The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

[1] My usage in spelling tribal names follows the list agreed upon by the bureaus of Indian Affairs and American Ethnology, and printed in C. J. Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 452, Serial 4253, p. 1021.

Five weeks after the special message Congress authorized a negotiation with the Kansa and Osage nations. These tribes roamed over a vast country extending from the Platte River to the Red, and west as far as the lower slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Their limits had never been definitely stated, although the Osage had already surrendered claim to lands fronting on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Missouri and the Arkansas. Not only was it now desirable to limit them more closely in order to make room for Indian immigrants, but these tribes had already begun to worry traders going overland to the Southwest. As soon as the frontier reached the bend of the Missouri, the profits of the Santa Fé trade had begun to tempt caravans up the Arkansas valley and across the plains. To preserve peace along the Santa Fé trail was now as important as to acquire grounds. Governor Clark negotiated the treaties at St. Louis. On June 2, 1825, he persuaded the Osage chiefs to surrender all their lands except a strip fifty miles wide, beginning at White Hair's village on the Neosho, and running indefinitely west. The Kaw or Kansa tribe was a day later in its agreement, and reserved a thirty-mile strip running west along the Kansas River. The two treaties at once secured rights of transit and pledges of peace for traders to Santa Fé, and gave the United States title to ample lands west of the frontier on which to plant new Indian colonies.

The autumn of 1825 witnessed at Prairie du Chien the first step towards peace and condensation along the northern frontier. The Erie Canal, not yet opened, had not begun to drain the population of the East into the Northwest, and Indians were in peaceful possession of the lake shores nearly to Fort Wayne. West of Lake Michigan were constant tribal wars. The Potawatomi, Menominee, and Chippewa, first, then Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes, and finally the various bands of Sioux around the Mississippi and upper Missouri, enjoyed still their traditional hostility and the chase. Governor Clark again, and Lewis Cass, met the tribes at the old trading post on the Mississippi to persuade them to bury the tomahawk among themselves. The treaty, signed August 19, 1825, defined the boundaries of the different nations by lines of which the most important was between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes, which was later to be known as the Neutral Line, across northern Iowa. The basis of this treaty of Prairie du Chien was temporary at best. Before it was much more than ratified the white influx began, Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake Michigan blossomed out into Chicago, and squatters penetrating to Rock Island in the Mississippi had provoked the war of 1832, in which Black Hawk made the last stand of the Indians in the old Northwest. In the thirties the policy of removal completed the opening of Illinois and Wisconsin to the whites.

Indian Country and Agricultural Frontier, 1840–1841

Showing the solid line of reservation lands extending from the Red River to Green Bay, and the agricultural frontier of more than six inhabitants per square mile.

The policy of removal and colonization urged by Monroe and Calhoun was supported by Congress and succeeding Presidents, and carried out during the next fifteen years. It required two transactions, the acquisition by the United States of western titles, and the persuasion of eastern tribes to accept the new lands thus available. It was based upon an assumption that the frontier had reached its final resting place. Beyond Missouri, which had been admitted in 1821, lay a narrow strip of good lands, merging soon into the American desert. Few sane Americans thought of converting this land into states as had been the process farther east. At the bend of the Missouri the frontier had arrived; there it was to stay, and along the lines of its receding flanks the Indians could be settled with pledges of permanent security and growth. Here they could never again impede the western movement in its creation of new communities and states. Here it would be possible, in the words of Lewis Cass, to "leave their fate to the common God of the white man and the Indian."

The five years following the treaty of Prairie du Chien were filled with active negotiation and migration in the lands beyond the Missouri. First came the Shawnee to what was promised as a final residence. From Pennsylvania, into Ohio, and on into Missouri, this tribe had already been pushed by the advancing frontier. Now its ever shrinking lands were cut down to a strip with a twenty-five-mile frontage on the Missouri line and an extension west for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the south bank of the Kansas River and the south line of the Kaw reserve. Its old neighbors, the Delawares, became its new neighbors in 1829, accepting the north bank of the Kansas, with a Missouri River frontage as far north as the new Fort Leavenworth, and a ten-mile outlet to the buffalo country, along the northern line of the Kaw reserve. Later the Kickapoo and other minor tribes were colonized yet farther to the north. The chase was still to be the chief reliance of the Indian population. Unlimited supplies of game along the plains were to supply his larder, with only occasional aid from presents of other food supplies. In the long run agriculture was to be encouraged. Farmers and blacksmiths and teachers were to be provided in various ways, but until the longed-for civilization should arrive, the red man must hunt to live. The new Indian frontier was thus started by the colonization of the Shawnee and Delawares just beyond the bend of the Missouri on the old possessions of the Kaw.