33.8 America: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 15/31)

The boundaries of the Louisiana territory were actually very poorly defined except in the east and south, where the Mississippi and Red rivers respectively served as "natural barriers". On the west the border was the Rocky Mountains, whatever line that might indicate, and on the north there was even less definition, with mention of a border in the vicinity of the origin of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. By this century, the Sioux

Indians, who had been in the Michigan region in the early 1 7th century, then in Minnesota late in that century, had gone on to the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 18th century, driving out the Cheyenne and the Kiowa. In this 19th century they inhabited large areas of the north Great Plains and western prairies of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, as well as some regions in Canada. There were 7 tribes with a total of about 30,000 people. Like the Shawnees, most of them supported the British in the War of 1812. Treaties of one sort and another were signed with the United States in 1815, 1825, and 1851. (Ref. 38 )

Even after the United States acquired Missouri in the Louisiana Purchase, French influence remained dominant in that region. But Americans began to filter in, particularly in the regions of the lead mines at Ste. Genevieve and Potosi. By the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition St. Louis was already notable as the gateway to the Far West. Later St. Joseph, Missouri was the supply center for the gold rush "49ers" and over 50,000 emigrants went through that city of only 3,000 permanent people. (Ref. 38 , 39 ) On his return from Canada the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa, led his people into Missouri, but they met some resistance from local tribes and the whites and late in 1827 they left St. Louis, en route for Kansas. (Ref. 293 ) We have mentioned the admission of Missouri as a state of the Union and the politics involved in the "Missouri Compromise" on page 1145. Settlement quickened after the 1820s and many German immigrants arrived in the 1840s and 1850s.

In the early century part of the mid-west was not very enticing. De Tocqueville (Ref. 218 ) describes all the land which is now Oklahoma, Kansas, southern Nebraska, the panhandle of Texas and eastern Colorado and New Mexico as a desert, generally covered with sand incapable of cultivation' In the decade following 1821 some 271 steamboats were launched on the Mississippi and its tributaries. (Ref. 217 ) The treeless prairies were not well settled down to 1850, but then new machinery such as McCormick's mechanical reaper, Marsh's harvester, the steel-toothed cultivator, etC., along with the rising price of wheat up to $2.50 a bushel in 1855 and the building of railroads into the prairie country, stimulated a great proliferation of farmers. Politics was involved in the building of the railroads as well as the bill for the organization of the Great Plains as the "Territory of Nebraska" in 1854 and Stephen Douglas of Illinois was a promoter of both. The political issue was again slavery and its relation to the new Territory and the old Missouri Compromise (see page 1145). The old "Northwest" seethed with indignation over the Kansas-Nebraska Act which nullified the Missouri Compromise and was ripe to form a new anti-slavery party - a new "Republican" one. In Kansas itself, slavery and anti-slavery immigrants actually came to war, anticipating the Civil War and federal troops had to restore order. The two contending groups then each held conventions asking for statehood. The anti-slavery Topeka convention was rejected by the Senate in 1856 and the Le Compton Constitution was accepted.