Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

The Creeks and Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws of the Gulf region were more advanced towards civilization than the Indians of the northwest. While the latter lived chiefly by hunting and trapping, the southwestern Indians had developed a considerable agriculture and a sedentary life. For that very reason, however, they were the more obnoxious to the pioneers who pressed upon their territory from all sides; and, as we shall see, strenuous efforts were made to remove them beyond the Mississippi.

Throughout the decade the problem of the future of the Indians east of this river was a pressing one, and the secretaries of war, to whose department the management of the tribes belonged, made many plans and recommendations for their civilization, improvement, and assimilation. But the advance of the frontier broke down the efforts to preserve and incorporate these primitive people in the dominant American society. [Footnote: Am. State Paps., Indian, II., 275, 542, et passim; J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, VII., 89, 90, 92; Richardson, Messages and Papers, II., 234, et seq.]

Across the Mississippi, settlement of the whites had, in the course of this decade, pushed up the Missouri well towards the western boundary of the state, and, as the map of the settlement shows, had made advances towards the interior in parts of Arkansas as well. But these were only narrow wedges of civilization thrust into the Indian country, the field of operations of the fur-traders. Successors to the French traders who had followed the rivers and lakes of Canada far towards the interior, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Northwest Company under British charters had carried their operations from the Great Lakes to the Pacific long before Americans entered the west. As early as 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific from the Great Lakes by way of Canada. [Footnote: Mackenzie, Travels.] The year before, an English ship under Vancouver explored the northwestern coast in the hope of finding a passage by sea to the north and east. He missed the mouth of the Columbia, which in the following month was entered by an American, Captain Gray, who ascended the river twenty miles. The expedition of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806, made the first crossing of the continent from territory of the United States, and strengthened the claims of that country to the region of the Columbia. [Footnote: Cf. Charming, Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap vii.]

John Jacob Astor's attempt to plant a trading-post at Astoria [Footnote: Irving, Astoria.] had been defeated by the treachery of his men, who, at the opening of the War of 1812, turned the post over to the British Northwest fur-traders. The two great branches of the Columbia, the one reaching up into Canada, and the other pushing far into the Rocky Mountains, on the American side, constituted lines of advance for the rival forces of England and the United States in the struggle for the Oregon country. The British traders rapidly made themselves masters of the region. [Footnote: Coues (editor), Greater Northwest.] By 1825 the Hudson's Bay Company monopolized the English fur-trade and was established at Fort George (as Astoria was rechristened), Fort Walla-Walla, and Fort Vancouver, near the mouth of the Willamette. Here, for twenty-two years, its agent, Dr. John McLoughlin, one of the many Scotchmen who have built up England's dominion in the new countries of the globe, ruled like a benevolent monarch over the realms of the British traders. [Footnote: Schafer, Pacific Northwest, chap. viii.] From these Oregon posts as centers they passed as far south as the region of Great Salt Lake, in what was then Mexican territory.

While the British traders occupied the northwest coast the Spaniards held California. Although they established the settlement of San Francisco in the year of the declaration of American independence, settlement grew but slowly. The presidios, the missions, with their Indian neophytes, and the cattle ranches feebly occupied this imperial domain. Yankee trading-ships gathered hides and tallow at San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco; Yankee whalers, seal- hunters, and fur-traders sought the northwest coast and passed on to China to bring back to Boston and Salem the products of the far east. [Footnote: R. H. Dana, Two Years before the Mast.] But Spain's possession was not secure. The genius for expansion which had already brought the Russians to Alaska drew them down the coast even to California, and in 1812 they established Fort Ross at Bodega Bay, a few miles below the mouth of Russian River, north of San Francisco. This settlement, as well as the lesser one in the Farallone Islands, endured for nearly a generation, a menace to Spain's ascendancy in California in the chaotic period when her colonies were in revolt. [Footnote: H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of California, II., 628; Hittel, Hist. of California.]

In the mean time, from St. Louis as a center, American fur-traders, the advance-guard of settlement, were penetrating into the heart of the vast wilderness between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade of the Far West] This was a more absolute Indian domain than was the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi at the end of the seventeenth century—an empire of mountains and prairies, where the men of the Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling waves of that tide of civilization that was to sweep them away. The savage population of the far west has already been described in an earlier volume of this series.[Footnote: Farrand, Basis of Am. Hist. (Am. Nation, II.), chaps, viii., ix., xii.; see also chap. iv. On the location of the Indians, see map, p. 309; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., pt. v., chaps, viii., ix., x.; Bureau of Ethnology, Seventh Annual Report.]

With the development of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the most flourishing period of the St. Louis trade in the far west began. The founder of this company was William H. Ashley, a Virginian. Between the autumn of 1823 and the spring of the next year, one of his agents erected a post at the mouth of the Bighorn, and sent out his trappers through the Green River valley, possibly even to Great Salt Lake. A detachment of this party found the gateway of the Rocky Mountains, through the famous South Pass by way of the Sweetwater branch of the north fork of the Platte. This pass commanded the routes to the great interior basin and to the Pacific Ocean. What Cumberland Gap was in the advance of settlement across the Alleghenies, South Pass was in the movement across the Rocky Mountains; through it passed the later Oregon and California trails to the Pacific coast.

On the lower Missouri and at various places in the interior,[Footnote: See map, p. 114; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I., 44-51 (describes posts, etc.).] stockaded trading-posts were erected by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its rival, the American Fur Company. In these posts the old fur-trade life of the past went on, with French half-breed packmen and boatmen, commanded by the bourgeois. But in some of the best trading-grounds, the savages declined to permit the erection of posts, and so, under Ashley's leadership, bands of mounted American trappers, chiefly Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, and Missourians, were sent out to hunt and trade in the rich beaver valleys of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain trappers were the successors to the Allegheny frontiersmen, carrying on in this new region, where nature wrought on a vaster plan, the old trapping life which their ancestors had carried on through Cumberland Gap in the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky.

Yearly, in June and July, a rendezvous was held in the mountains, to which the brigades of trappers returned with the products of their hunt, to receive the supplies for the coming year. Here, also, came Indian tribes to trade, and bands of free trappers, lone wanderers in the mountains, to sell their furs and secure supplies. [Footnote: Irving, Bonneville, chap. i.] The rendezvous was usually some verdure-clad valley or park set in the midst of snow-capped mountains, a paradise of game. Such places were Jackson's Hole, at the foot of the lofty Tetons, Pierre's Hole, not far away, and Ogden's Hole, near the present site of Ogden, in Utah. Great Salt Lake was probably first visited by Bridger in 1824, and the next year a party of Hudson Bay trappers were expelled by Americans who took possession of their furs. In 1826, Ashley carried a six-pounder cannon on wheels to Utah Lake for the defense of his post.

A new advance of the American fur-trader was made when Jedediah Smith succeeded Ashley as the leader in Rocky Mountain trade and exploration. In 1826 he left the Salt Lake rendezvous with a party of trappers to learn the secrets of the lands between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Proceeding to the southwest along the Virgin River, Smith descended it to the Colorado, and crossed the desert to San Diego, California. Here, by the intercession of a Yankee captain then in that port, he obtained supplies from the Spaniards, and turned to the northwest, traveling parallel to the coast for some three hundred miles to wintering grounds on the headwaters of the San Joaquin and the Merced. Leaving most of his party behind, he crossed the mountains, by a route south of the Humboldt, and returned to Great Salt Lake.