Chapter IX: The Mountaineers Conquer the Southwest

Meanwhile the States of the lower Mississippi Valley were coming into existence at a rapid rate.

* * * * *

Alabama had no American settlement until after the Revolution, save for the sporadic appearance of adventurers or traders. But in 1798, when the Mississippi territory was formed, including the present State of Alabama, there was already a movement of settlers from the adjoining States on the east and north, and this continued rapidly until checked by the war with the Creek Indians in 1813 and 1814. This war advertised the territory. Its termination threw the land open to settlement, and more than 100,000 people located in Alabama within five years. The slight French and Spanish element in Mobile and two or three other places was soon reduced to insignificant proportions.

The State was settled either by those who came down some of the rivers of that region, particularly from Tennessee, or by those who came through Georgia, stopping long enough at the land office in Milledgeville (then the State capital) to make the necessary arrangements for acquiring title to real estate. An unimproved but passable trail ran thence through Montgomery to Natchez, and over this "Three Notch Road" (so-called from the blaze which marked it) a stream of settlers from the Atlantic seaboard States passed into the broad belt of rich blackland which quickly made Alabama and Mississippi the heart of the Cotton Kingdom. Alabama is, for the most part, the offspring of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, and therefore represents almost entirely Scotch and English blood. Its foreign-born population was negligible in 1860, amounting to little more than 12,000, almost half of whom were Irish, in a total of virtually a million.

* * * * *

Mississippi: As in most others of this group of States, the supposed influence of the earlier French and Spanish settlements is more sentimental than real. American settlers began to filter in after 1763, some coming even from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. A few Loyalists drifted down to the Mississippi country during the Revolution, joining the British who were attached to the district at that time in military or administrative capacities. One of the elements of this Loyalist immigration consisted of Scotch Highlanders from North Carolina.

The census of 1850 furnished the first opportunity to ascertain the origin of the population. The main immigration naturally was from other Southern States which contributed 145,000 against 5000 from the Northern States. In the same year 18,000 natives of Mississippi were residing in other Southern States, principally in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee.

At the census ten years later the Mississippi natives, then located in other Southern States, had almost doubled in number. The enumeration gives an interesting picture of the way in which population was flowing backward and forward between adjoining States at that time as it has in almost every other period in American history.

Since the population of Mississippi before the Civil War was almost identical in composition with the population of the other Mississippi Valley slave States, most of which owed their inhabitants originally to Virginia and subsequently to the States which Virginia had colonized, it was not surprising that these people found it easy to move from one part of this region to another. Of nearly 800,000 population at the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign-born, still mainly Irish, constituted only one in a hundred. But nearly half of the population of the State was colored, and thus no element of racial strength. In this respect Mississippi's record was surpassed only by Georgia and South Carolina. This latter State was the only one in which Negroes actually outnumbered Whites at that time. Other Southern States later reached the same unenviable situation, and it continued in South Carolina until after the shift of Negro population which followed the World War.

* * * * *

Louisiana at the time of the Purchase in 1803 presented among its 50,000 residents a more varied group than could be found in any other American State. The foundation of this population was French, the Spanish element never having been important. These French seem to have represented a much more heterogeneous lot than did the early French-Canadians. One colonization scheme after another had been launched in Paris, and settlers had been recruited by all sorts of means, many of them of more than doubtful merit.

Here, however, as in other colonies, it must be remembered that the final population represented not those who arrived, but those who both survived and left posterity. This fact has too often been disregarded in the accounts of the origins of the American population. If France shipped prostitutes to New Orleans to provide wives for its soldiers, nevertheless this is now of importance only in so far as such persons left descendants. In one case, of which the details exist, forty-four girls were sent out from France in 1722. They all married, but only one left offspring.

Another element in the population was the Acadian refugees, who, uprooted by the New England militia in 1758, were driven to almost every part of the colonies. Some made their way to Louisiana, as Longfellow has described, though drawing a very erroneous picture, in _Evangeline_. Others were scattered through Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, in fact on almost every part of the Atlantic coast. The total number of persons expelled from Nova Scotia at this time probably did not exceed 6000, and many of these certainly died from hardships. In any case only a minority was directed to Louisiana, so that the original settlement of Acadians must represent a very small part of the population. The so-called "Cajan" population of some of the southern parishes of Louisiana is, at the present time, largely of other origins, chiefly Negro.

Another group of French refugees came from Haiti by way of Cuba after 1800, when the Negro uprising there drove out the Whites. Many of these were persons of good quality but as many as could do so went elsewhere after peace returned.

Still another source of population was the notorious Mississippi Bubble sponsored by the Scotchman John Law about 1717. This was the period at which the Germans from the Palatine and adjacent regions were emigrating in large numbers, as has been previously set forth in detail, and 10,000 or more of them were persuaded to go to Louisiana. According to accepted accounts, not more than 2000 of these Alpines actually arrived, and when the bubble burst, they settled along the Mississippi above Baton Rouge in a region which is still known as the German Coast.

An ill-natured English traveller, John Davis, visiting Louisiana in the year before the Purchase of 1803, has left the following picture of these two elements as they appeared to him:

"The Acadians are the descendants of French colonists, transported
from the province of Nova Scotia. The character of their
fore-fathers is strongly marked in them; they are rude and sluggish,
without ambition, living miserable on their sorry plantations, where
they cultivate Indian corn, raise pigs, and get children. Around
their houses one sees nothing but hogs, and before their doors great
rustic boys, and big strapping girls, stiff as bars of iron, gaping
for want of thought, or something to do, at the stranger who is
passing.

"The Germans are somewhat numerous, and are easy to be distinguished
by their accent, fair and fresh complexion, their inhospitality,
brutal manners and proneness to intoxication. They are, however,
industrious and frugal."

A small Spanish settlement, New Iberia, was made in 1779 of colonists largely from Andalusia and the Canary Islands. At least the former element doubtless contained Moorish blood.

Finally, there was an immigration from the American colonies which had been coming in for a generation previous to the Purchase. One of the first groups was from North Carolina. From time to time other small bodies of settlers crossed the mountains to the Tennessee River, where they constructed flat boats and floated down to the Ohio and thence to the Mississippi. A few years later a group of Scotch Highlanders from North Carolina arrived, settling near Natchez. The early American immigration to Louisiana came on the whole from the upland parts of the Southern States, and was therefore Scotch and English. After the Purchase a similar immigration increased greatly in numbers.

The census of 1860, which credited the State with 708,002 people, revealed that only 81,000 of these were foreign-born, the Germans and Irish being in about equal numbers. Nearly all of the remainder who were not natives of the State were born in adjacent States of the Mississippi Valley, the Whites being made up in about equal proportions of native-born and those born in nearby States. The former contained much of the old French and mixed stock; the latter was almost entirely of British antecedents.

* * * * *

Arkansas, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, did not contain 500 white people. The current of immigration down the Mississippi had gone past the Post at the mouth of the Arkansas River without taking the trouble to turn aside. Settlement can scarcely be said to have begun before 1807, and at the census three years later there were only 1000 people in the territory.

It was not until after the passage by Congress in 1818 of the Land Act that the pioneers, each carrying in a leather wallet a certificate which entitled him to a homestead, began to work their boats up the current of the Arkansas River. There was a steady though not rapid arrival of settlers from Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and particularly Tennessee--which has often been regarded as the original parent of Arkansas.

Attempts have been made to trace a line of migration from the first settlement in North Carolina, the undesirable character of which was mentioned earlier, through Tennessee and down into Arkansas, and to attribute to this element of the population the backwardness of some parts of the last-named State. A few settlers came from Georgia or Alabama up the Mississippi River but this involved a long struggle with a strong current and it was easier for them to settle in the blacklands of Mississippi or Louisiana.

There were about 14,000 persons in Arkansas in 1817 when it was created a Territory. Thereafter it made a steady growth, derived generally from all the Southern States of the Mississippi Valley, until nearly the time of the Civil War when Indiana and Kentucky began to contribute some settlers. Its population therefore was in general made up almost wholly of British stock. Its 1860 population of 435,350 was one-fourth black, the Whites being almost wholly native-born, a thousand Germans and a thousand Irish being lost in the mass.

* * * * *

Missouri must be considered from a double point of view. As a French outpost, St. Louis had become the refuge of much of the French population of the whole Northwest Territory when that passed under English control, and for many years the city remained a foreign settlement. Scattered settlers began to occupy the river banks after or even during the Revolution. In the westward march of population down the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley small groups soon began to enter Missouri, until at the census of 1810, they amounted to 20,000 persons occupying a strip of land along the Mississippi with a small isolated settlement at the lead mines.

On the other hand, as a territory where slavery was permitted, Missouri naturally attracted emigrants from Virginia and North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. Within ten years after the Louisiana Purchase it was estimated that four-fifths of the people in Missouri were Americans and they were rapidly moving from the river back into the interior.

The Missouri River was naturally an avenue of access for these people. The interior of the State soon began to have the collective name of "Boone's Lick" because the Boones had made salt in that district in 1807. A real rush into this region began about 1817, and Kentucky showed its loyalty to its adopted son (who it will be remembered was a Pennsylvanian by birth) by contributing 90 per cent of the immigration. The State has been called the daughter of Kentucky and within limits this is not inappropriate. Tennessee, however, was strongly represented. The whole population was in general of the upland element originally from Virginia and North Carolina, largely Ulster Scotch in its more remote origin.

By 1830 the movement of population had reached the western border of the State. Until this time the settlement was purely British in character save for the now negligible remnant of French on the Mississippi. Missouri then began to get a part of the immigration of German Alpines which makes Saint Louis still one of the American cities with a most marked German tinge. At the same time some of the old American stock who objected to slavery and its influences were passing north and west of Missouri into Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. On the whole, however, at the close of this period Missouri remained a Nordic community mostly of Virginian stock going back eventually to Great Britain. Its population of well over a million was nine-tenths white and eight-tenths American-born, the Germans outnumbering the Irish two to one among the foreigners. Kentucky had been by far the largest contributor, Tennessee came next, followed by Virginia, while Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana together accounted for only about as many as Kentucky alone, that is, 100,000.

This Missouri population, with its Ulster Scotch tinge, played an important part in the settlement of the trans-Missouri West. It contributed a large percentage of the plainsmen and mountain men of later date, as well as of the cowboys on the cattle ranges, to say nothing of the gun-men and bad men of the frontier.

* * * * *

Florida missed the establishment of one of the earliest and what might have been one of the greatest of Nordic colonies in North America when Coligny's settlement of Huguenots was massacred by the Spanish on September 20, 1565. The latter made no effective use of the territory which was looked upon by the government of Mexico probably in about the same light as the Virgin Islands are now looked upon by the government in Washington. In 1763 Spain ceded Florida to England in return for Havana, which had been captured during the Seven Years' War.

A second Nordic invasion of Florida occurred at the time of the American Revolution when the English Loyalists from the Southern colonies sought refuge there to the number of more than 13,000. If these had remained as permanent settlers the State would have benefited immensely, but most of them left in 1784, when the Spaniards reoccupied the territory and abolished religious freedom. Some went to England and others to the West Indies or Nova Scotia. The development of the peninsula was thereby long delayed.

East and West Florida became part of the United States in 1819. A Florida colonization scheme, of little importance numerically, deserves mention in passing because it represented the first real establishment in American territory of the Mediterranean peoples who have formed such an important element in the immigration of the last half-century. This was a colony established by British promoters to which they brought 1,500 Greeks, Italians, and Minorcans about 1767. Sickness soon greatly reduced their numbers, but a few of the descendants of these people are in the State at the present time.

As late as the Civil War, Florida was one of the weakest of the American States, with but 140,000 population, of which well over a third was colored. Nearly all of the Whites represented a southward thrust of the Atlantic seaboard states, from or through Georgia. Foreigners were a scattered lot, constituting but one in twenty-five of the white population.