No one better combined science and colonization, propaganda and practical information than John Charles Frémont. The dashing officer of the Topographical Engineers will end this chapter begun by the reluctant print icon Daniel Boone. If Frémont had a demure bone in his body, he amputated it early and buried it deep. An illegitimate child, he had an eye for opportunity that may have been related to his social insecurity. He took advantage of one friendship to get a naval appointment, which enabled him to master mathematics and engineering. With these scientific tools at his command, he caught his next golden ring in the courtship and marriage of Jessie Benton, daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, senator from Missouri and a powerful western voice in Washington. Benton’s contacts were strung along the line of command, and he cried out for attention to the needs of the West—greater support for explorations and surveys, land developers, and railroads. Jessie inherited her father’s outlook, energy, and iron will. She defied him and eloped when he opposed her marriage to the young, insubstantial Frémont. In time, daughter and father reconciled, and Benton became Frémont’s patron.
John C. Frémont. Engraving by J. C. Buttre, 1856. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Frémont’s first assignments for the Topographical Engineers—which Benton secured—made him into one of the great celebrities of his day. From 1843 to 1844, he surveyed the Oregon Trail with a company made up mostly of métis voyageurs, following a route carefully planned by Benton and President John Tyler. They wanted the expedition to appear strictly scientific, and science did provide an important motivation. The group certainly looked the part, bristling with delicate European equipment, including barometers, field telescopes, and chronometers. The engineers calculated innumerable latitudes, longitudes, and elevations and observed the emergence of the first satellite of Jupiter. They collected fossils from rocks, new plants (such as Frémontia), and hundreds of birds, fish, and mammals.
But Frémont’s report—skillfully ghostwritten by his wife, Jessie Benton—was more than a scientific treatise. Attention to availability of water and fuel, grass and pasturage, and the ease of the grade all spoke to the needs of overland emigrants. He noted the Americans he saw on the trail and even reported renegade cows, escapees from the wagon trains, grazing among the bison herds. These passages were calculated to portray a robust Oregon migration fully backed by the federal government. Senator Benton arranged for the printing and distribution, at government expense, of ten thousand copies of the report, including an excellent map of the trail produced by the “Great Pathfinder.” In reality Frémont was guided by others. His expeditions included a number of Indian scouts and mountain men, including Kit Carson, who had spent twenty years trapping furs in the southern Rockies. Jessie Benton’s narrative neglected the Indians but gave Carson ample time in the spotlight, and he soon became equally famous, the mid-nineteenth-century inheritor of Daniel Boone’s mantle (Carson had, in fact, been raised in the home of a Boone descendant). It was a vivid demonstration of the combination of science, practicality, and popular culture that characterized the Topographical Engineers.
Jessie Benton Frémont. Photograph by Carleton Watkins, c. 1855. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Frémont’s report became a best seller among easterners as well as emigrants, exciting talk in New York drawing rooms and Missouri barns. Western writer Joaquin Miller later recalled reading the report as a boy. “I fancied I could see Frémont’s men, flags in the air, Frémont at the head, waving his sword, his horse neighing wildly in the mountain wind, with unknown and unnamed empires on every hand.”24
THE OVERLAND TRAILS
Thousands of Americans carried Frémont with them. He was the Pied Piper of their empire, and he represented the coming of a new power structure. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, families had ruled the West through the ties that bound them. This was due in great part to the influence wielded by the Indian nations tapping into the reservoir of energy sunk in the grass of the Great Plains. Through their horses, the Comanches, the Sioux, the Osages, and the Cheyennes commanded the region and forced their European partners to trade according to their customs, including building alliances through marriage. One of the prime upwardly mobile romancers in the history of the United States, Frémont understood the strategic necessity of a good marriage as well as any Comanche chief. His star rose and fell in tandem with Jessie Benton and her senator father. Yet, unlike his trusty scout Carson, who married across cultures three times, twice to native women and once to a prominent Mexican woman in Taos, Frémont’s knots tied him to the East and the federal government, cultures and institutions that drew their power from sources other than grass, horses, and interpersonal alliances. The true path Frémont blazed connected government bureaucrats, venture capitalists, and stockholders to western domains. These outsiders would play an increasingly determinate role in the future of the region.
FURTHER READING
Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (2009)
Jon T. Coleman, Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation (2012)
Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996)
John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992)
Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (2011)
Richard E. Oglesby, Manuel Lisa and the Opening of the Missouri Fur Trade (1963)
Jared Orsi, Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike (2014)
Thomas P. Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (2004)
Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (1980)
David J. Weber, The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540–1846 (1971)
David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–40: A Geographical Synthesis (1979)
6
War and Destiny
In 1845 a young congressman from Illinois redrew the map of North America on the floor of the House of Representatives. Constrained in stature but bursting with grandiosity, Stephen A. Douglas pronounced the United States too big for its borders. The time had arrived, he announced, “to blot out the lines on the map which now marked our national boundaries . . . and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself.” His speech merged liberty and the American nation. Both seemed bent on expansion. Liberty was enveloping the globe, and the rebellious spirit of 1776 placed the United States at the leading edge of an antimonarchical wave that had engulfed France, Haiti, Mexico, and huge swaths of South America. Governments everywhere were breaking loose and starting anew. By the time Douglas verbalized this connection, many Americans had subscribed to the theory that their nation had reinvented the ancient human endeavor of territorial aggression. A new-style colonizer, the United States would break shackles as it gobbled up ground. It had become, in a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson, an “empire of liberty.”1
The empire of liberty was an unstable celebratory concoction, a homemade cherry bomb that boomed with grand intentions and exploded in its inventors’ faces more often than not. The same communications revolution that delivered Frémont’s report to households across the country also spread the idea, in the words of newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan, of the nation’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Congressman Andrew Kennedy of Indiana put it in more prosaic language. “Go to the West,” Kennedy declared, “and see a young man with his mate of eighteen, and [after] a lapse of thirty years, visit him again, and instead of two, you will find twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table.” What his math elided, of course, was the purposeful federal policy and ruthless military power required to conquer a continent. The America
n people did not acquire an empire simply by doing what came naturally. The ideology of “manifest destiny” masked the messy business of seizing, occupying, and ruling over foreign peoples and nations. It also attempted to submerge controversies that bitterly divided Americans over expansion.2
Manifest destiny was not, as is so often implied, a deeply held American folk belief. It was a self-conscious creation of propagandists like O’Sullivan, who used the megaphone of the penny press in an attempt to uncouple the politics of expansion from the growing sectional conflict over slavery. That dispute first threatened to split the country in 1820, when northern congressmen added the antislavery clause of the Northwest Ordinance to the bill elevating Missouri from a territory to a state. After fierce debate and shrill threats of disunion, Congress crafted a compromise, balancing Missouri’s admission with statehood for Maine and agreeing that henceforth slavery would be “forever prohibited” in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36 degree, 30 minute latitude line. American political orthodoxy proclaimed that the more ground the United States covered, the less divided the nation would become. But the West would prove more jackhammer than balm. Eventually, all the rattling that came with expansion would tear the country apart.
The West was never free from race, slavery, or a cornucopia of other ethnic, religious, and gender differences. Americans inherited a complex set of racial ideas, captivity arrangements, religious traditions, gender norms, and sexual orientations from the native and European frontiers that came before. The newcomers added their own patterns of difference to this crazy quilt of us-versus-thems. Difference animated conflicts over property, politics, and citizenship. Difference stimulated anger, hate, discrimination, and oppression. Difference ignited violence—riots, lynchings, and massacres. Yet the American West reveals a mixed legacy. Even in opposition—perhaps especially in opposition—humans forged a shared past. Odium and trauma linked entire populations, creating enduring, though at times extremely unhappy, bonds. We confront grim histories not only to recognize victims and expose injustices but to invite the past into the present in the off chance that we might transform tragic opposition into humane reconciliation. That’s the hope, at least, that through the honest engagement with history, we can better understand the present.
. . .
The Americans perceived themselves as the harbingers of liberty. Yet slavery was the most expansive force in American life. That was something that no one had expected in the late eighteenth century at the nation’s founding. The leaders of the Revolution—including prominent slave masters such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—believed that “the peculiar institution” was on its way to extinction. Instead it became the most important driver of economic growth. The production of upland cotton exploded with the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s, and during the first half of the nineteenth century, cotton accounted for more than half the value of the nation’s exports. The manufacture of cotton cloth in England, Europe, and the northern United States inaugurated an industrial revolution, stimulated the growth of a proletarian working class, and generated enormous reserves of capital. Slavery was the beating heart of the American economic system, and it grew hand in hand with continental expansion.
Slaves being driven to the Mississippi frontier. From Wilson S. Armistead, A Tribute for the Negro (New York, 1848).
Slaves produced cotton on land seized from Indians. Following the War of 1812, planters began colonizing the millions of acres ceded after Andrew Jackson’s victory over the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, land that was perfect for cotton production. Soon planters were encroaching on the unceded lands of other southern Indian nations, including the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, whose combined population numbered between fifty and sixty thousand. Southern politicians pressed the federal government to force them all out, but both President James Monroe and his successor, President John Quincy Adams, refused. In 1828 Jackson, who grew cotton and drove slaves on his plantation estate near Nashville, defeated Adams and won the presidency on a platform of forcing all Indian people from the states and relocating them west of the Mississippi. In 1830 Congress followed Jackson’s lead and passed the Indian Removal Act. Removal was to be voluntary, the president insisted, but in the context of the times, everyone understood that the law eliminated federal protection and exposed Indian nations to the aggression of the individual states.
INDIAN REMOVAL
Opponents of the Removal Act pointed out the “civilized” accomplishments of Indians like the Cherokees—their syllabary, their Christianity, and their slave-owning. If they could not be absorbed in the nation, then what Indians could? Jackson countered with a theory of history. “Those tribes can not exist surrounded by our settlements,” he declared. “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.” In Jackson’s twisted logic, he was doing the Cherokees a favor by shoving them out of the way of a runaway train. Federal commissioners, employing bluster, bullying, and bribery, pressured the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks into signing treaties of removal.3
The Cherokees, however, remained adamant in their opposition. They wrote a constitution, elected John Ross as their president, and brought suit in federal court against the infringement of their sovereignty by the state of Georgia. The case soon came before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the majority opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), tried to have it both ways. There could be no doubt, he declared, that the Cherokee Nation was “a distinct political society, separated from others, [and] capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” But, Marshall continued, “it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may, more correctly, perhaps be denominated domestic dependent nations.” Because they were not completely “foreign” and only foreign nations could sue one of the states, Marshall threw out the Cherokees’ suit. President Jackson cheered.
But the decision also bound the federal government to the Cherokees, and within months Georgia tested those obligations by passing an act regulating the presence of white people in Cherokee territory. When two missionaries to the Cherokees defied Georgia’s authority over their movements, they were imprisoned, and one of them, Samuel Worcester, brought a federal suit against Georgia. Writing for the majority in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice Marshall concluded that the Cherokees constituted “a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter.” The Cherokees had won and their leaders rejoiced. But President Jackson had the last say. “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born,” he declared, meaning that the government of the United States would do nothing to prevent Georgia from enforcing its rule over the Cherokees. The president was perfectly willing to violate the Constitution to cleanse as many Indians as possible from the East.4
Removal split the Cherokees. In 1835 a minority Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota, which relinquished the Cherokee homeland in exchange for five million dollars and permanent lands on the Arkansas River, west of the Mississippi. Led by President John Ross, fifteen thousand Cherokees, nearly the entire population, signed a petition rejecting that treaty. The dispute reached national attention as the Senate debated the treaty’s ratification. What opponents termed the “fraud upon the Cherokee people” passed by only one vote. In 1838 seven thousand troops under the command of General Winfield Scott rounded up the Cherokees who refused to leave Georgia and herded them into camps in preparation for their forced relocation. The federal government as
serted its almighty power on the cheap. Under funded and poorly organized, the ethnic cleansing operation proceeded with little food and poor equipment. Many people suffered from malnutrition and dysentery. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died of epidemic diseases. On what the Cherokees called the “Trail on Which We Cried,” the Americans displayed just how far they would go to expel groups considered racially different and politically uncooperative. The forced removal of Indian peoples, former president John Quincy Adams wrote in his private diary, was “among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgement—but as His own time and by His own means.”5
Andrew Jackson. Engraving from a painting by W. J. Hubbard, 1834. Library of Congress.
. . .
Thousands of eastern Indians, in the North as well as the South, had successfully assimilated into the mainstream of nineteenth-century American society, flourishing in its deepest currents. They were landowners, farmers, stock raisers, and businesspeople as well as citizens of their own nations. Now white Americans pressed them to cede their lands in exchange for territory in the West. Many left and made the best of the situation with little protest; others resisted without resorting to bloodshed. The Winnebagos of Wisconsin, for example, simply drifted back to the former homes after an unpleasant stint in the arid West.
The American West Page 21
