The Last American FrontierPaxson, Frederic L. (Frederic Logan)
History
The Last American Frontier
Paxson, Frederic L. (Frederic Logan)
Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); West (U.S.) -- History
Before Black Hawk's War occurred, the great peace treaty of Prairie
du Chien had been followed, in 1830, by a second treaty at the same
place, at which Governor Clark and Colonel Morgan reënforced the
guarantees of peace. The Omaha tribe now agreed to stay west of the
Missouri, its neighbors being the Yankton Sioux above, and the Oto
and Missouri below; a half-breed tract was reserved between the
Great and Little Nemahas, while the neutral line across Iowa became
a neutral strip forty miles wide from the Mississippi River to the
Des Moines. Chronic warfare between the Sioux and Sauk and Foxes had
threatened the extinction of the latter as well as the peace of the
frontier, so now each tribe surrendered twenty miles of its land along
the neutral line. Had the latter tribes been willing to stay beyond
the Mississippi, where they had agreed to remain, and where they had
clear and recognized title to their lands, the war of 1832 might
have been avoided. But they continued to occupy a part of Illinois,
and when squatters jumped their cornfields near Rock Island, the
pacific counsels of old Keokuk were less acceptable than the warlike
promises of the able brave Black Hawk. The resulting war, fought
over the country between the Rock and Wisconsin rivers, threw the
frontier into a state of panic out of all proportion to the danger
threatening. Volunteers of Illinois and Michigan, and regulars from
eastern posts under General Winfield Scott, produced a peace after a
campaign of doubtful triumph. Near Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, a
new territorial arrangement was agreed upon. As the price of their
resistance, the Sauk and Foxes, who were already located west of the
Mississippi, between Missouri and the Neutral Strip, surrendered to
the United States a belt of land some forty miles wide along the west
bank of the Mississippi, thus putting a buffer between themselves and
Illinois and making way for Iowa. The Winnebago consented, about this
time, to move west of the Mississippi and occupy a portion of the
Neutral Strip.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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