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
The completion of the Indian frontier to the upper lakes was the work
of the early thirties. The purchase at Fort Armstrong had made the
line follow the north boundary of Missouri and run along the west
line of this Black Hawk purchase to the Neutral Strip. A second Black
Hawk purchase in 1837 reduced their lands by a million and a quarter
acres just west of the purchase of 1832. Other agreements with the
Potawatomi, the Sioux, the Menominee, and the Chippewa established
a final line. Of these four nations, one was removed and the others
forced back within their former territories. The Potawatomi, more
correctly known as the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, since the
tribe consisted of Indians related by marriage but representing these
three stocks, had occupied the west shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago
to Milwaukee. After a great council at Chicago in 1833 they agreed to
cross the Mississippi and take up lands west of the Sauk and Foxes and
east of the Missouri, in present Iowa. The Menominee, their neighbors
to the north, with a shore line from Milwaukee to the Menominee River,
gave up their lake front during these years, agreeing in 1836 to live
on diminished lands west of Green Bay and including the left bank of
the Wisconsin River.
The Sioux and Chippewa receded to the north. Always hereditary enemies,
they had accepted a common but ineffectual demarcation line at the
old treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. In 1837 both tribes made
further cessions, introducing between themselves the greater portion
of Wisconsin. The Sioux acknowledged the Mississippi as their future
eastern boundary, while the Chippewa accepted a new line which left the
Mississippi at its junction with the Crow Wing, ran north of Lake St.
Croix, and extended thence to the north side of the Menominee country.
With trifling exceptions, the north flank of the Indian frontier had
been completed by 1837. It lay beyond the farthest line of white
occupation, and extended unbroken from the bend of the Missouri to
Green Bay.
While the north flank of the Indian frontier was being established
beyond the probable limits of white advance, its south flank was
extended in an unbroken series of reservations from the bend of the
Missouri to the Texas line. The old Spanish boundary of the Sabine
River and the hundredth meridian remained in 1840 the western limit of
the United States. Farther west the Comanche and the plains Indians
roamed indiscriminately over Texas and the United States. The Caddo,
in 1835, were persuaded to leave Louisiana and cross the Sabine into
Texas; while the quieting of the Osage title in 1825 had freed the
country north of the Red River from native occupants and opened the way
for the colonizing policy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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