GEORGE ROGERS CLARK Selected Papers From The 1983 And 1984 George Rogers Clark Trans-Appalachian Frontier History Conferences

Our forebears of a century ago and more were not pluralists. Jane Addams and the A.P.A., Henry L. Dawes and Richard L. Pratt, Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan, one and all sought a homogeneous American population. Deviations from the true American type were described and treated as stereotypes. And academics shared the trait. Frederick Jackson Turner, in the epochal essay to which we all owe so much, scattered stereotypes everywhere. Thus at one point Turner wrote, "The tidewater part of the South represented typical Englishmen . . . ." Elsewhere he quoted Governor Glenn of South Carolina speaking of the "very industrious and thriving Germans" in the frontier settlements. [1] Or, again, this time quoting John Mason Peck:

First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting.... He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." ... [He] occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till neighbors crowd around... and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and to employ his own figures, he "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.

Peck continues, identifying a second class of frontiersmen as purchasers of the land, who improve both the land and their surroundings and "Exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life." The third class Peck calls "the men of capital and enterprise," who buy the improvements of the second class. These men move further on to "become ... [men] of capital and enterprise in turn." [2]

This three-fold division of the frontier population, or some variation of it, seems almost universal among observers of the frontier, whether travelers through the region, or later historians of the western expansion. Virtually all the reporters agree in their approval of the second and third types, while the first class suffers from a very unfavorable stereotype, as a sampling of historians will remind you.

Billington quotes an official observing the frontier around Pittsburgh after the fall of France, "[these pioneers] will remove as their avidity and restlessness incite them, ... wandering seems engrafted in their Nature." His description of Daniel Boone's way of life makes Boone the archetype of the pioneer of Peck's first class. [3] Echoing Peck, Richard Bartlett speaks of the "'Cutting-edge Squatter' who left 'for the tall timber' while the buyer of his clearing picked up in making improvements where the original pioneer had left off." [4] In the course of several pages of description, Bartlett identifies the Scotch-Irish as the "stock frontier type":

In America the counterpart of the Irishman whose land was stolen or taken by force was the Indian — the new guerilla fighter was the Indian brave. It was a simple matter to replace the Irish as objects of their hatred with the Indians, and the Scotch-Irish achieved this transfer with great success.... Here the men could abandon all self-discipline and become addicts of drink, for they early learned how to make corn into a potent liquid; peach brandy was a common product also. A second addiction was the hunt. To many a man, the wilderness, his gun, his dogs, and the unrestrained freedom to hunt equaled the closest approach he knew to heaven on earth. They were a restless people, these Scotch-Irish, caring little for their farms, content to live in lean-tos — cabins still open to the world on one side — or completed cabins with earthen floors and few improvements. [5]

Most observers deplored pioneer morality. One reporter, admittedly prejudiced, "accused the back country folk of 'swopping wives as cattle' and estimated that 95 per cent of the young women he married were already pregnant. He further concluded that nine-tenths of the settlers had venereal disease." [6] E. P. Fordham, visiting Illinois in 1818, noted:

Their women never sit at table with them; at least, I have never seen them. I cannot speak in high terms of the manners or of the virtue of their squaws and daughters. Their houses contain but one room, and that used as a sleeping room as well by strangers as by the men of the family, they lose all feminine delicacy, and hold their virtue cheap. [7]

The Scotch-Irish, says Bartlett, were "distinctly anti-intellectual, . . . a mobile people, moving again and again and yet again. They were despoilers, creating farms without beauty. . . . They were a people who could work unceasingly for a time, then lapse into a long period of lethargy. . . ." [8]

To summarize, observers of the pioneers of Peck's first class agreed on a number of traits. The most common of these was surely mobility. Fordham wrote, "This class cannot be called first Settlers, for they move every year or two." [9] Dondore quotes Sir William Johnson referring to their "wandering disposition." [10]

These nomads were basically hunters. "Their rifle is their principal means of support," Fordham declared, and George Flower agreed. [11]

Johann Schoepf, in common with other observers, recognized that the backwoodsmen were "vastly fond" of their way of life, although it meant that they became "indifferent to all social ties." Neighbors, "by scaring off the game," were "a nuisance." Schoepf also noted another attraction. "They are often lucky on the hunt," he wrote, "and bring back great freight of furs, the proceeds of which are very handsome." [12] The "Cutting-edge" frontiersman was also the original Indian-hater. They were "a daring, hardy race of men, who live in miserable cabins, which they fortify in times of war with the Indians, whom they hate. . . ." [13]

This "most vicious of our people" was widely reported as "ignorant" and given to strong drink and brawling; they led "a roistering existence," says Dondore. [14] Their poverty, many observers agreed, derived from "their extreme Indolence." [15] "Too many," Henry C. Knight thought, "instead of resting one day in seven, work only one day in six." [16] "These men cannot live in regular society," declared Timothy Dwight, "They are too idle; too talkative; too passionate; too prodigal, and too shiftless; to acquire either property or character." [17] Sir William Johnson deplored the influence of these men on the Indians. He said: "Many of these emigrants are idle fellows that are too lazy to cultivate land and invited by the plenty of game they found, have employed themselves in hunting, in which they interfere much more with the Indians than if they pursued agriculture." [18] Buley endorses the charge of idleness, at least as applied to Indians. [19]

Most descriptions allowed that the backwoodsman was "impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality." [20] "[He was] content," Buley has concluded, "with the rudest of shelters, a corn and pumpkin patch, a few hogs of the same bold disposition as himself." He was "crude in speech and as naively unaware of his picturesque profanity as he was innocent of underwear or a daily bath." [21]

Undoubtedly part of this reception — and perception — of the people of Peck's first class rested on revulsion at the nearly universal squalor of their persons and habitations. Their "miserable cabins" [22] sheltered dirty women fostering filthy children all "pigged together" in a single room, along with whatever passersby happened along. [23] They were reportedly no more fastidious in their persons than they were in their dwellings. William Cullen Bryant traveled the Illinois frontier in 1832 and met some of these pioneers:

In looking for a place to feed our horses I asked for corn at the cabin of an old settler named Wilson. Here I saw a fat dusky woman barefoot with six children as dirty as pigs and shaggy as bears. She was lousing one of them and cracking the unfortunate insects between her thumbnails. I was very glad when she told me that she had no corn or oats. [24]

For some, however, the revulsion might be mitigated if the proprietor turned out to be a man of substance. During a steamboat wooding stop, Edmund Flagg

entered easily into confabulation with a pretty, slatternly-looking female, with a brood of mushroom, flaxen-haired urchins at her apronstring, and an infant at the breast very quietly receiving his supper.

Flagg continued in this vein, but then added:

Subsequently I was informed that the worthy woodcutter could be valued at not less than one hundred thousand! Yet, en verite, reader mine, I do asseverate that my latent sympathies were not slightly aroused at the first introduction, because of the seeming poverty of the dirty cabin and its dirtier mistress! [25]

Hear Bryant again:

At the next house we found corn and seeing a little boy of two years old running about with a clean face I told John that we should get a clean breakfast. I was right. The man whose name was Short had a tall young wife in a clean cotton gown and shoes and stockings. She baked us some cakes, fried some bacon and made a cup of coffee which being put on a clean table cloth and recommended by a good appetite was swallowed with some eagerness. [26]

"These men of the 'long knife' stock," Buley writes, "were not tenderfeet, for back of them was usually more than one generation of pioneers." [27] Solon J. Buck reached the same conclusion. "From the time it appeared on the continent their strain had been in the vanguard of settlement. As frontier conditions passed away in one place, they packed up their few possessions and pushed farther into the interior." [28] The "cutting-edge" backwoodsman, then, played a continuing role in the frontier movement.

I think these statements point us toward an understanding of these vanguards of American expansion. They represented a different culture, a different society, with obviously different values. "If the People did not live up to other people's ideas, they lived as well as they wanted to," one of their defenders declared. "They didn't make slaves of themselves, they were contented with living as their fathers lived before them." [29] One need not accept the identification of these people with Scotch-Irish, as Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney have proposed, to perceive that here was a different culture. [30]

The charges against the backwoodsmen resemble in almost every particular the contemporary ideas about the Indians. This fact, of course, has not escaped the notice of reporters and historians of the frontier. Johann Schoepf, shortly after Independence, noted:

These hunters or "backwoodsmen" live very like Indians and acquire similar ways of thinking. They shun everything which appears to demand of them law and order, dread anything which breathes constraint. [31]

Fordham commented that this "daring and hardy race of men" resembled the Indians in "dress and manners." [32] It well may be that the dislike, often antagonism, expressed toward these pioneers derived from the same sources as the Indian-hating described by Roy Harvey Pearce. In the foreword of his Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization, Pearce writes:

I have tried to recount how it was and what it meant for civilized men to believe that in the savage and his destiny there was manifest all that they had long grown away from and yet still had to overcome. Civilized men, of course, believed in themselves; they could survive, so they knew, only if they believed in themselves. In America before the 1850's that belief was most often defined negatively — in terms of the savage Indians who, as stubborn obstacles to progress, forced Americans to consider and reconsider what it was to be civilized and what it took to build a civilization. [33]

In many ways the "cutting-edge" frontiersman posed as much of a threat to the stability and respectability of "American society and culture" as the Indian, perhaps even more of a threat since a bath and a shave could eradicate the most obvious stigmata of the backwoodsman. These white Indians constantly reminded the established order how precarious "civilization" really was.

The above discussion leads to several conclusions. In the first place, the foregoing observations may serve to extend to the middle western frontier the notions about the Scotch-Irish that McWhiney and McDonald have applied to the South. Richard Bartlett would surely subscribe to this view. Secondly, the unsympathetic picture of the first frontiersman has no doubt concealed many of the facets of his life and of the history of the frontier that a more sympathetic, less culture-bound investigation may disclose. [34] For instance, that these woodsmen did not aspire to be farmer-settlers may well explain why they declined to establish their homesteads on the prairies. Historians, by definition non-farmers, have generally implied that these pioneers' neglect of prairie locations represented a conservative, if not timid or even stupid, rejection of novelty, novelty that from our perspective is so obviously advantageous. On the other hand, these foresters knew wooded land. The forest held their game; it sheltered them from storms; it fed their herds of swine; it provided them with fencing and building materials. The prairie lacked almost all of these attractions. Finally, the coincidence of unfavorable judgments about both the first pioneers and their Indian neighbors invites contemplation of what this tells us about the dominant society's secret self. Roy Pearce's reasoning would suggest that the established order harbored considerable uncertainty about the merits of the work ethic and associated virtues.

REFERENCES

¹Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1920), 27 and 23.

²Ibid., 19-20. See also Dorothy Anne Dondore, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (New York: Antiquarian Press, Lts., 1961; first published 1926), 203-204.

³Ray Allen Biilington, Westward Expansion, A History of the American Frontier, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1960), 156, 162.

⁴Richard Bartlett, The New Country, A Social History of the American Frontier, 1776-1890 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 118. See also Robert E. Riegel, America Moves West, 3d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1956), 79-80. Riegel really says little relevant to the stereotype except that he moved on leaving "land that had been at least partially cleared . . ."

⁵Bartlett, New Country, 131-135. See also E. Estvyn Evans, "The Scotch-Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation and Heritage in the American Old West," in Essays in Scotch-Irish History, ed. E. R. R. Green (London: Kegan Paul, 1969), 82.

⁶Ibid., 136.

⁷Quoted in R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period, 1815-1840, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1950), 1:28.

⁸Bartlett, New Country, 139-140.

⁹Solon J. Buck, Illinois in 1818, 2d. ed., rev, and repr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967, first ed., 1917), 103. See also ibid., 101-102, where Buck says, "As frontier conditions passed away in one place, they packed up their few possessions and pushed farther into the interior."

¹⁰Dondore The Prairie, 123. See also Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:28.

¹¹Quoted in Buck, Illinois, 103 (Fordham) and 104 (Flower). See also Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:24, 27-28, and James Flint, a traveler in Illinois in 1818-1820: "His farther operations are performed with his rifle. The formation of a settlement in his neighborhood is hurtful to the success of his favourite pursuit, and is the signal for his removing into more remote parts of the wilderness." (Buck, 104-5.)

¹²Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783-1784, trans. and ed. by Alfred J. Morrison (Philadelphia, 1911), 238-239, quoted in Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish in Colonial Pennsylvania (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1962), 194.

¹³Buck, Illinois, 103; Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:27-28.

¹⁴Dondore, The Prairie, 123, quoting Crevecoeur; William Cullen Bryant, New York, to Sarah S. Bryant, 23 Aug. 1832, in Letters, ed. Bryant and Voss, 1:357. Dondore also quotes Johnson calling these men "the most dissolute Fellows," p. 123. Ibid., 203-204 for "the roistering existence."

¹⁵Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, "The South from Self-sufficiency to Peonage: An Interpretation," AHR 85, no. 5 (Dec. 1980): 1095-1096. See also Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:31.

¹⁶McDonald and McWhiney, "The South," AHR 85, no. 5 (Dec. 1980): 1095-1096.

¹⁷Dondore, The Prairie, 290, citing Travels in New England and New York, 4 vols., 1821. Vol. 2: 459.

¹⁸Quoted in Dondore, The Prairie, 123.

¹⁹Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:29.

²⁰Dondore, The Prairie, 290. See also Schoepf, Travels, 238-239, quoted in Dunaway, Scotch-Irish, 194.

²¹Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:27-28, and 31.

²²Buck, Illinois, 103.

²³William Cullen Bryant, New York, to Sarah S. Bryant, Letters, ed. Bryant and Voss, 1:355-359.

²⁴William Cullen Bryant, Jacksonville, IL, to Francis F. Bryant, 19 June 1832, Letters, 1:348-349.

²⁵Edmund Flagg, The Far West, 83, from Reuben Gold Thwaites, Early Western Travels, 26:112.

²⁶William Cullen Bryant, Jacksonville, IL, to Frances F. Bryant, 19 June 1832, Letters, 1:348-349.

²⁷Buley, The Old Northwest, 1:27-28.

²⁸Buck, Illinois, 101-102.

²⁹McDonald and McWhiney, "The South," AHR 85, no. 5 (Dec. 1980): 1095-1096.

³⁰Ibid. See also Evans, "The Scotch-Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation," in Essays, ed. Green, 80: "The Scotch-Irish preferred to make fresh clearings and move on once they had 'taken the good' out of the land. They were in effect practising their old 'outfield' system, adapted to a forested landscape of seemingly limitless extent. They were not tied to a plot of earth by a regular system of crop-rotation or any tradition of fruit-growing. The Indian methods of 'deadening' the woodlands served their purpose."

³¹Schoepf, Travels, 238-239, quoted in Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish, 194.

³²Buck, Illinois, 103.

³³Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization, rev. ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), ix.

³⁴Clarence W. Alvord showed an inkling of this idea when he wrote, "The vanguard in the winning of the West has been composed of men of hardy nature with few social graces; and observers coming from better surroundings have frequently identified the external ugliness with the inward reality." The Mississippi Valley in British Politics: A Study of the Trade Land Speculation, and Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1917), 2:237-238.