than the Ohio Canal because the resources of the State were insufficient to carry on two major operations at once. There was a good market for the Ohio canal stocks. Eastern men of means took some millions of them. The process of financing western improvements with eastern money got slowly under way as the improvement programs were launched, and never after 1825 was the West entirely without some eastern aid in its ventures. The period was over in which western development was limited by the resources that western funds could provide. The new financial ties provided at once a source of constant irritation between East and West, and a closer and more reliable union.

Dayton, at the northern end of the first section of the Miami Canal, was not reached until 1839; much of the delay being due to the panic of 1837. Congress, in 1827, came to the aid of the canals by voting not only a free right of way through the public lands, but a grant of free sections as well. Within the next few years one half of the lands lying within five miles of the canals on either side were used by the States concerned to advance the Miami, Wabash, Illinois, and Rock River canals. Alternate sections were retained and granted, so that a map of the canal lands took the appearance of a strip cut from a checkerboard, with the red squares devoted to the improvement, and the white reserved by the United States for sale. The proponents of the grants urged them on the ground that Government lands would be more than doubled in price by an adjacent canal, and that it was only fair for the Government to share the unearned profit with the States whose sacrifices made the improvements possible. Even with Government aid the Miami Extension to Defiance was not open until 1845, two years after Indiana initiative had procured the building of a canal the whole length of the Maumee from Toledo to Fort Wayne.

The Wabash and Erie Canal had the advantage of following the best known route, and the disadvantage that its completion required the concurrence of two States. It was surveyed under the act of 1824, and in the same year Congress provided it with a right of way; adding in 1827 the grant of five sections of public lands per mile. It was not begun until 1832, the year in which the Ohio Canal was finished; and it was sadly delayed by the financial stringency caused by the panic of 1837. In 1843 the canal was in operation from Toledo to Lafayette, on the Wabash. It was in later years projected further and further down that stream, to

Terre Haute, and then to Evansville. But before it could become as important as the Ohio Canal had been, it was out of style, and railroads were the rage.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal was started under desires similar to those of Indiana and Ohio and received the same kind of aid from the United States. Surveys were made for it in the twenties and the commissioners in 1830 platted a town at Fort Dearborn to be its Michigan terminus, naming it Chicago; but the first steamboat did not anchor off the shoal mouth of the Chicago River until the summer of 1832. The prairie State still had no northern end, its population in 1830 being confined to the river bottoms of the Ohio and Mississippi, and the angle between them. The National Road would have crossed this southern angle had it not been abandoned, incomplete, at Vandalia. The panic caught Illinois so hard that little construction could be put through before the early forties. After 1843 the canal was rapidly built and in 1848 it was an accomplished fact.

Even the Wabash Canal was not as significant as its promoters hoped. It never quite justified the wailing note of DeBow's Southern Review, that it was "stretching its line down the banks of the Wabash, and as fast as it extends itself, it sweeps the whole products of the valley up the river, against its natural current, to the Eastern Markets, by way of the Lakes." This was the motive of the Northwest in the period of canal building but only the Ohio Canal approximated success. Even Illinois lost interest in the Illinois and Michigan Canal before it was finished in 1848. All the States received sharp lessons in the risks of public business, and this era of public ownership as well as of the canals reached its end.

The canal period could never have flourished in the earliest frontier phase of any State, from lack of population, wealth, and business. It came to life as the first positive effort of the States to utilize their wealth in the direction pointed out by Clay's American System; and was supported in the hope that such a use of capital would increase returns and spread prosperity. The building of canals through unsettled regions, where land was hardly worth the Government minimum of $1.25, was justified upon the plea that population would increase, and that taxable values would grow rapidly enough to warrant the outlay. The movement failed in

J. W. Putman, "Economic History of the Illinois and Michigan Canal," in Journal of Political Economy, vol. xvII.

the Northwest from lack of skill and funds. In the Southwest it was never far advanced, for the southern man of means needed all his capital to hold his slaves and had little free for investment.

The positive results of the canal construction were most felt within the area indicated by Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Toledo. Here the canals distributed immigration, and collected the freights. Business relationships were established with the East, though they were not neglected with New Orleans. The fleets of steamboats increased on western rivers in spite of all canals, and New Orleans maintained a worthy rivalry with New York.

The western public works and the struggle of the East to reach the western markets, gave wide advertisement to the frontier regions in the years after 1825. There was a falling off in migration after the boom year of 1819, and the burden of debts was not forgotten until the twenties were well advanced. But every new enterprise taken up after 1825 called new attention to western opportunity and stimulated the movement of population. The canal lands, as they came upon the market, advertised specific regions. The opening of the Ohio Canal marks the beginning of another period comparable to the great migration, although there were fewer States to be created as a result. From 1832 until 1837 this wave of population flowed in swelling dimensions over the regions of the older settlements and out upon the public domain. For the first time since the beginning of the western movement the areas of available lands were limited. Behind the agricultural frontier there was a population of towns and farms growing more dense each year. Beyond it stood a barrier made up of the international boundaries of the United States, the desert across the Mississippi, and a solid Indian frontier that had come into existence since the inauguration of John Quincy Adams. This Indian frontier placed a limit upon expansion as well as upon the imagination of the American people.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE PERMANENT INDIAN FRONTIER, 1825-1841

WHEN the international boundaries of the United States were stabilized by the English treaty of 1818 and the Spanish treaty of 1819, it appeared to contemporaries that the country had reached the limit of its external growth. There was no serious thought that either Canada or Mexico would become parts of the United States, and even when the exhilaration of patriotic holidays was felt there were few whose flights of fancy reached a nation that stretched beyond the Rocky Mountains. Clay accepted the fact of national completeness, and devised his American System for the furtherance of its internal advantage. Monroe and Adams accepted it, and the former made his memorable gesture of defiance of the European world in his message to Congress in 1823. The War Department accepted it, and carried out its reorganization after the War of 1812, upon the supposition that the United States had little to fear from foreign enemies, and was chiefly concerned with internal police along the border. The chain of frontier forts, from Fort Smith to Fort Howard, were testimony to this view; and in the course of erecting them, the War Department and the President learned much of the native races for whose control and protection they were built.1

The new States that were the legacy of the great migration established a new frontier of organized government for the United States. After 1821 the further boundary of the States ran from Lake Erie, at Toledo, around Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, to the Gulf of Mexico. From the standpoint of the War Department the new States raised a cer+ainty that could not be ignored. The history of the States thus far showed that no white community lived contentedly with an Indian community in its vicinity. Even the organized territories protested when the tribes were not removed fast enough to please

1 F. L. Paxson, The Last American Frontier (1910). Lewis Cass discussed these experiences in "The Removal of the Indians," in North American Review, vol. xxx; Annie H. Abel gives intense detail in Indian Consolidation west of the Mississippi (1906); Ruth A. Gallaher has reconsidered the matter in "The Military-Indian Frontier, 1830-1835," and "The Indian Agent in the United States before 1850," appearing in recent volumes of the Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 1917.

them; but the States expected to be freed of them. Georgia made this the price of its cession of western lands to Congress in 1802; and was repeatedly complaining because the Cherokee, which was the tribe chiefly concerned, showed a preference for staying where it was. Thus far it was a simple matter, when dealing with the tribes, to persuade them to surrender their old homes, and to drift further west. But the time had come, by 1821, when the available region of the West was narrowed down by the boundaries of the United States, and the western boundary of the several States. If, as was certain, Arkansas and Michigan Territories should rise to statehood; if a State should be formed north of Illinois, and perhaps another north of Missouri, it would become a difficult matter to tell the tribes where they might go when they were dispossessed by the pressure and demands of encroaching white populations. At no time in the past had a serious effort been made to formulate a policy for handling the Indians, except the short-lived effort of England, in which the Proclamation Line played a weak part. From pillar to post, the Indians had been driven in a piece-meal fashion. There was the ancient practice of shifting them towards the West, but no statesman or philanthropist had worked out a policy telling why and how this should be the case.

John C. Calhoun, as Secretary of War for James Monroe, was custodian of Indian rights and interests, as well as the agent for their chastisement when things went wrong. Under his direction the army was reorganized, the forts were arranged for, and the Indian problem was studied now that its solution was becoming pressing. He submitted the results of his study to the President and the latter transmitted them to Congress on January 27, 1825. The report of Calhoun contained long summaries of the numbers, location, and condition of the various tribes with which the United States had to deal. "One of the greatest evils to which they are subject is that incessant pressure of our population, which forces them from seat to seat," he wrote. "To guard against this evil... there ought to be the strongest and most solemn assurance that the country given them should be theirs, as a permanent home for themselves and their posterity."

As Calhoun and his countrymen looked upon the domain of the United States, there was no permanent home for the tribes within any State; and none in a region that white men were likely to desire. But beyond Missouri lay the great area of the Plains, with the Rockies, Canada, and Mexico as its thither boundaries. The