John Mack Faragher

Yale University

Copyright 1997, John Mack Farragher, All Rights Reserved

"Our Father: We, a deputation of about 400 of your children of the Shawnee nation, would respectfully lay our situation before you." So began the 1831 memorial of the chiefs of the Black Bob Band of Shawnees to President Andrew Jackson. "For the last forty years we have resided in Upper Louisiana," they wrote (using the old territorial designation for the region that had since become the state of Missouri), "peaceably following our usual occupations for the support of our families." These Shawnees had been among the first of their tribe to leave the Ohio valley and cross the Mississippi, seeking refuge from the violent conflict between Indians and Americans that wracked the trans-Appalachian West in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. During the ensuing decades these "absentee" Shawnees had been reliable and loyal residents of Missouri, but now state and federal authorities were pressing them to exchange their homes and farms for a reservation established for all the Shawnee people on the western plains of Kansas. That place, they wrote, was a "climate colder than we have been accustomed to, or wish to live in," and they would be "surrounded by people strangers to us." No longer did they feel strong connections with their Shawnee brethren from Ohio; "so long a period has elapsed since we separated from them, that there is now but little of a common feeling of blood and friendship existing between us and them." William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis, had heard their appeal, they wrote, "but he says that he has not the power to grant our request, and he tells us to apply to you as the only person able to assist us. Our Father: Have pity on us; take our situation into consideration, and sent us a favorable answer."[1]

The plight of the Black Bob Band was but one of dozens of wrenching cases of dispossession and dislocation that mark the history of Indian removal during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and it would seem to confirm an important difference in the comparative history of North American frontiers. Colonial societies on the fringe of the French and Spanish North American empires frequently assumed a form that the historical geographer Marvin Mikesell calls "frontiers of inclusion," in which strong affiliations developed between native and colonist communities, including a good deal of cultural and social intermixture, even intermarriage. The British and subsequently the American empires, however, established "frontiers of exclusion," confining indigenous peoples to separate and distinct territories, and eventually requiring them to remove further west. "All European peoples were selfishly pursuing their own ends in North America," writes Carl Ekberg in his history of successive colonial regimes in the community of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; but "the Anglo-Americans found it expedient to try to eliminate the red man, whereas Frenchmen and Spaniards found it more profitable to tolerate him."[2]

Yet what is most striking about the bitter removal of the Black Bob Band - as well as the other Indian communities banished during the era of ethnic-cleansing that American historians have anticeptically labeled the "Removal Period" - is that it came at the end of a long history of generally good relations in eastern Missouri among American settlers, French-speaking residents known as Creoles, and emigrant Indians. For a generation following the American acquisition of Upper Louisiana, the local commentary on ethnic relations tended to emphasize the benefits of diversity and the positive character of intercommunal connections. It was not until the movement for Indian removal got underway, in the years surrounding Missouri statehood, that this colloquy of inclusion gave way to one of exclusion.

Shawnees, Delawares, and other Algonquian-speaking peoples of the southern Great Lakes region, first emigrated to the lower Missouri River country during the 1780s. Anticipating that they would "soon be hemmed in on all Side[s] by the White people, and then be at their mercy," delegations of Ohio valley chiefs came to St. Louis in 1780 and 1782, the Spanish governor Francisco Cruzat reported, "to beg the protection of our Catholic sovereign, with the intention, as they assured me, of establishing a firm and sincere peace with the Spaniards." The chiefs declared that "the Americans, a great deal more ambitious and numerous than the English, put us out of our lands, forming therein great settlements, extending themselves like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio River. They treat us as their cruelest enemies are treated, so that today hunger and the impetuous torrent of war . . . have brought our villages to a struggle with death." Believing it impossible to reach an accommodation with American expansionism, these Indian peoples crossed the Mississippi, in the words of one Shawnee descendant, "because they were weary of warfare with the Americans and wished to settle in a region in which they could live at peace."[3]

Spanish authorities were interested in using emigrant Indian warriors as an armed force for the protection of Upper Louisiana. Still fresh was the memory of the British-led assault of northern Indian warriors on St. Louis in 1780, during the American Revolution, and the Spanish hoped to shore up the security of their colony by organizing an effective local militia among the Shawnee and Delaware communities. By 1787 some 1800 emigrant Indians, mostly Shawnees and Delawares, had settled in towns along the Mississippi, south of the village of Ste. Genevieve. With them was the Canadian Louis Lorimier, a trader long associated with the Shawnees, who emigrated to Missouri with his métis wife and family after being burned out of his Ohio trading post by the Americans. In 1793 the Spanish granted Lorimier a trading monopoly among the emigrant Indians in exchange for his "bringing as many as possible over to this side, by posting them as conveniently as may be to our settlements, . . . with a view to their rendering us aid in case of war with the whites as well as with the Osages." From his post on the Mississippi - which later grew into the town of Cape Girardeau - Lorimier was able to call into the field in service for Upper Louisiana at least two hundred armed men from these Indian communities.[4]

The use of emigrant Indians as a colonial militia was a principal feature of Spanish frontier Missouri. It was a pattern that continued well into the American territorial period, with Lorimier continuing to act, until his death in 1812, as intermediary between the territorial government and communities of emigrant Indians. In 1805, on the recommendation of Louisiana's territorial governor James Wilkinson, Lorimier became Indian agent for the Shawnees and Delawares. "This Man is from long habit a savage," Wilkinson condescended, yet "has, I believe, always discharged the trust reposed in Him with Zeal & Integrity." More to the point, Lorimier could "muster 600 men, . . . over whom he holds absolute controul." According to Amos Stoddard, who preceded Wilkinson as chief American officer in Louisiana, the Shawnees and Delawares, counting several hundred warriors among them, were "considered as a safe-guard to the whites." Because "the country about them is too much settled to afford plenty of game," he wrote, "they mostly hunt on the waters of the St. Francis and White river; and sometimes they penetrate into the territories of the Osages, between whom a predatory war has been maintained for many years." Stoddard praised the Shawnees and Delawares whom, he said, had "generally conducted themselves to the satisfaction of the whites." William Clark - in charge of Indian affairs from 1807, and territorial governor of Missouri from 1813 until statehood in 1821- believed these emigrant Indian warriors performed a "great service to our frontier settlements in that quarter, in preventing roberies of the Osage and in bringing in horses which had either strayed or had been Stolen from the frontiers." Historian Lynn Morrow argues that the Shawnee and Delaware struggle with the Osages "helped make the Missouri Ozarks region a safe place for new settlements."[5]

During the War of 1812 emigrant Indians fought alongside Americans against tribes allied with the British. When the Boone's Lick country of central Missouri was under siege by Osages in 1814, Governor Clark "sent out the Showoness & Delaways" to protect the frontiers. The Indians formed a critical component of a three-hundred man expeditionary force from the eastern Missouri settlements under the command of Henry Dodge, sheriff of the Ste. Genevieve district. Many of these Indians were veterans of bitter battles fought against Americans during the Revolution, but they put those old hatreds aside. As the expedition traveled up the Missouri River, passing the community where the American frontiersman Daniel Boone had retired with his large extended family, an ancient Shawnee warrior named Pappiqua recounted to Dodge how thirty-five years before "he had aided in capturing Col. Daniel Boone." It was a credible claim. Louis Lorimier himself had accompanied the Shawnee war party that had taken Boone hostage in 1778.[6]

Boone's son Nathan, in charge of the American defense of the lower Missouri country during the war, counted these Shawnee veterans, including those who had participated in the capture of his father, among his most trusted scouts. In the late 1820s, when the army was making plans to organize the first American cavalry company for western duty, Indian agent Benjamin O'Fallon, nephew of William Clark, suggested recruiting emigrant Indians. "When Indians Are equally mixed with White Troops," he advised, the result is "the finest light troops in the world." Cautioning that regular army officers were "too bigoted in their own opinions to learn enough of the Indian character," O'Fallon insisted that such a company needed the leadership of an officer with experience among Indian people. When the army finally created a company of American Dragoons to patrol the plains a few years later, Nathan Boone was placed in command. Boone recruited "Shawnee friends," as he called them, to be his scouts and aides.[7]

The acculturation of emigrant Indians to colonial ways seldom failed to impress visitors. The Shawnees of Missouri, wrote Nicholas de Finiels of France during a tour of Upper Louisiana in 1797, are "capable of more civilization than has generally been thought possible for Indians." He found their villages "more systematically and solidly constructed than the usual Indian villages," with fields fenced "in the American style in order to protect their harvests from animals." Five years later, François Perrin du Lac noted that the residents of the Indian communities near Cape Girardeau were "active, industrious, and good hunters," and that "they breed cows and pigs, and cultivate maize, pumpkins, melons, potatoes, and corn sufficient for their support the whole year." Likewise American commandant Amos Stoddard approvingly observed that "the houses of all the [Indian] villages are built of logs, some of them squared, and well interlocked at the ends, and covered with shingles. Many of them are two stories high; and attached to them are small houses for the preservation of corn, and barns for the shelter of cattle and horses, with which they are well supplied. Their houses are well furnished with decent and useful furniture."[8]

Not that these Indian people had abandoned their own culture. Finiels shrewdly called attention to what he termed the "mingling" of customs among them, the way, for example, in which the Shawnees would appear "sometimes in European garb and sometimes in the dress of children of nature," depending on the occasion. Indeed, cultural mingling was a two-way street, with settlers taking up Indian ways as well. "The proximity of the Indians," wrote Finiels, "had no small influence on the character of the colonists . . . . Breechclout took the place of culottes, leggings replaced stockings, doeskin moccasins succeeded European shoes, a loosefitting tunic covered the rest of the body, a blue kerchief wrapped about the head completed the costume." Recalling a childhood spent in Ste. Genevieve during the 1790s, Henry Brackenridge described how Indian "boys often intermingled with those of the white village, and practiced shooting with the bow and arrow; an accomplishment which I acquired with the rest, together with a little smattering of the Indian language."[9]

This intermingling continued unabated during the first generation of American settlement. The emigrant Indian community known as Rogerstown - first sited west of St. Louis on the south side of the Missouri River at a place now known as Bridgeton, then relocated up the Meramack River valley near the present city of Union - included a few Americans, some Delawares and Miamis, and many Shawnees, a number of whom had known Daniel Boone during the Ohio and Kentucky days. Boone's home was several dozen miles north, across the Missouri River, and family members later remembered the visits of Shawnees to Boone's cabin as well as the old man's trips to Rogerstown to go hunting with Indian friends.[10]

The leader of this community of some forty families was a man named Jimmy Rogers, an American who had been captured as a child and reared, in the words of one settler, to be "a perfect Indian." It was said that during the long period of warfare with the Americans, Rogers had commanded a marauding party that plundered Ohio River flatboats and murdered their owners. After the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, however, he led his group out of the United States and across the Mississippi to Upper Louisiana. Baptist preacher John Mason Peck, who was a regular visitor at Rogerstown during his missionary travels, testified that Rogers had became a Christian and transformed himself into "a man of strong sense, industrious, generous, and a firm friend to his white neighbors." Several of those neighbors later remembered the people of Rogerstown fondly. James Long described the Indians as "strong and straight, and fine specimens of manhood. The women were beautiful, and swift on foot." According to Elizabeth Musick, daughter of an American pioneer family who farmed land nearby, "the squaws made baskets and moccasins & sold them to the whites. The Indians were kind." The people of Rogerstown raised subsistence crops and grazed substantial herds of livestock. They were "thrifty farmers," wrote Peck, "and brought the best cattle to the St. Louis market the butchers had received." In 1811 the residents of Rogerstown discovered near their town a lead mine "in sufficient quantity to induce them to work it," and they requested Governor Clark to grant them "a license of Three Miles Square including the Town, with promission to raise and Sell the Lead Ore imediately in and about the Town." Receiving approval from the War Department, the Indians added mining to their list of successful enterprises. Rogerstown grew prosperous, even wealthy, by contemporary pioneer standards.[11]

These emigrant Indians shared subsistence strategies with their American neighbors. Each spring the people of Rogerstown burned the open range, a practice condemned by the investors of the nearby Maramec Iron works, who feared the destruction of their facilities in the annual conflagrations. This was not an exclusively Indian practice, however, for American pioneers in the area also carried out spring burnings in the belief that it improved grazing conditions and held down the populations of snakes, ticks, and chiggers. Henry Brackenridge provided a description of the American homesteads along the Missouri that sounds much like descriptions of Indian farms: "These usually consist of a few acres cleared on the borders of the river, with a small log hut or cabin, and stables for horses, &c. They raise a little Indian corn, pumpions, potatoes, and a few vegetables. But they have abundance of hogs and horned cattle." By outward appearance, there was little to distinguish between Daniel Boone's settlement of Femme Osage, on the north side of the Missouri, and the village of Rogerstown on the south. Both were settled by farming and stockraising people who loved horses and hunting.[12]

To be sure, not all the inclusive commentary was positive. Although Amos Stoddard praised the military prowess of emigrant Shawnees and Delawares, measured against his ideal of the noble savage he found them "wonderfully degenerated," particularly prone to problem drinking. "They have gradually imbibed all the vices of the whites," he believed, "and forgotten their own virtues." The historical evidence suggests that alcoholism was indeed a considerable problem for these emigrant Indian communities. The wife of Chief Rogers of Rogerstown told a missionary that "her husband, when sober, was an amiable and good husband, but that when drunk he was terrible, and not at all to be trusted," and Elizabeth Musick recalled that sometimes the communal dances of the Rogerstown folk would degenerate into a "drunken spree," and "a death would occasionally occur." But the evidence documents at least as much alcohol abuse among Americans as among Indians. John Mason Peck complained bitterly of "scenes of drunkenness and profane revelry" among settlers. "One-half, at least, of the Anglo-American population," he believed, "were infidels of a low and indecent grade, and utterly worthless for any useful purposes of society."[13]

Indeed, accounts of native vice are matched by others in which Americans suffered in the contrast with emigrant Indians. Traveling through the Missouri country before the War of 1812, Henry Brackenridge was appalled at the indolence of backcountry settlers. At an isolated shack in a cane break an American "gave us some hogmeat and coarse hominy for supper [and] threw a bearskin on the ground for us," then shocked his guests by admitting that he did not know the name of the president of the United States, and moreover didn't give a damn about finding out. Resuming their travels, and coming to a nearby Shawnee town, Brackenridge and his companions put up at the well-built and comfortable house of an emigrant Indian who offered them fine hominy and venison steak. "He not only knew the name of the president," Brackenridge noted with approval, "but even made particular inquiries respecting our affairs with England and France, and the prospect of peace or war with either!"[14]

Although for the most part emigrant Indians and American settlers maintained separate communities, a good deal of intermingling went on between them. With the assistance of missionaries, Chief Rogers organized a community school at Rogerstown, and because it offered the best educational opportunity in the area, a number of American settlers sent their own children. "The white and Indian boys were at their books in the school house," John Mason Peck wrote, and echoing Henry Brackenridge's memory of late-eighteenth century Ste. Genevieve, he recalled how the students of this "half-Indian seminary" would play "bow and arrow and other Indian past times during intermission." Chief Rogers' oldest boy Lewis took very well to schooling, and so impressed his teachers with his progress that they arranged for his transfer to an academy in Kentucky. Chief Roger's other son, however, showed no interest in school. "Lewis would speak to the paper," Rogers declared, but "God damn, I think Indian make it Jim, [he] won't go to school." There were also Americans at the school who "made it Indian." Lewis Williams, later a prominent Baptist minister, so mastered the recess lessons of his Indian friends "in hunting and their own dangerous games" that he became a locally-renowned rifleman and woodsman. During the War of 1812, when young Williams was serving as a marksman with one of the militia companies, a Shawnee compatriot challenged him to a contest of skill. Williams won the shooting match to the Shawnee's chagrin. "Pale face, silver hair," he complained, "but Indian inside."[15]

Interviewing old settlers in the mid-nineteenth century, the antiquarian collector Lyman Draper accumulated local lore concerning relations between American settlers and the Indian residents of Rogerstown. According to Elizabeth Musick, Chief Rogers promised half a bushel of silver to any white man who would marry his daughter. One settler was said to have taken up the offer, but he soon died, and his place was taken by another. "But neither," Musick said, "got the promised dowry, old Rogers saying he would wait & see if they proved worthy husbands, for it might be that they would desert her if they should get the money." Musick also told a tale of the attempt of the chief's son Lewis Rogers to find himself a white wife. He courted a local girl but things didn't work out. "Ah," Musick quoted Lewis, the woman "was mighty nice. . . . She wanted to know when I come again - I tell her, but didn't go then. Me thought me go when she not expecting me. Did so & found her dirty, everything all scattered around, ashes on hearth. Then think it best I'll not marry her, and did not go anymore." While these tales reveal, perhaps, a strain of resentment about having rich Indians for neighbors, they are also suggestive of the intimate connections between the two communities of Indian and American emigrants.[16]

While most Missouri communities maintained their character as principally American, French, or Indian, there were also multiethnic villages. Charette, a settlement on the north side of the Missouri River about fifty miles from St. Louis, was founded by French Creoles in the late 1790s, but over the next few years quite a few Americans, including a number of Boone kin, established farms on the river bottom and in the nearby fertile valleys. Gradually the community came to include Indian men and women as well. By the time the United States acquired Louisiana, Charette had become a thoroughly mixed village of backcountry Americans, French-speaking Creoles, emigrant and native Indians, free and enslaved African Americans, and the growing progeny of their various combinations. Boone kinsman Elijah Bryan, called Charette "a French and Indian village," but among the early residents he remembered families with Anglo surnames. "I know the names of other Charette village men," Bryan replied to queries from Lyman Draper, "John Manley - had an Indian woman for a wife . . . [and] John Manial was one I could not think of [before]. Had an Osage woman for a wife with four or five children." Charette, where Daniel Boone's daughter Jemima lived with her husband and children, and where old Boone himself was buried, was the site of a great deal of intermingling.[17]

This "syncretic society," as historian William Unrau labels it, characterized the frontier of the lower Missouri valley during the first two decades of American rule. The inhabitants of the territory, wrote Henry Brackenridge in 1817, "are composed of whites, Indians, metiffs, a few civilized Indians, and negro slaves." It was a population, declared Washington Irving after touring the region in the early 1830s, that was "more motley than Mackinaw," the old Great Lakes trading post. Looking back on the relations between emigrant Indians and settlers many years later, John Musick wrote that "justice was practiced by both races, and the colonists long lived by the side of the Indians in peace." Musick's view may have been softened by the nostalgia he felt for his youth, but he was more right than wrong.[18]

These relatively good interethnic relations were attributable in part to the modest numbers of Americans who moved across the Mississippi during the first decade of the territorial period. The tangle of unresolved French and Spanish land grants in Missouri kept the legal title of private lands in limbo for more than a decade. The federal land commission appointed to settle these claims did not finish its work until 1813, and the War of 1812 further delayed the surveying that federal law required before officials could open Missouri's public domain to legitimate settlement. Indeed, President Thomas Jefferson had initially proposed keeping settlers out altogether, arguing that Missouri be used exclusively as a reserve for emigrant Indians from the east. Privately he suggested to his aides that all the non-Indians on the west side of the Mississippi be relocated to the Illinois country. This radical notion horrified the president's advisors, and they quickly persuaded him to drop it, but the protection of emigrant Indian communities from the encroachments of squatters remained a high priority of the territorial administration. "Exert your utmost vigilance in detecting unauthorized settlements the moment they are made or discovered," Jefferson instructed Secretary of War Henry Dearborn in November of 1804, and Dearborn passed the president's orders down the chain of command to territorial officers. A year later Governor Wilkinson wrote Jefferson of his continuing efforts to eliminate the scattered squatter settlements encroaching on Shawnee and Delaware lands between Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau, and anticipating the removal of even more eastern native peoples to Missouri in conformance with Jefferson's plan, he argued that the "depopulation [of Americans] must precede the transfer of the Indians. . . . It is not by preparing Beds of down, that we are to get rid of unwelcome Guests."[19]

Unwelcome guests continued to be a problem. John Musick labeled these squatters "branch-water men," the kind who would take their water from a "branch" or creek "in preference to digging a well, because to dig a well would cost him some exertion, and he is an enemy to anything like labor." This "shiftless sort," wrote Musick, invaded the lands of emigrant Indians, established preemption claims, and sold their improvements to ignorant newcomers, who then had to contend with angry Indian neighbors. In 1807 Indian agent Louis Lorimier asked acting governor Joseph Browne to forward to the president a petition signed by leaders of the Shawnee and Delaware communities complaining that "incroachments on their Boundaries remain unchecked." Fearing that "those intrusions, if too long unnoticed, might become actual claims injurious to them, and their silence or inaction should be construed as consent," the chiefs urged Jefferson to "put an end to their state of suspence and uneasiness." Without waiting for presidential instructions Browne "directed Prosecutions to be immediately commenced against Intruders on the Land claimed by those Indians," and Sheriff Henry Dodge was ordered to remove the squatters, along with their "Companions, Followers, Dependents, Servants or Slaves." It is important to recall here that Sheriff Dodge frequently called upon the Shawnees and Delawares themselves to act as his deputies.[20]

Such federal actions against squatters aroused considerable fear and loathing among newcomer Americans in Missouri. "White people are at liberty to settle where they please," one newly-arrived group angrily insisted to Indian agent James McFarlane when he attempted to warn them off Indian lands in 1808, and displaying their firearms they dared him to "let them see who would prevent it." The territorial administration stood up to the challenge. Jefferson instructed Governor Meriwether Lewis to act against squatters, to "prohibit them rigorously." In 1809, noting "that certain intruders are settling and making improvements at and near Rogers' town," Lewis issued an anti-squatter proclamation and ordered it printed in the Missouri Gazette, the territory's principal newspaper. He would not allow "the peace and tranquillity so happily subsisting between the United States and those tribes [to] be thus wantonly interrupted," Lewis declared, and he directed "the said intruders on the public lands of the United States, at towns and places aforesaid, or within five miles or either of the same, to depart therefrom, at their peril: And I do also require the sheriffs of the respective districts aforesaid, in the event of this requisition not being punctually complied with, to return to me the names of said intruders, in order that they may be proceeded against according to law." Thus, while there were persistent problems of encroachments on the lands of emigrant Indians, they were countered by vigorous actions by territorial officials to warn squatters off.[21]

The problem of illegal squatting became much harder to handle following the War of 1812. In the aftermath of the fighting Americans "came like an avalanche," in the words of missionary John Mason Peck. "It seemed," he wrote, "as though Kentucky and Tennessee were breaking up and moving to the 'Far West.'" Population statistics are telling. In 1804, when the United States acquired Louisiana, the Creole, African American, and American population of the Missouri district totaled about 10,000, the emigrant Indians about 2,000 more. Population grew slowly over the next decade, reaching a total of just 25,000 by 1814. But over the next six years more than 40,000 settlers crossed the Mississippi and took up lands in the territory. By 1824 the respective settler and emigrant Indian populations stood at 97,000 and 8,000 respectively. This process - in which incoming settlers overwhelm previously established communities - historical geographer Donald Meinig calls the creation of a "minorated society."[22]

Only a few months after the war, Shawnees and Delawares complained to Governor Clark that hordes of strangers were taking their lands and appropriating their improvements. Clark laid the problem to the newly-arriving Americans who "encroach upon the Indians nearest them," and acknowledged Indian claims for damages "against the citizens of the United States, to a large amount, for spoliations of various kinds, but which they have not been able to support by the testimony of white men." Several contingents of Cape Girardeau Delawares decided to relocate westward, some to the headwaters of the White River in the Ozarks, where Clark set aside a large tract for them, others to the Arkansas valley where they joined Cherokee migrants who had founded communities there some years earlier. Most residents of the Indian communities of eastern Missouri, however, refused to give up their lands, continuing to tough it out. French Creole communities fell victim to American squatters as well. Residents of the village of Cardondelet petitioned Congress complaining that Americans were "intruding daily . . . , destroying the timber which is scarce in most places here, & which once destroyed leaves the land of no value."[23]

In December of 1815 Clark responded to squatter encroachments with a proclamation. "Our government, founded in justice, will effectually extend its protection to the Native inhabitants within its limits," the governor bravely asserted. "I do hereby require that all white persons who have intruded and are settled upon the Lands of the Indians within this territory depart therefrom without delay - Should they neglect this last and peaceful warning the military power will be called upon to compel their removal." Clark's proclamation echoed the one issued six years before by his late comrade Meriwether Lewis.[24]

But political conditions in Missouri had changed fundamentally during the war. An elected House of Representatives, created in 1812 when Congress advanced Missouri to territorial status of the "second grade," was dominated by newcomer delegates, and they balked at Clark's invocation of traditional policy. In January 1816 the legislators protested that the "Tract Claimed by those Indians includes a Considerable portion of the richest and most fertile part" of Missouri, and that the Indian communities were "entirely Surrounded with flourishing Settlements of White people." Explicitly rejecting Clark's proclamation, the assembly passed a resolution urging Congress to resolve the problem "by giving those Indians lands some where Else in the unsettled parts of the Territory." Indian removal, they argued, "would much contribute to the population of that part of the Country and secure tranquillity to the neighboring inhabitants."[25]

In the face of this challenge to federal territorial policy, officials in Washington remained adamant. "The President expects the most prompt and perfect execution of the proclamation," Secretary of War William H. Crawford instructed Governor Clark. "Orders have been issued to the military commanders to furnish the necessary aid, where it shall be required." It was one thing, however, to order the eviction of squatters, quite another to succeed in having the orders carried out. Lacking federal marshals or troops, Clark had to rely on the state militia, whose ranks were filled with newly-arrived American emigrants. "It is my opinion, justified by the statements of many," wrote Alexander McNair, registrar of the federal Land Office in St. Louis, "that five Militiamen of this Territory would not march against the intruders on public lands." Although there is no discussion of the composition of the Missouri militia in the years after the War of 1812, it seems clear that with the arrival of hundreds of new American settlers authorities had discontinued calling upon emigrant Shawnees and Delawares for service. Meanwhile the territorial assembly renewed their demand for the removal of Indians to "some more remote part of the Territory which is better adapted to Indian persuits." In 1818, after two years of this stalemate, and with squatters continuing to invade Indian lands, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun finally instructed Clark to open negotiations with the Shawnees and Delawares on the possibility of removal.[26]

By 1820 Clark had reached an agreement with a substantial number of emigrant Indians, who took this opportunity to exchange their Mississippi River lands for tracts on the Arkansas River. "The Land proposed to be received in exchange is not of an equal quality by a great difference," Missouri's territorial delegate to Congress, John Scott, wrote candidly to Secretary Calhoun. "The Land which those Indians now inhabit is Very Valuable - The Soil is excellent - it is in the middle of the Settlements and fronting on the Mississippi - Those Indians have their Houses, Towns, and farms thereon - Their Animals are domesticated to the place - and all their property there." In conclusion, Scott wrote, "I really think the Bargain to U States a good one."[27]

The controversy over Missouri's admission to the union as a slave state had important implications for emigrant Indians. In 1818 the territorial legislature adopted a memorial praying for Missouri statehood, but when the enabling legislation came to the floor of Congress, early in 1819, it was defeated by anti-slavery members of the House of Representatives, setting off two years of debate over the western extension of slavery that seemed to threaten the foundations of the union. Finally, in 1821, Congress agreed to the famous Missouri Compromise, pairing the admission of slave Missouri with free Maine, and agreeing thereafter to the prohibition of slavery in all territory of the Louisiana Purchase north of parallel 36°30'. The ideological and practical issues at stake in this struggle for Missourians worked against the interests of emigrant Indians.

The principal spokesman for the pro-slavery party in Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton, editor of the St. Louis Enquirer, framed the conflict as a struggle over sovereignty. Missourians, he declared in 1819, were "the first to whose lot it had fallen to make a fair and regular stand against the encroachment of Congress upon the Sovereignty of the States." Benton even took the radical stand that had the territory's petition for statehood been denied a second time, its residents would have been justified in forming a republic of their own. Such a zealous defense of sovereignty continued after the achievement of statehood, for while the conflict may have been resolved in Congress through compromise, there was no hint of compromise in the attitude of the state's leaders, who saw threats to their prerogatives at every turn. Quickly the new state government embarked on a concerted campaign to eliminate any trace of competing sovereignty that inhered in the emigrant Indian communities, which technically remained part of "Indian Country" - territory overseen by federal officials of the Indian Office and outside the state's jurisdiction. "I would beg leave to draw your attention to the views of the State of Missouri," Indian agent Richard Graham wrote to Secretary Calhoun in late 1821. "She will evidently urge the extinguishing of the Indian title as far as the western boundary line." Graham predicted trouble, for "those Indians who are some little advanced in civilization, may have farms that they would be unwilling to relinquish.[28]

Benton, who had been elected one of Missouri's first two senators, understood full well the practical dimensions of this land grab. "Extending the area of slavery," he wrote in his memoirs, required "converting Indian soil into slave soil." In Missouri, as in all the western states, the principal way to wealth was through speculation in land. Settlement created a demand for land and thus increased its value, and in Missouri that process was being driven by emigrants from the slave states, many thousands of them accompanied by slaves of their own. As Floyd Shoemaker, historian of the Missouri statehood struggle, has argued, "the business man, the surveyor, the politician, believed that his business was bound up with more southern settlers and more slaves." Benton put it starkly: "to remove the Indians would make room for the spread of slaves."[29]

As Jefferson's earlier ideas about Indian removal suggest, there had long been sympathy in Washington for Indian removal. But now the territory that Jefferson had proposed as a refuge for emigrant Indians was itself to be cleansed of them. In 1817 and 1820, prompted by pleas from the state of Georgia as well as the territory of Missouri, President James Monroe recommended plans for voluntary Indian removal, but these proposals failed to muster sufficient support in Congress. Prodded by Senator Benton, Monroe reintroduced the plan in 1824. It would promote "the security and happiness of the tribes within our limits," he argued in an official message to Congress. "Surrounded as they are, and pressed as they will be on every side by the white population, it will be difficult if not impossible for them, with their kind of government, to sustain order among them[selves]." Monroe also made it clear, however, that Indians could not be forcibly removed from their lands, a founding principle of Indian affairs enunciated first in the promise of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that Indian "land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent," and reiterated by every president since Washington. "It is the duty of the United States," Monroe concluded, not "to commit any breach of right or of humanity, in regard to the Indians, repugnant to the judgment and revolting to the feelings of the whole American people."[30]

The lofty rhetoric, however, only served to underline the contradiction embedded in Monroe's text, the kind of self-serving conundrum that consistently tore at the seams of American Indian policy. The American people, he offered, would "revolt" at the thought of forced Indian removal; yet, he also admitted, they would continue to "surround" and "press" against the lands and resources of Indian communities. At precisely the point where his analysis called for genuine moral leadership, the President fell silent. Of course Monroe was not alone in seeking to avoid a confrontation with this American Janus. The contradiction was left for Indians to resolve by deciding themselves upon voluntary removal for their own "security and happiness." It was clear from what Monroe didn't say that the federal government had resolved to turn a blind eye to the efforts of states like Missouri to use squatters as a club to beat emigrant Indians into submission.

This was not a policy enunciated by a vote of the Missouri legislature or a decree of its governor. It is observable only in the breach, as with impunity the state allowed squatters to steal Indian farms and appropriate their improvements. The contrast with the actions of the territorial administration under the leadership of governors Lewis and Clark is palpable. An incident at Rogerstown, preserved in the papers of Indian Agent Richard Graham, offers such evidence. A Shawnee farmer named Petatwa, known to Americans as Shotpouch, complained to subagent Pierre Menard that a squatter by the name of William Fulbright had stolen his farm. "He has been four years in possession of a plantation on Courtois fork on the Maramek about twenty five miles from Rogerstown," Menard recorded in Petatwa's deposition. "He was ordered off by Fulbright, aleging that he had not [the] wright to Staie. . . . This Fulbright ordered him off from his place and took possession of it, on wich was a good Cabin and fifteen hundred rails," which Petatwa had just finished splitting, making ready to fence his fields. As the Shawnee owner retreated from his property, the squatter Fulbright shouted that he owed him nothing for these improvements, that the farm "was on government land," by which he meant it was free for the taking from the public domain. Some time later, Petatwa told Menard, he returned to his farm, but was severely beaten by another squatter, one John Scaggs, who "maltreated him by violently knocking him over the head with a rifle & otherwise beating him . . . . Scaggs broke his ribbs and cut him across the head twice with a Tomahawk after which he tied him by both arms."[31]

Menard attempted to use state offices to redress this clear injustice. This would be difficult to accomplish, for by state law Indians could not testify in court. "If you take this man's property," he wrote to Fulbright, "I will be forced to prosecute you according to law. . . . If you want his field, buy it of him, and pay him the worth of it. You would not like to pay your Self for a House Stolen by another white man from the Indians." Menard's colleague, Indian agent Richard Graham, wrote to state prosecutors that a number of American witnesses had come forward and were willing to testify against Fulbright. Indeed, it was a neighboring American farmer who had rescued Petatwa from his imprisonment at the hands of Scaggs. Meanwhile, Petatwa's brother, a man known as Little Captain, had also been assaulted. Justice of the Peace Lovel Thompson wrote Graham that "one white man by the [name] of John Martin have taken A gun of Little Captain by force with the pretence that he owed him." The American abused Little Captain's wife and squatted on his farm. "I will att[est] all I can for the Ind[ian]," Thompson promised.[32]

Thus a number of American neighbors supported the Rogerstown Indians in their attempt to preserve their lands. Yet despite the letters written on Petatwa's behalf by Menard, Thompson, and Graham, the state obstructed the prosecution with technicalities and delayed initiating proceedings until the statute of limitations had run out. The people of Rogerstown, and indeed all the emigrant Indians of eastern Missouri, were left legally defenseless. The fundamental problem was not simply the illegal action of squatters against Indians, but the action - or rather the inaction - of the state itself. Petatwa's testimony shrewdly suggested this. Asked by Menard to provide the date of Scagg's attack, the Shawnee farmer remembered that it had taken place on "the day on which the first election for Governor of the State of Missouri was held." The state, he seemed to be saying, was responsible.[33]

There were Americans in Missouri who considered removal unfair and unwise. "How mistaken (it seems to me) is the policy of our Government in proposing to remove any more Indians to this already impoverished country," Benjamin O'Fallon wrote from Council Bluffs. "Its present inhabitants can scarcely keep soul & body together. Their Tomehawks & sculping knives are already quarreling for something to eat." To Missouri officials, however, the issue at stake was sovereignty. "To the State," declared the Missouri assembly in a memorial to the federal government in 1824, "the existence of separate communities within its bosom, and independent of its laws, is a palpable evil, an anomaly in government, and direct inconsistency with the policy and jurisdiction of a sovereign State." This document concluded with an ominous threat that suggests the forces at work in Indian removal. The emigrant Indians "are fully sensible of the disadvantages of their present position," read the memorial.

They have suffered too much from the contact and pressure of a white population not to know its effect. They are too few in number to oppose any resistance to the moral and physical causes which must operate to their degradation, and to the further diminution of their numbers. They must know that their present position is temporary; that an effort to remove them is incessantly made; that the power of the State is against them; and that, sooner or later, they must go.

The refusal of the state of Missouri to protect Indians in the face of squatter violence was the brutal stick of American policy. [34]

It remained for the federal government to offer the carrot. Secretary of War Calhoun directed Clark - now serving as Superintendent of Indian Affairs of the Western District - to expedite removal with liberal applications of annuities and rations. In 1825 the whipsaw of squatter violence and federal inducement finally convinced delegations of emigrant Indians to sign treaties ceding their lands in Missouri in exchange for tracts on the Kansas River. The exodus of Shawnee and Delaware families that took place the next year was the first of hundreds of deportations during the era of Indian removal. "The treaties of 1825 were the beginning of the system of total removal," Benton proudly wrote. "It was a beginning which assured the success of the whole plan, and was followed up . . . until the entire system was accomplished." Indian removal in Missouri, in other words, was the necessary prelude to the violent removals of the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Seminoles, and dozens of other Indian peoples over subsequent decades.[35]

Yet even in the face of violence, many Indians remained in eastern Missouri, refusing to give up the struggle to maintain their communities. In 1829 another round of treaties paved the way for the removal of several more communities, but it was not until 1833, when President Jackson denied the petition of the Black Bob Band, that the last remnant of the emigrant Indians left the eastern part of the state, heading either for isolated valleys in the Ozarks, or the reservations in Kansas.

Among the casualties of Indian removal in Missouri was the inclusive colloquy that had characterized most of the commentary on interethnic relations during the territorial period. In its memorial of 1824, the Missouri legislators offered an exclusionist reading of the state's history:

The experience of centuries has shown that Indian tribes, placed in small masses, in the midst of a white population, are constantly exposed to the influence of causes which operate to the degradation of their character, and to the diminution of their numbers. The contact of two races of people, differing in language and character, and each retaining a recollection of former wars and massacres, gives rise to collisions, both of persons and property, in which the weaker party are most usually the sufferers, both in the first wrong, and in the final punishment.

There was in this memorial no acknowledgment of the contribution of Indian warriors to the military history of territorial Missouri, no recognition of the participation of Indian cattlemen and farmers in the early markets of St. Louis, nothing of the years of good relations between different ethnic communities, not even a hint that for forty years Indians and Americans had been intermingling and mixing in Missouri. As emigrant Indians moved west, leaving their lands to new settlers ignorant of Missouri's history, an exclusionist reading of the past took hold.[36]

No one did more to disseminate this interpretation than Timothy Flint, whose memoir of the decade he spent as a missionary in Missouri from 1815 to 1825, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, was one of the most influential books on the West in antebellum America. One of the persistent themes of Flint's narrative was his denunciation of "amalgamation." Describing a visit to the cabin of a Creole and his Indian wife, for example, Flint warned his readers that "no words can reach the description of the filthiness and apparent misery of this wretched place. . . . For supper the husband had a terrapin, the squaw an opossum, and we had biscuit and uncooked mackerel, which we carried with us." Despite Flint's disgust with this domestic scene, "the man persisted in declaring himself happy in his condition and in his wife," which the missionary took to be a confirmation of his savagery. In the métis children of these intermarriages, Flint wrote, "the lank hair, the Indian countenance and manners predominate." Like the authors of the Missouri memorial, Flint took a racial rather than a cultural view of intermingling. "It is a singular fact that the Indian feature descends much farther in these intermixtures, and is much slower to be amalgamated with that of the whites than that of the negro." Between the French Creoles and the Indians, he wrote, there seemed to be a "natural affinity," but American settlers would have nothing to do with mingling and mixing. "The antipathy between the two races seems fixed and unalterable. Peace there often is between them when they are cast in the same vicinity, but any affectionate intercourse, never." Flint had to admit that "monstrous exceptions sometimes occur" to this rule of antipathy, but "even the French themselves regard it as a matter of astonishment." Indeed, from his perspective the whole interethnic history of territorial Missouri must have seemed a "monstrous exception." Flint went on to become, in the scholarly assessment of James K. Folsom, "one of the most influential western men of letters of the first half of the nineteenth century." In his many popular works on western topics. Flint read his racial exclusionism back onto the American frontier experience. [37]

This exclusionist reading of the frontier past had become commonplace by the time Francis Parkman published the first volume of his epic "history of the American forest," The Conspiracy of Pontiac, in 1851. "The French showed a tendency to amalgamate with the forest tribes," he wrote; but "the borders of the English colonies displayed no such phenomena of mingling races. . . . Scorn on the one side and hatred on the other still marked the intercourse of the hostile races." For Parkman there were not even any monstrous exceptions to this rule. "With the settlers of the frontier it was much the same. Rude, fierce and contemptuous, they daily encroached upon the hunting-ground of the Indians, and then paid them for the injury with curses and threats. Thus the native population shrank back from before the English, as from an advancing pestilence." The rhetoric of exclusion had reached high tide, and no margin remained for a history of mingling in places like territorial Missouri. By the 1850s memories of ethnic cooperation in early Missouri were all but forgotten. Taking their place was a cant of exclusion that suppressed the history of peaceful and stable relations among communities that is such an important part of our useable past. [38]

[1] Shawnee Chiefs to President Andrew Jackson, November 20, 1831, in Correspondence on Removal of Indians West of Mississippi River, 1831-1833, and Accounts of Dispersing Agents in Five Counties, 2 vols., Senate Document 512, 23d Congress, 1st Session, 2:706. For the political and social context of this letter see Grant Foreman, The Last Trek of the Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 54. I want to thank Elizabeth Perkins, Jean O'Brien, Peter Wood, Andrew Cayton, Fredrika Teute, Rob Forbes, and my colleagues in the Yale American Studies Faculty Seminar for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

[2] Marvin W. Mikesell, "Comparative Studies in Frontier History," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 50 (1960), 64-74; Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald, Missouri: The Patrice Press, 1985), 124.

[3] Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 356; Francisco Cruzat to Estevan Miro, March 19, 1782, in Louis Houck, The Spanish Regime in Missouri, 2 vols. (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1909), 1:209; Cruzat to Miro, August 23, 1784, quoted in Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve, 93; Lyman Draper interview with Charles Tucker, Shawnee, June 26- 27, 1868, in Draper Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 23S172- 177. See also Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "An American Indian Gateway: Some Thoughts on the Migration and Settlement of Eastern Indians around Early St. Louis," Gateway Heritage 11 (Winter 1990-91), 47.

[4] Zenon Trudeau to Louis Lorimier, May 1, 1793, in Houck, Spanish Regime in Missouri, 2:50.

[5] Governor James Wilkinson to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, August 10, 1805, in Clarence E. Carter and John P. Bloom, eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1934-1975), 13:183; Amos Stoddard, Sketches, Historical and Descriptive of Louisiana (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1812), 210, 215; Governor William Clark to President James Monroe, April 10, 1811, in Territorial Papers, 14:445-446; Lynn Morrow, "Trader William Gilliss and Delaware Migration in Southern Missouri," Missouri Historical Review 75 (1981):150. On Lorimier's tenure as Indian agent see James F. Keefe and Lynn Morrow, eds., The White River Chronicles of S. C. Turnbo (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 265.

[6] Governor William Clark to Secretary of War James Monroe, August 25, 1814, in Territorial Papers, 14:786; Draper interview with Henry Dodge, June 29, 1855, Draper Manuscripts 11C81 and 15C99[1]; Rufus Babcock, ed., Forty Years of Pioneer Life. Memoir of John Mason Peck D.D. (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1864), 138; Milo M. Quaife, "Louis Lorimier," Missouri Historical Review 21 (1926-27):616-618. For background on Boone and his family see John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).

[7] Benjamin O'Fallon to Willis M. Green, December 8, 1829, in Benjamin O'Fallon Letterbook (transcript copy), Beinecke Library, Yale University, 2:228-229; Nathan Boone's report, 1843, included in Louis Pelzer, Marches of the Dragoons in the Mississippi Valley (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1917), 230.

[8]Nicholas de Finiels, An Account of Upper Louisiana, edited by Carl J. Ekberg and William E. Foley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 34-36; Fran‡ois Marie Perrin du Lac, Travels Through the Two Louisianas (London: R. Phillips, 1807), 45-46; Stoddard, Sketches, 215.

[9] Finels, Account of Upper Louisiana, 35-36, 112; H. M. Brackenridge, Recollections of Persons and Places in the West (Philadelphia: James Kay, Jun. and Brother, 1834), 26.

[10] Faragher, Daniel Boone, 313-314.

[11] Draper interviews with James Long and Elizabeth Musick, May 1868, Draper Manuscripts, 24S164-165, 22S168-170; John R. Musick, Stories of Missouri (New York: American Book Company, 1897), 31; Babcock, ed., Forty Years, 112; Governor William Clark to President James Monroe, April 10, 1811, and Secretary of War William Eustis to Clark, May 31, 1811, in Territorial Papers, 14:445-446, 452.

[12] Keefe and Morrow, eds., White River Chronicles, 298; H. M. Brackenridge,Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri Performed in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (Baltimore: Coale and Maxwell, 1816), 17.

[13] Stoddard, Sketches, 444; Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, edited by George R. Brooks (1826; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 108-109; Draper interview with Elizabeth Musick, May 1868, Draper Manuscripts, 22S168-170; Babcock, ed., Forty Years, 87-88.

[14] H. M. Brackenridge, Recollections, 236-239.

[15] Babcock, ed., Forty Years, 113; Draper interview with James Long, c. 1868, and Draper interview with Uel Musick, c. 1868, Draper Manuscripts 24S164-165, 24S190-191; Robert E. Parkin, Overland Trails and Trials (Overland, MO: Krawll Printing Co., [1956]), 6.

[16] Draper interview with Elizabeth Musick, May 1868, Draper Manuscripts, 22S168-170; Musick, Stories of Missouri, 31. For similar stories detailing the continuing positive interactions between Shawnees and American settlers in the Ozarks see Keefe and Morrow, eds., White River Chronicles, 7, 265.

[17] Elijah Bryan to Lyman Draper, October 23, 1884, Draper Manuscripts, 4C34. Further west, in the Ozarks region, this mingling included the use of common cemeteries, and it is likely that this pattern also characterized multiethnic communities such as Charette; see Keefe and Morrow, eds., White River Chronicles, 1.

[18] William E. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 24; H. M. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana; containing Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Notices of that Vast and Important Portion of America (Baltimore: Schaeffer & Maund, 1817), 208; Washington Irving, Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1961), 1:107-108; Musick, Stories of Missouri, 31.

[19] D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America. Volume 2: Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 79; President Thomas Jefferson to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, November 1, 1804; Governor James Wilkinson to Jefferson, November 6, 1805 in Territorial Papers, 13:54.

[20] President Thomas Jefferson to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, November 1, 1804, and Governor James Wilkinson to President Jefferson, November 6, 1805, in Territorial Papers, 13:55, 266; Musick, Stories of Missouri, 178-180; Louis Lorimier to Acting Governor Joseph Browne, February 19, 1807, Acting Governor Browne to Secretary of War Dearborn, March 23, 1807, and Secretary of Louisiana Territory Frederick Bates to Sheriff Henry Dodge, November 5, 1807, in Territorial Papers, 14:112, 111, 175.

[21] James McFarlane to Governor Meriwether Lewis, December 11, 1808, and Proclamation by Governor Lewis, April 6, 1809, in Territorial Papers, 14:267- 268, 261.

[22] Babcock, ed., Forty Years, 146; Hattie M. Anderson, "Missouri, 1804-1828: Peopling a Frontier State," Missouri Historical Review 31 (1937):227-253; Meinig, Continental America, 172-75.

[23] Grant Foreman, The Last Trek of the Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 34-35, 54; C. A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 353, 371-372, 410; William Clark to John C. Calhoun, September 5, 1823, quoted in Foreman, Last Trek, 48-49; William Clark, "Treaty with the Shawnees," November 7, 1825, in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive. Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832-61), 2:591; Petition of the Inhabitants of Cardondelet, October 30, 1818, in Territorial Papers 15:451.

[24] Proclamation of Governor William Clark, December 4, 1815, in Territorial Papers, 15:191-192.

[25] Resolution of the Missouri Territorial Assembly, January 1, 1816, in Territorial Papers, 15:105-107.

[26] Secretary of War William H. Crawford to Governor William Clark, February 5, 1818; Registrar Alexander McNair to Commissioner Josiah Meigs, January 27, 1816; Memorial of the Territorial Assembly of Missouri, January 24, 1817; Secretary of War John C. Calhoun to Governor Clark, May 8, 1818, in Territorial Papers, 15:113, 111-112, 234-235, 390.

[27] John Scott to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, September 21, 1820, in Territorial Papers 15:646.

[28] Floyd Shoemaker, Missouri's Struggle for Statehood (Jefferson City, Missouri: Hugh Stephens Printing Co, 1916), 84-86; Richard Graham to John C. Calhoun, November 11, 1821, in Richard Graham Papers, Missouri Historical Society. The Indian Office (later called the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was part of the Department of War until 1849, when it was transferred to the newly-created Department of the Interior.

[29] Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years View; or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, From 1820 to 1850, two volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1854), 1:28, 626; Shoemaker, Missouri's Struggle for Statehood, 134.

[30] James Monroe, "Extinguishment of Indian Title to Lands in Georgia," April 2, 1824, in Indian Affairs, 2:460, punctuation edited slightly for clarity.

[31]Deposition of Petatwa or Shotpouch, c. 1821; Pierre Menard to Paul Bright, August 7, 1822; and Deposition of Petatwa, c. 1826 in Graham Papers.

[32] Pierre Menard to William Fulbright, September 10, 1821; Lovel Thompson to Richard Graham, December 19, 1823; Deposition of Petatwa or Shotpouch, c. 1826 in Graham Papers. Menard became the subagent for the Shawnees, Delawares, and Cherokees west of the Mississippi in 1813 after the death of Louis Lorimier; see Keefe and Morrow, eds., The White River Chronicles, 265.

[33]Richard Graham to Col. Rufus Easton, September 18, 1823; Rufus Easton to Richard Graham, September 30, 1823; Deposition of Petatwa or Shotpouch, c. 1826, in Graham Papers.

[34] Benjamin O'Fallon to William Clark, May 9, 1825, O'Fallon Letterbook, Beinecke Library; General Assembly of the State of Missouri, "Proposition to Extinguish Indian Title to Lands in Missouri," May 14, 1824, in Indian Affairs, 2:460, 512, emphasis added.

[35] Foreman, Last Trek of the Indians, 34-35, 51-52, 54; Weslager, Delaware Indians, 430-433; Benton, Thirty Years' View, 29.

[36] Proposition to Extinguish Indian," in Indian Affairs, 2:512.

[37] Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 96-97, 119-120; Howard Roberts Lamar, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 380.

[38] Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 2 vols. (1851; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1888), 1:77-80.