The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

The heavy sod of the Iowa prairies was beyond the strength of the individual settler. In the years of first development the professional sod breaker was on hand, a most important member of his community, with his great plough, and large teams of from six to twelve oxen, making the ground ready for the first crop. In the frontier mind the land belonged to him who broke it, regardless of mere title. The quarrel between the squatter and the speculator was perennial. Congress in its laws sought to dispose of lands by auction to the highest bidder,—a scheme through which the sturdy impecunious farmer saw his clearing in danger of being bought over his modest bid by an undeserving speculator. Accordingly the history of Iowa and Wisconsin is full of the claims associations by which the squatters endeavored to protect their rights and succeeded well. By voluntary association they agreed upon their claims and bounds. Transfers and sales were recorded on their books. When at last the advertised day came for the formal sale of the township by the federal land officer the population attended the auction in a body, while their chosen delegate bid off the whole area for them at the minimum price, and without competition. At times it happened that the speculator or the casual purchaser tried to bid, but the squatters present with their cudgels and air of anticipation were usually able to prevent what they believed to be unfair interference with their rights. The claims associations were entirely illegal; yet they reveal, as few American institutions do, the orderly tendencies of an American community even when its organization is in defiance of existing law.

The development of the new territories of Iowa and Wisconsin in the decade after their erection carried both far towards statehood. Burlington, the earliest capital of Iowa, was in 1840 "the largest, wealthiest, most business-doing and most fashionable city, on or in the neighborhood of the Upper Mississippi.... We have three or four churches," said one of its papers, "a theatre, and a dancing school in full blast." As early as 1843 the Black Hawk purchase was overrun. The Sauk and Foxes had ceded provisionally all their Iowa lands and the Potawatomi were in danger. "Although it is but ten years to-day," said their agent, speaking of their Chicago treaty of 1833, "the tide of emigration has rolled onwards to the far West, until the whites are now crowded closely along the southern side of these lands, and will soon swarm along the eastern side, to exhibit the very worst traits of the white man's character, and destroy, by fraud and illicit intercourse, the remnant of a powerful people, now exposed to their influence." Iowa was admitted to the Union in 1846, after bickering over her northern boundary; Wisconsin followed in 1848; the remnant of both, now known as Minnesota, was erected as a territory in its own right in the next year.

Fort Snelling was nearly twenty years old before it came to be more than a distant military outpost. Until the treaties of 1837 it was in the midst of the Sioux with no white neighbors save the agents of the fur companies, a few refugees from the Red River country, and a group of more or less disreputable hangers-on. An enlargement of the military reserve in 1837 led to the eviction by the troops of its near-by squatters, with the result that one of these took up his grog shop, left the peninsula between the Mississippi and St. Peter's, and erected the first permanent settlement across the former, where St. Paul now stands. Iowa had desired a northern boundary which should touch the St. Peter's River, but when she was admitted without it and Wisconsin followed with the St. Croix as her western limit, Minnesota was temporarily without a government.

The Minnesota territorial act of 1849 preceded the active colonization of the country around St. Paul. Mendota, Fort Snelling, St. Anthony's, and Stillwater all came into active being, while the most enterprising settlers began to push up the Minnesota River, as the St. Peter's now came to be called. As usual the Indians were in the way. As usual the claims associations were resorted to. And finally, as usual the Indians yielded. At Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, in the autumn of 1851, the magnates of the young territory witnessed great treaties by which the Sioux, surrendering their portion of the permanent Indian frontier, gave up most of their vast hunting grounds to accept valley reserves along the Minnesota. And still more rapidly population came in after the cession.

The new Northwest was settled after the great day of the keelboat on western waters. Iowa and the lead country had been reached by the steamboats of the Mississippi. The Milwaukee district was reached by the steamboats from the lakes. The upper Mississippi frontier was now even more thoroughly dependent on the river navigation than its neighbors had been, while its first period was over before any railroad played an immediate part in its development.

The boom period between the panics of 1837 and 1857 thus added another concentric band along the northwest border, disregarding the Indian frontier and introducing a large population where the prophet of the early thirties had declared that civilization could never go. The Potawatomi of Iowa had yielded in 1846, the Sioux in 1851. The future of the other tribes in their so-called permanent homes was in grave question by the middle of the decade. The new frontier by 1857 touched the tip of Lake Superior, included St. Paul and the lower Minnesota valley, passed around Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa, and reached the Missouri near Sioux City. In a few more years the right wing of the frontier would run due north from the bend of the Missouri.

The hopeful life of the fifties surpassed that of the thirties in its speculative zeal. The home seeker had to struggle against the occasional Indian and the unscrupulous land agent as well as his own too sanguine disposition. Fictitious town sites had to be distinguished from the real. Fraudulent dealers more than once sold imaginary lots and farms from beautifully lithographed maps to eastern investors. Occasionally whole colonies of migrants would appear on the steamboat wharves bound for non-existent towns. And when the settler had escaped fraud, and avoided or survived the racking torments of fever or cholera, the Indian danger was sometimes real.

Iowa had advanced her northwest frontier up the Des Moines River, past the old frontier fort, until in 1856 a couple of trading houses and a few families had reached the vicinity of Spirit Lake. Here, in March, 1857, one of the settlers quarrelled with a wandering Indian over a dog. The Indian belonged to Inkpaduta's band of Sioux, one not included in the treaty of 1851. Forty-seven dead settlers slaughtered by the band were found a few days later by a visitor to the village. A hard winter campaign by regulars from Fort Ridgely resulted in the rescue of some of the captives, but the indignant demand of the frontier for retaliation was never granted.

In spite of fraud and danger the population grew. For the first time the railroad played a material part in its advance. The great eastern trunk lines had crossed the Alleghanies into the Ohio valley. Chicago had received connection with the East in 1852. The Mississippi had been reached by 1854. In the spring of 1856 all Iowa celebrated the opening of a railway bridge at Davenport.

The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837. Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development that chartered railways and even built them between points that scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer, who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak gold.