Frederic L. Paxson

“ An English observer, hopeful for the worst, announced in the middle of the war that "When that 'late lamented institution,'226 the once United States, shall have passed away, and when, after this detestable and fratricidal war—the most disgraceful to human nature that civilization ever witnessed—the New World shall be restored to order and tranquility, our shikaris will not forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel suffices to transport them from fallow deer and pheasant shooting to the haunts of the bison and the grizzly bear. ”

“ In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and twenty-seven dead oxen.
Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away, so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.
The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy. Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached the gold fields. ”

“ The degree of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache. A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their haunts—hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled—by white flags, or any other method, human or divine—and then put to death. ”

“ The country was strewed with the skeletons and carcases of cattle, and the graves of the early Mormon and California pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst emigrant route that I have ever travelled; much of the road is through deep sand, feed is very scanty, a great deal of the water is alkaline, and the snows in winter render it impassable for trains. ”

“ The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land, possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase, could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against self-help and private war. ”

“ In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded facts. ”

“ Here at Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties. For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the Southwest,—all these gave to Independence its name and place. ”

“ Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains. ”

“ I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext that they may choose to allege. ”

“ And out of this shifting frontier between man and nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic development and social organization, have in most instances originated near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier interest. ”

“ The men who exploited California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class, mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana. Activity was constant during these years all along the continental divide. ”

“ THE OVERLAND MAIL
Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not self-supporting for a decade or more ”

“ We will have a sort of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together. ”

“ Here was a new settlement far away from the seat of territorial government, while the government itself was impotent. Kansas had no legislature competent to administer law at home—far less in outlying colonies. But spontaneous self-government came easily to the new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers in his diary, "that within two weeks of the arrival of a few dozen Americans in a wilderness, they set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory! But we are of a fast race and in a fast age and must prod along." ”

“ The United States itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the Mississippi," lamented the Nation in 1868, but "there is no book of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a mass of very desultory information. ”

“ By the time of the attack upon the stage line it was clear that an Indian war existed, involving in varying degrees parts of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes. The merits of the causes which provoked it were considerably in doubt. On the frontier there was no hesitation in charging it all to the innate savagery of the tribes. Governor Evans was entirely satisfied that "while some of the Indians might yet be friendly, there was no hope of a general peace on the plains, until after a severe chastisement of the Indians for these depredations." ”

“ The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and political unit. ”

“ The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence. What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West. ”

“ Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. ”

“ In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and cabins of the frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old Mexico, yearly growing narrower ”

“ A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them, while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of this on their own account. ”

“ A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period, the great West. ”

“ It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade, and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but the progress was real, if not rapid or great. ”

“ The sky has been dark ever since the war began. These braves who are with me are all willing to do what I say. We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they may sleep in peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies." To him Governor Evans responded that this submission was a long time coming, and that the nation had gone to war, refusing to listen to overtures of peace. This Black Kettle admitted. ”

“ On the slavery side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas, and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing the erection of a free state on her western boundary. ”