Indians & Pioneers - The Story Of The American Southwest Before 1830 (Paperback)

Indians j f me The Story of the American Southwest before 1830 BY GRANT FOREMAN New Haven Tale University Press LONDON . HUMPHEET MILIWD OXFOED TTNIVEESITT PEBSS 1930 Copyright 1930 by Yale University Press Printed in the United States of America No 11 To the Memory of My Father and Mother w PREFACE HEN early writers told of the West and Southwest, they were, with few exceptions, writing of a region east of the Mississippi River. As the country enlarged after the Mexican War and the discovery of gold, the West suddenly expanded to the Pacific, and the Southwest of that period was the region colored by the romantic atmosphere of Spain. The Northwest had its Lewis and Clark, its Astoria, and the Oregon Trail. Historians and novelists have reaped harvests from the fertile soil between Westport and the Pacific with narratives of the covered wagon, the pony express, and the cow-horse. The adventures of explor ers and military expeditions, the saga of white settle ment and pioneering in this boundless domain have been celebrated in volumes without number. For years scholars have been bringing into view thou sands of manuscripts from the opulent archives of Spain and Mexico, to contribute to the history of our Spanish domain and Southwest came to suggest the land of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, of the cliff dweller, the pueblo, and the Spanish mission. But there was another Southwest that has remained in eclipse. Between the Mississippi River and New Spain was a region little known. That part of the original Missouri Territory which afterward became Arkansas Territory, southern Missouri, and southern Kansas, has held for the historian only a fugitive interest. When the state waserected out of Arkansas Territory, the remain ing domain extending westward to the Spanish posses sions was held as an Indian country, and until modern times was not opened up for settlement by white people and thereby it missed much of the romance of white x Indians and Pioneers pioneering. Before the Civil War the Government made several abortive efforts to set up an Indian state here, where many indigenous and immigrant tribes were to be combined under a government in which they would all participate. This interesting experiment was never put into operation as the plans of the Government were in variably rejected by the Indian owners of the soil, though they were at the time engaged in building up an interesting civilization here. When the state of Oklahoma was admitted to the Un ion, with four times as many people as there were in the next largest state at the time of its admission, it began with a degree of literacy exceeding that of most pioneer states. Unlike other young states, her civilization was to a great extent the civilization of the aborigines. The In dian owners of this land had erected orderly constitu tional governments, and established schools patronized by them with a zeal unequaled by most frontier white settlements. These and other interesting characteristics peculiar to this region developed from an equally interesting early history that distinguished it from the surrounding territory. While most of the writers of books have passed it by in quest of the white mans adventures, this Ameri can Southwest was not wanting for chroniclers of early conditions and events. More than one hundred years ago army officers, Indian agents, factors, traders, and missionaries, matter-of-fact observers of this virgin country from the Mississippi to the Spanish possessions, in the discharge of routine duties began recording and forwarding their accounts to the East. These documents accumulated in the dust-covered files of official store rooms, appeared in early prints, or in more recent years drifted into the archives of historical societies...