Though Long titled this section of his report “Indians,” he was really talking about fur traders. Here in a nutshell was the army’s interest in the fur trade. To secure the northern frontier against the British, the army needed to pacify the Indian tribes; to pacify the Indian tribes, it wanted to reorganize the fur trade so that the Indians would no longer depend on British traders. In short, the United States had to take control of the fur trade within its borders so that the tribes would finally abandon the British-Indian alliance of the Revolutionary War era.9
American military strategists had been driving at this problem for many years. President Washington sought to put American trade with Indians on a stronger footing by means of the Trade and Intercourse Acts. Under those laws, the federal government took responsibility for licensing traders and regulating intercourse between whites and Indians. The army was called upon to track the traders, removing violators while protecting legitimate traders against Indian attack. But enforcement of the Trade and Intercourse laws was weak. In fact, during the first three decades of American independence, licensed American traders played a relatively insignificant role in the fur trade. British traders vastly outnumbered them and operated within US territory with impunity. In Jay’s Treaty of 1794, British traders were specifically guaranteed the right to maintain their trading posts on American soil. Americans’ strong resentment of those terms formed one of the causes of the War of 1812. Following the war, American interest in the fur trade burgeoned. The army built forts along the Indian frontier and took other steps to control the Indians. Long was destined to play a significant role in those efforts, first as a surveyor of new forts and then as a western explorer. He would become a keen observer of the fur trade and advise the government on how it might better regulate it.10
The first major statement of US aims in the fur trade after the Treaty of Ghent came in a report to the Senate by Secretary of War Crawford in March 1816. Long’s ideas paralleled Crawford’s, and it is likely he familiarized himself with Crawford’s report before preparing his own. The secretary’s report was a major statement on federal Indian policy—according to Crawford’s biographer, it was one of the signal accomplishments of his short stint at the War Department. Befitting the mood of national expansion, Crawford’s main concern was to consider ways to Americanize the fur trade within the territorial limits of the United States.11
Crawford began with the widely held assumption that all Indian peoples were more or less dependent on the fur trade for some of their necessities—the more so wherever their hunting grounds were depleted of game. He stressed that the United States had to support the trade in one form or another or it would “alienate the affections” of the tribes. The British traders could not be evicted from US territory precipitously, because in many areas it would create a hardship for the Indians. Crawford pointed to such remote areas as the upper Mississippi and the upper Missouri, where the Americans had little knowledge about the tribes and could not simply move in as the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company vacated their trading posts. In such areas the British fur companies must be permitted to continue operations under US licenses for an interim period. As soon as the United States acquired more information on the Indians, then the British traders would be made to surrender their licenses so that American traders could take their place.12
Crawford wanted the government to increase its support of government-run trading houses, or “factories,” but only as a stopgap until private enterprise was able to meet the demand. The unpopular factory system dated back to the 1790s. When the federal government began to regulate the fur trade, it did so through two parallel measures: licensing of independent traders and establishment of factories. The government-run factories were intended to have a beneficial effect on Indian-white relations by supplying the Indians with manufactured goods at fair price, placing honest men in charge of the government stores, and keeping the more rapacious independent traders in check. President Jefferson expanded the factory system, giving it the mantle of “civilizing” the Indians. It was his belief that more trade would eventually lead the Indians to adopt a more settled way of life. (He also argued that it would promote Indian indebtedness, giving the United States an upper hand in extracting land cessions.) Congress was wary of establishing a government monopoly in the fur trade, however, and provided only half-hearted support for the factory system. Chronically underfunded, the factory system never became the dominant force on the frontier that its champions wanted. The licensed traders hated the government trading houses, since the purpose of the government traders was to keep a watchful eye on them and undersell them when necessary. By the second decade of the nineteenth century most westerners shared the private traders’ scorn for the government-subsidized trading houses, thinking that they discouraged capital investment on the frontier. Congress was increasingly inclined to heed western opinion and reduce funding for the factory system.13
If the factory system was a disappointment, the licensing system was even more fraught with problems. The law provided for the governors of the territories to issue licenses to anyone who could post bond. Ostensibly the bond was a guarantee that the licensed trader would abide by the government’s regulations. But with practically no enforcement the regulations were largely ignored. There were many disreputable traders who cheated the Indians out of their furs by whatever means they could. Often they plied the Indians with liquor and then stole from them. Competition between traders only made the situation worse by contributing to the use of illegal liquor in manipulating the Indians. Viewing the independent traders with much skepticism, Crawford urged Congress to amend the Trade and Intercourse Acts so that governors would have authority to select traders on the basis of moral character. Traders bore a responsibility as the torchbearers of “civilization,” and it was only reasonable to expect that they present a good face to the Indians.14
Crawford’s main idea for Americanizing the fur trade was for a large, well-capitalized company to enter the field and establish a private monopoly. Such a company would be easier for the government to regulate, and by ending competition between traders it would eliminate some of the worst abuses of the fur trade. The problem was how to attract sufficient capital, which could only be found in the commercial cities of the Atlantic seaboard. Unfortunately, venture capitalists tended to view the fur trade as a bad risk. Crawford’s solution was to establish a government factory at St. Louis that would serve as a forward supply base, furnishing goods, capital, and skilled persons to the trading houses located on the frontier. At first this factory would supply government trading houses. In time, when the desired company had arisen to take the place of the government, the whole operation could be sold to private enterprise.15
Crawford based his ideas on the conviction that the policy of an “enlightened nation” must be “to draw its savage neighbors within the pale of civilization.” For if the federal government were simply to withdraw from regulation of the Indian trade, allowing land-hungry whites to strike their own deals with Indian peoples, the outcome would be “continual warfare, attended by the extermination or expulsion of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to more distant and less hospitable regions.” A civilized people must abhor such an outcome, Crawford declared. So, the Indian must be assimilated.
Crawford echoed the Jeffersonian idea that the fur trade was an incubator for raising the Indian from a “savage state.” A growing dependency on trade goods would instill in the Indians the value of personal property, he believed. From a keener desire for personal property would come a desire for separate property in the form of land, and from this would come an inclination to farm. Once the Indian became a landowner and a tiller of the soil, he would acquire a respect for laws and be on the path to full American citizenship. It was a hopeful vision of universal human progress. But there remained the question of whether the Indian had sufficient time, given the pressure of white land hunger, to proceed unmolested along this path from savagery to
civilization. Given that pressure, Crawford added his own recommendation to the Jeffersonian idea of civilizing the Indian, which many of his contemporaries found shocking. “When every effort to introduce among them the ideas of separate property . . . should fail,” Crawford urged, “let intermarriages between them and the whites be encouraged by the government.”16
Crawford was a southerner and a slaveholder, the owner of a small plantation in Georgia, and a co-founder and vice president of the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to ending slavery in the United States by colonizing freed slaves in Africa. Evidently he had higher hopes for assimilating Indians into white society than he had for blacks. His idea was not a new one; missionaries had been advocating intermarriage between whites and Cherokees for a number of years. But Crawford’s proposal for the government to encourage interracial marriage caused dismay among some members of Congress. Three days after he submitted his report, the Republican Party caucus met to nominate a presidential candidate. With Crawford’s name in contention alongside James Monroe’s, several members who opposed him pilloried his report with its odious suggestion that the Indian and white races amalgamate. The caucus chose Monroe over Crawford by a vote of 65 to 54. Crawford never retracted his words about interracial marriage, but privately he allowed that the statement had been politically damaging.17
Long could not have known anything about what went on in the Republican Party caucus, but there is a good chance he was following Crawford’s political star that spring and summer of 1816. While Long was en route from St. Louis back to Washington in the fall, Crawford left the War Department to become secretary of the treasury. Three weeks later, James Monroe was elected fifth president of the United States, the last of the Virginia Dynasty. That winter, as the president-elect assembled his cabinet, Long wrote his topographical report and prepared a large map of the Illinois country. He addressed his report to Acting Secretary of War George Graham, who headed the War Department in the last few months of the Madison administration. Graham apparently approved of Long’s ardent recommendations for internal improvements and his nationalist tone. He gave the report to his friend, Joel Mead, editor of The National Register, with the suggestion that he publish an abstract of it in his weekly paper. Mead chose to print the entire report, presenting Major Long of the US Topographical Engineers to the American public for the first time.18
5
Encounters with the Sioux
Long obtained his second assignment in the West the following year. Reporting to General Thomas Smith at Fort Belle Fontaine, near St. Louis, in May, he received his new orders. He was to make a military and topographical reconnaissance of the upper Mississippi, essentially completing the work he had begun in 1816. On his way up the Mississippi River he would inspect frontier defenses: Forts Edwards, Madison, Armstrong, and Crawford, the last of these being situated at Prairie du Chien at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers. From Prairie du Chien, he was to make a side trip up the Wisconsin River to survey the portage between that river and the Fox River flowing into Green Bay on Lake Michigan and to recommend a site for a fort there. This was the main route used by the French and British for supplying the fur trade west of the Great Lakes. After returning to Prairie du Chien, he was to proceed north to St. Anthony Falls, the farthest point of navigation on the Mississippi, investigating possible sites for more forts in that direction. Long’s reconnaissance of the upper Mississippi served the national aim of establishing a cordon of forts between the Northwest Indian tribes and the British. A subsidiary purpose was to meet with the Sioux Indians inhabiting the upper Mississippi and learn if they were peaceably disposed to the United States. For Long, the final leg of this expedition from Prairie du Chien to St. Anthony Falls was exactly the kind of exploration he was itching to do. What little was known about the area came from the published accounts of two previous explorers, the celebrated eighteenth-century fur trader and traveler, Jonathan Carver, and the late Captain Zebulon M. Pike.1
Governor of Missouri William Clark, the veteran explorer of the Lewis and Clark expedition, presented Long with a six-oared skiff for the voyage, while General Smith assigned him six enlisted men, a corporal, and an interpreter. It was a larger command than on his previous expedition through the Illinois country. In addition to this eight-man crew, the boat carried provisions, cooking utensils, a single camp tent, and supplies of whiskey, tobacco, and other items for making presents to the Indians. The expedition set sail from Fort Belle Fontaine on the first of June. Six weeks later it arrived at Prairie du Chien, where it took on board fresh supplies and one additional soldier for exploration of the upper Mississippi.2
Prairie du Chien was not only the jumping-off point for Long’s first major exploration, it was the center of the fur trade in Wisconsin in 1817. With a population that was predominantly French-speaking, substantially mixed-blood, and salted with a few British traders, it was typical of the Anglo-French-Indian milieu that persisted throughout most of the Old Northwest even after the War of 1812. Governor Clark had led a military expedition to this old French settlement in May 1814, establishing Fort Shelby as a defense against a British invasion from Canada, but the British had captured the fort just two months later and held it until the end of the war, blowing it up when they withdrew. Even with the return of peace, American traders were hardly welcome there. A report reached Washington after the war ended of Americans’ scalps being bought and sold in the village of Prairie du Chien and strung on poles as a warning to American traders not to come into the area. In July 1816, General Smith arrived with a force of soldiers and built Fort Crawford on the site of the previous fort. When Long arrived in July 1817, the US Office of Indian Trade had recently established a government factory nearby under the supervision of John W. Johnson. This government trader informed Long that the Indians who lived on the Mississippi above Prairie du Chien would probably give him no trouble. But hostility toward Americans on the part of the village occupants and their Indian trading partners was still palpable; Johnson himself, despite being married to an Indian, said he could not wait to get away from “the cursed stinking Indians.”3
Long’s impression of this frontier settlement was no more favorable than Johnson’s. Prairie du Chien was named for an elongated plain lying between the Mississippi River and a line of bluffs. The prairie was beautiful to behold, but as portions of it were swampy and periodically inundated by the river, he found the whole place pestilential. Fort Crawford was situated on an island where the river braided into many channels, and in times of low water—as when Long visited there in July—the fort was surrounded by stagnant pools. The settlement of Prairie du Chien, located on the mainland, was only marginally better off than the fort, as much of the surrounding plain was infiltrated by sloughs and marshes. A single village street, lined with stores, workshops, and stables, ran parallel to the river for about a half mile, while dwellings were scattered more widely about. Zebulon Pike had estimated the village population at around 500 or 600 people in 1805, but it appeared to Long to be much less; he counted a total of thirty-eight occupied family dwellings. About one mile in back of the settlement was the grand farm, which was enclosed against wandering livestock and cultivated by the inhabitants in common. Long, with a New Englander’s eye for how to lay out a farm, thought the existing crops of corn, wheat, and potatoes showed a decided lack of initiative by the inhabitants. “They have never yet taken pains to seed the ground with any kind of grain except the summer wheat, which is never so productive as the fall or winter wheat.” With proper care, he commented, the farm could yield much larger and more varied crops.4
Long took a disparaging view of the people of Prairie du Chien. Noting that most of them had “savage blood in their veins,” he gave voice to a common perception of his era in which all of humanity existed on a continuum from savage to civilized. He thought the community was not only dwindling in size, it was also slipping backwards into a state of savagery after the disruptio
n of peaceful trade for a number of years during the War of 1812. “If we compare the village and its inhabitants in their present state with what they were when Pike visited this part of the country, we shall find that instead of improving they have been degenerating,” he wrote. “Their improvement has been checked by a diversion of the Indian trade into other channels and their degeneracy accelerated not only by a consequent impoverishment of the inhabitants, but in addition to natural decay, their unconquerable slothfulness and want of enterprise.”5 The idea of human degeneracy ran like a motif through American thought in Long’s day, so the explorer was hardly alone in perceiving a community’s economic decline in social and moral terms. In Long’s mind, Prairie du Chien’s degeneracy provided a window into the savage state of Indian peoples.
As Prairie du Chien stood on the border of Sioux territory, Long replaced his first interpreter with a second, a mixed race named Roque, who spoke the Sioux language. But as he found it difficult to communicate with Roque in French he took aboard yet another interpreter, a New Englander by the name of Hempstead, who had resided in Prairie du Chien for eight years and spoke fluent French. Thus, to communicate with the Sioux his speech would be translated from English into French and from French into Sioux. He also permitted two young Americans to join the party when they paddled up suddenly in their birchbark canoe. Grandsons of Jonathan Carver, with the names King and Gun, they had journeyed from New York to claim a tract of land that their grandfather had purchased from the Indians more than fifty years earlier.6
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