Vanguard of Expansion Army Engineers in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1819-1879

Steamboats were novelties on the western rivers in 1819, so any steamer docked at St. Louis that spring would have evoked interest. But the strange vessel that bobbed gently in the Mississippi River caused more than the usual commotion. One of the first sternwheelers on the river, the Western Engineer was remarkable for its shallow draft—a mere nineteen inches—and for its unusual adornments. A St. Louis newspaper described the vessel, the prow resembling "a huge serpent, black and scaly, . . . his mouth open, vomiting smoke," the trappings designed "to attract and awe the savage." The writer noted "artillery; the flag of the republic; portraits of a white man and an Indian shaking hands; a calumet of peace; a sword. . . ." [1]

The passengers were also out of the ordinary. The list was headed by Major Stephen H. Long, a Topographical Engineer and former West Point instructor. No stranger to St. Louis or the Mississippi, Long had ranged far up and down the river in 1817, selecting sites for Fort Smith on the Arkansas River and Fort St. Anthony at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi. His companions included Dr. William Baldwin, physician and botanist; Augustus E. Jessup, geologist; Titian R. Peale, artist and naturalist; and zoologist Thomas Say. [2]

Major Long's party was the scientific branch of the Yellowstone Expedition, a large force sent by the War Department to secure the American claim to the upper Missouri River. British agents, "tools of a corrupt government, according to surgeon John Gale of the expedition and many of his countrymen, still worked among the Indians, cementing tribal loyalties to the Crown and channelling the peltry trade through Canada. President James Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun sought to eliminate British influence among the tribes of the northern plains. Although overshadowed by the main expedition, Long's scientific party had an important mission. Long's orders read: "explore the country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains"—"permit nothing worthy of notice to escape your attention." [3]

On June 21, amid rumors that the crew would steam up the Missouri to its headwaters, dismantle the vessel, portage it over the Rockies, and sail down the Columbia, the Western Engineer left St. Louis and headed up the Missouri. The pace was leisurely. Speed averaged less than three miles per hour, and now and then the boat tied up to put parties ashore. At Franklin, where the citizenry turned out to welcome "Long's Dragon," the group tarried a week, enjoying frontier hospitality and presenting their hosts with the town's exact latitude and longitude. Some pleasant times notwithstanding, the trip was no excursion. Heat, insects, and thieving Indians proved bothersome. Sickness plagued the expedition, and Dr. Baldwin, a consumptive, died. The river, with its snags, sandbars, and swift currents, was a navigator's nightmare. Yet, the Western Engineer got through. October found Long's company snug in winter quarters near Council Bluffs, at a place they called Engineer Cantonment, and Long himself en route to Washington to discuss plans for the following year. [4]

Kansas Indians dancing for Major Long's party. 1819. Library of Congress.

The winter at Engineer Cantonment was a significant chapter in the education of the scientific gentlemen. While examining the Council Bluffs vicinity, collecting natural history specimens, and taking astronomical observations for latitude and longitude, they learned of life on the upper Missouri. Here on the cutting edge of the frontier, where white and Indian cultures met, were the mountainmen, dirty and unkempt fur traders who were mostly illiterate and always wise to the ways of the wilderness. Joshua Pilcher, Lucien Fontenelle, and the most remarkable of all the early entrepreneurs in the trade, Manuel Lisa, visited the expedition's quarters. Lisa was extremely influential among the Indians and has been credited with personally sustaining the tenuous American foothold beyond the Father of Waters. These meetings marked the first intersection of the paths of Engineer-explorers and the mountainmen, two groups that would form a vital partnership in making available to all citizens an understanding of the great West. There were also the Indians, their faces streaked with red and white clay, who came to the camp to dance and share feasts of roast buffalo hump. Throbbing drums, booming artillery, and the sizzle of broiling skunk all underscored the distance from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. [5]

In the spring, Long's scientific party left the main expedition for a rapid reconnaissance across the plains to the Rocky Mountains. They moved westward along the Platte—a stream so sluggish that some men claimed its waters were not drinkable but edible—to the front ranges of the Rockies in what is now Colorado. Riding south along the eastern slopes of the mountains, they discovered and named Long's Peak, and pitched camp near the future city of Denver. After climbing Pike's Peak and measuring its height, the company split into two groups for the homeward journey, one going down the Arkansas, the other searching for the sources of the Red. [6]

Neither division successfully completed its mission. Long mistook the Canadian River for the Red and only discovered the error after going so far east that he could see the Ozarks. The trouble that beset the other party was vastly different. At the end of August, three soldiers deserted with the party's supplies, Indian presents, and scientific notes. Neither the manuscripts nor the miscreants were ever located. [7]

The Rocky Mountains from the Platte River. Library of Congress.

Nevertheless, the exploration had significant results, all beneficial save one. An account of the journey, compiled by Baldwin's replacement, Dr. Edwin James, disseminated much authentic information about vast areas of the West. A display of natural history specimens at Peale's Philadelphia Museum attracted crowds of curiosity seekers, and thus served to acquaint the public with rocks, plants, and animals from beyond the Mississippi. Major Long's map, which supplied fresh detail and corrected serious errors, became standard for a generation. Unhappily for his reputation, Long fixed the label Great Desert on the high plains and pronounced the region "almost wholly unfit for cultivation and, of course, uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence." [8] Others before and after Long took much the same view, and with good reason. Early frontiersmen, dependent upon forests and streams, would have found the plains inhospitable, to say the least. Even so, Long went down in history as the author of the "Great American Desert" myth and as a delaying influence on western settlement. [9]

During the two decades that followed Major Long's expedition, the government focused its efforts on the vast triangle west of the Mississippi, north of the Missouri, and south of Canada. Competition with Britain for both the peltry trade and loyalty of the Indians remained a potent motivation for several years. Then, as settlers entered Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, conflicts among the Indians themselves took on a new importance, for intertribal warfare endangered the nascent Anglo-American communities. Rumors of rich metal deposits on the shores of Lake Superior and an ongoing fascination with discovery of the source of the Father of Waters also stimulated interest in the Northwest. For these reasons, and because much of the trans-Mississippi Southwest was controlled by a hostile Mexican government, the few expeditions that could be equipped and dispatched in the 1820's and 1830's probed the lands north and west of St. Louis.

Trained personnel for a thorough study of the Northwest were in short supply. The United States Military Academy educated nearly all civil engineers, and demand for their professional skills was heavy. Important projects closer to the centers of population, such as surveys of the Atlantic coast and Great Lakes and examination of routes for wagon roads, canals, and later railroads, required attention. The War Department, particularly under Secretaries John C. Calhoun in 1817-1825 and Lewis Cass in 1831-1836, was steadfastly committed to exploration. Nevertheless, the pressing need for an interior network of communication and transportation took precedence. [10]

This portion of Long's map of his 1819-1820 expedition bears the label "Great Desert." National Archives.

Both internal improvements and western exploration were also limited by a lack of money. Although the primarily agricultural economy of the nation did not generate great wealth, the reluctance of Congress and the President to commit revenues to such programs was a far greater obstacle than an overall scarcity of funds. The widespread uncertainty in the government regarding the constitutionality of spending public money on internal improvements and exploration combined with sectional jealousies to block many proposals. [11] Consequently the expeditions of the 1820's and 1830's were frequently designed as multipurpose enterprises, so that they would be acceptable to congressmen reluctant to furnish money for exploration. Then funds to pay guides, buy Indian gifts, and obtain other essential goods and services had to be scraped from the bottom of the budgetary barrel. Because the expeditions were burdened with numerous responsibilities and could obtain only marginal financial support, the 1820's and 1830's were the lean years of Engineer exploration in the West.

The first expedition to follow Major Long's reconnaissance of 1819-1820 amply illustrated the conditions under which exploration would take place. In the autumn of 1819, while Long was struggling for funds to continue his work, Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan Territory suggested to Secretary of War Calhoun a probe of the south shore of Lake Superior and the waterways connecting the lake to the Mississippi. Mindful of the difficulties of obtaining support for exploration, Cass listed a number of other justifications for the expedition he intended to lead: an inquiry into Indian customs, acquisition of land for a military post at Sault Ste. Marie, examination of copper deposits along Lake Superior, and evaluation of Britain's role and influence in the fur trade. Cass requested a military escort, "an intelligent officer of engineers," and "some person acquainted with zoology, botany, and mineralogy." Aware that no funds were allocated explicitly for exploration, he asked Calhoun to authorize the expenditure of $1,000 to $1,500 from appropriations for Indian affairs. [12] Of such complicated expedients was born the exploring expedition of 1820.

Secretary of War Calhoun, always eager to obtain information about the new country, approved Cass' proposal and provided the necessary personnel and assistance. He offered the post of mineralogist to Henry R. Schoolcraft, a versatile young naturalist "of more than ordinary vigor, daring, and perseverence," who had independently visited and studied the lead mines of Missouri in 1818. As topographer, Calhoun chose Engineer Captain David Bates Douglass, a graduate of Yale College who had served with distinction in the War of 1812. Douglass temporarily left his post as Professor of Natural History at the Military Academy to join Cass and Schoolcraft at Detroit in early May. [13]

On 20 May 1820, the thirty-seven scientists, soldiers, voyageurs, and Indians stepped into three canoes for the journey to the western tip of Lake Superior. Up Lake St. Clair, the St. Clair River, and Lake Huron to Michilimacinac and Sault Ste. Marie, they dipped their paddles rythmically in the cool, clear northern waters. After obtaining Ojibway approval for a military post at Sault Ste. Marie, Cass and his party followed the south shore of Lake Superior to "the far famed Copper Rock" of the Ontonogon, said by some early travelers to be a veritable mountain of pure copper. Both Douglass and Schoolcraft were disappointed by the quality and purity of the ore in the ten-cubic-foot lump, and made only a cursory probe for other deposits. They pushed their birch craft back into the water and paddled west into the wind, past the Bad, the Brule, and Iron rivers, to the mouth of the St. Louis at the western tip of Superior, where they beached their canoes forty-five days after leaving Detroit. [14]

Cass negotiated with the Indians, while Schoolcraft and Douglass devoted their time to scientific pursuits. Although unable to study deposits en route as carefully as he would have liked, Schoolcraft picked up enough samples to conclude that the south shore of Lake Superior would ultimately yield vast riches of copper, iron, and lead. Douglass carefully traced the route of the expedition but found time to "botanize and mineralize" as well. He also paid careful attention to the political relationships and loyalties involved in the fur trade. After coming close to discovering the source of the Father of Waters, the scientists returned to Detroit in September with promises of loyalty from numerous bands of Indians and a great wealth of geological, topographical, and ethnological information. Through Schoolcraft's account of the journey and numerous newspaper and magazine articles, the government and people of the United States learned a great deal about the new country, its native peoples, and resources—at a bargain price. [15]

Although Governor Cass was pleased, he was far from satisfied. After he returned to Detroit, he urged Secretary Calhoun to send other expeditions into the Northwest. Cass gave highest priority to reconnaissances of the St. Peter's (or Minay-Sotor, and later Minnesota), the most important tributary of the Mississippi above the Missouri, and the St. Croix rivers. Cass said both could be carried out by an able officer and ten men in a canoe. With this letter Cass in effect set the immediate goals for further exploration of the Northwest. The next two expeditions, sent by Calhoun in 1823 and by Cass himself as Secretary of War in 1832, did just what Cass suggested in 1820. [16]

Major Stephen Long commanded the 1823 expedition to the St. Peter's. Like Governor Cass three years earlier, Long led a low-budget, multipurpose enterprise. Instructions from the War Department required him to describe the topography of the country, fix the latitude and longitude of all important points, examine the regional fauna, flora, and minerals, and investigate the character and customs of the Indians. The source of funds was as complex as the mission. Less than one-tenth of the $2,000 allotted for the expedition actually came from the Engineer Department budget. Most of the money was taken from the Quartermaster and Indian departments, while the Subsistence Department contributed its share for such inedibles as steamboat and stage fare for landscapist Samuel Seymour and zoologist Thomas Say. Thus instructed and financed, Long set out again for the new country. [17]

The exploration began at Fort St. Anthony, near the mouth of the St. Peter's. There Long and his companions rested, enjoyed the hospitality of post commander Colonel Josiah Snelling, and added three interesting characters to the party. Frontier-wise fur trader Joseph Renville signed on as guide and interpreter, and Colonel Snelling's son Joseph volunteered to go along as Renville's assistant. Italian linguist and jurist Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, who had come up the Mississippi seeking its source, also joined the expedition. These three widely different people—a skilled frontiersman, an adventuresome officer's son, and a European scholar armed with a red umbrella—marched with the party when it left the post to follow the St. Peter's to the Red and Pembina. [18]

Long's sketch of the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, from his 1823 journal. Minnesota Historical Society.

A month's journey, made alternately pleasant and miserable by handfuls of wild raspberries and swarms of mosquitoes, brought the expedition to the Scottish immigrant community of Pembina. Long spent five days at the small border settlement, observing the stars for latitude and marking the boundary with Canada. To the apparent satisfaction of the residents, all but one of the town's sixty log buildings stood south of Long's line. On 8 August 1823, Major Long formally took possession of the settlement for the United States, raised the stars and stripes, and fired a salute. [19]

On the next day Beltrami and Long quarreled and parted. Their disagreement flared when Long invited an Indian into their quarters. Beltrami turned the guest out. Long's protest of this unnecessary and foolish provocation only incited Beltrami to more foolishness. The Italian left in a huff, and headed southeast, accompanied only by two Ojibway guides and a Canadian-Indian interpreter. Beltrami came very near to finding the source of the Mississippi on his return trip. The lake he named Julia, for Countess Guilia Spade de Medici, was only a few miles from the true source. The state of Minnesota later commemorated his nearly successful quest by naming after him a county south of Lake of the Woods. [20]

While Beltrami went southeast, Long began his return trip by way of the northern lakes. After eighty-four portages his canoes glided into the blue velvet of Lake Superior. At Thunder Bay he crossed to the south shore so geologist William H. Keating could examine the Michigan copper deposits that had disappointed Schoolcraft and Douglass in 1820. Keating thought the deposits were so vast as to be inexhaustible. In time to come, his countrymen found reason to agree: in their first thirty-five years of operation, from 1855 to 1889, the Michigan mines produced over one trillion pounds of refined metal. [21]

Nine years after Long returned from Pembina, Henry Schoolcraft organized another multipurpose expedition into the north woods. Schoolcraft, then working as the Office of Indian Affairs agent to the northern tribes, sought an end to the frequent Ojibway-Sioux wars that threatened new settlements in the Northwest. He also wanted to investigate the influence of British traders on these conflicts. When he broached the plan to Secretary of War Cass, he asked that an Engineer officer accompany him to map the route of the expedition. Cass approved but was unable to provide an Engineer because of the great demands elsewhere for the skills of Corps officers. Instead Lieutenant James Allen, an infantry officer detailed to topographical duty, joined Schoolcraft to make the map, as well as report on geology and natural history, game and fish. Before Schoolcraft left, his tasks expanded to include a thorough study of the fur trade and even vaccination of the Indians against smallpox. Moreover, he had still another purpose in mind. After receiving his orders, he told Cass, "If I do not see the 'veritable source' of the Mississippi this time, it will not be from a want of effort." [22]

Schoolcraft and Allen, with Dr. George Houghton and about thirty voyageurs and infantrymen, followed the Cass-Schoolcraft route of 1820 to the head of Lake Superior. Twenty-three days later, after travel unlike anything experienced by Allen and his foot soldiers—around portages, through swamps, and over rapids—they stood on the shore of Lac la Biche, the true source of the Father of Waters. Schoolcraft renamed the lake Itasca, a word he coined from the Latin veritas caput ("true head"). On an island in the lake, dubbed Schoolcraft by Lieutenant Allen, the party hoisted a flag, which they left flying when they began their return. They made their way back to Superior via the St. Croix, which they followed from its mouth on the Mississippi to its source in northwestern Wisconsin. With their survey of the St. Croix they finished the basic reconnaissance suggested by Cass in 1820. On August 26 they arrived at Sault Ste. Marie, the exploration completed. [23]

Henry Schoolcraft at Schoolcraft Island in Lake Itasca. Minnesota Historical Society.

Although they passed rapidly through the north country, Schoolcraft and his companions accomplished a great deal. Equipped only with a compass, Allen accurately traced the party's route and drew the first map of the lake country in which the Father of Waters had its origin. Dr. Houghton vaccinated over 2,000 Ojibways and took a census of all the bands he met. So encouraging was Houghton's success that the government decided to continue efforts to protect the Indians against smallpox. Some bands promised to stop the constant intertribal warfare, but Schoolcraft harbored no illusions regarding a permanent peace. And, while he failed to stop the long-standing Indian feud, he scored a major triumph when he discovered and named "the 'veritable source' of the Mississippi." [24]

Secretary of War Cass could take great satisfaction from the exploration of the north country between 1820 and 1832. In spite of the lack of personnel and money, the general contours of the region had been made known, the copper deposits verified, and the source of the Mississippi identified. After his success in planning and executing the basic reconnaissance of the upper Mississippi and its major tributaries, the St. Peter's and the St. Croix, Congress for the first time became a willing collaborator in continuing exploration of western lands. In 1834 and again in 1836, while Cass was still Secretary of War, the national legislature voted $5,000 for geological and mineralogical surveys of western lands. [25]

With this money Cass authorized Colonel John J. Abert, chief of the Topographical Bureau, to hire George W. Featherstonhaugh to examine the mineral deposits in Arkansas Territory and then along the St. Peter's in Minnesota. Featherstonhaugh was an English traveler and geologist who had founded the short-lived Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science in 1831. Secretary Cass, who well understood the utility of geological exploration, took an interest in the Englishman's work. Cass tried unsuccessfully to convince Congress to appoint Featherstonhaugh professor of geology at the Military Academy, before obtaining authorization to send him to the Arkansas frontier in 1834. [26]

Joseph Nicollet at a trading post on the Crow Wing River. Minnesota Historical Society.

Featherstonhaugh's two journeys across the Mississippi had few noteworthy results. In Arkansas he located some coal and lead deposits and cautioned pioneers against wasting effort in search of nonexistent deposits of precious metals. On his northwestern trip of 1835, his major achievement was identification of the coal deposits of western Maryland and Pennsylvania. After he arrived in Minnesota, he examined the St. Peter's with so much care that Joseph N. Nicollet, the brilliant French scientist who undertook an expedition sponsored by the Topographical Bureau in 1838, thought it unnecessary to add anything to the Englishman's analysis. [27]

Three years after Featherstonhaugh's return from Minnesota, Colonel Abert's bureau sponsored the first of two expeditions by Nicollet. Renowned in France as a mathematician, the former professor at the College Louis-le-Grand and one-time secretary of the Paris Observatory undertook on his own to explore and map the huge Mississippi basin. In the course of his travels, he improved on Schoolcraft's work by locating and tracing the courses of the small creeks that flowed into Lake Itasca and accurately fixing the longitude and latitude of the lake. Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett, who shared the commitment to exploration shown by his predecessors Calhoun and Cass, became interested in Nicollet's enterprise and arranged for sponsorship of the project by Colonel Abert's office. [28]

On the first of his two expeditions as a civil agent of the Topographical Bureau, Nicollet examined the lush valley of the Minnesota and some of its tributaries. A young civilian topographer named John Charles Frémont (who also obtained his position through Poinsett), German botanist Charles A. Geyer, and guide Joseph Renville accompanied him up the Minnesota and Cottonwood rivers to the Red Pipestone Quarry south of the Flandreau. Behind them came several French voyageurs driving horsecarts full of gear. Nicollet eagerly anticipated his visit to the quarry, which provided the Sioux with clay for their ceremonial pipes, but listened skeptically when the Indians told of thunder and lightning greeting visitors to the site. After a descent into the valley that was marked by a severe thunderstorm and violent winds, Nicollet spent five days at the quarry, making careful astronomical observations for his map and collecting geological specimens. From Red Pipestone he led his men back to Fort Snelling (formerly Fort St. Anthony) and south to St. Louis before winter ended navigation on the upper Mississippi. [29]

In 1839 Nicollet turned his attention to the Dakota prairie. He and Frémont, who was developing an almost worshipful admiration for the man he called the Pilgrim of Science, boarded the American Fur Company steamer Antelope at St. Louis for the trip up the Missouri to Fort Pierre. Geyer, former Prussian artillerist Louis Zindel, and mountainman Etienne Provost, also accompanied Nicollet on the paddle wheeler as it struggled upstream against the strong spring current of the Big Muddy. Always a careful observer, Nicollet noticed that the Missouri had changed dramatically since the days of Lewis and Clark. Many of the landmarks described by those pioneers of western exploration had been swept away by the furious river, which the Antelope battled for seventy days before reaching Pierre. [30]

Inscription Rock at the Pipestone Quarry. The "C. F." below Nicollet's name stands for Charles Frémont. Minnesota Historical Society.

After hiring two prairie-wise guides, William Dixon and Louison Freniere, Nicollet turned his back on the river and rode north across the prairie toward Devil's Lake. Mosquitoes were everywhere, and Frémont, now a second lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, complained of many meals flavored by "mosquito sauce piquante." The exuberant and lusty Dixon rode point for the party, reconnoitering the land and picking the route. He led Nicollet through ravines and over hills toward a bluff overlooking the valley of the James River. Once atop the eminence, Nicollet understood Dixon's choice of paths. Before them lay the spectacular vista of the James, enlarged by the waters of the Mud, Snake, Nixon, and Wolf rivers, tributaries that joined it like spokes of a wheel while it wound through the Dakota prairie to the Missouri. Nicollet gazed in awe, while Dixon exclaimed, "Well, come now, you want geography: look! there's geography for you." [31]

Nicollet approached his fieldwork and computations with a meticulous professionalism. Stopping to sleep only three or four hours each night, he made over two hundred precise sets of astronomical observations for longitude and latitude and as many barometric readings for altitude. Armed with this data and other field notes on the topography, Nicollet travelled to Washington at the conclusion of the second expedition. There with the help of Frémont and another topog, Lieutenant Eliakim P. Scammon, the Frenchman worked long hours over many months translating rough sketches and field computations into his now famous map of the upper Mississippi valley. [32]

While Nicollet and his assistants toiled on the map, Colonel Abert pleaded with Congress for continued support of the project. He had sent Nicollet out in 1839 with only promises of an appropriation from Congress, then had to wait until 1840 to obtain money to pay the expedition's debts. Ultimately both Abert's faith and Nicollet's labors proved worthwhile. His chart of the hydrographic basis of the upper Mississippi fully met Abert's expectation of "an extremely accurate map." [33] Members of the American scientific community later echoed Abert's judgment. Spencer F. Baird, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, referred to his copy of the map as "highly prized," and Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, an outstanding cartographer in his own right, called it "one of the greatest contributions ever made to American geography." [34] More recent commentators have only added to the encomiums of nineteenth-century critics. [35]

Nicollet's map of the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. National Archives.

Publication of the map in 1843, shortly after Nicollet's death, capped a long and difficult period of exploration in the Northwest. The expeditions of the 1820's and 1830's accomplished complex missions with slender financial resources. Slowly, building on the Cass plan for exploration and then going beyond it, the Army obtained a complete picture of the huge region between the Missouri and Canada. While this process was underway, the underpinnings were laid for future efforts. The explorers made contacts with the knowledgable mountainmen and gained valuable experience in fieldwork; the Topographical Bureau gathered experience in administering the work. Like the Bureau, the Corps of Topographical Engineers was also growing to maturity. At least three topogs, Major Long and Lieutenants Frémont and Scammon possessed a more than passing acquaintance with exploration, western cartography, or both. Thus, the decades of the 1820's and 1830's were both an end and a beginning. The reconnaissance of the Northwest was finished, and the topogs were ready for a larger role in exploration.