Daniel Boone in Missouri, eighty-five years old. Engraving by James Otto Lewis, 1820. Author’s collection.
In legend, Boone moved whenever his elbow room was threatened by new settlers. In real life, he fled from debt collectors and lawyers. Boone found respite from his woes in the company of Indian neighbors, many of whom had removed from places farther east, men who shared his love of hunting and his feeling of persecution. His choice of companions surprised admirers, who expected the celebrated Indian fighter to hate his foes. But Boone disliked telling war stories and refused to count scalps. Legend portrayed him as “a wonderful man who had killed a host of Indians,” he said, and he allowed that “many was the fair fire I have had at them.” But, he avowed, “I am very sorry that I ever killed any, for they have always been kinder to me than the whites.” Some Americans, expecting a fiercer defense of their nation’s right to western lands as well as their treatment of the region’s perceived savages, found Boone’s sentiments embarrassing. He backed away from the greed and rancor he spied in his fellow citizens. If this be civilization, Boone concluded, he would “certainly prefer a state of nature.”3
Boone’s perspective offers a jumping-off point for a consideration of the western expansion of the United States. How did the young nation on the Atlantic coast wind up with a growing western empire that included former Spanish and French territories in Louisiana and Texas, as well as a joint occupation of the Oregon Country with Great Britain? What ideas and emotions did Americans attach to the ground they gained on maps? Where did these new margins fit in their mental cartography of race and nationhood? More importantly, how did the people living in these spaces perceive these changes in ownership?
. . .
The founders believed that expansion was critical to the nation’s future. James Madison, often called the father of the Constitution, placed it at the heart of the American political system. “Extend the sphere,” he declared in the Federalist Papers, “and you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” Expansion would ameliorate social conflict. American republican government would thrive with an ever-expanding geography, leading to what he called “one great, respectable, and flourishing empire.” George Washington envisioned the United States as a “rising empire,” a growing and expanding state, and many Americans entertained continental ambitions. “The Mississippi was never designed as the western boundary of the American empire,” declared Jedidiah Morse in American Geography, a popular textbook published in 1789, the year the Constitution was ratified. “It is well known that empire has been traveling from east to west. Probably her last and broadest seat will be America. . . . We cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the american empire will comprehend millions of souls west of the Mississippi.”4
The patriotic rhetoric camouflaged the vulnerability of a nation still under construction. The United States was by no means a foregone conclusion in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Napoleon menaced from his sugar islands in the Caribbean, and in 1800, when Spain returned Louisiana to France, the resurgence of the French in North America appeared imminent. Great Britain humiliated the United States during the War of 1812, and Canadian fur trade corporations stretched British influence across North America, allying many interior tribes with the crown. Powerful Indian nations stretched across the Great Plains, controlling trade through their alliances, their military prowess, and their vast herds of horses and mules. The United States struggled to maintain control over its own frontier citizens, and domestic unrest added to the treacherousness of nation-building in the West. In 1794 President Washington led troops into western Pennsylvania to subdue the Whiskey Rebellion. Plots and subterfuge infested the highest ranks of western officials. Men sold their loyalty and hatched schemes that involved founding new nations out west or breaking chunks of American peripheries off and feeding them to Spain or Canada.
Yet many Americans believed that they enjoyed a natural right to the continent. They told a story of their nation’s founding that sprung from the geographic fringes. There, they imagined, far removed from Europe’s cultural reach, a new breed emerged. Nature remade western Americans into gnarly woodsmen, fiercely independent bark-eaters who bowed to no one. The Boone of legend, the prototype of this distinctive American folk hero, was followed by many more of the same mold. But this national origin myth ignored how things actually worked. The real Boone knew the truth. To acquire wealth, to gain power, and to stay alive, humans needed other humans. Success hinged on reaching across cultural, ethnic, and racial divisions to create friends and family. Friends and families, not solitary masculine heroes, built companies, partnerships, alliances, nations, and empires. In the West, a person or a country was only as strong as the bonds that were made and kept.
. . .
In American eyes, the friendship that defined this period of western history was the one formed between Thomas Jefferson’s secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and the military captain William Clark. In 1801 Jefferson asked Lewis to prepare a western exploratory mission. The expedition would travel through territory claimed by European empires. In 1762, before Britain and France signed the treaty ending the French and Indian War, the French had transferred their claim to western North America to Spain. The boundaries of Louisiana were huge but vague, beginning at the linchpin port of New Orleans, taking in the entire western watershed of the Mississippi River, and falling off somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The Spanish closed the Mississippi to American traffic, choking off economic development in the trans-Appalachian West. Finally in 1795, after long negotiations, Spain agreed to open the river to American commerce.
But soon American concerns shifted to France. Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized control of revolutionary France in a coup d’état in 1799, had New World imperial dreams of his own. He envisioned a revived empire that would unify France’s Caribbean colonies with the mainland colony of Louisiana. In 1800 he invaded and defeated Spain, then dictated a peace treaty returning Louisiana to French control. President Jefferson, concerned about continued American access to New Orleans, sent an American delegation to France to negotiate the purchase of the city and the surrounding country on the east bank of the Mississippi. In letters he fully expected French censors to read, Jefferson let slip that the Americans would resist French imperialism on the continent by romancing another country. “The day France takes possession of New Orleans,” he wrote, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”5
But it was a slave revolt, rather than Jefferson’s threat, that altered Napoleon’s plans. François-Dominique Toussaint, one of the era’s great generals, broke France’s hold on its most profitable Caribbean colony. Born a plantation slave, Toussaint acquired enough education to read the writings of French revolutionaries as well as Julius Caesar’s account of his conquests. When Haiti’s slaves rebelled against their French masters in 1790, he became their leader, taking the name L’Ouverture, “the Opener.” By 1798 the Haitians had thrown out their former French masters and installed L’Ouverture as governor for life, sending panic throughout the slaveholding world. Napoleon sent twenty thousand troops to oppose L’Ouverture’s eight-thousand-man army. The Americans encouraged clandestine shipments of supplies to the rebels but refused to support L’Ouverture publicly for fear of inspiring their own slaves to cut their throats. The Haitians’ fierce guerrilla tactics as well as an outbreak of yellow fever decimated the French. Captured by his enemies, L’Ouverture died in a miserable dungeon, but his followers fought on. By early 1803, Napoleon had to acknowledge the Haitians’ independence, and he decided to cut his losses.
In April 1803, the American negotiators in Paris were shocked when French foreign minister Talleyrand asked, “What will you give for the whole?” The “whole” of what? The Americans responded cautiously. “Whatever it was we took from Spain,” the minister answered with a shrug. The Americans offered fifteen million dollars for the
French claim, only slightly more than they had been prepared to offer for New Orleans alone. The land, of course, remained in the possession of its Indian proprietors. Every acre would have to be won by treaty or conquest at a cost that ultimately would be nearly thirty times greater than the sum paid to France. But even that was an incredible deal. “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves,” Talleyrand declared at the conclusion of the negotiations. “And I suppose you will make the most of it.”6
THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
. . .
Jefferson intended to do just that. The Louisiana Purchase gave his western exploration plans new urgency. Commanded jointly by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the expedition combined Jefferson’s scientific and nationalistic ambitions. He wanted the captains to find and catalog the interior’s botany, zoology, and geology, hoping their investigation would prove North American flora and fauna as diverse and vigorous as any found in Europe. Science would back the naturalness of American power while the captains’ survey of the territory would reveal new avenues for this power’s expression. It was well and good to admire frontier nature, but to hang onto the West, the Americans must bend that nature to their advantage. Lewis and Clark explored for the exploitable: a quick passage across the continent to reach the China market; fur resources like beavers and otters; and trading partnerships and military alliances with native nations.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in council with Indians. From Patrick Gass, A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery under the Command of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clarke . . . (Philadelphia, 1810). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
In the spring of 1804, the company shoved off, crossing the Mississippi from Illinois and entering the Missouri River country. The forty men made up a motley crew: backwoodsmen of British and Irish decent, métis of mixed ancestry, and Lewis’s black slave, York. As they rowed up the Missouri, they passed communities more motley still: towns of French-speaking Creoles and métis who had lived there since the mid-eighteenth century, villages of emigrant Indians more recently displaced from the Ohio valley, and clusters of recent arrivals from the American backwoods, like Daniel Boone, who lived with his family on the north side of the Missouri.
Pulling against the current, the company spent a summer reaching the earth lodge villages of the Mandan and Minnetaree Indians near “the falls” of the Missouri, in what is now central North Dakota. Farmers, these groups lived in durable towns, which made their lodges trading centers for the northern Great Plains. The Americans found French traders living among them with Indian wives and métis children. Frenchmen had been visiting the Mandans since 1738, when the party of fur trader Pierre de Varennes et de La Vérendrye arrived, part of a wave of French traders pushing westward from the Great Lakes. After warning the traders that the region was now part of the American West, Lewis hired a number of them, including Toussaint Charbonneau, who offered the interpretive skills of one of his wives, a fifteen-year-old Shoshone captive named Sacagawea. The only woman to accompany the expedition from the mountains to the Pacific, Sacagawea eased the Americans’ passage through the social and political crosscurrents of the region with her words as well as her visage. “The sight of this Indian woman,” wrote Clark, convinced the Indians “of our friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter.”7
Mandan village on the Missouri River. From George Catlin, Catalogue of Catlin’s Indian Gallery of Portraits . . . (New York, 1837). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Like Boone’s legend, Sacagawea’s story—the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a stamp in 1994—distorted the historical circumstances that inspired it. A very young woman who had probably been sold as a slave to her husband, Charbonneau, she bore little resemblance to the plucky feminist heroine others fabricated. (Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women’s rights advocates and suffragists latched onto Sacagawea as a role model and female counterpart to Lewis and Clark.) But there was nothing especially unusual about Sacagawea. She belonged to a small but influential group of captive women and children who knit the peoples of the West together. Her legacy to the explorers and to American history was her normalcy. Rather than helping Lewis and Clark to win the West, she helped them figure it out.
To navigate the West in the early nineteenth century, the Corps of Discovery had to establish relationships with the people living there. Women like Sacagawea acted as intermediaries among traders, tribes, nations, and empires. Through marriage, captivity, and slavery, women traversed linguistic, political, ethnic, and racial boundaries. Their travels and travails created kinship networks that made trade and alliances possible. It also made some of them dealmakers and peacekeepers. Some women used their proficiency in multiple languages and their ties to multiple families to secure wealth and independence. Many others, like Sacagawea, however, were not so lucky. They remained on the peripheries of their captors’ societies. Essential as go-betweens, their split identities and loyalties roused suspicions and provoked abuse.
The range of captivity and slave experiences signaled a key difference between the West and other sections of the United States. Western enslaved people ran the gamut from oppressed laborers to cherished family members. Some left bondage when they married their captors; others died scraping bison hides for wealthy masters who had no intention of ever freeing them. No racial codes or state constitutions controlled or dictated western slavery. A fluid arrangement, western slavery epitomized the ambivalence of the frontier. Bought and sold, ripped from kith and kin, slaves and captives forged new bonds with their masters and captors. The product of shattered lives, these relationships undergirded the politics and economies of the early West.
Lewis and Clark depended on Sacagawea, on French fur traders, and on informants among the Mandans and Minnetarees to begin to understand the complicated world of the Great Plains, a region that had been transformed over the preceding century. Soon after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, horses from the Spanish settlements drifted onto the plains, triggering a cultural revolution based on grass. Groups of natives exploited the power generated by the horse’s ability to consume sunshine encased in the blades that grew in oceanlike swaths along the continent’s midsection. Indians bred, stole, and traded the animals. They used them to move, fight, and hunt. Horses increased wealth by giving hunters greater access to the Great Plains’ bison herds. Bison meat filled bellies while their robes bought European trade goods, especially guns. The Indian nations that bet heavily on horses in the eighteenth century grew into formidable nations—some historians call them empires. Equestrian nomads dominated the West that Lewis and Clark encountered in the winter of 1804.
The horse remade life on the plains for better and worse. The social and cultural revolution hobbled native women. Nomadism upped their workload. Men hunted and fought; women did everything else. They struck and moved camp, transporting tepees, food, and the increasing bulk of hides and trade items to new pastures. They cooked, foraged for wild plants, and cared for children. And they processed hide after hide. Increasingly lethal, male hunters overburdened their female kin with bison hides and robes for trade. It took about three days of constant labor to cure a single hide; and a proficient hunter might bring in a dozen hides from a good hunt. Successful hunters not only acquired many horses but began to take many wives. Female laborers were the bottleneck in the hide business. A hunter could trade only as many as women could manufacture. The hide trade fueled captive-taking and the slave trade. Men stole and bought women to increase hide production.
Facsimile of a buffalo hide pictogram. Painted by Samuel Seymour, 1820. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The nomads of the plains lived most of the year in hunting bands consisting of a handful of families. As the bands moved, their allegiance and loyalty often shifted, and tribal identities emerged only gradually. The nations that confronted the Americans in the Wes
t were recent consolidations. The grass revolution inspired massive moves and reorganizations. A rambunctious country with a land-hungry and impressively fertile population, the United States was not the most expansive nation on the frontier. Mounted peoples converged on the interior of the continent from all directions. The Comanches originated as a Shoshone people of the Great Basin. After adopting the horse, they migrated onto the plains, and over several generations they moved southeastward toward present-day Oklahoma and Texas. There, they found some of the best pasture in the world. Their horse herds thrived, and their wealth and power increased. By the early nineteenth century, the Comanches dominated the southern plains.
In the northern plains a number of nomadic groups contested one another for hunting space. The Crows broke away from kindred farming communities along the Missouri River around 1700. A little later the Cheyennes left their farming homeland in present-day Minnesota and moved west. Long before Europeans or Americans reached the area, these two groups met in violent clashes in the vicinity of the Black Hills. The Cheyennes migrated in response to competition from an even stronger and more populous people, the Lakotas. Before the horse, the Lakotas, like all their neighbors, combined hunting, gathering, and a little farming to make a living on the northern fringe of the plains, but as the French traders pushed beyond the Great Lakes, their Algonquian allies, the Ojibwas and Crees, went to war with the Lakotas, driving them west. Indeed, the name by which we generally know the Lakotas—the Sioux—is a French transliteration of an Algonquian word meaning “enemy.” The Lakotas’ migration brought them into conflict with the Cheyennes and Crows. The groups fought over the Black Hills for decades. The Sioux won, pushing their rivals farther west. By the late eighteenth century, the Sioux rivaled the Comanches in the northern plains.
The American West Page 17