The Mammoth Book of the West (5 page)

By the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain granted the new nation its independence, plus sovereignty over a domain which stretched from the Great Lakes in the north to the 31st parallel in the south, and west to the Mississippi. It was a great chunk of land, but given entirely out of British self-interest. The grant lured the United States from the side of her allies, France and Spain; thus Britain weakened the diplomatic bloc against her. And not only that. By giving up such a generous domain. Britain was guaranteeing her former colony a host of troubles. And so it proved.

Even before Congress could ratify the Paris treaty, it was obliged to untangle the problem of competing claims by the various states to the land beyond the mountains. Virginia, for instance, claimed Kentucky (which had a population of 45,000 by 1780; not even war could halt the flood tide of settlement), and North Carolina claimed Tennessee. Other states also had western land claims. The problem was solved only when the states surrendered their claims to central government. New York took the lead in 1780. The rest followed reluctantly, Georgia quitting its claim only in 1802.

Having gained jurisdiction over trans-Appalachia, the national legislature then passed a series of ordinances, ending with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which were the most important laws in the history of westward expansion. Under the terms of the ordinances the Old Northwest, the area around Ohio, was divided into sections by a corps of surveyors, armed with compasses and 66-foot chains, and then grouped into townships six miles square. Surveyed land was to be auctioned off in eastern cities at a minimum of a dollar an acre.

Additionally, the ordinances set out a plan of government for the region, which was to be divided into five
districts and ruled initially by a Congressionally appointed governor. Once 5,000 free males had settled in each district, a legislature would be elected. On reaching a population of 60,000, the territory could petition for statehood. When admitted it would enjoy the same rights and privileges as original states of the Republic. The ordinance also guaranteed civil liberties and the rights of common law, and forbade slavery.

Underneath the legalistic prose, the ordinance hid a revolutionary idea. The western regions were invited to join the original 13 colonies as equal partners in shaping national destiny. Eventually some 30 states would join the Union on the basic principles laid down in the ordinances (although not all would be required to outlaw slavery).

The ordinances also gave a great fillip to westward expansion. For a man might now leave the old states without fear of giving up his political and judicial rights.

Not that the ordinances were flawless. The minimum price of $1 per acre was reasonable – but land had to be bought in parcels of 640 acres. Few leather-clad pioneers had $640. Consequently, the parcels were often bought by unscrupulous eastern land companies, who then sold on the land in small plots at hiked-up prices. The ordinance was a speculator’s charter. To lure the buyer the companies often published promotional pamphlets full of lavish description of the acreage for sale, acreage which they had never even seen. One such pamphlet read:

A climate wholesome and delightful . . . Noble forests, consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar . . . and a plant that yields ready made candles . . . Venison in plenty, the pursuit of which is interrupted by wolves, foxes, lions or tygers . . . A couple of swine will multiply themselves a hundred fold in two or three years. (Prospectus of the Scioto Company)

Many innocents fell victim to the speculators’ scams, the most pitiful of all being the French citizens who read and believed the claims of the Scioto Company. Between 1787 and 1790 the Scioto Company sold, via its Paris office, 150,000 acres of land it did not own. Some 600 French arrived in America to be informed that they had been duped. The matter was a national scandal, not least because the head of the Scioto Company was Colonel William Duer – the official who handled government land sales. Eventually, a few tracts of land were given over to the French (including 24,000 acres by a pitying Congress), but it was no bountiful farmland Paradise. It was unbroken forested frontier, from which the French had to carve out smallholdings and vineyards. They passed their lives in poverty and squalor.

And attacks by Indians. The ordinances conveniently ignored the fact that the Northwest was already occupied. With tomahawk and burning torch, a coalition of the tribes tried to stem White settlement north of the Ohio. Fanning the flames was Britain, anxious to surreptitiously stymie American expansionism and still clinging – in violation of the Paris treaty – to her Northwest forts.

By the autumn of 1789 the United States was embroiled in its first Indian War. To crush the insurgent tribes the new president, George Washington, sent out two military expeditions. Both fared badly. The first, in 1790, under General Josiah Harmer, was mauled comprehensively by the warriors of Miami chief Little Turtle. The next year, General Arthur St Clair, governor of the Northwest territory, led his men one hundred miles north from Cincinnati – and into the waiting arms of Little Turtle. Inept and inexperienced, St Clair let his men sleep almost without guard. Throughout the night of 3 November 1791 Miami warriors infiltrated the sleeping Whites’ camp south of the Maumee. At dawn, the war-whooping Miami rushed
the Americans, killing almost at will. One hundred troops were killed. The rest fled in panic, reaching Fort Jefferson – a ten-day march under normal conditions – in under 24 hours. It was to be the worst defeat in the history of US Indian fighting.

A sobered Congress decided to seek a peace with the Indians of the upper Ohio. The Wabash and the Illinois were receptive, but the Miamis preferred the sound of a settler dying. A further operation of war was put in motion. To lead it, Washington called out of retirement General Anthony Wayne, a tanner turned dashing Revolutionary soldier. “Mad Anthony” patiently drilled his men and perfected their marksmanship and then led them to a decisive victory on 20 August 1794 in the tangled thickets of Fallen Timbers. Under cover of fire by riflemen, American infantry made a screaming mass charge into the thickets. The Indians broke and fled for the safety of Fort Miami, only to have the gate closed in their faces. The British commander was not prepared to openly violate Britain’s neutrality. The rejection broke the Indians’ morale and by the following year the Miamis were ready for peace. Under the Treaty of Greenville (1795), the Indians forfeited a slice of southeastern Indiana and nearly all of Ohio. White settlers flocked in. By 1803 Ohio was a state of the Union.

In the aftermath of Fallen Timbers, Britain also inclined to the negotiating table. Increasingly embroiled in Europe’s wars, and her plotting in America undone by Wayne’s revitalized hangdog army, Britain was keen to cut her losses. In Jay’s Treaty of 1794, she agreed to evacuate her forts in exchange for trading rights amongst the Indians of the Old Northwest.

Britain, however, was not the only imperial menace on the continent. Spain owned the Louisiana Territory, and a whole swathe of the south. Yet Madrid, too, was becoming
preoccupied with the affairs of Europe and tiring of her expensive intrigues with the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokee and Chickasaw. It was a good time for prudence. In the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo (or Pinckney’s Treaty), Spain ceded the so-called Yazoo Strip of Alabama to the United States, and opened up the Mississippi to American traders.

Spain was also desirous of ridding herself of Louisiana, a colony which cost the Spanish dear every year. Late in 1800 Madrid sold the entire land of Louisiana to a France whose imperial urge had been revived by Napoleon Bonaparte. The sale sent a shudder of apprehension throughout the United States. (It also ruined Daniel Boone, who had been given a large tract of Louisiana by an admiring Hispania; he died penniless at the age of 85, still wanting to wester.) France could be a powerful foe. Yet President Jefferson was her match. With considerable guile he convinced France that the United States was about to join a military alliance with Britain. This, plus the abject failure of Napoleon’s troops to quell a slave revolt in Santa Domingo, made the French gratifyingly cooperative. On Easter Monday 1803 Napoleon announced his decision to sell to the US the whole of Louisiana. At around 800,000 square miles, it was an area larger than the United States at the time. The price agreed on was 80,000,000 francs – about $15 million (or 3 cents an acre). Thomas Jefferson had just struck the greatest real estate deal of all time. He had just bought most of the West beyond the Mississippi.

What was in this land Jefferson had bought? Only a few Europeans had ever been inside it, and then mostly along the narrow ribbons of its major rivers. To unveil Louisiana’s secrets Jefferson organized a “Voyage of Discovery”. It would be the first and the longest of the United States’ journeys into the uncharted wilderness.

For Jefferson the Voyage was the realization of a compulsive dream. He was an inveterate – if armchair – Westerer. More, he was a scientist by hobby, and he had a scientist’s need to know what was in the unknown. He also had a politician’s need to know if a Northwest passage existed, which would connect shining sea to shining sea. For 20 years Jefferson had tried to have someone explore the lands west of the Mississippi. In 1786 he had encouraged the Connecticut adventurer John Ledyard to walk across Russia, boat the Bering Straits and then walk eastward to St Louis (Ledyard never got further than Irkutsk in Siberia). As Secretary of State, Jefferson had again backed another frustrated trans-America exploration, that of the French botanist André Michaux in 1793.
(The idealistic Michaux became sidetracked by the French Revolution.) It was not until he became President that Jefferson could finally find the men and the money to journey the continent. The Voyage of Lewis and Clark was begun even before Jefferson had Louisiana in his pocket. Jefferson browbeat Congress into stumping up $2,500 for his enthusiasm in January 1803, two clear months before Napoleon agreed to sell.

With the Louisiana deal completed, Jefferson could move more openly. To lead the expedition he chose his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, a 28-year-old Virginian. With the President’s concurrence, Lewis invited his old friend, William Clark, to be co-leader. Clark accepted. The President gave the two men detailed and precise instructions on their task. By his charge they were to “explore the Missouri river, and such principal stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean . . . may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.” If the primary purpose of the expedition was imperial, it was also to observe and record the soil, topography, flora and fauna of the lands it passed through, and to note the languages and traditions of the peoples it encountered.

That the Voyage would accomplish so much of its grand brief was due to the quality of its commanders. Lewis had a talent for naturalistic observation. Clark, a 32-year-old Kentuckian, was a skilled map-maker. Both men were experienced soldiers, having fought in the Revolutionary War and under Wayne at Fallen Timbers. Such was their friendship that they co-led the Voyage, in defiance of military hierarchy, from first to last in complete harmony.

By July 1803 Lewis and Clark were ready to leave the East. They travelled overland to Pittsburgh, descending
the Ohio by keelboat, and then ascending the Mississippi to St Louis, which was to be their jumping-off point into the unknown. At winter camp by the banks of the river they drilled the recruits to their “Corps of Discovery” in the techniques of frontiering.

On 14 May 1804, Lewis and Clark began their historic ascent of the Missouri. With them went 27 unmarried members of the Corps. Two non-military personnel were also in the party: George Drouillard, a half French-Canadian interpreter, and York, an African-American slave Clark had inherited from his father. Within a few days the party, travelling in an iron keelboat and two pirogues, had left all signs of civilization behind them, and the “Big Muddy” had begun to reveal its watery dangers. Only ten days into the journey, Clark recorded in the expedition’s red-morocco bound journals:

Set out early. passed a verry bad part of the River Called the Deavels race ground, this is where the Current Sets against some projecting rocks for half a Mile . . . The Swiftness of the Current Wheeled the boat, Broke our Toe rope, and was nearly over Setting the boat.

As they struggled upriver, they endured other problems of nature. Members of the party were frequently ill. On 6 June Clark wrote: “I am Still verry unwell with a Sore throat & head ache.” Fifteen days later, he noted: “The party is much afflicted with Boils, and Several have the Deasentary, which I attribute to the water.” There were difficulties with discipline as well:

The Commanding officers, Capts. M. Lewis & W. Clark constituted themselves a Court Martial for the trial of such
prisoners as are Guilty of Capital Crimes, and under the rules and articles of War punishable by
DEATH
.

Alexander Willard was brought forward Charged with “Lying down and Sleeping on his post” whilst a Sentinel, on the Night of the 11th. Instant” (by John Ordway Sergeant of the Guard).

To this charge the prisoner pleads Guilty of Lying Down, and Not Guilty, of Going to Sleep.

The Court after Duly Considering the evidence aduced, are of the opinion that the Prisoner Alexdr. Willard is guilty of every part of the Charge exhibited against him. it being a breach of the rules and articles of War (as well as tending to the probable distruction of the party) do Sentience him to receive One hundred lashes, on his bear back, at four different times in equal proportion, and Order that the punishment Commence this evening at Sunset, and Continue to be inflicted (by the Guard) every evening until Completed.