The Old Northwest; the beginnings of our colonial system

Front matter

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Contents

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I. North America in Outline, . . . . i

II. The First Division of North America, . . 6

I. North America In Outline

North America is easily separable into three very plainly mafted physical divisions. The Pacific Highlands, which are a vast plateau surmounted by the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountain systems, extend from the Arctic Ocean to the Isthmus of Panama, and form the primary feature of the continent. The Atlantic Highlands, consisting of the Labrador Plat'eau and the Appalachian Mountain system, with the adjacent eastern slope, extend from Labrador almost to the Gulf of Mexico, and form the secondary feature. Between the Pacific Highlands and the Atlantic Highlands, extending from the southern Gulf to the northern Ocean, 5,000 miles in length by 2,000 in breadth at the widest part, and opening out like a fan to the north, is the Central Plain.

The Central Plain is also easily separable into three parts. First, the Arctic Plain descends by easy slopes from the wavy elevation called the Height of Land, north and northeast to the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay. Secondly, south of the Height of Land and a second similar elevation that takes off from it, near the head of Lake Superior, and sweeps southeast and northeast until it unites with the Appalachian Mountains in Northern New York, the Mississippi Valley falls away gently to the Gulf of Mexico, Thirdly, between the Arctic Plain and the Mississippi Valley lies the Basin of the Great Lakes, that is lengthened eastward in the St. Lawrence Valley.

The two sides of the continent, as divided by the eastern ranges of the Rocky Mountains, present the strongest contrasts. The western side consists of great mountain chains, attaining high elevations, with short and abrupt descents to the Pacific Ocean ; tlie eastern side is a vast plain, descending to the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico, by long and easy lines, save in the southeast, where it is interrupted by the moderate elevation of the Appalachian Mountains. Straight lines can be drawn from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, from the southern shore of Lake Ontario to the' Rio Grande, and from the source of the Ohio to the source of the Kansas, that will at no point rise 2,000 feet above the level of the sea. In fact, the geographer passes over whole States without finding any elevations of surface that he need represent upon a map intended for common purposes.

On the one side, and particularly south of 49° north latitude, the coast line is remarkably regular ; on the other side, remarkably irregular.

On the west, few rivers descend to the sea, and not one of these cuts through the mountain masses and reaches the interior; on the east, every subdivision of the Central Plain is traversed by a great natural water-way. Hudson Strait, Hudson Bay, and the Nelson-Winnipeg River system together reach the very foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. The noble St. Lawrence, cutting through the Appalachian Mountains, opens a channel for the Great Lakes to discharge their floods, and for man to ascend to the central parts of the continent. The Mississippi — ^Father of Waters — with his 35,000 miles of navigable affluents, gives ready means of access to every part of the great valley that bears his name. If three men should ascend these three water-ways to their farthest sources, they would find themselves in the heart of North America, and, so to speak, within a stone's-throw of one another. One of these water-ways has played hitherto no considerable part in the affairs of civilized men ; but the

NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 3

other two are as prominent in the history of America as they are in its geography.

The world scarcely offers a parallel to the ease and celerity with which the passage can be made from the upper waters of any one of these great water-ways to either of the others. " The Great Lakes occupy an elevated plateau, the summit, in fact, of the vast expanse of land which spreads out between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains ; no large streams flow into them, and they drain limited areas;"' and their basins are separated from the regions north and south by water-sheds that in no point rise to the dignity of mountains. Lake Superior is 900 feet above the Gulf of St. Lawrence ; Lake Itasca, Pittsburg, and Cairo are 1650, 700, and 300 feet respectively above the Gulf of Mexico. From Omaha west along the Platte River, the Union Pacific Railroad ascends by a grade of five feet to the mile; while from St. Paul northwest to the Yellowstone, the ascent is but two feet to the mile. In Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin the streams flowing in opposite directions often head in the same swamps ; and in times of high water it would almost be possible to push a flat-bottomed boat from the Lake Basin into the Mississippi Valley. The highest level of the Ohio Canal is 395 feet, the highest level of the Miami Canal, 380 feet, above Lake Erie. A simple pump sufifices to carry the sewage of Chicago to a level where gravitation takes it to the Mississippi. Lake Michigan once had a natural outlet to the Gulf of Mexico, and when the Drainage Canal now approaching completion is finished, it will be an artificial one.

In the days when the Northwest was discovered and explored, and again in the days when it was settled, the short and easy portages between the northern and southern streams, scattered all the way from Western New York to Minnesota, were of very great importance.

The Appalachian system consists of several chains or

' Hubbard : Memorials of a Half Century, 3.

ranges, and the valleys lying between them. To the explorer or pioneer attempting to reach the interior, they opposed a continuous mountain-wall from 3,500 to 7,000 feet in height, a slight obstacle, indeed, as compared with the mountains on the other side of the continent, but still considerable, and playing no unimportant part in history. The Atlantic Plain, as the slope east of these mountains is called, is coursed by many rivers that furnish excellent harbors at their mouths and render the whole region readily accessible from the sea. Five of these rivers, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the James, cut deeply into the mountains. The valleys of these rivers to-day are roadways for great lines of travel and transportation leading to the West ; but when the country was in a state of nature, only one of them offered an easy passage from the Atlantic Plain to the Mississippi Valley. Geologists tell us that once Lake Ontario had an outlet to New York Bay ; and certain it is that by the Hudson and Mohawk, the streams flowing to the Lakes whose sources are intertwined with those of the Mohawk, and the short and easy portages between them, the explorer and the colonist could readily have reached the interior but for a formidable obstacle that will receive attention in another place. Despite this obstacle, the site of Oswego was visited by Englishmen before the site of Pittsburg; Avhile it was through the Mohawk Valley that the first canal and railroad were built connecting the East and the West. From New York Bay to the St. Lawrence extends a deep valley that cuts the mountains asunder; Hudson River fills the southern half, Lake Champlain and the River Richelieu the northern half, of this valley ; and these waters, together with the easy " divide " between them, have played a very important part in American history from the very first.

These geographical features of our continent have been boldly sketched, because they have had the greatest influence upon the course of American, and particularly of Western- American, history. Had some convulsion of nature lowered

NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 5

the Appalachian Mountains to the level of the country east and west at the time the first English colonies were founded on the Atlantic slope, or thrown up a system of mountains as high as the Appalachians along the low water-sheds that separate the Lake Basin and the Arctic Plain from the Mississippi Valley when the first French settlements in Canada were planted, no one can tell in what different lines history would have run. Nor can one rightly estimate the prodigious influence upon the Northwest of the fact that it lies partly within the Lake Basin and partly within the Mississippi Valley, and that it holds in its bosom all the rivers flowing to the Lakes on the south, and to the Mississippi on the west, from the Ohio to the head of Lake Superior.

Speaking relatively, North America has an open and a closed side ; and fortunately it is the open side that faces Europe.

Note. — The author has treated the subject of the early chapters of this work more fully in his book entitled How to Study and Teach History, N. Y., 1S94, chaps, xv., xvi., xvii.

TI.

THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA.

For two hundred years after its discovery, North America had no independent life and history. The seeds of future American questions were being thickly planted, but for the time no such questions appeared. The continent was the theatre of European ambition, strife, and endeavor. Three great nations played each an important part in the drama — Spain, France, and England. We are now to see how the country was first divided among them.

I. The Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Spaniards had not firmly established themselves in the West Indies before they plunged into the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Columbus himself was on the coast of South America in 1498, and on the coast of Central America in 1502 and 1503. Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien, and discovered and named the South Sea, in 1 5 1 3. Cortez began the conquest of Mexico in 15 19, and Pizarro that of Peru in 1526. In 1 5 13 Ponce de Leon discovered and named Florida. Miruelo ran along the western side of the peninsula as far as Pensacola in 15 16. In 15 19 Pineda coasted the northern shore of the Gulf as far as Panuco, in Mexico, and on his return discovered the Mississippi River, which was first called *' The River of the Holy Spirit." In 1520 Ayllon sailed to the coast of Georgia and South Carolina ; and five years later he continued his explorations as far as Virginia, where he planted an ill-fated settlement on the future site of Jamestown. In 1527 De Narvaez conducted an unfortunate expedition to the northern shore of the Gulf. He lost his life while crossing the stream of the Mississippi out at sea, but De Vaca, one of his lieutenants, and a few others, survived the perils of the deep and of the land, to tell in after-years one of the most romantic tales to be found in the history of American exploration. Hernando de Soto, Governor of Cuba, having obtained from Charles V. a grant of the country from Florida to the River of Palms, landed at Tampa Bay in 1539 with a large and well-appointed command.

He hoped to find a rich Indian kingdom, such as Pizarro had found in Peru and Cortez in Mexico. After two years' marching in the interior, De Soto, disappointed in his search, found himself in latitude 35° north, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Crossing the river, he continued his march many hundreds of miles to the northwest ; but, still disappointed, he returned the next year to the river, his command greatly reduced by battle, disease, and famine, and himself wasted in body and broken in spirit, where he died. In the sonorous language of Bancroft : " His soldiers pronounced his eulogy by grieving for their loss ; the priests chanted over his body the first requiems that were ever heard on the waters of the Mississippi. To conceal his death, his body was wrapped in a mantle, and in the stillness of midnight was silently sunk in the middle of the stream. The wanderer had crossed a large part of the continent in his search for gold, and found nothing so remarkable as his burial-place." ' His surviving companions fled down the river to the Gulf, and made their way to their countrymen in Mexico. At the same time that De Soto was seeking his imaginary El Dorado in the region south of the Missouri, Coronado, who had come overland from Mexico, was searching in the same region for the fabled " Seven cities of Cibola." The two commands were so near each other " that an Indian runner, in a few days, might have carried tidings between them;" in fact, "Coronado actually heard of his

' History : 6-vulume edition, 1S76, I., 50.

countryman, and sent him a letter, but his messenger failed to find De Soto's party." ' Spaniards had now virtually met in the centre of the Mississippi Valley, coming from points as distant as Tampa Bay and the Gulf of California ; they had found no El Dorado or Cibola, and they gave over the attempt at exploration and conquest in these regions.

In no important sense did the Spanish discoveries make known the Mississippi to the world. Holding the shore line from Florida to Mexico, Spain, in the sixteenth century, had the finest opportunity ever offered any nation to explore, occupy, and possess the Mississippi Valley; the Appalachicola, the Mobile, the Colorado, and, above all, the Mississippi itself, invited her to ascend them and people their banks. No powerful Indian nation was on the soil to oppose her, no European rival was present to deny her right. Why did she not do so ? The answer is one of the exploded theories of political economy. In that age Europeans generally, and Spaniards particularly, held to the "Bullion Theory:" The precious metals are the only form of wealth. Not finding them in the region visited by De Soto, Spain fixed her attention on regions where she had already found them ; and so intent was she on the mines of Mexico and South America, that hergallions ploughed the waters of the Gulf for one hundred years, ignorant or regardless of the fact that they were crossing and recrossing before a portal that stood always open to admit them to the richest valley in the world. So indifferent was Spain to her opportunity that in the next century she allowed the Mississippi to slip from her hands to those of France, without serious protest. When another century had gone, she awoke from her indifference, and made strenuous efforts to recall the mistake. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for the world, it was too late. Fortunately for the world : for what greater calamity could have befallen civilization on this continent than a South America or a Mexico

' Narrative and Critical History of America, II., 292.

planted between the Alleghany and the Rocky Mountains ? Still, Spain, in the sixteenth century, founded two settlements within the present limits of the United States. Santa Fe, hidden away, in 1582, in one of the upper valleys of the Rio Grande, never played any part in history until our own times. But to hold Florida against all comers was to Spain a simple necessity. The peninsula offered an excellent base for attacking the fleets that bore the spoil of the East Indies, Mexico, and Peru from Vera Cruz and Carthagena to Spain, as well as for menacing the islands at the entrance of the Gulf ; and " the hurricanes of the tropics had already strewn the Florida coast with the fragments of Spanish wrecks." ' Hence the savage vigor with Avhich she expelled the Huguenot colonies from Northern Florida, and the persistence with which she held the English colonists on the north at bay down to 1763, when she surrendered the peninsula as the price of the Queen of the Antilles. St. Augustine, founded in 1565, a castle rather than a colony, was the key to the positions of Spain in the Gulf and in the East India seas.

II. The French in the Valley of the St. Lawrence.

Verrazzano in 1524 led the first French ofificial exploring expedition to North America. He sailed along the coast from latitude 32° to Newfoundland, landing at many places, and visiting New York Bay, and then returned to France. This voyage, which added considerably to contemporary knowledge of America, and led to other and more important voyages, crave color to the claim that France afterward made to the whole coast within the extreme points that Verrazzano touched. James Carticr, also with a French commission, made three voyages to the northern parts of the continent in 1534, 1535, and 1540. In 1534 he explored the coast of Newfoundland and the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, visited Labrador, and discovered the St. Lawrence River. Hoping

' Narrative and Critical History of America, 11. , 254.

lO THE OLD NORTHWEST.

that this river was the long-sought passage to Cathay, Cartier sailed up its current to Stadeconna, the Indian name of Quebec. Leaving here his ships, he pushed on with two or three boats and a few companions to Hochelaga, an Indian town on the present site of Montreal. It was the month of September ; the northern forests were putting on their gorgeous autumn garments, and the Frenchmen could not sufficiently admire the beauty of the country. Cartier visited Stadeconna and Hochelaga again in 1540, when he took possession of Canada, as the Indians called the country, in the name of his royal master, by raising a cross surmounted by the flciir-delis, and emblazoned with the legend : Franciscus primus, DEI GRATIA Francorum Rex regnat. Attempts to colonize the valley were immediately made, but they ended in failure.

Samuel deChamplain was the father of Canada. He came to America with Pontgrave, in 1603. Sent up the St. Lawrence to Hochelaga, he was filled, like Cartier, with admiration as he viewed the country, and was at once convinced that this valley, and not Acadia, must be the seat of the future French-American Empire. Deeply patriotic and fervently religious, Champlain longed to plant among the forests and waters of the north a colony that should shed lustre on the arms of France and extend the bounds of the Catholic Church. The forests and waters abounded in the valuable furs that, next to gold and silver, were the prime object of search to the first American colonists ; they would shield a colony from its enemies ; while the great river that was lost in unknown regions of mystery would probably lead on to the lands of Marco Polo. He returned to France burning with desire to carry out this purpose. His coveted opportunity soon came; in 1608 he had the great happiness to plant, under the rock of Quebec, the first permanent French settlement in Canada. The next year he plunged into the wilds of Northern New York, where, near the head of Lake Champlain, he met a war party of Mohawk Indians. Although he destroyed the party,

THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA. II

Champlain was so much impressed by their courage, and by wliat he heard of the formidable confederacy to which they belonged, that on returning to Canada he directed his attention to the north and west, where he found man, if not nature, more tractable.

The Gulf and River St. Lawrence, and the streams that fall into the river on the north, gave the French easy entrance to the interior of the great continent. Ascending to the head of Lake Huron by the Ottawa, Lake Nipissing, and Georgian Bay, they were at the foot of Lakes Michigan and Superior, that stand to the Northwest in some such relation as the lung-lobes to the human body. Ascending the St. Lawrence to the southern shore of Lake Ontario, they had turned the left flank of the Appalachian Mountains, and gained the edge of that vast plain which stretches away to the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande. The use that they made of these advantages will form the subject of a future chapter.

It was most fortunate that Champlain concluded not to invade the seats of the Iroquois, but to lay the foundations of New France farther to the north. Had he persisted in his first purpose, and been successful, he would have made the region in which the Genesee and the Richelieu, the Hudson and the Delaware, the Susquehanna and the Ohio take their rise French territory, and so have given the French the advantage of a position that two great generals have called the key to the eastern half of the United States.' As it was, Champlain fully won the title accorded him : " Father of New France." The planting of Quebec was the most important event that had taken place in North America since its discovery, save only the planting of Jamestown the previous year.

' "General Scott, standing on the field of Bemus Heights, declared this Commonwealth [New York] to hold the military key of the continent east of the Mississippi, and on the same spot, General Grant confirmed the judgment." Roberts : New York, in Commonwealth Series, I., 124-

III. The English on the Atlantic Plain.

John Cabot, sailing with a commission from Henry VII. of England, discovered North America, June 24, 1497, making his landfall, it is probable, on the Island of Cape Breton. The next year, acting under the same authority, he conducted a second exploring expedition farther to the southward. How much of the coast of the continent he skirted in the two voyages is not certainly known, but it is not unlikely that he touched points as far apart as Northern Labrador and South Carolina or Georgia. He took possession of the country in the name of his royal patron, and English historians, statesmen, and jurists have always based on these voyages England's claim to that portion of North America which fell to her at the first apportionment.

For a long time, owing to her unwillingness to offend Spain, to her absorption in attempts to find the northeast and northwest passages, to her domestic troubles, and to her indifference, England took little interest in the new empire that John Cabot had given her; but toward the close of the sixteenth century she began to awake to her opportunity, and to take an interest in western planting. Her first colony was Jamestown, planted in 1607 ; and between that date and 1733 she had absorbed the Dutch and the Swedes on the Hudson and the Delaware, and divided the whole coast, often by boundary lines that ran to the Pacific Ocean, into thirteen colonies.

Both in respect to character and geographical position, the colonists of the Atlantic Plain present strong points of contrast to those on the Gulf coast and those in the St. Lawrence Valley. They were not adventurers thirsting for gold and conquest, like the Spaniards ; nor were they trappers, traders in furs, voyagenrs, and priests intent on Indian evangelization, like the French. There was, indeed, in most of the thirteen colonies a considerable infusion of adventure, but it took the direction of business rather than of conquest. Nearly all the

English colonists were interested in industry, trade, and politics ; and many of them, as the New Englanders and Marylanders, came seeking in the wilderness those religious and civil rights that were denied them at home. They were not blind to the advantage of the fur trade, nor wholly indifferent to the religious state of the Indians ; but Indian trade was the smaller part of their commerce, and their religious zeal took the direction of establishing new churches where they could themselves live at peace rather than of converting the savages to the old one. Accordingly, they were more than content to plant their settlements by the sea.

Then the English seem to have been more thoroughly than either the French or the Spaniards under the influence of those false ideas of the North American continent that did so much to shape the course of history.

To the imagination of Europe, America was first an archipelago. The explanation of this belief is due to several circumstances : to Columbus's expectation that he would first come to the outlying Asiatic islands; to his belief that the West Indies were the islands that he expected to find ; and to the fact that the early voyagers to North America touched the coast at widely separated parts, which geographers were unable for a long time properly to connect. In 1660 Endicott called New England "this Patmos," and as late as 1740 the Duke of Newcastle directed letters to the " Island of New England."

Navigators and geographers next conceived of our continent as a long and narrow strip of land running north and south, cut by water-ways that connected the two oceans. Most evident signs that a great continent lay behind the shore that seamen touched at points as remote as Labrador and Mexico, such as the great rivers that came down to the sea, were constantly disregarded. "A Mapp of Virginia" sold in London in 165 1 lays down Hudson River as communicating by "a mighty great lake "with "the sea of China and the Indies," and carries a lecrend runninsf alone the shore of California, " whose happy shores (in ten days' march with fifty foot and thirty horsemen from the head of James River, over those hills and through the rich adjacent valleys beautifyed with as proffitable rivers which necessarily must run into that peaceful! Indian sea) may be discovered to the exceeding benefit of Great Britain and joye of all true English." ' An official map of Maryland, published in 1670, and certified by a competent authority to be by " no means a bad one," represents the Alleghanies above the Cumberland Mountains, and gives this description of them : " These mighty high and great Mountaines, trending N.E. and S.W. and W.S.W,, is supposed to be the very middle ridg of Northern America and the only Natural cause of the fierceness and extreame stormy cold winds that come northwest from thence all over this continent and makes frost," "^ This conception of North America explains the endeavors of Smith, Hudson, and Cartier to find the India road in the rivers that they explored. It explains also the fact that Captain Newport, in 1608, brought over from England a barge so constructed that it could be taken to pieces and then put together, with which he and his company were instructed to ascend the James River as far as the falls, then to carry their barge beyond the falls and descend to the south sea, " being ordered not to return without a lump of gold as a certainty of the said sea." This persistent misconception of North America was due to that mental prepossession which prevented men seeing any insuperable obstacle to their finding a western sea-road to the Indies, and to the fact that Balboa, Drake, and others, from the mountains of Darien, had seen the two oceans that wash its shores. It is well to illustrate this false notion thus at length, because evidences of its influence in history are abundant.

Shut out from the Gulf of Mexico by the Spaniards, and from the River St, Lawrence by the French ; not caring to

' Narrative and Critical History, III., 465,

^ Browne : Maryland, in the Commonwealth Series, 100.

venture far from the coast inland, and actually confined to it by a great physical cause, the English were much slower than their rivals in seeing in North America a vast continent.

Then, when the English colonists ascended from one to two hundred miles the rivers coursing the Atlantic Plain they found themselves confronted by the Appalachian wall and their further progress arrested. Accustomed to pass and repass, these mountains in a few hours' time at a dozen points, it is difficult for us to conceive how, at that day, they impressed the imaginations of men and retarded the spread of settlements to the West. The southern Indians called them the " Endless Mountains," the English, sometimes, " the Great Mountains."

The memorials of the first emigrants to Ohio, although the best natural roads had now been discovered and improved, and all obstruction from the Indians had ceased, tell us how difficult of passage they found these mountain ridges. In fact, at the close of the last century, the safest, easiest, and quickest line of travel from Philadelphia or Baltimore to Central Kentucky, or even to Fort Washington, that stood on the present site of Cincinnati, led to Wadkin's Ferry on the Potomac ; thence up the Shenandoah Valley, through Martinsburg, Winchester, and Staunton; thence over the "divide" to New River and on to Cumberland Gap — the " Wilderness Road" of early Western emigration, the "Valley Road'' of recent warfare — and thence by Crab Orchard and Lexington to the Ohio.'

At the north. Nature had indeed prepared a highway to the West ; but the Mohawk Valley was exposed to attack from Canada, as the burning of Schenectady shows, while the people of the Long House blocked the Englishman's way to the Lake Basin almost as effectually as they blocked the Frenchman's way to the sources of the Delaware and the Susquehanna. The Iroquois were generally friendly to the

' Speed : The Wilderness Road, I2, 23.

English and hostile to the French ; but that haughty, jealous race were but little more disposed to see their ancestral seats invaded by their friends than by their foes.