after the Black Hawk cession. The new boundaries were designed to be temporary; but for the present they carried the jurisdiction of the territory as far west as the Missouri River and as far south as the northern boundary of the State of Missouri. Most of the new area was Indian Country, under the protection of the Indian Intercourse Act that was passed two days after the Michigan enlargement. It was as yet uncertain where the balance would be established between the Indians and the whites along the northern section of the frontier, and meanwhile some form of government for the settlers west of the Mississippi could not be avoided. Michigan promptly created two counties, Dubuque and Des Moines, separated by a line drawn west from Rock Island, and thus allowed the first Iowa residents to work out their own destinies. The statehood movement in Michigan gave the terminal date at which the extension of its area must cease, and Congress took up at the same time the admission of Michigan and the organization of a new Mississippi Valley territory. There had been agitation for a division of Michigan for several years, led by Morgan L. Martin, a New York emigrant residing at Green Bay, and George W. Jones, of the lead region, who was Michigan territorial delegate in Congress in 1836. The territory of Wisconsin was the result of their activity, created in the spring of 1836, and including all of Michigan Territory outside the boundaries established for the State of Michigan, thus extending from Lake Michigan to the Missouri River. Henry Dodge, of Mineral Point, was appointed governor by President Jackson, and speedily convened his first legislative council at the village of Belmont in Iowa County. There were six counties in his original domain, two west of the Mississippi and four east. His territorial census found 10,531 inhabitants west of the river, and 11,683 on the eastern side. The local news was cared for by the Belmont Gazette and the Dubuque Visitor, while local finance was made more chaotic by the incorporation of the Miners' Bank to operate at Dubuque. As soon as Wisconsin Territory was launched it became apparent that its form was temporary, and that the flow of emigration would speedily procure its division into at least two commonwealths. The routes leading up the Mississippi were shorter and more direct than those around the lakes, and the southwest portion of the territory was growing more rapidly than the eastern. • Moses M. Strong, History of the Territory of Wisconsin, from 1836 to 1848 (1885), is almost an autobiography. The first legislative council appreciated this and established a seat of government near the geographical center of the eastern section of the territory, finding a name for it in that of the venerable Madison, who died in the summer of 1836. Two years later Congress recognized the trend of events and created the Territory of Iowa, comprising the portion of Wisconsin west of the Mississippi. There was southern opposition to the creation of additional northern territories that were likely to be free and to threaten the balance of power in the Senate; but George W. Jones, who had now become sponsor for Iowa, and who was in Congress as the Wisconsin delegate, appears to have caught the southern leaders napping. In the territorial census of 1838 there were shown to be 22,859 inhabitants in Iowa and 18,189 in Wisconsin; the former in a compact body along the Mississippi, the latter in two flourishing and rival sections, one on Lake Michigan and one on the Mississippi. There has been no moment since 1838 when the politics of Wisconsin have not depended upon the balance of these two sections. The northern section of the Indian frontier was worked out during the early stages of the organization of the upper Mississippi territories. Since the beginning of the century it had been the scene of the great activities of the fur traders. First the British and then the American companies had established their factories and trafficked with the Indians between the lakes and the Missouri. Pike found traders at St. Paul, and Lewis and Clark found them at the Mandan villages. After 1819, the United States post at Fort Snelling was the center of trading, and for nearly twenty years the traders had no rivals, until in 1837 Governor Dodge, and the Indian agent at Fort Snelling, Taliaferro, convened the Chippewa and the Sioux for a new adjustment. Two treaties, concluded that autumn, opened much of northern Wisconsin to white entry. The Chippewa receded east and north, towards Lake Superior, surrendering the timberlands of the Wisconsin Valley. The Sioux ceded what claims they had left east of the Mississippi, most important of which was the rich pine country of the St. Croix Valley. The farmer was slow in following the retiring Indians north of a line drawn from Fort Winnebago to Fort Snelling, but the lumbermen rushed in to establish a new frontier of their own and to lay the foundations of the first large private fortunes that the far Northwest produced. Down the St. Croix, the Chippewa, and the Wisconsin to the Mississippi, down the Mississippi to the eager buyers in the prairie States, the logs were floated every spring. After 1837 the northern section of the Indian frontier was stable for a decade, with two new territories nestling in between it and the frontier States. CHAPTER XXXIII THE BORDER STATES: MICHIGAN AND ARKANSAS "THE great rage even here in this part of Ohio is to sell & go West!" wrote an intelligent young teacher from Carthage, Ohio, early in 1837. Carthage was only a few miles north of Cincinnati, on the line of the canal to Dayton, and in a region that expected much from the internal improvements that were under way. But the Jacksonian migration was at its height, and the stories of successful development and speculation set in motion not only the social elements that were normally relied upon for the outfitting of new frontiers, but many of the staid and settled members of society. The migration picked up its people everywhere. There were Yankees from tidewater who moved with it to the extreme borders of the West; there were southerners from the coastal plain who found their way to Missouri or to Texas. No one has estimated how large a percentage of the whole American population was swept from its moorings by either the hope of improvement in a new location, or the positive discomforts of the old. The great migration was shaped by strong incentives to shift out of the East. In the Jacksonian migration the attractiveness of the West was the impelling force. In this, as in the earlier movement, the through migrant was the exception; the typical one was seized by the current where he happened to be, and was carried only a short distance towards the actual border. The heaviest contribution of the current was deposited in the parts of the West that already had the most population, while the most apparent was on the edge where every cabin stood out sharply against the background of loneliness. The 6,300,000 inhabitants of the western States in 1840 included, as has been seen, over 4,100,000 who were new since 1820, and introduced new strains and stresses in the system of American politics because the newer elements were not spread over the country in the same proportions as the old. In 1820, Kentucky and Tennessee, the oldest West, boasted 980,000 inhabitants, and had a safe ascendency over the northwest and southwest neighboring groups. The northwest group, colonized largely through or out of Kentucky, included the three States, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the territories of Michigan and Missouri, and comprised 840,000. The southwest group included the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the new territory of Arkansas, and had reached a total of 354,000. The Kentucky-Tennessee ascendency was gone in 1830, for although the region had received a healthy increment in numbers, advancing to 1,370,000, the northwest neighbors had grown to 1,590,000. The southwest group, with the plantation now directing the course of its economic development, reached 670,000 at the same time. In ten years more, the ascendency was still further disturbed, for the plantation country grew to 1,400,000 whereas Kentucky and Tennessee had attained only 1,610,000. The old West was still growing with more than average rapidity, but it could not hold the pace with the abnormal increases of its younger rivals. The northwest group in 1840 was not only far ahead of the old West, but was as weighty as the old West and the plantation West combined, counting 3,330,000 inhabitants at the census. In all three areas the usual forces of development were intensified; the northwest group of States had additional contributions from the northern sources of immigration which had hitherto been less than fully developed. The Erie Canal made possible the New England and New York outpouring over the West. - The western sectional balance of 1840 shows that the West was less solid than it had been when Jackson was elected, and much less so than in 1800. The preponderance in numbers of the country north of the Ohio River over its more southern neighbors foreshadowed what the next two decades were to bring about: — a preponderance within the Northwest of the northern strains among its population. For the purpose of this tabulation Missouri has been counted among the States northwest of Kentucky. If, however, its 383,000 inhabitants of 1840 should be subtracted from the Northwest and added to either of the other sections, the discrepancy in growth, though lessened, would still be overwhelming. The creation of Iowa and Wisconsin Territories marks the extension of the Jacksonian wave of settlement into the most northwest corner of the United States. Michigan, which became a State in 1837, rose in population from 8000 in 1820, to 31,000 in 1830, and 212,000 in 1840. Indiana and Illinois each increased by more than the total Michigan population in the single decade closing ir 1840, and Ohio increased nearly thrice as much. But these were already States, and the influx though disturbing did not yet upset |