Cuyahoga, old portage from, to Mus kingum, 33. Davis, Jefferson, his influence in Washington, 180. Douglas, Stephen A., reports on Ne braska, 168; enunciates " squatter sovereignty," 169 ; introduces Ne braska bill, 170 ; struggles with opposition, 171 ; his victory, 172 ; confronted by Abraham Lincoln, 173 ; the great debate, 181. Dred Scott decision, 178, etc. Dunmore, Lord, govemor of Vir ginia, 69 ; his war with the In dians, 70, 71. Du Tisn6 explores in Southwest, 44. Eads, James B., builds the St. Louis bridge, 206 ; constructs the jetties at the Passes, 207. Education, early condition of, 156. English, advance of Thirteen Colo nies into Mississippi Valley, 51, etc. ; Clark attacked from Detroit, 87 ; attack New Orleans, 149, etc. Estevanico, first negro, 25 ; his ad ventures in New Mexico, 26 ; in Zuni traditions, 27. Farragut, David Glasgow, at New Orleans and Vicksburg, 190 ; at Port Hudson, 195. Federalists, talk disunion, 118, 123. Filles ^ la cassette, wives of pio neers, 49. Flatboats, 95, 155. Florida, De Soto lands in, 28. Fort Chartres, established, 50 ; sur rendered, 53, 78. Fort Donelson captured by Grant, 187. Fort Duquesne established, captured, 52. Fort Henry captured by Grant, 186. Franklin, State of, 96. Franklin, battle of, 201. Fremont in Missouri, 1861, 184. French, enter America, character of their colonization, 31 ; in Missis sippi Valley middle of 18th cen tury, 45 ; characteristics of their life, 46 ; their polity, tendency to roam and fall into savagery, 47 ; power in Mississippi Valley extin guished, 53; numbers in Illinois Country, condition, 79 ; Louisiana recovered and sold by, to United States, 119, etc. Frontenac, govemor of Canada, 36. Frontiersman, his character, desper ate nature of Ms task, 56 ; his ap pearance and life, 60, 61, 62 ; title to lands in the Valley, 66 ; his home, 115. Gallipolis swindle, 105, 106. Galvez, campaigns against British, 95. German immigration, 168. Gibault, Father, priest at I 82 ; helps Clark at Vincennes, 83. Grant, Ulysses S., his beginning, 185 ; his early career, at Paducah and Belmont, 186 ; captiires Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, 187 ; at Shiloh, 188, 189 ; captures Vicksburg, 192, etc. ; at Missionary Ridge, 199 ; in Virginia, 203. Green Bay, old portage, 32. Groseilliers on the S^sissippi, 1654, 34. Hamilton, Alexander, slain by Aaron Burr, 140. Hamilton, Henry, British commander at Detroit, 75 ; campaigns against Clark, 87, 88; captured at Vin cennes, 92. Harmar as Indian fighter, 107, 108. Harrison, W. H., first govemor of Indiana, 113. Helm, Leonard, commands at Vin cennes, 1778, 84 ; captured by Brit ish, 88 : captures a reinforcement, 92. Henderson, land speculator, 72. Hennepin, Father, companion of La Salle, captured by Sioux, 41 ; wan ders in Minueso^, his books, his lyuag, 42. Hood, J. B., at Chickamauga, 198; succeeds J. E. Johnston, 200 ; re pulsed at Franklin, 201 ; routed at Nashville, 202. Iberville in Louisiana, 43. Illinois admitted as a State, 158. Immigration, picturesque features, INDEX 227 153 ; not necessarily hurtful even when large, 210. Indiana, Territory of, W. H. Harri son, govemor, 113 ; admitted as a State, 158. Indians, their probable origin and general condition at the coming of the whites, 5, etc. ; sparseness of occupation, 19 ; displaced by Ar yans, 23 ; Roosevelt on their dis possession, 54 ; numbers not dimin ished, sentimentalism about them, 55 ; in Lord Dimmore's war, 71 ; in Revolutionary War, 76 ; dealt with by George Rogers Clark, 84, etc. ; barbarities of, about 1787, 106, 107 ; they defeat Custer, 210. Iowa admitted as a State, 209. Iroquois, " long house " of, 9 ; de stroy the Illinois, 38 ; their ferocity east and west, 54. Island No. 10 captured, 189. Jackson, Andrew, his beginnings, 98 ; in Congress, 112 ; fascinated by Aaron Burr, 142 ; his character, 147 ; his strength and weakness, 148 ; at New Orleans, 150 ; his army, 151 ; his victory, 152. Jay's treaty fixes northern boundary, 112. Jefferson, Thomas, author of Ken tucky Resolutions, 1798, 118 ; in the Louisiana purchase, 122 ; sends out Lewis and Clark, 127. Jesuits, their work and records, 19. Jetties built by Eads at river mouth, 207. Johnston, Albert Sidney, commands Confederates at Shiloh, 187; his death, 188. Johnston, Joseph E. , at Jackson, 193 ; succeeded by Hood, 200. Joliet, Louis, companion of Mar quette, 34. Juchereau explores in Southwest, 44. Kansas, set off from Nebraska, 170 ; troubles begin^ 174 ; Reeder's gov ernorship, 175; John Brown ap pears in, 176 ; admitted as a State, 181. Kaskaskia, founded on Wabash, 46 ; captured by Clark, 81, etc. Kenton, Simon, companion of Boon, 65 ; adventures of, 77. Kentucky, visited by Boon, 64 ; settle ment of, 72; admitted to state hood, 112. King's Mountain, battle of, lY80, won by frontiersmen, 94. Labor and Capital, their strife amel iorated, 221, 222. Lafitte, Jean and Pierre, Barataria pirates, 151. La Harpe explores in Southwest, 44. La Salle, Sieur de, comes to America, 35 ; discovers the Ohio, builds the Griffin on Lake Erie, 36 ; reaches Illinois, misfortunes, 37 ; witnesses Iroquois ravages, 38; goes down Mississippi, founds Louisiana, sails for France, 39 ; wrecked and mur dered, 40. Laussat, prefect in Louisiana, 1803, 120. La Verendrye, father and sons, in Northwest, discover Rocky Moun tains, 44, 45. Law rudely administered at first, 157. Law, John, and the Mississippi Bubble, 48. Le Clerc, death of, in San Domingo, 120. Lecompton Constitution in Kansas struggle, 181. Lee, Robert E. , overwhelmed in 1865, 203. Le Sueur ascends Mississippi, 44. Lewis and Clark sent out by Jeffer' son to explore Louisiana, 128, etc. Lexington, Kentucky, founded, 74. Llncohi, Abraham, his father rescued from death, 99 ; debates with Douglas, 181 ; President of the United States, 182. little Turtle, Miami chief, defeats St. Clair, 110. Livingston, Robert R., and the Lou isiana purchase, 122. Locomotive, creator of the Great West, 211 ; its work, 212, etc. Longstreet, James, at Chickamauga, 197, 198. Louisiana, named by La Salle, '39 ; indefinite boundaries, condition in 18th century, 48 ; helped by Mississippi Bubble, 49 ; population in 1750, 50 ; ceded to Spain, 53, 78 ; retroceded to France and sold to United States, 119, etc. ; iU at ease under new regime, 126 ; ad mitted to the Union, 158. Lynch law, 63. Lyonj Nathaniel, at St. Louis, 1861, his death at WUson's Creek, 184. Madison, author of Virginia Resolu tions, 118 ; in the Louisiana pur chase, 122. Maize perhaps exercises a retarding infiuence, 8. 228 INDEX Mallet brothers explore in South west, 44. Mandans, Lewis and Clark among, 130. Marcos de Nizza, Fray, 25. Marietta founded, 103. Marquette, Jacques, on Mississippi, 1673, 34. Maryland, her action as regards Westem claims, 97. Massachusetts resigns her Western claims, 97. Maumee, old portage to the Wabash, 32. Mexican war, 168. Minnesota, Hennepin in, 42 ; visit of Jonathan Carver, 73, 74 ; visit of Pike, 135 ; admitted as a State, 209. Missionary Ridge, battle of, 199, etc. Mississippi River, in geologic times, 1 ; its present physical character, its lower course, 2 ; its upper course, 3; blocked by Spain, 113, 119 ; steam-navigation on, 154 ; operations in civil war, 190, etc. ; a difficult problem for engineers, 204. Mississippi, Territoiy becomes a State, 158. Mississippi Valley, its area, 3; re sources, comparison with other river basins, 4 ; primitive popula tion, 5, etc. ; scarcely distiirbed middle of 18th century, 51 ; An glo-Saxon advance into, 52, etc. ; becomes part of the United States, 75, etc. ; western half acquired by Louisiana purchase, explored by Lewis and Clark, 128, etc. ; by Pike, 134, etc. ; endangered by Aaron Burr, 140, etc. ; attacked by the English, 149, etc. ; struggle over slavery in, 165, etc. ; civil war in, 183, etc. ; its vast re sources, 208 ; its rapid develop ment, 209 ; as affected by the lo comotive, 211 ; present condition and prospects under organization, 223. Missouri, its extent as Territory, 164 ; admitted as a State, 166 ; how held to the Union in 1861, 184. Missouri Compromise, 165, 166. Monroe, James, ambassador to France, 1803, 123. Montana becomes a State, 209. Moral standard, elevation of, 222. Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois, 167. Moscoso, Don Luis de, successor of de Soto, 30. Mound-building, 13. Napoleon Bonaparte, recovers Lou isiana from Spain, 119 ; plans to restore colonial empire, reasons why he could not do so, 120 ; de termines to sell Louisiana to the Americans, 121 ; sale completed, 123. Nashville, founded, 95 ; battle of, 202. Nebraska, extent as Territory, 169; becomes a State, 209. Nebraska bill, struggle over, 170, etc. New Orleans, founded, 46; its ap pearance in 1803, 125, 126; at tacked by British in 1815, 150; Jackson's defense, 151 ; his victory, 152, 153. New West, its rapid development, 208. New York resigns her Westem claims, 97. Nicolet, Jean, at Green Bay in 1634, 33. North Carolina, settlers go out from, 59 ; resigns her Western claims, 98. North Dakota becomes a State, 209. Northwest, conquered by Clark, 80, etc. ; injured by bad management of public lands, first settled from the South, 114. Northwest Ordinance, 98 ; provisions of, 101, 102. Ohio, Territory, St. Clair govemor of, 104 ; becomes a State, 1802, 127. Ohio Company, formation of, 100. Oklahoma ready for statehood, 209. Owen, Robert Dale, founds commu nity at New Harmony, Indiana, 167. Pakenham, Sir Edward, leads force against New Orleans, 149 ; his ar rival, 150 ; his overthrow, 152, 153. Panfilo de Narvaez, 24. Pea Ridge, battle of, 184. Pemberton, defeated at Vicksburg, 194. Pierce, Franklin, signs Nebraska bill, 173 ; his pro-slavery tenden cies, 175. Pike, Lieut. Z. M,, his expedition North in ISO, 5134 ; expedition West in 1806, 135 ; discovers Pike's Peak, hardships, 136; his retum and death, 137. Pinckney's treaty establishes south ern boundary, 112. Pittsburg Landing, battle of, 187, etc. Pleasant Point, battle of, 71. Pontiac, his career and deatfi, 67. Portages, old waterways into wilder ness, 32. INDEX 229 Port Hudson, naval battle at, 195 ; siege and capture of, 196. Presqu' Isle, old portage to Alle ghany, 33. Putnam, Rufus, and Ohio Company, 100. Quebec, captured, 53. Radisson on the Mississippi in 1654, 34. Railroads, their powerful influence, 213 ; problems of management, 214 ; beneficent action of, 215, etc. Reeder, Edwin, govemor of Kansas, 175. Religion, early condition of, 116, 166. Rifle, the frontiersman's, 60. Robertson, James, on the Watauga, 68 ; settles Tennessee, 71, 95 ; has Spanish sympathies, 97. Rocheblave commands for British at Kaskaskia, 81. Roosevelt, N. J., pioneer of steam- navigation on Mississippi, 154. Roosevelt, Theodore, on disposses sion of the Indians, 54. Rosecrans, W. S., succeeds Buell, 190 ; at Stone River, 191, etc. ; captures Chattanooga, 196 ; at Chickamauga, 197, etc. Sacajawea, Shoshone squaw with Lewis and Clark, 131. St. Clair, General Arthur, governor of Ohio, 104 ; his expedition and defeat, 108, etc. Ste. Genevieve, settlement of, 78. St. Ignace, home of Marquette, 34, 35. • St. Joseph, old portage, 32. St. Louis, founded by Laclede, 1764, 78 ; starting-point of Lewis and Clark, 128 ; of Pike, 134 ; in 1861, 184 ; Eads bridge at, 206. San Domingo, failure of French in, 120. Savagery, stages in, 6. Schofield defeats Hood at Franklin, 201. Schools, public, 16th section in each township set off for, 103 ; their existence threatened, 220. Scotch Irish, their origin, immigra tion to America, 58 ; their char acter, love of freedom, in western North Carolina, 59. Separatist feeling, 97, 118. Sevier, John, his origin and char acter, 68 ; at King's Mountain, 94 ; govemor of Tennessee, 112. Sheridan, Philip H., at Stone River, 191 ; at Chickamauga, 198. Sherman, W. T., his beginning, 185 ; at Shiloh, 188 ; defeated at Chick asaw Bayou, 192 ; at Vicksburg, 191 ; at Missionary Ridge, 199 ; marches to the sea, 200. Shiloh, battle of, 187, etc. Sioux, capture Hennepin, 41 ; their ferocity, 55. Slavery, prohibited in Northwest through Southern men, 100 ; its antiquity and persistency, 161 ; tends to die out at end of ISth century, 162 ; revived hy cotton- gin, 163 ; its legacy of trouble, 220. Soto, Fernando de, lands in Florida, 28 ; fights Indians, reaches Missis sippi, dies, 29. South Carolina resigns her Westem claims, 97. South Dakota becomes a State, 209. Spaniards, come to Mississippi Valley, 24 ; Spanish system promotes sur vival of unfittest, 30 ; protest against French settlement of Lou isiana in 1699, 43 ; Louisiana ceded to, by French, 78 ; retroceded, 119. Steam-navigation introduced ou Mis sissippi, 154. Stone River, battle of, 191, 192. Taney, R. B., and the Dred Scott decision, 179. Tecumseh at Tippecanoe, 146. Tennessee, settled, 67 ; admitted to statehood, 112. Tennessee River, its source and course, 66. Thayer, Eli, foimds Emigrant Aid Society, 174. Thomas, Crcorge H., at Stone River, 191 ; at Chickamauga, 198 ; at Missionary Ridge, 199 ; at Nash ville, 202. Tonti, lieutenant of La Salle, 37 ; commands in the Illinois, 39 ; dies of yellow fevet, 49. Topeka Constitution, 176. Toussaint I'Ouverture thwarts Na poleon in San Domingo, 120. Transylvania, organized, 73. United States, foundation of, career of, 75. Van Dorn fortifies Vicksburg, 190. Vicksburg, fortified, 190 ; attacked, 192, etc. ; captured, 194. Victor named to command in Louisi ana by Napoleon, 120. Vigo, FrauQois, helps Clark against Vincennes, 88 ; encounters Ma nasseh Cutler, 104. Vincennes, founded on Wabash, 46 ; 230 INDEX won by Gibault, 83 ; captured hy Clark, 89, etc. Virginia resigns her Westem claims, 97. Wabash, Clark in the drowned lands of, 89, etc. Walker penetrates Mississippi Val ley, 1748, 51. Wallace, Lew, at Donelson, 187. Washington, on headwaters of Alle ghany, as a pioneer, becomes a sol dier, 62 ; as surveyor, 65. Watauga Association, 68; constitu tion, 69. Wayne, his expedition and victory over the Indians, 111. West Virginia admitted as a State, 209. Whitney, EU, invents cotton-gin, 115. Wilkinson, James, commissioner to receive Louisiana in 1803, 124 ; dis patches Pike northward, 134 ; westward, 135 ; becomes involved with Aaron Burr, 142; his career and character, 143 ; betrays Burr, 145 ; his disgrace, 146. Wilson's Creek, battle of, 184. Wisconsin, admitted as State, 209. Wyoming becomes a State, 209. ElectrotyPed and printed by H, O. Houghton &* Ctn. Cambridge, Mass,, U.S. A* YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 9002 02824 1322