Iowa, the first free state in the Louisiana purchase : from its discovery to the admission of the state into the Union, 1673-1846

Front matter

IOWA: THE FIRST FREE STATE IN THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

* WILLIAM SALTER nmf

Class Book.

Contents

Page

I. Discovery. 1673 n

II. The Aborigines 22

II

Among those bluffs now stands aloft the city of McGregor.

One hundred and thirty-two years previously De Soto had been upon the lower Mississippi, nine hundred miles down the river, and met his tragic fate. On Spanish maps '' Nova Hispania " had been inscribed over the whole vague outline of North America. But in the lapse of more than a century De Soto's adventures passed out of notice. No one followed them up. Spain was engrossed with the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Glutted with silver and gold from those lands, and enfeebled by luxury, her rulers lost that ambition for a larger knowledge of the globe which gave immortal honor to Queen Isabella. The spirit of adventure passed to France.

Marquette led in the new discovery. He was the forerunner in bringing the valley of the Mississippi to hght. Sailing down the river, he noted the fishes, the birds, the buffalo, and other animals, but saw no trace of a human being for eight days. On the twenty-fifth of June, having gone about two hundred and seventy miles, human footprints were seen upon the right bank of the river, and a beaten path leading to a beautiful prairie. Marquette and Joliet went ashore and followed the path some five or six miles to a village of Illinois Indians on the banks of the Des Moines. One of our chief poets has put Marquette's narrative of their reception into the closing scene of the ** Song of Hiawatha " :

From the farthest realms of morning Came the Black-Robe chief, the Prophet, He the Priest of Prayer, the Pale-face, With his guides and his companions.

And the noble Hiawatha, With his hands aloft extended.

Held aloft in sign of welcome,

Cried aloud and spake in this wise : ** Beautiful is the sun, O strangers. When you come so far to see us ! All our town in peace awaits you, All our doors stand open for you ; You shall enter all our wigwams. For the heart's right hand we give you. Never bloomed the earth so gayly,

Never shone the sun so brightly, As to-day they shine and blossom When you come so far to see us ! '*

And the Black-Robe chief made answer, Stammered in his speech a little. Speaking words yet unfamiliar : " Peace be with you, Hiawatha, Peace be with you and your people, Peace of prayer, and peace of pardon. Peace of Christ, and joy of Mary ! "

Then the generous Hiawatha Led the strangers to his wigwam. Seated them on skins of bison, Seated them on skins of ermine. And the careful old Nokomis Brought them food in bowls of basswood. Water brought in birchen dippers. And the calumet, the peace-pipe. Filled and lighted for their smoking. All the old men of the village. All the warriors of the nation,

Came to bid the strangers welcome ; "It is well," they said, " O brothers. That you come so far to see us ! "

On the thirtieth of June the explorers proceeded down the Mississippi. They observed the Missouri mingHng its tumultuous flood with the great waters, and they went as far as the mouth of the Arkansas, when they turned about, lest they fall into the hands of Spaniards from Florida, Spain being then at war with France. On their return, they passed up the Illinois River, and crossed over to Lake Michigan.

As reports of their discovery reached Quebec and France, other explorers soon followed. In 1680, Hennepin, a Franciscan missionary, came down the Illinois River, and ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony. As he passed along the whole eastern border of Iowa, Jie was the first white man to see that part of it which lies above McGregor. He had the art to ingratiate himself among the Sioux Indians. The same summer, Du Luth, whose name is preserved in the city at the head of Lake Superior, threaded his way through the wilderness and swamps between that Lake and the Mississippi into the Sioux country, where he fell in with Hennepin. In the fall they came down the Mississippi together to the Wisconsin, and went up that river, and over to Green Bay and Mackinaw, retracing the route by which Marquette and Joliet came to the Mississippi seven years before.

Two years later (1682), La Salle unfurled the banner of France on the ninth of April at the mouth of the Mississippi, and took formal possession of the country watered by it and its affluents, in the name of Louis XIV. In this act he named the country Louisiana, as Hennepin also called it in his " Description of Louisiana," published at Paris in 1683.

Prominent among other explorers was Nicolas Perrot. Born in France in 1644, he came to Canada when eleven years old, and at the age of twenty-one engaged in trade among the Indians. A man of native powers, of fine address, fond of adventure, he went among different tribes, and made himself famihar with their languages and customs. Possessed of religious fervor, he affihated with the Jesuit fathers, and supported their missions. From his acquaintance with the tribes of the Upper Lakes, Talon, the Intendant of New France, had employed him to assemble the chiefs of those tribes at the Falls of St. Mary on the fourteenth of June, 1 67 1, when the French standards were set up with pomp, and formal possession of the country was taken. Next to the Jesuit fathers who were present, Perrot affixed his name to the proch-verbal as " His Majesty's Interpreter in these parts." The name of Joliet follows. It was Perrot's report to the Intendant of what the Indians had told him of a great river running south, that led Talon to despatch Joliet with Marquette to discover it.

Afterwards, Perrot was the first trader with the Indians upon the Mississippi ; Marquette and JoHet after their discovery were never again upon its waters. Perrot made several establishments; one, among the Sioux near Lake Pepin; another, near the mouth of the Wisconsin, probably in what is now Clayton County, Iowa. The latter had his Christian name. It was Fort St. Nicolas. These establishments, called " forts," were depots for goods brought into the country and for furs bought of the Indians in exchange for knives, guns, blankets, and trinkets. The traders were soldiers, subject to military orders. While thus engaged, Perrot was commissioned by the Governor of New France, Denonville, to take formal possession of the upper Mississippi, " in order to make incontestable His Majesty's right to the country discovered by his subjects." This was done on the eighth of May, 1689, at Post St. Anthony, which stood upon a commanding site, Mont Trempealeau, a few miles above the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin. De Bois Guillot, commandant at Fort St. Nicolas, Joseph Jean Marest, of the Society of Jesus, Le Sueur, a hardy adventurer and mine prospector in the Sioux country, and other witnesses were present, and with Perrot signed the proch-verbal.

The following year, 1690, some Miami Indians, then Hving upon the Mississippi, brought a specimen of lead ore from a " ruisseau " (probably Catfish Creek, Dubuque), to Perrot, and requested him to establish a trading-post there, which he did, and the place became known as "Perrot's Mines."

At the period of these discoveries all western Europe was in arms. France was at the head of the nations, and Louis XIV. was head of France, and a terror to other lands. While discovering the Mississippi on one continent, he was carrying dismay and ruin into neighboring countries on another, overrunning the Palatinate, conquering Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg, threatening England and Holland. Only the resistance, the patience, and the daring of William, Prince of Orange, afterward William III. of England, turned the tide of battle against him. At the same period the Huguenots, denied liberty of worship in France, begged the privilege of planting themselves upon the Mississippi. But Louis XIV. replied that he had not banished Protestants from France to make a republic of them in America.

At the time of Marquette's discovery the English settlements on the Atlantic coast were scattered and feeble. They extended but short distances into the interior, and were frequently in terror of the Indians. King Philip was still at peace with the Plymouth Colony, but two years later, 1675, he kindled a general Indian war, which excited gloomy apprehensions in every settlement in New England. In New York, the Dutch and English were still at strife for the province. William Penn had not yet crossed the Atlantic ; nine years later he founded Philadelphia. The settlement in Virginia was sixty-six years old, but numbered only forty thousand souls. The Carolinas had a population of four thousand ; the city of Charleston was founded seven years later. A Spanish settlement had existed for a century at St. Augustine, but was still feeble, and chiefly memorable for intolerance, cruelty, and crime.

Thus small and obscure were the beginnings of our country when the bluffs and prairies of Iowa first glimmered into view. Though a part of the earhest discovered portion of the Mississippi valley, and rich and attractive as any, the settlement of Iowa was long delayed. For a century and a half it remained in the o

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Marquette's Map of the Discovery of Iowa seclusion of nature, the home and hunting-ground of wandering and warring tribes, visited only by traders to get the furs of the region, its fortune in history held in abeyance by persons living and events occurring far away.

II

THE ABORIGINES

THE discoverers of Iowa found roving bands of Illinois and Miami Indians upon its borders, who soon returned east of the Mississippi, where their names remain in rivers of other States. The lowas had the same roving habits. They were of Sioux stock, as their language and traditions indicate. They were sometimes called " Prairie Sioux." They roamed from Lake Michigan to the Missouri River, and at the same time occupied villages in Iowa, and upon rivers that bear their name, longer and more continuously than any other tribe. Hence Iowa became the name of the State, as the names of the Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota Rivers fell to the States through which those rivers flow. Bands of lowas were found at one period and another upon the Milwaukee River, the Mississippi, the St. Peter's, the Upper and

Lower Iowa, Rock River, the Des Moines, the Missouri, the Grand, the Chariton, and the Little Sioux. On an early map (171 8) the Little Sioux is called '' River of the lowas."

Rivers were the Indian highways of transportation in canoes of birch bark. These were of graceful construction, built without hammer or nail, but strong, of large carrying capacity, yet so light as to be easily carried over a portage from one river to another.

The aborigines were in a low state of barbarism. They had no arts or trades. They knew nothing of writing, or of numbers beyond the ten fingers. Their tools or implements were shells, fish-bones, the bones of wild animals, clubs and spears of wood. They knew not the use of stone in building, or of lime and sand, or how to construct a chimney. Their tents were put up with poles and sticks, covered with skins, or with mats made of bark and rushes. Their clothing was of skins. At feasts and on show occasions they smeared the face and body, put feathers on their heads, and strung bear claws about the neck. They had no iron, wax, or oil. They made fire by rubbing sticks. They had no horses, cows, sheep, hogs, chickens ; only dogs. They knew not the use of milk. Their subsistence was from fishing and hunting, in which they were expert, and from little corn-fields and melon-patches, cultivated by the squaws. The men hated labor. Nothing aroused them to action but war and the chase. To hunt, fish, and pursue and scalp an enemy, was their life. On marches the squaws carried the pack-burdens; on hunting expeditions they dressed the skins, jerked the buffalo meat, and put up the lodges at night.

The savages had hardly a conception of property, or it was limited to a few things, that were held in common rather than as personal belongings. They had no idea of money or sense of value. In their wandering Hfe they knew nothing of land-ownership. The earth is our common mother, they said, and land and water are free as air and light. When we speak of the Indians selling their land, or of our people buying their land, we use the language of our civilization, not that of the savages.

Marquette's friendly reception by the Illinois drew his heart to that tribe, and it was in his mind to establish a mission among them, but his life was cut short in less than two years, and the work fell to others. Father Gabriel Marest, a brother of Joseph Jean Marest, previously mentioned, took up the work and prosecuted it with heroic devotion. Writing from Kaskaskia thirty-seven years after Marquette's death, he said :

" The Illinois are less barbarous than other savages. In a great extent of country only three or four villages are found. Our life is passed in threading dense forests, crossing lakes and rivers, that we may overtake some poor savage who is fleeing from us, whom we know not how to tame. Slaves to brutal passions, they are indolent, deceitful, and naturally thievish, so as to boast of their skill in thieving. Nothing is more difficult than the conversion of these savages ; it is a miracle of the Lord's mercy. We must first make men of them, and afterward work to make them Christians." *

The Illinois were the only tribe on the upper Mississippi among whom the Jesuits established *" Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), Ixvi., 218.

missions. The lowas, the Sioux, and the Missouris, Pawnees, Otoes, Omahas, of what is now western Iowa, and the Osages of the country south, remained in original savagery.

The Sacs and Foxes came later into Iowa. A century elapsed before they gained a foothold upon the upper Mississippi. The early explorers of Canada found them about Lake Huron and Saginaw Bay, where they were at war with other tribes. Soon they were at war with the French. When worsted in those wars, and after the repulse of the Foxes at the siege of Detroit in 1712, they drifted to Lake Michigan and Green Bay. Here they carried on war with the Chippewas and other tribes, and again fought the French, robbed the French traders, and burned their trading-houses. Again worsted, they moved over to the Wisconsin River. Here they went on the war-path against the Illinois Indians. A captain in the French service at Fort Chartres reports the descent of a body of Foxes, Sacs, and Sioux from the Wisconsin River in more than a hundred canoes to avenge upon the Illinois Indians the killing of a Fox hunting-party :

"The Foxes had fixed upon Corpus Christi day for fighting the lUinois, knowing they would come to see the ceremonies performed by the French on that day. Ten or twelve of the Foxes fell upon the Indian village, which was only a league from the Fort, killed all they met, and fled. The Illinois pursued them, but an army of Foxes was lying in the tall grass, and they killed twenty-eight Illinois, and then fell upon the village, set fire to it, killed men, women, and children, and led away the rest as captives. The Foxes lost but four men. I was a spectator of the slaughter, June 6, 1752, from a hill which overlooks the village, and had the opportunity of saving the life of a girl of fifteen years of age, who came to bring me strawberries. The savages did not venture to shoot at her for fear of hitting me." *

The famous Connecticut traveller, Jonathan Carver, found a large Sac village on the Wisconsin River in 1766. Thence they drifted to the Mississippi. The region was open before them, former occupants were gone, and they spread themselves up and down the river, and up the Missouri, carrying their war spirit in every direction, fighting the remnant of the

* Bossu. " Travels in Louisiana," i,, 131.

Illinois, fighting the lowas, fighting the Osages and the Missouris, fighting the Sioux, fighting Spain, fighting the United States. The idea of their owning Iowa by hereditary right, or by long occupation, is fabulous. From the beginning they resisted all efforts for their civilization. They spurned the missionary, with cross and rosary, or with Bible and school-book, and the farmer, sent by the United States to teach them the plough and the spade.

III Under France I 682-1 770

WHILE Marquette's discovery and the acts of La Salle and Perrot gave to France the territory now called Iowa, it remained during the whole French domination a savage wilderness. France was then in search of silver and gold mines, such as Spain had found in Mexico and Peru. Le Sueur, who was with Perrot on the upper Mississippi in 1689, was foremost in the search. After the formal possession of the country was taken, he went to France, to obtain exclusive mining privileges and men to work the mines. But encountering many mishaps in the war then raging between England and France, it was not until ten years afterward that he arrived at New Orleans with a party of French miners. In the spring of 1700 they started up the Mississippi, and passed along the border of Iowa in the summer. They encountered Canadian voyageurs and Sioux and Iowa Indians upon the river. On the thirteenth of August they were at Perrot's Mines, and on the seventh of September they passed the present boundary line between Iowa and Minnesota. Later in the season they ascended the St. Peter's to the Blue Earth River, where Le Sueur made an *' establishment." Here again he met lowas, with Indians of other tribes.

The Indian trade of the upper Mississippi centred at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, where trading posts were established, some of them on the west bank of the Mississippi. Thence traders and missionaries went up into the Sioux country, or down the Mississippi, or followed a long path to the Missouri River, overland, which was marked on English maps as the *' French route to the West." The Indians on the Missouri River furnished a valuable trade, in which the French at Kaskaskia also engaged. The idea was then cherished, as expressed by Charlevoix in 1722, of ascending to the sources of that river and finding a passage to the Pacific Ocean ; an idea realized eighty-three years afterwards by Lewis and Clark.

The Des Moines River was also traversed its whole length by Canadian voyageurs. They observed " great plenty of pit coal " upon its banks, and that the river " issues from the midst of an immense meadow which swarms with buffaloes and other wild beasts," and they traced the connection between the lakes that are its source and other lakes in which the Blue Earth River has its origin.

A few names, as that of the Des Moines River, and of T^te des Morts in Dubuque County, are the only marks of French domination remaining upon the soil of Iowa. No grant of land was made to any one. During much of the time, France, England, and Spain were at war with each other, and jealous as to their respective possessions in America. In 1720, Spain being at war with France, an expedition was fitted out from Santa Fe to seize Louisiana, but the party on reaching the Missouri River fell into the hands of savages, and all but one, the priest who escaped, were massacred. Two years later, the French built Fort Orleans on the Missouri River, near the mouth of the Osage, to guard against another invasion. Later, this fort was attacked by the savages, and all the French were massacred.* Bossu, writing from Kaskaskia, May 15, 1753, says;

" Spain saw with great displeasure our settlements on the Mississippi. The English, too, spared no intrigues to ruin this growing colony, as they still do those on the Ohio, which they say belongs to them ; they have likewise laid claim to the Mississippi." f

Louis XIV. cherished a warm and ambitious regard for New France and Louisiana. He gave them his personal attention and support. No English sovereign had any such regard for the English colonies in America. They grew by their own energy and enterprise. As against Louis XIV. and James II., they supported the Revolution of 1688, which put William III. on the throne of England. The contest raged

* Amos Stoddard. " Sketches of Louisiana," pp. 45-46. t Travels m Louisiana,!., 151.

fiercely in America, in what were known as the French and Indian wars, on the frontiers of the Hudson, the Connecticut, the Merrimac, and the headwaters of the Ohio. At an early stage in those wars the French abandoned their establishments on the Mississippi, and the traders returned to the St. Lawrence. So far as che Indians of this region took part, it was on the British side.

Louisiana was dependent originally upon and subordinate to New France, with the seat of government at Quebec. Charlevoix in his History of New France (1744) treats them as one, though under separate governments. He says the country above the Illinois is " not Louisiana, but New France." The Ohio River and the mouth of the Arkansas were at different times spoken of as the line between them. On the west side of the Mississippi, above the mouth of the Ohio, the first settlement was at St. Genevieve in 1 745 ; the next at St. Louis in 1764 by the adventurous LaclMe, who organized a company that obtained a monopoly of the fur trade of the whole region. " Many ages must pass before we can penetrate into the northern parts of Louisiana," said a historian of that time.*

Meanwhile, the French and Indian wars were closed on the Heights of Abraham with the fall of Quebec (1759). France was humiliated. She lost Canada, and she feared for Louisiana, lest an English fleet should seize the mouth of the Mississippi and capture New Orleans. In these straits, Louis XV., great-grandson of Louis XIV., a weak and corrupt man, by a secret treaty ceded New Orleans and the country west of the Mississippi to Charles III. of Spain, another great-grandson of Louis XIV., a man of stronger character, '' from the afifection and friendship existing between these two royal persons." The cession was accepted, and acknowledged in the Treaty of Paris, January i, 1763.

At New Orleans the people were exasperated at the treaty. They sent a deputation to the French king, begging him to retract his donation to Spain. The venerable Bienville, the

* Du Pratz. " History of Louisiana," London, 1763, ii., 159.

Jonathan Carver founder of the colony, then residing in Paris in his eighty-sixth year, expostulated with the prime minister, with tears and upon his knees, to retract; but to no purpose. The answer was:

*' The colony cannot continue its precarious existence without an enormous expense, of which France is incapable. Is it not better that Louisiana should be given away to a friend than be wrested from us by a hereditary foe ? "

At New Orleans the people refused subjection to Spanish authority. They ordered off the first governor sent by Spain, and were not brought into subjection until the arrival of a strong military force under another governor (1769).

The first American who is known to have been in Iowa was Jonathan Carver, of Connecticut. He came down the Wisconsin River in October, 1766, and ascended the Mississippi. The traders of his party took up a residence for the winter at the mouth of Yellow River, in what is now Allamakee County, and he went up to St. Anthony's Falls.

No representative of Spain came to upper Louisiana until August, 1768, when a captain arrived at St. Louis with twenty-five soldiers. By universal consent, however, the last French commandant, Saint-Ange de Bellerive, a venerable man of high character, continued in authority until a Spanish Lieutenant Governor arrived, Don Pedro Piernas, who received possession of the province on the tenth of May, 1770. Thus what is now Iowa came under Spain.

T

IV Under Spain

HE possession of Louisiana gratified the ambition of Spain for larger possessions in America. An act of friendship between two royal persons, it was also a compensation for the aid Spain had given to France in the recent war with England. That war was disastrous to both France and Spain ; but the acquisition of Louisiana did for Spain what De Soto in 1540, and the expedition from Sante F^ in 1720, had vainly attempted. It made her colonial possessions the largest in the world. They now stretched in an unbroken line on the west side of the continent from Cape Horn to the sources of the Missouri and the Mississippi. Slumbering in that vast area, undistinguishable in the wilderness, lay Iowa. Under Spain, it continued in the hands of wandering and warring savages, with few incidents for historical record, its future determined in the counsels of courts far away.

As the Treaty of Paris (1763) secured to England free navigation >of the Mississippi, British traders soon appeared upon the upper Mississippi. They came into competition with the French Canadians who had been there earlier, and with Spanish traders who came later. They extended their trade up the Des Moines, and far up the Missouri, where the trade was the richest of all. By their enterprise, and with better goods at lower prices, they ingratiated themselves with the Indians, and, as trade makes friends, won them to the British side, against both Spain and the United States. At the same time Laclede and Chouteau carried on a prosperous trade from St. Louis. That city vied with Mackinaw for the Indian trade, and therein laid the foundation of its wealth.

In 1779, Spain went to war with England. A Spanish force captured Natchez on the lower Mississippi. On the upper Mississippi, the representatives of the two powers were feeble and scattered, but they shared in the war. In May, 1780, a British force from Mackinaw with a motley band of traders and Indians assaulted St. Louis. The next year a Spanish expedition from St. Louis marched across Illinois and captured a small English fort on St. Joseph River, near the present city of Niles, Michigan. This capture was made the ground of a Spanish claim to a vast tract of country east of the Mississippi.

During the American Revolution Spain was friendly to it, and aided the United States with arms and ammunition. But when independence was won, Spain became jealous of the new nation, and endeavored to cut it off from the Mississippi.

Though Spain excluded the British from the Indian trade west of the Mississippi, the British traders kept it up. It was to no purpose that Lieutenant Governor Cruzat at St. Louis sent word to the Sacs and Foxes, November 30, 1781, that "the King of Spain, the master of the world, was their true father, and that the

English were intruders." They judged both Spanish and British traders by the prices at which they sold their goods. The Spanish traders were shackled by heavy taxes to their government, and were sometimes victimized by the Indians, especially by the lowas, who stole their best furs and turned them over to British traders. At the same time the British traders took the risk of being overtaken by Spanish gunboats and stripped of all they had. In I786> Navarino, the Intendant at New Orleans, complained that " the British had all the trade with the nations on the Des Moines, where beaver and otter skins were in the greatest abundance." Later, the fur trade of Spanish Louisiana was farmed out to an English house in London.

But few Spaniards came into Upper Louisiana. The population remained French. A few Americans came under the offer of land from the government; as Daniel Boone, who settled on the Missouri River, and Israel Dodge, who settled near St. Genevieve. They also cherished the belief that the country would at some time fall into the possession of the United States. Without that expectation Boone said that he would not have come. The only Spaniard who distinguished himself byenterprise and adventure was Manuel Lisa, an active and indefatigable fur trader, who spent many winters in the wilderness, and was foremost in extending trade among the Indians upon what is now the western border of Iowa, and among the Blackfoot and Crow Indians of the Big Horn Mountains. He became a patriotic American, and was employed in the service of the United States. He said, ** I have suffered enough under a different government, to know how to appreciate the one under which I now live."

The Sacs and Foxes came into the Mississippi country about the time of the transfer of Upper Louisiana to Spain. The Foxes established themselves in five villages on the west side of the river, between the upper Iowa River and Rock Island. Their largest village was on Catfish Creek. Julien Dubuque, a French Canadian, an early settler at Prairie du Chien, visited this village to trade with the

Indians. A man of parts, cunning, adroit, a charmer of rattlesnakes, of which the region was full, handling them with impunity, he ingratiated himself with the Indians, and secured their unlimited confidence. He took a squaw wife. The discovery of a lead mine at the village made his fortune. He assembled the Fox chiefs of the region at Prairie du Chien, and procured a permit to work the mines, with a monopoly of the right, November 22, 1788. Ten Canadian laborers were employed in working the mines. Dubuque built them cabins, and they, too, took squaw wives. He built a smelting furnace, and a house for himself. Large quantities of lead were produced. The establishment prospered. It was the first white settlement in Iowa. Dubuque drove off other traders who came there with goods. Pie shipped lead to St. Louis, and gained consideration and credit with Chouteau, the principal merchant of that city. As under Spain none but Spaniards could hold mines, he became a Spaniard, and named his mines "Spanish mines." In 1796 he petitioned