Chapter X: From the Mississippi to the Oregon

After the Old Northwest Territory was filled up, it began to overflow into the territories across the Mississippi which the Louisiana Purchase had provided.

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Minnesota's early settlers were French and half-breeds, who came over the border from Canada, together with a small number of Scots escaping from the breakup of the Red River Colony in Manitoba in the first quarter of the last century. This Red River is, of course, the Red River of the North which forms the present boundary between Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Beginning in 1837 treaties were made with the Indians which gradually opened up the land to settlement; but in 1849, when a territorial organization was effected and the first official census taken, there were less than 5000 persons in the region.

Meanwhile the flood of immigration was reaching the nearby States, and Wisconsin and Iowa were growing with tremendous spurts. The tide soon began to flow up to Minnesota, coming by four principal routes. Some of the invaders came from Milwaukee across Wisconsin by land. Others from Chicago by land through northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin. Still others from Chicago to Galena, embarking there on the river steamers. Another group embarked at Saint Louis and came 800 miles up the Mississippi to Fort Snelling, the nucleus around which the Twin Cities began to develop.

When the Rock Island and Pacific Railway was built through to the Mississippi in the early summer of 1854, the gateways really opened. The next season saw 50,000 persons in the territory of Minnesota. That number was doubled in 1856. In 1854 the sales of public land had amounted to 300,000 acres, in 1856 to 2,300,000. Most of this population, which evidently came to stay, was from the Middle States. The States of the Old Northwest and New England were not far behind, but little of the Southern emigration came this far north. The years 1855, 1856, and 1857 marked the high tide of the flood of immigration of territorial days which has not since been duplicated.

The Scandinavian immigration, which has colored Minnesota so strongly, began in this decade, and brought a steady stream of hardy Nordics who avoided the cities, their objective being to acquire land, establish a home, develop a farm, and become American citizens. A substantial part of the German migration also reached Minnesota, so that in the census of 1860 one-third of the foreign-born population was German. By this time the Canadian elements had been completely swamped. The Federal Census of 1860, three years after the territory had been admitted to Statehood, found 170,000 inhabitants, of whom 58,000 were foreign-born. The Germans at this time still somewhat exceeded the Scandinavians in number. The native-born were overwhelmingly of British ancestry and represented a prolongation of the westward movement of population from New England that had been going on for more than two centuries. Minnesota at this time had a Nordic population and was pre-dominantly Anglo-Saxon in character.

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Dakota was included in Minnesota in 1860 when a few settlers had already begun to enter the region. Dakota Territory, however, scarcely deserves consideration until the final period is herein reviewed.

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Iowa had no real settlement until the spring of 1833, when several companies of Americans from Illinois and elsewhere settled in the vicinity of Burlington, although John Dubuque established a settlement in 1788 on the site of the city which now bears his name, and, with his descendants, carried on a business of mining lead and trading with the Indians for a generation or more. Settlements then began to be made at other points along the Mississippi, and in 1838 the country was cut off from Wisconsin and established as a separate territory.

As in the States of the Old Northwest Territory, the early population of Iowa was made up principally from the Southern States; and when Dubuque was formally declared to be a town in 1834 its 500 citizens were mostly from Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

The delay in the settlement of Iowa, as compared with that of the States east of the Mississippi, was due mainly to the fact that it was held by the Indians. The Black Hawk War kept the country disturbed for three years. At the end of that time the chief was utterly routed and ultimately captured, and in September, 1832, a treaty was signed in which the Indians relinquished what was afterward known as the Black Hawk Purchase, comprising about one-third of the present State of Iowa.

At that time there were probably not fifty white men in Iowa, but thenceforward the settlement was extraordinarily rapid. The pioneers from the South came up the Mississippi, while those from the East could go down the Ohio. But since the purpose of most of the settlers was to take up farm land and since the livestock and implements necessary for this purpose could not be transported easily on the small river boats, the great bulk of the immigration was overland in wagons drawn by oxen, horses, or mules.

In 1836 there were 10,000 Southerners in the territory. In the following two years this number had more than doubled and the census of 1840 made it 43,000.

Foreign immigrants began to appear in small numbers, but the new arrivals were still largely of Southern upland stock, mainly of Scottish ancestry. By the Federal Census of 1850 Iowa had nearly 200,000 people and, although the settlement had begun at the most only seventeen years before, one-fourth of the population was Iowa-born.

As in the Old Northwest Territory, the direct contribution of New England was small. Most of the settlers came from adjoining States, and, while many of them went back to New England in pedigree, a still larger number in the early years came from the Southern States. This was true in Iowa nearly up to the time of the Civil War.

The ebb and flow of population in these States was so rapid as to make the task of tracing its details difficult. Thus in 1843 meetings were held in various points in Iowa to form companies of emigrants for Oregon. In 1849 the territory contributed its share to the California gold rush. Whole communities were depopulated almost as fast as they had been populated a few years previously, but many of these travellers probably returned after failing to find fortune ready to hand in the Golden State. Ohio was sending on settlers to the three States beyond her. Indiana and Illinois were attracting large bodies of settlers from Ohio but sending on others to Iowa. Iowa itself was contributing heavily to the population of Utah and Oregon. But these were all of the old native English Nordic stock.

By 1860 Iowa had a population of 674,913. The foreign-born made up nearly one-sixth of the total, two-thirds were German or Irish, and the remainder English or Scandinavian.

Iowa, by the outbreak of the Civil War, had become a Northern State, not so much from the direct New England immigration (only 25,000 of its people were New England born) as from the general drift of population, and from the fact that, as pointed out previously, many of the Southerners who came into the Northwest Territory had very little sympathy with the slave-holding point of view.

Iowa then entered the Union as a State almost completely Nordic and overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, populated by settlers from all parts of the original States who were moving westward in the hope of finding an advantage. What an immigrant of the 1830's said about Iowa pioneers he encountered, holds good of most of the westward movement--that it was made up of three classes: "men with families seeking to ameliorate fortune, men with families seeking to retrieve fortune, and young men attempting fortune." While the first pioneer surge into a new territory often contained a surplus of bachelors, the permanent settlement was made by men who brought their families.

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Kansas-Nebraska's settlement in the decade before the Civil War is a familiar episode to every one who remembers his American history.

Daniel Morgan Boone, a son of the Kentucky Pathfinder, is often alleged to have been the first American settler in Kansas, having been sent there by the government in 1819 to aid the Indians in agriculture. But the settlement of the State did not begin seriously until 1854, when treaties were made with the tribes of what was at that time an Indian territory.

Missouri, adjoining Kansas to the east, had then nearly 600,000 inhabitants, and the counties bordering on the Kansas line contained a population of some 80,000 whites, as shown by the census of 1850. These naturally were the most available material for settlement of the new land and in a short time they had staked out the best claims in the river bottoms. While they do not bear a good reputation in the Kansas histories, where they generally go by the name of "border ruffians," they represented, worthily or not, pure Nordic American stock. Most of the Missourians who had moved into Kansas at that time were simply seeking new homes and were not even in favor of slavery. The trouble that was made on the border was due to small organized gangs of quite a different complexion.

Kansas represented a real battleground for the slavery and free-soil elements, and colonies were organized in a number of the Southern States, but particularly in Alabama and Kentucky, to move to the new territory and insure its retention for the cause. Most of the Southern settlers naturally stayed as close to the Missouri border as possible. The Free-State settlers on the other hand tended to get away from the border, to leave the belt of pro-slavery settlers behind, and to stake out their claims well within the interior of the territory.

The New England Emigrant Aid Company was the principal crusader in the campaign to make Kansas free soil, and proclaimed widely that it would send 10,000 men into the region. Its funds, however, were scanty, and beyond advertising the opportunities of the country, it gave little substantial aid to the emigration. Contrary to what is generally supposed, the number of settlers who came directly from New England to Kansas was small. As had been the history elsewhere in this country, most of the settlers came from nearby States such as Illinois; though often of New England ancestry.

In the first census of the territory, in 1855, more than half of the population was found to be from the South, although the Slave States' representatives made strong protests against the manner of taking the census which was sudden and in mid-winter when many of the Missouri settlers had returned to their old homes. The high-water mark of the Southern immigration was in 1856. Thereafter the emigration from the Free States increased until by 1860 it outnumbered the Slave-State natives nearly three to one. That year's census, crediting Kansas with 107,000 population, also revealed that Missouri and Kentucky were the principal sources of the pro-slavery immigration, while the main sources of the free-soil immigration were in the following order: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York, with only 3000 direct from all the New England States together. Indeed, there were almost as many natives of North Carolina in Kansas as there were natives of Massachusetts.

Kansas was at the end of this period a western State, of almost wholly British complexion. The streams of Scandinavians and Germans which afterward entered the State had scarcely begun at this period. Kansas was, to a marked degree, the offspring of New England through the Central States, while not much more than one-fourth of its population, arriving from the border States, had ancestral lines running back to Virginia.

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Nebraska, like many other Western States, was first settled by trappers, traders, missionaries, and soldiers. In 1845 the Mormons, driven out of Illinois and Iowa, stopped in the Nebraska country, but most of them afterward moved on to Utah. Meanwhile, the State was being traversed each year by hundreds of emigrant trains on their way to the Pacific Coast, and thus became known to people from all parts of the Union. During the years 1849 and 1850 it was estimated that more than 100,000 people crossed the Nebraska plains in this way. Some of them would stop there for various reasons, while others came into the section to cater to the needs of the emigrants. Thus Nebraska was gradually built up out of the overland traffic. The early migration to Utah and to Oregon was succeeded by the rush to California, and that had scarcely died down when the boom days in Colorado brought new contingents to the region. Before this had disappeared the Transcontinental Railway opened up the territory in real earnest.

The first boom year in the territory was in 1856 when a large number of permanent settlers came in. In 1860 the population numbered 28,841, and even at this time relatively few of the settlers depended upon agriculture, most of them still "living off of the tourists," which became a recognized profession in some States half a century later.

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Utah, when Brigham Young led his Saints there in 1847, was a desert as to the region of the Great Salt Lake, with scarcely even a population of Indians. The early population was almost wholly Nordic, made up of people from the New England States, New York, and those States in which the Mormon Church had temporarily settled, or through which it had moved successively to Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska.

The Mormon authorities made a determined effort from the outset to bring converts from Europe, the first one arriving from Liverpool in 1849. At that time the English mission was said to have 30,000 members. In the fall of 1849 the Mormon leaders established the famous Perpetual Emigrating Fund which was used thenceforth to aid the transport of converts.

The Mormon Utah settlement by 1850 had a population of 11,000. The number of converts brought from abroad during the first ten years is put at 17,000, mostly from England. By 1887 the Mormons are said to have brought more than 85,000 of the working classes from England and northern Europe to the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains.

Brigham Young in 1849 organized his territory as "The Provisional State of Deseret," including what is now Utah and Nevada, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. This had but a short existence even on paper, for in 1850 Congress passed a law organizing the territory of Utah which also included what is now Nevada.

Toward the end of this period the discovery of rich silver mines in the Nevada section began to attract a miscellaneous population from all parts of the West. By 1863 a Mormon census of Utah gave the territory a population of 88,206, of whom probably a majority were foreigners. The great bulk of these were English, particularly from the factory towns, but Brigham Young boasted that fifty nationalities were represented in his territory a few years later. On the whole, however, the population was almost entirely Nordic.

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Idaho's first settlement is supposed to have been made by a party of Mormons in 1855 when it was still a part of Washington territory. At the close of the period here considered it was still a part of Washington and was just beginning to get a population of its own because of a gold rush in 1860.

Its early settlers were from Oregon, Washington, and northern California, and included an unusual proportion of men bred in the Southern and Southwestern States.

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Montana had scarcely begun to receive settlers at this time.

Meanwhile the tides of colonization were flowing over the "great plains" to deposit their load on the Pacific Coast.

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Oregon's settlement may be conveniently dated from the expedition of Marcus Whitman in 1836. The few trappers and traders who had arrived in early days may be disregarded. Thus began the short-lived race between the United States and Great Britain to colonize the country and to have their claims to possession based on effective occupation. American immigration did not commence in earnest until 1842 or 1843, but continued steadily, until the discovery of gold in California diverted many to that territory.

Most of the early American settlers came from Missouri or Iowa, and represented therefore either the Southern or New England pioneer stock. In general it may be said that Oregon at that time was settled from the Mississippi Valley, and mainly by men who came as genuine settlers with their families, in striking contrast to the adventurers who invaded California.

Meanwhile, the British colonizers were coming from Canada, many of them French-Canadians, while the rest were mostly of Scotch ancestry. But the American population grew so much more rapidly that by 1846, when the Treaty was made defining the parallel of 49° as the boundary between the two nations, there were nearly 8000 American settlers in the Oregon territory as against about 1500 of British allegiance.

In 1860, of the 30,500 native immigrants in the State 40 per cent were of Southern birth. Nearly half of these were from Missouri, and a large part of the others from Kentucky or Tennessee. The remainder represented principally the New England stock which has always been considered to be the foundation of Oregon.

The actual permanent settlement of the Puget Sound country began in 1845, but progress for some years was slow. Scarcely had a start been made here when the gold rush turned everyone's attention to California. Following this came the Indian war of 1855 to 1856, and shortly afterward the Civil War upset all plans, leaving the few scattered inhabitants of the Puget Sound region in the midst of a wilderness, surrounded by hostile savages, and inevitably neglected by the government to which they naturally looked for attention.

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Washington was separated from Oregon and established as an independent territory in 1853. The census found there only 3965 white persons, a small number to assume the responsibilities of a separate political existence. Walla Walla Valley was opened up in 1859, when the removal of a military interdict and a survey of public lands allowed a waiting population of some 2000 to rush in and spread over the whole of eastern Washington within a short time.