After his death, McLoughlin’s historical reputation rose as anti-British sentiment receded. By the late nineteenth century, old pioneers hailed the memory of the Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor, recalling his humanitarian aid to arriving settlers and insisting that he was the early friend of the American cause. Many years after he was gone, he became known as the “Father of Oregon.”
Retiring from western exploration after his 1823 expedition, Stephen H. Long turned to various nation-building endeavors in the settled part of the United States for the remainder of his career with the US Topographical Engineers. His latter activities, which came to span the whole antebellum period, included surveying for a national road, building railroads in Maryland and Georgia, and improving navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He headed the Office of Improvements of Western Rivers for a decade and a half. He supervised dredging of sandbars and removal of snags on the Mississippi and its tributaries and oversaw construction of a small fleet of steam-powered snagboats, each vessel operated by a crew of thirty to forty men. Late in life he was promoted to the rank of colonel and was appointed chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers.
Long’s nearly half century of military service spanned the years 1814 to 1863, coinciding almost exactly with the life of the Topographical Engineers as an elite unit in the army. During Long’s early career as an explorer, nationalists pressed for a federal role not only in safeguarding the nation’s frontiers but also in strengthening the nation’s transportation system. Nationalists wanted army engineers to deploy not only to build fortifications but also to survey major roads and improve waterways, the nation’s arteries for communication and commerce. The General Survey Act of 1824 authorized federal assistance for those so-called internal improvements. A further act of Congress in 1838 elevated the Topographical Engineers from a branch of the Corps of Engineers to a corps by itself. For the next quarter century, the Corps of Topographical Engineers flourished as the work of the “topogs” came to span an even wider array of nation-building projects, from dredging harbors and charting coastlines to surveying routes for transcontinental railroads. During and after the Mexican-American War, the topogs devoted more and more of their time to the trans-Mississippi West.43
Long was immensely gratified to see the topogs take on the work of internal improvements. Although his own assignments after 1824 did not take him west of the Mississippi River ever again, he remained a westward expansionist at heart. His political hero was Henry Clay of Kentucky, the longtime US congressman and speaker of the house. An ardent nationalist, Clay championed internal improvements as one of three major components of his “American System” for growing the national economy (along with protective tariffs and a national bank). Improving the nation’s roads and waterways would stimulate commerce between the North, South, and West and bind the three sections together.44
American nationalism turned inward in the 1820s as efforts toward nation building focused less on territorial expansion and more on internal improvements and economic growth. US Indian policy reflected the trend. Around the time that Long completed his western expeditions, the frontier of American settlement stood on a ragged north-south line down the length of the Mississippi valley. A few fingers of white settlement reached across the Mississippi and up the major tributaries draining from the west. East of the line of settlement, there were several large pockets of Indian-held lands where whites were discouraged from settling. The American populace fixated on getting access to those remaining Indian lands in the east. It demanded that the US government force all eastern tribes to cede their lands and move westward. The dispossessed tribes were to “remove” to unorganized territory lying beyond the Mississippi. Since the Great Plains constituted a Great American Desert unsuitable for white settlement, proponents of “Indian removal” claimed the tribes would find those lands to be a safe haven from further white encroachment, a “permanent Indian frontier,” an agreeable place for the tribes’ subsistence. In 1830, Congress enacted the Indian Removal Bill and President Andrew Jackson signed it into law. Although the federal policy of Indian relocation was not new, but rather a continuation of forced relocations that had already occurred in the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois over the preceding decades, it nonetheless took on a more draconian cast under the Jackson administration. A series of forced emigrations ensued for tribes still residing east of the Mississippi. The major tribes who were targeted for relocation were the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole tribes, known collectively as the “Five Civilized Tribes” for their decades-old effort to adopt the white man’s forms of land tenure, government, and religion in order to avoid this very outcome.
Although Stephen Long was not consulted during the final debate over the Indian Removal Bill, his legacy of western exploration from 1816 to 1823 helped prepare the ground for Indian relocation. In particular, his description of the Great Plains as a wasteland for white settlement, which would serve as a haven for nomadic tribes and a buffer against foreign invasion, provided intellectual cover for the US government’s big lie in the 1830s that the central and southern plains would be set aside as a permanent Indian territory.45
Americans in Long’s day were of two minds about Indian peoples. Some thought they should be absorbed into the American nation through a process of acculturation, that is, they had to be raised from “savagery” to “civilization” as nineteenth-century Americans understood those terms. Others thought the goal of assimilating Indian peoples into the nation was unachievable; therefore, tribes had to be removed from the nation or else face destruction by the overwhelming numbers of white settlers pressing on their lands. “Removal,” according to the latter view, was the tribes’ only alternative to extinction. Concepts of nation and culture in Long’s day did not admit other possibilities. Outside of the fur trade, the idea of cultural mixing was generally abhorred. The further notion that Indian peoples might retain part of their own traditions within a culturally diverse nation was scarcely imaginable then. Long’s often dark and pessimistic pronouncements about western tribes were, unfortunately, consistent with mainstream opinion in his time.
By the time Long reached old age in the mid-nineteenth century, the fur trade in the United States had faded into obscurity. Americans mostly went west in search of other riches: gold in California, free land in Oregon, freedom from religious persecution in Brigham Young’s Mormon West, and boundless timberlands in the Ojibwas’ homeland in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the Illinois country, where Long’s western explorations began and where he planned to retire, the white population grew to over a million by the mid-1850s. Long marveled over the transformation. “The region so wild, solitary and dreary in 1816,” he told an interviewer in 1854, “is now occupied by a numerous and widespread population, and checkered with counties, towns, villages, and cities scattered in every direction over its broad and fertile surface.” Chicago had been the site of a minor frontier military post when he had visited the place in 1816; now in 1854 it was a booming western city of 80,000 residents. Practically his whole route through Illinois in 1816, he recalled, had been through “a trackless wilderness, known and frequented almost exclusively by savages.” He neglected to add that in the 1820s and ’30s the US government forced all those “savages” to leave the state. The small number of Illinois Indians who were still surviving in the mid-1850s lived in exile and degradation in the western territories. Yet so pleased was Long that the Illinois country had become settled by white people, he seems to have been callous to the fate of the Indians.46
The old western explorer probably gave no more consideration to the legacy of Indian dispossession when, a few years later, he decided to speculate in Chicago real estate. He bought a five-acre lot in a subdivision at the western edge of the growing city. The land speculation was strictly a money-making proposition, and it succeeded for him splendidly. Long made a killing on a small piece of the tribes’ ceded lands. His wife, Martha, who outlived him by severa
l years, eventually sold the property for many times the investment price, clearing nearly $40,000. That sum was equal to about $700,000 in today’s dollars, and it lifted Stephen and Martha Long into the top 1 percent of American households by property wealth. Although Long would never have admitted it, in truth the estate he bequeathed to his heirs rested in large part on the nation’s gobbling up of the Indian estate.47
When one considers Stephen H. Long’s accomplished life next to the hard life of John McLoughlin and the tragic fate of John Tanner, Long easily appears to have been the most fortunate, the most personally fulfilled of the three. As each man came from a different background and identified with a different people, Long comes across as the one who got to play with the winning team. The comparison tends to put Long in an unflattering light by today’s standards, and that is not quite fair to him. The lessons to be taken from looking at Long in this context are less about him than they are about the place of privilege he occupied. If Long was blind to the huge advantages that race and nationality gave him, he was no more blind than millions of his countrymen.
In one respect Long was the least fortunate of the three men. He lived to see his nation descend into bloody civil war under the curse of slavery.
In 1858, Stephen Long moved his western headquarters to Alton, Illinois, opposite St. Louis on the Mississippi River. At age seventy-three, he wanted to join his four younger brothers who had settled in Alton over the preceding decades, gather his family around him, and ease into a comfortable retirement from the army. Stephen and Martha were accompanied to Alton by their oldest son, William, who was mentally handicapped and had remained in their care since birth, and their second son, Henry Clay Long, who was an engineer like his father. Taking up residence in a stately and commodious house on a quarter section of land, they were soon joined by their daughter Lucy and son-in-law Marcus P. Breckenridge and four Breckenridge grandchildren. The four adults and four grandchildren all lived with Stephen and Martha in the big house.48
Moving to Alton brought Stephen Long full circle, back to the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the very place where all of his explorations of the Illinois country, the upper Mississippi, the Arkansas, and the Great Plains had started. Yet the great river rolling past his new home in southern Illinois was not the same river of his younger days. It was not the river he had imagined when he wrote “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff.” Nor was it the same stream he had referenced in his letters to President Monroe and Secretary of War Calhoun when he proposed an ambitious program of army exploration. The Mississippi River no longer lay at the threshold of the Great West, its western tributaries pointing off propitiously in the direction of unknown lands and national destiny. Now the Mississippi River thrummed with steamboats laden with southern cotton and northern manufactures. Its broad, gray waters separated the free state of Illinois from the slave state of Missouri, forming part of the line between North and South. Its muscular current pulled irresistibly at the riverbanks, hissing of another national fate in the offing.
Years before Stephen and Martha moved to Alton, Stephen’s younger brother Enoch took part in that town’s first bloodletting of the sectional strife that culminated in the American Civil War. In 1837, Enoch rallied to the defense of Alton’s abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy when his printing press—his fourth since taking up the antislavery cause—was attacked by a proslavery mob. Lovejoy’s few dozen defenders exchanged gunfire with the mob, and Lovejoy was shot and killed in the hail of lead, becoming a martyr to the abolitionist cause. When Stephen and Martha took up residence in Alton more than twenty years later, memories of that night were still intense. Alton remained a hotbed for abolitionist agitation and southern angst. Runaway slaves from neighboring Missouri were spirited through the town on the underground railroad, and slavecatchers from Missouri occasionally raided and clashed with the townspeople. A number of houses in Alton contained hideaways for fugitive blacks transiting through the community.49
The year Stephen and Martha moved to Alton was also the year of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The two statesmen met in Alton for their seventh and final debate. Proslavery Missourians flocked to the event from across the river to support Stephen Douglas, while Free-soil Republicans came down from northern Illinois by steamboat to cheer for Abe Lincoln. It is doubtful that Long was in the audience that day, as he did not complete his move to Alton until the following month; but he would have received a first-person account of the event from Enoch or another brother shortly afterwards. Douglas went first and held forth for an hour, wooing the proslavery members of the crowd with his insistence that the Founding Fathers had never intended that the rights of US citizenship would apply to people of all races. For this, the Missourians gave the senator from Illinois a big hand of applause. Lincoln thundered back that the Founders’ ringing phrase “all men are created equal” admitted no other interpretation. Then, elaborating on his declaration in an earlier debate that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he went on to make one of his strongest denunciations of slavery yet. American democracy would not endure, Lincoln said, without accomplishing slavery’s “ultimate extinction.” At the end of his ninety-minute speech there were shouts from the crowd, “Hurrah for Abe Lincoln as next president!”50
Stephen Long’s position on slavery by this time is not known, but he was certainly a staunch unionist and probably a supporter of the insurgent Republican Party. As a new arrival in Illinois, Long would not have been able to cast a ballot, for in those pre–Civil War days the state laws did not provide for soldier absentee voting. During the early months of 1859, as the election results slowly came in, Long saw the Republican Party win control of the US House of Representatives, while Lincoln lost in his contest with Douglas. In that era before popular election of US senators, voters of each state elected their US representatives, while state legislators elected the US senators. Illinois voters elected four Republicans and five Democrats to the 36th Congress, while the Democratically controlled state legislature reelected Douglas to the US Senate by a vote of 54 to 46.
It is a reasonable guess that Stephen Long cast a ballot for Lincoln two years later in the presidential election of 1860. As an ardent supporter of the late Henry Clay, Long would have admired Lincoln’s high praise of Clay and likely would have followed Lincoln’s example in transferring his allegiance from the defunct Whig Party to the young Republican Party. During the winter of 1860–61, when southerners were in an uproar over the election, Long took the precaution of withdrawing federal funds from the US Assay Office in St. Louis and holding them in his home in Alton to prevent their falling into the hands of secessionist Missourians.
Long was overseeing snag removal on the Lower Mississippi around New Orleans when the southern states seceded from the Union one by one in the early months of 1861. After Louisiana seceded (in January), Long ordered his men to remain in the state long enough to complete a series of soundings near the mouth of the Mississippi before they pulled out. He knew the information that they obtained would be important for producing navigational charts for US naval commanders in the coming conflict.
In June 1861, he wrote to his superiors that in spite of his “advanced age and infirmities” he wanted to continue in public service. He applied for a promotion to colonel and was granted the higher rank, along with elevation to chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Long took up his new duties in the nation’s capital in December 1861.
In war, the Topographical Engineers reverted to their original role of producing military maps for the army. As the topogs were no longer needed for nation-building surveys and civil engineering works, Congress abolished the Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1863 and Long at last retired. The old soldier was back home in Alton when Union forces took Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. He died on September 4, 1864, at the age of seventy-nine, while the war still raged.51
POSTSCRIPT
John Tanner
as a Source
When John Tanner told his story to Dr. Edwin James, he did more than record his remarkable experiences for the reading public. He also made himself a valuable source for future ethnographers and historians. His autobiography provides a rare firsthand account of Indian life by a man who was, for a time, nearly Indian himself in every way except race. No less an authority than Native American writer Louise Erdrich has testified to the authenticity of Tanner as an Indian voice: “John Tanner was culturally an Ojibwa, and as such he is claimed by many to this day, for he lived as an Ojibwa, married an Ojibwa woman, cared devotedly for his mixed-blood children, and was never able to accommodate himself to a non-Indian life.”1 Since no actual Indians who lived in the same time and place as Tanner ever recorded their experiences in writing, his Narrative stands as a unique description of their world. It is remarkable in the richness of its details about western Ottawa and Ojibwa culture on everything from the waxing political power of medicine men in the time of the Shawnee Prophet to the manufacture and use of skin boats early in the spring, when it was still too cold to make birchbark canoes. Tanner belonged to that generation of Ottawas and Ojibwas who moved west with the fur trade and adapted their ancient woodland culture to the northern prairie environment. As part of that process, Tanner acquired horses and learned how to hunt bison both with gun and bow and arrow. Sometimes in preparing his Narrative, Tanner spoke directly as a historian of his people’s cultural adaptations, as when he stated that his friend, Sha-gwaw-koo-sink, an Ottawa, introduced the cultivation of corn among the western Ojibwas.
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