USA > Louisiana > The province and the states, a history of the province of Louisiana under France and Spain, and of the territories and states of the United States formed therefrom, Vol. IV > Part 5
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Morrison's ill luck in his Santa Fe experiment was repeated in other ways in the case of the Missourians Samuel Chambers, Robert Knight and James Baird in 1812, by Auguste P. Chou- tean and Julius DeMunni in 1815-17, and by others from the same locality in the next few years. William Becknell in 1822, the year in which Mexico gained its independence from Spain, with a party of seventy men, carried a stock of goods to Santa Fe, made a very profitable trade there, and from this expedition dates the beginning, in a systematic way, of the commerce between Missouri and New Mexico. This was two years before Benton's survey bill was enacted.
Though the route traced out by the United States engineers under this statute was not followed throughout its entire length, the traders' own experience evolving a better one in some parts of the course, the government's practical interest in the scheme, the military posts on or near the route which it provided, and the military escorts which it occasionally furnished, were of great advantage to the trade. Benton received high praise for his work both in Missouri and the rest of the United States, and also in Santa Fe, whose people were much benefited by the cheaper and better goods which they obtained from the Ameri- cans than they had been getting along to that time from their own countrymen. The jealousy of Mexico's traders, however, incited the home authorities to increase duties and place other obstructions on American importations, but these kept on grow- ing, nevertheless. It was at the time of the separation from Spain that the actual trade between Santa Fe and Missonri began.
In the few years following Becknell's first successful expedi- tion, that of 1822, the men who figured prominently in the Santa Fe trade included, among others, Jacob Fowler, Hugh Glenn, several of the Chonteans, Braxton Cooper, James O. Pattie, Will- iam 1 .. Sublette, William Bent, Ceran St. Vrain, Jedediah S. Smith (killed on the Cimmaron river by the Comanches in 1831),
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MISSOURI AS A BUILDER OF THE WEST.
Meredith M. Marmaduke (elected lieutenant governor of Missouri in 1840, who became acting governor in 1844 through the death of Thomas Reynolds, and father of John S. Marma- duke, a noted confederate officer in 1861-65, who was chosen governor of Missouri in 1884), Charles Bent (governor of New Mexico in 1846-47, who was assassinated by Mexicans in Taos in the latter year), and Josiah Gregg (author of the "Com- merce of the Prairies," published in New York in 1844, which is the principal authority on the rise and development of the Santa Fe trade), Gen. William Clark, the explorer, and super- intendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis for many years, was also interested in this commerce. Almost all the persons mentioned in this connection were residents of Missouri, and most of them lived in St. Louis.
The traders carried to Santa Fe calicoes, silks, cotton goods of various sorts, shirtings, hardware and other articles, and brought back gold and silver chiefly, and some furs. Until 1824 the trade was carried on principally by pack horses or mules, by pack animals and wagons from that time till 1826, and by wagons exclusively afterward, these being drawn mostly by oxen in the latter days. This commerce ranged in value from fifteen thousand dollars in 1822, and one hundred twenty thon- sand dollars in 1830, to four hundred fifty thousand dollars in 1843, the latest year quoted by Gregg. After New Mexico's annexation in 1848 it went to still higher figures, and was nearly one million dollars a year just before the advent of the railroad.
Franklin, in Howard county, Mo., which was swept away by the Missouri river afterward, and which was located opposite the site of the present Boonville, was the Santa Fe trail's east- ern terminus until about 1831. Then the overland starting point was shifted farther westward, to Independence. Subsequently it was located at Westport Landing, at the month of the Kaw river, the site of the present Kansas City, at Missouri's west- ern border. The sharp swing to the northward which the Mis- souri takes at that place made it the nearest river point to New Mexico, and Westport Landing remained the fitting out station until the railroad abolished the caravans. From Kansas City southwestward to Santa Fe the distance was about 775 miles. It was the scene of many battles with Pawnees, Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches and other red raiders of the plains. Throughout the greater part of its length the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad follows closely the line of the old trail, and when, in 1880, the locomotive first dashed into New Mex-
1
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ico's capital, the oldest and most famous of America's prairie thoroughfares passed into history.
Politically, this overland commerce between Missouri and the settlements along the upper Rio Grande valley acted in this way: It made the inhabitants of the most important part of New Mexico better acquainted with the United States than they were with their own country. Missouri, nearer to them in dis- tance, and far nearer to them in time, had much greater inter- est for many of them than could be aroused by any of the states ruled from the City of Mexico. Social and business rela- tions were established between the two peoples which proved more potent than the ties of language and blood. The trail frem the Missouri through Kansas and down to Santa Fe and beyond, which provided a broad and well marked highway along which marched Kearney's, Doniphan's, Price's and St. George Cooke's soldiers in the summer of 1846, at the breaking out of the war with Mexico, led them to a people who had become American- ized in sentiment in a considerable degree already, and the con- quest of New Mexico was speedy and permanent.
Westport Landing was also for many years the beginning of all the other great overland thoroughfares-to Oregon, to Cali- fornia, and to the Salt Lake basin. In the settlement of all those localities, particularly Oregon, Missouri wielded an impor- tant influence. From the beginning it took a leading part in the work by which Oregon was won. In the several decades of controversy between England and the United States in which England asserted a title to all the territory west of the Rocky mountains from Russia's province of Alaska at latitude fifty-four degrees, forty minutes, down to the line of the Columbia, and in which the United States declared its ownership of all the region from California's northerly line up to Alaska's south- ern boundary, Scott and other Missourians in the house and Benton and Linn in the senate were among the earliest and stur- diest of the champions of the American claims.
The bill introduced by Floyd of Virginia in the house in 1821 authorizing the president to occupy Oregon, to extinguish the Indian title in it and to provide a government for it, had Scott of Missouri as one of the three members of the special commit- tee which pushed it through that body. The strongest speech made in its favor in the senate was delivered by Benton, but it failed to pass that chamber. This was the Oregon question's first appearance in a practical way in congress.
On several grounds there was powerful opposition in congress
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MISSOURI AS A BUILDER OF THE WEST.
to the passage of any measure looking to Oregon's acquisition. Many persons, particularly in the Eastern and Southern states, opposed it because of their belief that the territory was value- less for agriculture. Others, chiefly in the East, were against its annexation because this would have a tendency to ultimately swing the country's center of political gravity still further west- ward than it had already been shifted by the Louisiana acqui- sition. Still others, all of them in the South, were hostile to it because Oregon would strengthen the free territory at the expense of the slave region, and destroy the balance between the two great sections.
Benton, a representative of a slave state, an owner of slaves, and a leading member of a party popularly supposed to be more strongly devoted to the slave interest than were that party's suc- cessive opponents, was against all this sectional and parochial narrowness. A Westerner rather than a Southerner in sentiment, he was an American and a nationalist first of all. Everything calculated to enlarge the country's boundaries in any direction and add to the country's prestige and power always found in Benton a stalwart champion. On Benton's platform on this general issue stood Benton's colleague in the senate from 1833 to his death in 1843, Lewis F. Linn. For several years a bill was introduced by Linn in each session of congress, cach differ- ing from the others either in scope or phraseology, but all look- ing to the assertion of United States authority over Oregon, and at last, in 1843, just before his death, one of his measures passed the senate, but it failed in the house. Linn's reports in the senate, his bills in that chamber, his and Benton's speeches in their favor, and the general discussion which they called out in congress and through the press, had an educative influence on the country which incited the emigration to that territory which forced England to renounce her claims to Oregon, and that region was won in the Anglo-American treaty of 1846, though the Oregon which we obtained was the Oregon which was bounded by the forty-ninth parallel, and not the Oregon for which Benton and Linn and the rest of the Missourians in con- gress contended, extending up to latitude 54 degrees, 40 minutes, Alaska's southern line.
Oregon showed its appreciation of the work done by Missouri in her favor. One of her counties is named for Benton and another for Linn. To the population of Oregon in that territory's early and critical days Missouri made a far larger contribution than did any other single community in the United States. Even
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as recently as 1900 the census enumerators found 17,000 native Missourians residing in Oregon, and 16,000 in Washington, part of the Oregon territory of the old days. In the same year there were 101,000 native Missourians in Kansas (a much larger num- ber than from any other state), 69,000 in Illinois, 51,000 in Texas, 47,000 in Oklahoma, 45,000 in Arkansas, 35,000 in California, 34,000 in lowa, 33,000 in the Indian Territory, 31,000 in Colorado, 26,000 in Nebraska, and many in all the rest of the states on each side of the Mississippi and between that waterway and the Pacific. Missouri from the beginning has been a potent force in the winning and the building of the greater West.
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MORMON TROUBLES IN MISSOURI.
CHAPTER VI
The Mormon Troubles
B EFORE the end of Governor Dunklin's service in 1836 there was the beginning in Missouri of the most serious domestic troubles which the state ever saw until the civil war days thirty years later. These were the Mormon disturb- ances, which, however, did not reach their most serious stage until Dunklin's successor, Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs, was in office.
The year 1836 saw a very exciting canvass for governor in Missouri, but the contest for president attracted less attention than did that of 1832. The Democrats swept the state in both campaigns, electing Boggs for governor and Franklin Cannon for lieutenant governor. The Whig nominees for these two posts, respectively, were Gen. William H. Ashley, the fur trader, who represented one of Missouri's two districts in congress, and James Jones. Van Buren, the Democratic candidate for presi- dent, never aroused anything like the enthusiasm in Missouri or any other part of the. West that his predecessor Jackson excited. As he was Jackson's political heir, however, he polled a large vote, 10,995 in Missouri as against the Whig nominee. In that year the Whig party, which had taken that name in 1834, and which had not yet amalgamated, did not unite on a ticket, but divided its strength among the states on four candidates-William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster, Willie P. Mangum and Ilugh L. White-hoping thus, by utilizing all the shades of opposition to Jackson and his disciple, to throw the election into the house of representatives, in which there might be a chance to make deals against Van Buren. This device failed signally, for Van Buren's electoral vote in the country at large was 170, against 124 for the four Whig aspirants in the aggregate.
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Kentucky, which furnished so many of Missouri's eminent men, also contributed Lilburn W. Boggs, who was born there in 1796. After serving in the war of 1812 he emigrated to Missouri, arriving in St. Louis in 1816, and residing in several other parts of the state in the next thirty years. He was engaged in the fur trade, served in the legislature, and in 1832 was elected lieutenant governor on the ticket with Dunklin, succeeding Dunklin as gov- ernor in 1836. After his retirement from that office in 1840 he was in the state senate for a time, removed to California in 1846, and died in 1861.
Governor Boggs' administration was the most stirring which Missouri had yet seen. It sent a regiment of mounted volunteers in 1837, at the request of President Van Buren, under command of Col. Richard Gentry, to Florida to assist in conquering the Seminoles, who had been making a long and fierce fight, baffling all the soldiers who were brought against them ; it witnessed the extension of the state's authority over the "Platte Purchase," the newly annexed region in the northwestern corner of the state, comprising the present counties of Andrew, Atchison, Buchanan, Holt, Nodaway and Platte; and it brought civil war in the state for a time during the Mormon troubles. The Seminole affair. and the Platte purchase will be set forth in another chapter. An outline of the Mormon disturbance will be given here.
April 6, 1830, in the little town of Manchester, N. Y., Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum and Samuel II. Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and his brother Peter Whitmer organized, under the laws of the state of New York, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This was the religio-political corporation which in the after time came to be popularly known as the Mor- mon church, which was destined to figure prominently for many years in the country's annals. The founder of the church was the Joseph Smith here named, who was born in Sharon, Vt., in 1805, and who about ten years of age, with his father, a farmer, removed to Palmyra, N. Y., and four years later to the neighbor- ing town of Manchester. At that place, according to the story of Smith, who at an early age began to have visions, the angel Moroni came to him one night in 1823 and told him about a writ- ten revelation which would be found on gold plates near by, and in 1827 the plates were delivered to him, and with them were two transparent stones, called the Urim and Thummim, through which the plates could be deciphered. The story that the plates told, which Smith read off and Oliver Cowdery wrote, which is a rather chunsy imitation of the scripture style, and which was printed in
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a paper in Palmyra in 1830, was what was called the Book of Mormon.
The Book of Mormon, however, is a history only, and not a creed. The Mormons' articles of faith are set forth in a volume called "Doctrines and Covenants," first published in 1835. In this body of doctrine, as first promulgated, polygamy was for- bidden. Polygamy did not formally become a Mormon tenet until 1852, five years after the hegira from Nanvoo to Utah, when it was proclaimed by Brigham Young, the then head of the church. As, however, the authorized interpretation of the Mor- mon doctrine is in the head of the church, and comes to him through what he calls revelations from God, the articles of faith are subject to change. Under the theory of "spiritual wives" and the doctrine of "sealing," cohabitation, it was charged by the Mormons' enemies, was practiced by many of them several years before polygamy was formally announced as an article of faith. Of course all the Mormons' pretensions about the plates and the divine revelations to their prophets were combated by their Gen- tile neighbors.
In obedience to a so-called revelation from God to Joseph Smith, which said that their gathering place should be at Kirtland, O., they removed from Manchester, N. Y., to that place in 1831. This figures in the Mormon annals as the first hegira. Proselytes, however, began to come so quickly and troubles with their neigh- bors were so numerous and embarrassing that Smith soon began to look for a larger and freer field of operations.
Early in 1831 Oliver Cowdery, Z .. Peterson, Parley P. Pratt, Peter Whitmer and Frederick G. Williams, missionaries (the Mormons' missionary system was organized in the infancy of the church and was active and powerful from the beginning), went on a prospecting and proselyting tour westward from Kirtland, travelling as far as Independence, Jackson county, Mo. The report which they made of the situation sent Smith and other magnates of the church there later in that year, and though Smith went back to Kirtland, lands were purchased in 1831 and 1832 and settlements were established in Independence, and a drift of Mormons to that locality soon set in. For several years longer, however, Kirtland remained their Zion, a temple was built there, costing $40,000, which was completed in 1836, but crooked trans- actions charged against them in real estate purchases and in the management of a bank which was under their direction, cul- minated in the expulsion in 1838 of Smith and Sidney Rigdon, who ranked next to Smith in influence in the church in the early
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years, and the flight to Missouri was complete. This was the Mormons' second hegira. Revelations to Smith before the flight told him that Jackson county, Mo., was to be the faithful Zion and New Jerusalem.
In 1831, when the Mormons made their first settlement in Mis- souri, Jackson county, which had a population of only two thousand eight hundred and twenty-three by the census of 1830, was on the frontier's verge. Independence, just west of which they located, the largest town in Jackson county, had only a few hundred inhabitants. In that sparsely settled country, with only a few whites and many Indians ( in the present Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska, and in the Platte Purchase, the six counties in the state's northwest corner, annexed to Missouri in 1837) as nea: neighbors, the Mormons felt that they were safe from molestation.
But they found the Missourians even less hospitable than were the Ohioans, and personal collisions and the destruction of prop- erty on both sides soon began to take place. At length a meeting of Gentiles was called for July 20, 1833, at the court house in Independence. The call, which was signed by hundreds of names, closed with a statement of grievances, all of which was printed in the Evening and Morning Star, the Mormon organ at Inde- pendence, published monthly, which was Jackson county's first newspaper. These sentences from that manifesto ( cited in Linn's "Story of the Mormons," pp. 170-72) show the Missourians' principal grounds of complaint :
"We, the undersigned, citizens of Jackson county, believing that an important crisis is at hand as regards our civil society, in con- sequence of a pretended religious seet of people that have settled, and are still settling, in our county, styling themselves Mormons, and intending, as we do, to rid our society, 'peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must ;' and believing, as we do, that the arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one, against the evils which are now inflicted upon us and seem to be increasing, by the said religious sect, we deem it expedient and of the highest importance to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose. It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics, or knaves (for one or the other they undoubtedly are), made their first appearance among us, and, pretending as they did and now do, to hold personal communication and converse face to face with the most high God; to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven ; to heal the sick by laying on hands; and, in short, to perform all the wonder-working miracles wrought by the
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inspired apostles and prophets of old. More than a year since, it was ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves, and endeavoring to rouse dissension and raise sedi- tions among them. In a late number of the Star, pub- lished in Independence by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free negrocs and mulattoes from other states to become
Mormons and remove and settle among us. . They declare openly that their God hath given them this county of land, and that sooner or later they must and will have the pos- session of our lands for an inheritance ; .
. we believe it a duty we owe to ourselves, our wives and children, to the cause of public morals, to remove them from among us, as we are not prepared to give up our pleasant places and goodly possessions to them, or to receive into the bosom of our families, as fit compan - ions for our wives and daughters, the degraded and corrupted free negroes and mulattoes that are now invited to settle among us."
The meeting, which was attended by about 500 persons, repre- senting every town in the county, resolved that no more Mormons should be allowed to move into the county ; that those then there who would pledge themselves to get out should be allowed a reasonable time in which to sell their property and depart ; that the editor of the Star should close his office forthwith, and never publish another issue of his paper in the county; and that "those who fail to comply with the requisitions be referred to those of their brethren who have the gifts of divination and of unknown tongues to inform them of the lot that awaits them."
These were harsh terms, but as the Black Hawk war had taken place just east of the Mississippi, in Illinois and Wisconsin, the previous year, 1832, as there were many disaffected red men on the borders of Missouri, and as some of the Mormons had boasted that they would form an alliance with them, the Gentiles felt that self-preservation warranted decisive action.
The Mormon leaders in Independence, to whom this ultimatum was immediately presented, and who were allowed fifteen minutes in which to make up their minds, naturally refused to agree to the terms, whereupon the Star's press and type were thrown into the Missouri, and the Mormon Bishop Partridge and a member of his flock were tarred and feathered on the public square of Independence, after which the proceedings were adjourned for three days, or until July 23. A treaty was then entered into, iu which the Mormon leaders agreed to keep other Mormons out of
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the county, and to begin leaving it themselves on January 1, 1834, the owner of the printing office to be reimbursed for the loss of his office and his printing outfit when he was ready to move out.
Revelations, however, to Prophet Smith at Kirtland incited the Jackson county Mormons to disregard their agreement, other Mormons came in, and new houses were erected. Several armed conflicts took place in October and November, and as the Mor- mons were the chief sufferers, and as they saw they could get no redress either from the courts or from Governor Dunklin, public sentiment being strongly against them, they accepted the inevit- able.
They moved out of Jackson county in 1834, suffering terrible hardships from loss of property and general privation, crossed the Missouri, established settlements in Clay, Ray, Carroll, Cald- well and Daviess counties, and built the town of Far West in Caldwell, which was their headquarters during the remainder of their stay in Missouri, and which was the entire sect's Zion.from the time that Smith and Rigdon were driven out of Kirtland in 1838 until the hegira from Missouri to Nauvoo took place. The Mormons numbered about 2,000 at the time they were driven out of Jackson county in 1834, and the work of their missionaries in the various states, in Canada and in some of the European coun- tries was rapidly adding to this number.
In a year or two public sentiment north of the Missouri began to be as hostile to the Mormons as it had been south of the river. It was incited by charges that they robbed and burned the houses of their enemies among the Gentiles, passed counterfeit money, which was not a difficult task in those days of wildeat banks, and committed secret assassinations. It was learned afterward that a secret murder society, the Danites, or Sons of Dan, sometimes called the Destroying Angels, was founded among the Mormons of Missouri around 1836 or 1837, to kill such Gentiles as would be particularly obnoxious to the Mormons. The assassinations committed by the Danites were justified by some of the Mormon writers on the ground of retaliation. Other Mormons, however, denied that there was any such society.
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