On the first day of the journey the expedition passed a village of the Winnebagos, deserted since 1814, and saw not a single Indian. On the second day, about forty miles above Prairie du Chien, the expedition passed a cluster of Sioux lodges on the left bank of the river. When the Sioux saw the skiff with its American flag, they hoisted an American flag in greeting. Long returned the greeting by discharging a blunderbuss, whereupon the Sioux fired two guns over the water ahead of the skiff. Since the skiff was under sail and making swift progress upstream, Long decided not to put ashore, but when six young men of the Sioux village jumped in a canoe he slackened sail so that their canoe could overtake them. As the canoe came alongside the skiff, he took the hand of the head man, exchanged a few words, and gave him some tobacco and a pint of whiskey, after which the Indians shoved off. 7
The next day, the expedition came to a larger Sioux village, where a similar ritual greeting unfolded. This time Long put ashore. The Indians gathered around the boat landing, seating themselves on the ground in a manner that suggested they expected a speech. Talking through his two interpreters, Long inquired if their chief was at home and learned that he was not. He then stated that he would like to talk with their chief and hoped to see him on their return trip. He further stated that he had been sent by the Great Father, the new president, who wanted to learn more about his red children. After this brief speech the Indians showed their friendly disposition by inviting Long and the interpreters to go through their village. It was evident that the Indians had just broken off a ceremony. They described for him what they called a bear dance, which was occasioned when a young male had a powerful dream that signaled his coming into manhood. Long pumped them for more information, and although the leaders would not identify the young man at the center of the ceremony they did give the explorer considerable details, which he carefully recorded. Long’s description of the bear dance ceremony, running to several pages in his journal, constituted his first effort at ethnography. It showed him to be an inquisitive and careful observer of native culture even though he assumed that it was inferior to his own.8
Long had few other encounters with the Sioux on this voyage. He made a brief stop at another village and passed still another that was deserted, the occupants being away hunting. The expedition reached St. Anthony Falls (the site of modern-day Minneapolis) after seven days of rowing from Prairie du Chien, camped one night on the shore just below the cataract, and then turned back. A few miles below the falls, Long inspected the bluff where the St. Peter’s River (now named the Minnesota) flows into the Mississippi, and found it to be an admirable location for a fort. He determined that the St. Peter’s was 200 yards wide at the mouth and navigable for Mackinaw boats, but he did not venture upstream to the three Sioux villages that he thought he would find about nine miles above. Going back down the Mississippi, he stopped at one more Sioux village at a wide section of the river known as Lake Pepin, but he spent only “a very few minutes” with the Indians there so as to take advantage of a strong wind blowing the skiff down that long stretch of slack water.9
Long’s haste and cursory Indian diplomacy were necessitated by a shortage of supplies. Running out of food, Long had to stop early each day so the men could catch fish for their dinner. Long blamed the shortage of provisions on his corporal, to whom he had entrusted the task of issuing rations. When the corporal disclosed the shortage, he admitted to having no prior experience in managing an expedition’s supplies. More troubling than the dwindling food supply, however, was the fact that the expedition ran out of whiskey soon after turning about at St. Anthony Falls, which meant that the commander had little to offer Indians by way of gifts. To shorten the return trip—and, perhaps also, to avoid Indians—Long ordered the expedition to run portions of the river at night, floating with the current and steering by the light of a fire, which burned on a raft towed behind the skiff. Even this arrangement presented problems, as the leading craft occasionally ran aground on the many sandbars. Notwithstanding those hazards and privations on the return, however, Long returned to Fort Belle Fontaine on August 15 with all men in good health. The expedition covered nearly 1,400 river miles in just seventy-five days, making an average distance of 18 miles per day, an excellent pace. With this journey Long proved his ability to lead men safely over great distances at relatively low cost to the government.10
6
Race and History
Working from his journals, Long wrote an account of his expedition in the following spring. He adopted a more literary style in this report than in his previous one on the Illinois country, evidently aiming to reach a wider readership.1 Besides reporting on the lay of the land and recording his impressions of the Sioux, Long included some elaborate, almost flowery descriptions of the scenery and antiquities observed en route. Those rather lyrical passages provide valuable insights into Long’s personal responses to the land and people he encountered.
Near the head of Lake Pepin, the explorer ascended a high hill to obtain a view of the surrounding country. Standing on the summit of this hill about 400 feet above the river, Long was enraptured by the view of forest-clad knobs and valleys spreading in all directions. To take it all in, he pictured the scene as it might have appeared in the remote past: inundated by a vast inland sea, a world totally given over to aquatic life until some great convulsion at the center of the earth caused most of the water to drain off, leaving the present landscape with its “rich and fertile alluvion, well adapted to vegetation of all kinds.”2 Long’s sense of the earth’s history reflected a mix of scientific and Biblical influences. The geological theory that a primitive ocean had once covered the whole surface of the globe, and that all landforms had been created by a cataclysmic lowering of the sea level, formed a kind of scientific orthodoxy until the 1820s. One of the strengths of this theory was that it explained how fossil remains of sea life could occur in the middle of continents. It also jibed with a short earth history and worldwide flood event as described in Genesis. An alternative theory held that the center of the earth was hot and molten and that most landforms resulted from the countervailing forces of mountain uplift and water erosion. The latter theory began to emerge in the late eighteenth century but was still considered a scientific heresy in Long’s day, mainly because it posited that the earth must be billions of years old. Long’s musings on the origins of the landforms along the Mississippi River were perhaps more romantic than scientific, but they nevertheless demonstrated that his mind was engaged with geologic theory.3
Perhaps nothing excited the explorer’s imaginings more than the ancient mounds that he investigated by horseback on the day after returning to Prairie du Chien. These extensive earthworks, some linear and others in the form of circles or squares, were spread all over the uplands at a point overlooking the Wisconsin River about three miles above its junction with the Mississippi. He described the arrangement of the mounds in detail, surmising that they had been constructed principally for defense, although at least a few evidently doubled as burial mounds. Some of the linear earthworks, which he called parapets, appeared to have been aimed at defending against cavalry attack. He took measurements, made computations, and marveled at the amount of labor required to build them. Long had seen smaller mounds on the Mississippi above the Illinois River and was aware that they existed in many other locations throughout the Mississippi valley. He presumed incorrectly that the mounds were the work of an extinct race of people unrelated to nineteenth-century Indian peoples.4 It is now well established that the widespread mounds were the works of a pre-Columbian Indian culture called “Mississippian” by archaeologists, and that Mississippians were ancestral to numerous village plains tribes.
What little information about the mounds Long could glean from local informants reinforced his belief that the mound builders were a mysterious, ancient, bygone race. The Indians around Prairie du Chien, he was told, had no traditions that would point to the mound builders being their own ancestors. “They only suppose that t
he country was once inhabited by a race of white people like the present Americans, who have been completely exterminated by their forefathers,” he wrote in his journal. One informant, a Mr. Brisbois of Prairie du Chien, told the explorer that while digging a cellar near his house he had unearthed eight enormous human skeletons lying side by side. Judging by the length of one shin bone, which he had held against his own leg for comparison, Brisbois thought these ancient people stood about eight feet tall. Long recorded this information in his journal with only a hint of skepticism, noting that the man said the bones crumbled to dust as soon as they were exposed to air and hence could not be preserved.5
Like his musings about the geologic origins of the landforms around Lake Pepin, Long’s response to the mounds reflected the mainstream thought of his contemporaries. Americans had been debating the question of who built the mounds since the 1780s. Thomas Jefferson excavated a relatively small mound near his home in Virginia, revealed its stratigraphy, and deduced that it had received human burials over many generations. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he asserted that the mounds were the work of Indian peoples. But Jefferson was practically alone in that conclusion. Most others who wrote on the question believed that the race of people who now inhabited the Mississippi valley did not have the interest or the social organization to build such monuments. To their way of thinking, the sustained effort of building the mounds must have come from an ancient, vanished civilization originated in Europe or Asia. Various theories held the mound builders to be offshoots of ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Hebrews, Hindus, Celts, or some other wayfaring people of the Old World. One of the more influential theories held that the mounds were built by Vikings who then migrated to Mexico and became the Toltecs.6
The question of who built the mounds fanned interest in the origins of American Indians. Since the time of Columbus, American Indians had presented Western thought with an intellectual problem that was part of the larger question of how to account for the varieties of the human species found around the globe. Christian doctrine held that humankind originated when God made Adam and Eve, and that after the Great Flood all of humanity descended from Noah and his three sons. That the origins of American Indians were not explicit in Genesis was troubling and led to numerous interpretations as to which Old World people they were descended from and how they had come to be in the Americas. But what was clear to all Christian thinkers was that Indians had souls and were part of God’s creation. The Christian worldview took for granted that American Indians had somehow migrated to the Americas, and it embraced Indian peoples as part of the unity of the human race.
How then to explain their different culture, their paganism, their savage state? Puritan thinkers favored the idea of degeneration, which they linked to Original Sin. Ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the human species had been prone to degenerate. As various peoples migrated around the globe after the Great Flood, local circumstances had resulted in some isolated peoples degenerating more than others. The diffusion of the human race accounted for the great contrasts between civilized and savage peoples. In short, American Indians had degenerated into savagery while European cultures had retained their grip on the civilization inherited from the ancients.7 It is impossible to know if Long held similar beliefs, but traces of this persuasion are evident in his reporting on the “degeneration” he found in Prairie du Chien, and in his assumption that Indians could not have built the mounds.
Christian doctrine was not the only source of influence on these questions. Scientific discourse on the origins of the human species—what would eventually become anthropology—began to emerge around the turn of the nineteenth century. The seminal work of this kind in the United States was Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species by the Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith, a professor at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). First published in 1787, Stanhope’s treatise was republished in expanded form in 1810, the year that Long moved to Germantown. As the book was abstracted and reviewed by all the literary digests on its second printing, and as its author was prominent in the American Philosophical Society, to which Long himself aspired to belong, it is likely that Long was familiar with the book. Smith’s thesis was that the variety of human races in the world had developed from a single origin. The human species had spread around the world because it was uniquely capable of adapting, both culturally and physiologically, to every type of environment. In other words, environment changed people and accounted for the variety of human characteristics. By insisting that humans were all of one species, Smith’s treatise supported the Christian doctrine of the unity of humankind and, more important, it affirmed the American political doctrine that “all men are created equal.” For that reason, it challenged those thinkers who had begun to argue that the several human races had formed separately and constituted different species.8
Another writer who had a wide influence on Americans’ perception of Indians in Long’s day was Scottish historian William Robertson, whose History of America, published in London in 1777, continued to have a strong readership in the United States forty years later. Robertson contended that American Indians had migrated from Asia to the Americas by way of ice formed across the Bering Strait. Isolated in the New World from the rest of the human race, American Indians had degenerated into a savage state owing to the harsh American environment. Robertson subscribed to the Enlightenment view of universal human progress, in which all peoples were on a path from savagery to civilization, and he found American Indians, because of their peculiar environmental adaptations, to be in the “rudest form” or most primitive state of any people in the world.9
The question of Indian origins continued to be of interest to white Americans in the years following the War of 1812. As historian Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. has shown, theories about Indian origins helped to shape and justify white Americans’ prejudices about Indian culture, and those prejudices in turn helped to shape and justify national policy and government actions designed to incorporate Indian peoples into the American nation.10 In 1816, a new theory about the peopling of the New World appeared in a book entitled Researches on America by Dr. James Haines McCulloh, an officer in the US army. McCulloh debunked the idea of a Bering Strait crossing and argued that the continents of the two hemispheres had once been joined by land, facilitating the migration of humans and animal species to all parts of the globe. McCulloh reckoned that the land migration had occurred some 2,600 years before Christ, and that at some indistinct point in time after that a great convulsion of the earth had caused large portions of the earth to sink, forming the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Although the convulsive event would have destroyed many lives, the remaining continents and islands would have preserved many others. As a result, McCulloh supposed, “fragments of the human family” became separated for generations, forming distinct cultures, until “the spirit of navigation and modern enterprise once more united the links between them and their brother men.” Concerning the origins of the mounds, McCulloh thought they were built by “ancient white aborigines of America” who had been driven out of the Mississippi valley, perhaps into Mexico, by a barbarian horde that then disintegrated into modern Indian tribes.11
Researches on America lurched back and forth between rambling expositions of various scientific works on earth history and the more familiar historical terrain of the Bible. Quirky though the book was, it appealed to Long’s countrymen because it was authored by an American and it managed to sound both learned and pious. One reviewer lauded the book for its “common sense” theory. Certainly Long’s ideas about earth history and the origins of the mound builders bear a similarity to McCulloh’s. The book was published in August 1816, two months prior to Long’s return from his first expedition through the Illinois country, and it is reasonable to imagine him reading it during the winter in anticipation of his second expedition in the West. But whether he did or not, what matter
s is that Long drew upon contemporary thought to fashion his own ideas about Indians and their place in American westward expansion.12
7
To Civilize the Osages
Soon after Long returned from the upper Mississippi, news of a war between the Osages and the Cherokees reached General Smith’s headquarters at Fort Belle Fontaine. The conflict between the Osages and the Cherokees lay far to the south of Rainy Lake House and Long’s eventual contact with John Tanner and John McLoughlin, but it is relevant to the story in the effect it had on Long’s developing ideas about the Indian frontier. General Smith ordered Long to accompany a force of riflemen under the command of Major William Bradford so as to locate a site for a fort in Osage country (the location of today’s Fort Smith, Arkansas). Bradford’s force would proceed to the upper Arkansas River, build the fort according to Long’s plan, and restore peace between the Osages and the Cherokees. Although Long’s immediate task was to situate and design the fort, as usual he had broader objectives to explore the country and report on the Indians and the white settlements—the latter composed largely of squatters who were trespassing on Indian lands. Long’s report on the Osages would stand as one of his most detailed commentaries on Indian peoples.
The expedition departed St. Louis in September and descended the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Arkansas. Long went with his own crew in his six-oared skiff, while Bradford took his men and supplies downriver in keelboats. From the mouth of the Arkansas, Long went ahead of the slower keelboats and located a site for the post, the future Fort Smith, which he called Belle Point. He also made observations of the river valley and continued on upstream to its head of navigation in present-day northeast Oklahoma.1
While exploring the upper Arkansas he encountered an Osage war party. He informed this party of the approach of US troops and invited them to a council one month hence for the purpose of making peace between themselves and the Cherokees. Long then returned to Belle Point and made a plan of construction for the fort. In early December he left with an escort of two soldiers and a guide and traveled over the Ouachita Mountains to the Red River of the South, where the guide left the party by prior agreement and Long and the two soldiers turned homeward.2
Rainy Lake House Page 7