The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

The northern flank of the Indian frontier, as it came to be established, ran along the line of the frontier of white settlements, from the bend of the Missouri, northeasterly towards the upper lakes. Before the final line of the reservations could be determined the Erie Canal had begun to shape the Northwest. Its stream of population was filling the northern halves of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and working up into Michigan and Wisconsin. Black Hawk's War marked the last struggle for the fertile plains of upper Illinois, and made possible an Indian line which should leave most of Wisconsin and part of Iowa open to the whites.

Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reënforced the guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois, and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the Neutral Strip.

The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River, gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of the Wisconsin River.

The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies, they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St. Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country. With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to Green Bay.

While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo, in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way for the colonizing policy.

The southern part of the Indian Country was early set aside as the new home of the eastern confederacies lying near the Gulf of Mexico. The Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had in the twenties begun to feel the pressure of the southern states. Jackson's campaigns had weakened them even before the cession of Florida to the United States removed their place of refuge. Georgia was demanding their removal when Monroe announced his policy.

A new home for the Choctaw was provided in the extreme Southwest in 1830. Ten years before, this nation had been given a home in Arkansas territory, but now, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, it received a new eastern limit in a line drawn from Fort Smith on the Arkansas due south to the Red River. Arkansas had originally reached from the Mississippi to the hundredth meridian, but it was, after this Choctaw cession, cut down to the new Choctaw line, which remains its boundary to-day. From Fort Smith the new boundary was run northerly to the southwest corner of Missouri.

The Creeks and Cherokee promised in 1833 to go into the Indian Country, west of Arkansas and north of the Choctaw. The Creeks became the neighbors of the Choctaw, separated from them by the Canadian River, while the Cherokee adjoined the Creeks on the north and east. With small exceptions the whole of the present state of Oklahoma was thus assigned to these three nations. The migrations from their old homes came deliberately in the thirties and forties. The Chickasaw in 1837 purchased from the Choctaw the right to occupy the western end of their strip between the Red and Canadian. The Seminole had acquired similar rights among the Creeks, but were so reluctant to keep the pledge to emigrate that their removal taxed the ability of the United States army for several years.

Between the southern portion of the Indian Country and the Missouri bend minor tribes were colonized in profusion. The Quapaw and United Seneca and Shawnee nations were put into the triangle between the Neosho and Missouri. The Cherokee received an extra grant in the "Cherokee Neutral Strip," between the Osage line of 1825 and the Missouri line. Next to the north was made a reserve for the New York Indians, which they refused to occupy. The new Miami home came next, along the Missouri line; while north of this were little reserves for individual bands of Ottawa and Chippewa, for the Piankashaw and Wea, the Kaskaskia and Peoria, the last of which adjoined the Shawnee line of 1825 upon the south.

The Indian frontier, determined upon in 1825, had by 1840 been carried into fact, and existed unbroken from the Red River and Texas to the Lakes. The exodus from the old homes to the new had in many instances been nearly completed. The tribes were more easily persuaded to promise than to act, and the wrench was often hard enough to produce sullenness or even war when the moment of departure arrived. A few isolated bands had not even agreed to go. But the figures of the migrations, published from year to year during the thirties, show that all of the more important nations east of the new frontier had ceded their lands, and that by 1840 the migration was substantially over.