SOME ASPECTS OF MID-WEST AMERICA'

I should like to make use of the opportunity afforded me this evening to present to the members of the Minnesota Historical Society a phase of the larger history of our part of America. A new word, " ethno-geography," just coming into use among historians, best describes the aspect of the subject which I want to stress in my discussion - the inter-relation of man and geography. By Mid-west America I mean all that part of North America lying east of the Rocky Mountains and west of Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, and the Appalachian Mountains. You will notice that in defining the region to be discussed I have added a large part of British North America to a corresponding portion of the United States. The justification for this lies in the fact that by history and geography all the inhabitants of the region are united and have practically the same problems in government and in their social and economic life.

From the point of view of physiography, Mid-west America consists of a vast lowland having three drainage systems - the southern, discharging its waters into the Gulf of Mexico; the central, including such rivers as the Red River of the North, the Saskatchewan, and the Churchill, discharging its waters into Hudson Bay; and the northern, of which the Mackenzie is the principal river, discharging its waters into the Arctic Ocean. The contour of this great lowland was produced by ice action during the two glacial epochs in the geological history of the region. It is for the most part unforested, probably never having reached the tree-bearing stage, except along the lakes and river courses and on the slopes of the mountains. The soil is of unusual fertility and the moisture sufficient for agriculture except in the western part. As a whole it is still 1 An address read at the annual meeting of the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, January 9, 1922.

the great fur and big game region of North America. The earliest inhabitants may be included in three or four large families, two of whom held most of the territory in early times. The climate is continental, that is, one of extremes, modified on the east and south by the presence of large bodies of water and on the west by the warm winds from the Pacific.

The history of the region corresponds with its geography; it has the same sweep and breadth; it is amply continental, never petty or sectional. The great interior of North America was for nearly two centuries after Columbus almost unknown to Spanish, French, and English explorers. The bare extent of this vast region was in itself a bar to exploration and trade and its lack of precious metals kept the Spanish from occupying it during this period. It was due to the enterprise and daring of the French explorers who followed Champlain's statesmanly initiative and no less to the devotion of the missionaries who traversed these wilds, that the great interior wilderness was added to the possessions of France. To the remarkable exploits of the intrepid Radisson in the region of Hudson Bay we owe the beginnings of the Hudson's Bay Company, which would have been a French fur-trading company but for the blindness of Louis XIV. La Salle added the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. La Vérendrye, latest of these empire-builders, blocked out his fur-trade region so as to cut directly athwart the great English grant to the Hudson's Bay Company and the grant by France to La Salle and his successors. The story of the exploits of these three Frenchmen and of those who rounded out their work reads like a romance, for the chivalry and pride of the best French traditions fired the hearts of these daring men and kept their achievements from sinking to the level of mere fur-trading operations. Thus in less than fifty years there were added to the maps of the period the main features of the interior of North America. If the French government had matched the heroism and enterprise of these wilderness workers with a policy at all in keeping with the unbounded opportunity they had created for France, the sub

sequent course of events in American history would have been entirely different.

During the eighteenth century the history of North America is concerned mainly with the contest of Spain, France, and England for possession of the middle portion of the continent. The Spanish held the southwest natives firmly in hand by a combination of forts and missions; the French were still profiting by the ancient treaty of Champlain with the great Algonquin family of Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region and farther west; the English with their Iroquois alliance of 1684 were in a position actively to compete with the French for possession of the Ohio Valley.

The Muskhogean tribe of Indians was located in that small area north of the Gulf of Mexico which lies in the angle between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and is bounded on the east by the Alleghany Mountains. Here they had permanent homes and a fixed village life; they cultivated fields of corn and tobacco and had a fairly well-developed tribal government. They controlled many of the fur-trade routes between the ocean and the interior and their friendship was valuable to all those who sought to win or to maintain a foothold upon the lower Ohio or the Mississippi. It is possible now to trace out the main lines of the exceedingly complex web of intrigue that enmeshed this group of Indian tribes. The Spanish influence, centering at Mobile and Pensacola, was the oldest, and for a long time it dominated the confederacy. The French at New Orleans, however, needed some Indian alliance for the defense of their eastern flank, and they soon had won over one of the tribes by well-planned diplomacy. The English from the Carolina settlements, last of all, found it necessary to cement the friendship of the tribe nearest them and controlling the mountain passes, and partly by force and partly by presents they built up a working alliance. When the United States, as a new nation, entered this western field, she swept away the whole fabric of alliances and finally banished the remnants of the tribes to a reservation across the Mississippi, in spite of

her own treaties and agreements and in the face of at least one supreme court decision.

On the southwest, France and Spain were competing strenuously for Texas and the adjoining territory. The struggle between France and England for the upper Ohio Valley, which ended in 1763, is usually referred to as the intercolonial wars. Pontiac, an Indian statesman of remarkable talent, performed the unusual feat of welding together all the western tribes that had been French allies in a last desperate effort to drive out the English. The year's war associated with his name is unique among Indian wars in the number of tribes involved and the immense area represented by the forces he was able to assemble under his single command.

The Revolutionary War was saved from being a purely local and sectional contest along the Atlantic seaboard by one considerable American offensive, the daring and successful exploit of George Rogers Clark. By this stroke the hardy frontiersmen of the Alleghany region made their contribution to the war in the region they looked upon as peculiarly their own. Their hopes for a great interior expansion were fully realized in the treaty of 1783. From a territorial point of view we were never again in serious hazard of losing our hold on the interior of North America, upon which, very obviously, depended our future national greatness.

Though in full possession of the Louisiana territory for nearly a century, France had not been able to measure up to the opportunity for a colonial empire far outranking anything England had yet developed. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century the Spanish had obtained but a vague idea of the extent and resources of Louisiana. Spain's interest was focused upon the lands bordering on the Gulf of Mexico such as Florida and Texas, which, because of their location, could be developed into a means of protection for her treasure fleet and the commerce she carried on with her possessions in the New World. Even when put in possession of this territory in 1763, she saw its value principally in the control of the gulf which

New Orleans gave her, though incidentally she was interested in developing the fur trade centering at the frontier post of St. Louis. It was this indifference to her vital territorial interests in America as well as her European preoccupation that smoothed the way for us in 1803, when we made our first essay at rounding out our Mid-west possessions in America. Of all the leading Americans of his time, Jefferson alone had sufficient vision to make full use of the unparalleled opportunity that had come to him as a result of the breakdown of Napoleon's remarkable scheme for colonial empire. Not only did he add a very large slice of the continent to our possessions in spite of the futile objections of the narrow-minded partisans of seaboard supremacy, but he planned and carried out the exploring expeditions of Pike and of Lewis and Clark. We possess in their reports an historical classic, embodying the first scientific survey of a region hitherto known only to the fur-trader.

But fortune was soon again to favor us. The establishment of the independence of Texas from Mexico in 1836 precipitated upon us another momentous decision complicated by the sinister issue of slavery extension. The national momentum acquired by the possession of the Louisiana territory carried us irresistibly to the Pacific coast in spite of Russia, England, and Mexico. Meanwhile the astute leaders of our slave-holding aristocracy understood their aspect of the case sufficiently to capitalize the impulse for national expansion and secure a valuable slave territory in the new state of Texas.

The rounding out of our Mid-west possessions by the Mexican War antedates by a generation a similar process going on north of us in British America. The first exploration of the extensive region beyond the valleys of the Saskatchewan and Churchill rivers in the Mackenzie River Valley was made between 1789 and 1795 by Alexander Mackenzie. The report of his explorations published in 1801 was the first account of the soil, climate, and populations of the northern portion of Mid-west America in these river valleys. Fired by this report