The Winning of the West Volume IV Part 1

The Winning of the West.

Volume Four.

by Theodore Roosevelt.

PREFACE TO FOURTH VOLUME.

This volume covers the period which opened with the checkered but finally successful war waged by the United States Government against the Northwestern Indians, and closed with the acquisition and exploration of the vast region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was during this period that the West rose to real power in the Union. The boundaries of the old West were at last made certain, and the new West, the Far West, the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was added to the national domain. The steady stream of incoming settlers broadened and deepened year by year; Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states, Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi territories. The population in the newly settled regions increased with a rapidity hitherto unexampled; and this rapidity, alike in growth of population and in territorial expansion, gave the West full weight in the national councils.

The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the north, and the innumerable obscure forays and reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in the south, so cowed the Indians, that they all, north and south alike, made peace; the first peace the border had known for fifty years. At the same time the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in fact the boundaries which the peace of 1783 had only given us in name. The execution of these treaties put an end in the north to the intrigues of the British, who had stirred the Indians to hostility against the Americans; and in the south to the far more treacherous intrigues of the Spaniards, who showed astounding duplicity, and whose intrigues extended not only to the Indians but also to the baser separatist leaders among the Westerners themselves.

The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true history is to be found, not in the doings of the diplomats who determined merely the terms upon which it was made, but in the western growth of the people of the United States from 1769 to 1803, which made it inevitable. The men who settled and peopled the western wilderness were the men who won Louisiana; for it was surrendered by France merely because it was impossible to hold it against the American advance. Jefferson, through his agents at Paris, asked only for New Orleans; but Napoleon thrust upon him the great West, because Napoleon saw, what the American statesmen and diplomats did not see, but what the Westerners felt; for he saw that no European power could hold the country beyond the Mississippi when the Americans had made good their foothold upon the hither bank.

It remained to explore the unknown land; and this task fell, not to mere wild hunters, such as those who had first penetrated the wooded wilderness beyond the Alleghanies, but to officers of the regular army, who obeyed the orders of the National Government. Lewis, Clark, and Pike were the pioneers in the exploration of the vast territory the United States had just gained.

The names of the Indian fighters, the treaty-makers, the wilderness wanderers, who took the lead in winning and exploring the West, are memorable. More memorable still are the lives and deeds of the settler folk for whom they fought and toiled; for the feats of the leaders were rendered possible only by the l.u.s.ty and vigorous growth of the young commonwealths built up by the throng of westward-pushing pioneers. The raw, strenuous, eager social life of these early dwellers on the western waters must be studied before it is possible to understand the conditions that determined the continual westward extension of the frontier. Tennessee, during the years immediately preceding her admission to statehood, is especially well worth study, both as a typical frontier community, and because of the opportunity afforded to examine in detail the causes and course of the Indian wars.

In this volume I have made use of the material to which reference was made in the first; beside the American State Papers, I have drawn on the Canadian Archives, the Draper Collection, including especially the papers from the Spanish archives, the Robertson MSS., and the Clay MSS.

for hitherto unused matter. I have derived much a.s.sistance from the various studies and monographs on special phases of Western history; I refer to each in its proper place. I regret that Mr. Stephen B. Weeks'

valuable study of the Martin family did not appear in time for me to use it while writing about the little state of Franklin, in my third volume.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

SAGAMORE HILL, LONG ISLAND,

_May_, 1896.

THE WINNING OF THE WEST.

CHAPTER I.

ST. CLAIR'S DEFEAT, 1791.

The Westward March of the Backwoodsman.

The backwoods folk, the stark hunters and tree-fellers, and the war-worn regulars who fought beside them in the forest, pushed ever westward the frontier of the Republic. Year after year each group of rough settlers and rough soldiers wrought its part in the great epic of wilderness conquest.

The people that for one or more generations finds its allotted task in the conquest of a continent, has before it the possibility of splendid victory, and the certainty of incredible toil, suffering, and hardship.

The opportunity is great indeed; but the chance of disaster is even greater. Success is for a mighty race, in its vigorous and masterful prime. It is an opportunity such as is offered to an army by a struggle against a powerful foe; only by great effort can defeat be avoided, but triumph means lasting honor and renown.

As it is in the battle, so it is in the infinitely greater contests where the fields of fight are continents, and the ages form the measure of time. In actual life the victors win in spite of brutal blunders and repeated checks.

The Grimness and Harshness of Frontier Life.

Watched nearby, while the fight stamps to and fro, the doers and the deeds stand out naked and ugly. We see all too clearly the blood and sweat, the craft and dunning and blind luck, the raw cruelty and stupidity, the shortcomings of heart and hand, the mad abuse of victory.

Strands of meanness and cowardice are everywhere shot through the warp of lofty and generous daring. There are failures bitter and shameful side by side with feats of triumphant prowess. Of those who venture in the contest some achieve success; others strive feebly and fail ign.o.bly.

Only a Mighty Race Fit for the Trial.

If a race is weak, if it is lacking in the physical and moral traits which go to the makeup of a conquering people, it cannot succeed. For three hundred years the Portuguese possessed footholds in South Africa; but they left to the English and Dutch the task of building free communities able to hold in fact as well as in name the country south of the Zambesi. Temperate South America is as fertile and healthy for the white man as temperate North America, and is so much less in extent as to offer a far simpler problem of conquest and settlement; yet the Spaniard, who came to the Plata two centuries before the American backwoodsman reached the Mississippi, scarcely made as much progress in a decade as his northern rival did in a year.

The task must be given the race just at the time when it is ready for the undertaking. The whole future of the world would have been changed had the period of trans-oceanic expansion among the nations of Europe begun at a time when the Scandinavians or Germans were foremost in sea-trade and sea-war; if it had begun when the fleets of the Nors.e.m.e.n at the threatened all coasts, or when the Hanseatic league was in its prime.

No race can Succeed Save at the Right Moment.

But in the actual event the days of Scandinavian supremacy at sea resulted in no spread of the Scandinavian tongue or culture; and the temporary maritime prosperity of the North German cities bore no permanent fruit of conquest for the German people. The only nations that profited by the expansion beyond the seas, and that built up in alien continents vast commonwealths with the law, the language, the creed, and the culture, no less than the blood, of the parent stocks, were those that during the centuries of expansion, possessed power on the ocean,--Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and, above all, England.

Interest of the Race and the Individual Opposed.

Even a strong race, in its prime, and given the task at the right moment, usually fails to perform it; for at the moment the immense importance of the opportunity is hardly ever understood, while the selfish interests of the individual and the generation are opposed to the interest of the race as a whole. Only the most far-seeing and high-minded statesmen can grasp the real weight, from the race-standpoint, of the possibilities which to the men of their day seem so trivial. The conquest and settlement rarely take place save under seldom-occurring conditions which happen to bring about ident.i.ty of interest between the individual and the race. Dutch seamen knew the coasts of Australia and New Zealand generations before they were settled by the English, and had the people of Holland willed to take possession of them, the Dutch would now be one of the leading races of mankind; but they preferred the immediate gains to be derived from the ownership of the trade with the Spice Islands; and so for the unimportant over-lordship of a few patches of tropical soil, they bartered the chance of building a giant Dutch Republic in the South Seas. Had the Swedish successors of Gustavus Adolphus devoted their energies to colonization in America, instead of squabbling with Slavs and Germans for one or two wretched Baltic provinces, they could undoubtedly have built up in the new world a Sweden tenfold greater than that in the old.

If France had sent to her possessions in America as many colonists as she sent soldiers to war for petty townships in Germany and Italy, the French would now be masters of half the territory north of the Rio Grande. England alone, because of a combination of causes, was able to use aright the chances given her for the conquest and settlement of the world's waste s.p.a.ces; and in consequence the English-speaking peoples now have before them a future more important than that of all the continental European peoples combined.

Each Race Indifferent to its Own Future.

It is natural that most nations should be thus blind to the possibilities of the future. Few indeed are the men who can look a score of years into the future, and fewer still those who will make great sacrifices for the real, not the fancied, good of their children's children; but in questions of race supremacy the look-ahead should be for centuries rather than decades, and the self-sacrifice of the individual must be for the good not of the next generation but perchance of the fourth or fifth in line of descent. The Frenchman and the Hollander of the seventeenth century could not even dimly see the possibilities that loomed vast and vague in the colonization of America and Australia; they did not have, and it was hardly possible that they should have, the remotest idea that it would be well for them to surrender, one the glory gained by his German conquests, the other the riches reaped from his East Indian trade, in order that three hundred years later huge unknown continents should be filled with French and Dutch commonwealths. No nation, taken as a whole, can ever see so far into the future; no nation, even if it could see such a future, would ever sacrifice so much to win it. Hitherto each race in turn has expanded only because the interests of a certain number of individuals of many succeeding generations have made them active and vigorous agents in the work of expansion.

This Indifference as Marked in New as in Old Communities.

This indifference on the part of individuals to the growth of the race is often nearly as marked in new as in old communities, although the very existence of these new communities depends upon that growth. It is strange to see now the new settlers in the new land tend to turn their faces, not towards the world before them, but towards the world they have left behind. Many of them, perhaps most, wish rather to take parts in the struggles of the old civilized powers, than to do their share in laying the obscure but gigantic foundations of the empires of the future. The New Englander who was not personally interested in the lands beyond the Alleghanies often felt indifferent or hostile to the growth of the trans-montane America; and in their turn these over-mountain men, these Kentuckians and Tennesseans, were concerned to obtain a port at the mouth of the Mississippi rather than the right to move westward to the Pacific. There were more men in the new communities than in the old who saw, however imperfectly, the grandeur of the opportunity and of the race-destiny: but there were always very many who did their share in working out their destiny grudgingly and under protest.

The Race Grows because its Interests Happen to be Identical with those of the Individual.

The race as a whole, in its old homes and its new, learns the lesson with such difficulty that it can scarcely be said to be learnt at all until success or interests failure has done away with the need of learning it. But in the case of our own people it has fortunately happened that the concurrence of the interests of the individual and of the whole organism has been normal throughout most of its history.

The United States and Great Britain in 1791.

The att.i.tude of the United States and Great Britain, as they faced one another in the western wilderness at the beginning of the year 1791, is but another ill.u.s.tration of the truth of this fact. The British held the lake posts, and more or less actively supported the Indians in their efforts to bar the Americans from the Northwest. Nominally, they held the posts because the Americans had themselves left unfulfilled some of the conditions of the treaty of peace; but this was felt not to be the real reason, and the Americans loudly protested that their conduct was due to sheer hatred of the young Republic. The explanation was simpler.

The British had no far-reaching design to prevent the spread and growth of the English-speaking people on the American continent. They cared nothing, one way or the other, for that spread and growth, and it is unlikely that they wasted a moment's thought on the ultimate future of the race. All that they desired was to preserve the very valuable fur-trade of the region round the Great Lakes for their own benefit.

They were acting from the motives of self-interest that usually control nations; and it never entered their heads to balance against these immediate interests the future of a nation many of whose members were to them mere foreigners.

Reluctance of the Americans to Enter into War with the Indians.

The majority of the Americans, on their side, were exceedingly loth to enter into aggressive war with the Indians: but were reluctantly forced into the contest by the necessity of supporting the backwoodsmen. The frontier was pushed westward, not because the leading statesmen of America, or the bulk of the American people, foresaw the continental greatness of this country or strove for such greatness; but because the bordermen of the West, and the adventurous land-speculators of the East, were personally interested in acquiring new territory, and because, against their will, the governmental representatives of the nation were finally forced to make the interests of the Westerners their own. The people of the seaboard, the leaders of opinion in the coast towns and old-settled districts, were inclined to look eastward, rather than westward. They were interested in the quarrels of the old-world nations; they were immediately concerned in the rights of the fisheries they jealously shared with England, or the trade they sought to secure with Spain. They did not covet the Indian lands. They had never heard of the Rocky Mountains--n.o.body had as yet,--they cared as little for the Missouri as for the Congo, and they thought of the Pacific Slope as a savage country, only to be reached by an ocean voyage longer than the voyage to India. They believed that they were ent.i.tled, under the treaty, to the country between the Alleghanies and the Great Lakes; but they were quite content to see the Indians remain in actual occupancy, and they had no desire to spend men and money in driving them out.

Nevertheless, they were even less disposed to proceed to extremities against their own people, who in very fact were driving out the Indians; and this was the only alternative, for in the end they had to side with one or the other set of combatants.

The governmental authorities of the newly created Republic shared these feelings. They felt no hunger for the Indian lands; they felt no desire to stretch their boundaries and thereby add to their already heavy burdens and responsibilities. They wished to do strict justice to the Indians; the treaties they held with them were carried on with scrupulous fairness and were honorably lived up to by the United States officials.

The Government Especially Averse to War.

They strove to keep peace, and made many efforts to persuade the frontiersmen to observe the Indian boundary lines, and not to intrude on the territory in dispute; and they were quite unable to foresee the rapidity of the nation's westward growth. Like the people of the eastern seaboard, the men high in governmental authority were apt to look upon the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and suspicion. Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back into the very conditions from which the race has raised itself by the slow toil of ages.

Inevitable Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.

The conditions cannot but tell upon them. Inevitably, and for more than one lifetime--perhaps for several generations--they tend to retrograde, instead of advancing. They drop away from the standard which highly civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they bring the new land up towards the level of the old, they themselves partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back towards the state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of the leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness upon the effort of the Westerners to push north of the Ohio.

The Westerners Solved the Problem.