Between 1837 and 1842 there was less than the normal shifting of population in the United States. The grandiose schemes for advancing prosperity had fallen flat in the former year. Some of the debts were actually repudiated by the States that incurred them; others were compromised with the creditors; the individual farmer had speculative obligations to meet, and yet lacked a market for the only goods he could produce. There was no region that by its prosperity attracted the floating population. The aspirations of the discouraged frontier produced a new political party and elected William Henry Harrison President in 1840, much as they had elevated Jackson to the same office twelve years before. The growing repute of Oregon was the first thing to break the spell. The westward movement revived in 1843.

Every year after 1842 a larger party met at the Missouri and crossed to Oregon. Congregating at the edge of the Indian frontier and pushing across it, the emigrants had many contacts with the Indians colonized there, and the plains tribes beyond them. Fort Leavenworth became more important as the strategic center of the region, and along the trail various posts were opened where travelers might replenish their outfits. Except for such supplies as these stations carried in stock and the game that could be shot along the march, the emigrant train was dependent upon itself for a period of from four to eight months. In 1846 Congress allowed the War Department to garrison selected spots for military posts. The first of these, near the head of Grand Island in the Platte, was 310 miles from Fort Leavenworth and was called Fort Kearny, after Stephen Watts Kearny, first lieutenant-colonel of the dragoon regiment. Farther out the trail, 337 miles west of Fort Kearny, an old adobe trading post at the mouth of Laramie Creek was bought and became Fort Laramie. For thirty years nearly everything that affected the Sioux of the plains was in some way associated with this post. Beyond South Pass were private posts at Fort Bridger, Fort Hall, and Fort Boisé. In the numerous journals that have survived the migrations, these spots stand out as the landmarks of the trail. After 1845, the emigrant commonly carried in his kit a copy of Frémont's journal with a useful map of the country as far as the Pacific.8

When the Oregon Country was spoken of by emigrants, they

J. C. Frémont, Report of the exploring Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-'44 (28th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Document 174).

generally meant the long fertile valley of the Willamette River, running north from California to a junction with the Columbia at Fort Vancouver. Here the Americans took root, from Portland up to Salem. There were smaller groups around Whitman's mission on the Walla Walla; in the valley of the Grande Ronde which the settlers had to cross between Snake River and the Walla Walla there were a few. The mission workers and the employees of the Hudson's Bay Company were of much aid to them as they arrived in Oregon ragged, footsore, and often hungry at the approach of winter. Even before White arrived with the emigration of 1842 there was a need for government. He made it his business to guide the community in this direction in the following spring.

The benevolent despotism of Dr. McLoughlin was overturned by the American Oregonians in May, 1843, when they formed at a convention held in a place called Champoeg, a local government based upon the laws of Iowa Territory. They had no laws, no land titles, and no rights, but they erected one of the spontaneous governments of the frontier that met their minimum needs until Congress was ready to make them into a territory. They sent a messenger to Washington to ask such treatment, but Congress had not yet given notice under the treaty of 1827 and was not ready for action.

Oregon became a national political issue before any steps were taken to solve it as a social problem. Between 1841, when Harrison's death in office turned the Presidency over to John Tyler, and the inauguration of Tyler's successor in 1845, a Democratic administration made ready to incorporate Texas in the Union. The unwillingness of the Senate to ratify a treaty of annexation forced the issue into politics on the eve of a new election. The Democrats embraced it, came out with James K. Polk for the "reannexation" of Texas; and added "the whole of Oregon or none" as a slogan to sweeten northern public opinion. The policy was not advanced as one of expansion but was defended upon the ground that both tracts belonged to the United States of right. Polk accepted both with sincerity and determination but found it convenient to agree to a compromise upon Oregon in 1846. On June 15, James Buchanan, Secretary of State, negotiated a treaty with England whereby the forty-ninth parallel, the old line of 1818, was extended to the Pacific Ocean. It was a reasonable compromise of a matter in which neither side had a good case against the other. The campaign cry, sometimes phrased as "fifty-four forty or

fight," lacked a sound justification in fact. The treaty left the Columbia River in the United States.

With the rising interest in Oregon and the migration across the frontier, the Indian policy of 1825 was quietly dropped, and the region of the plains, from being a providential boundary to check American dispersion, became an annoying impediment to communication between the coasts. There was yet no white use found for the plains, and no tendency of the agricultural frontier to advance by the old process into the country directly west of Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. But the travel through and across the Indian Country dispelled the notion of its universal barrenness. The War Department did not even try to enforce the provisions of the Indian Intercourse Act as to white entry into Indian Country. The military posts authorized in 1846 were in contemplation of a permanent use of the trails, and between the forty-second parallel and the forty-ninth the United States was now for the first time in ownership of a tract facing the Pacific Ocean. Congress was dilatory in meeting its responsibility for the new possession and did not create the Territory of Oregon until 1848.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE "STATE" OF DESERET

THE belief that the Indian frontier was to last forever was almost universal in 1832 and was accepted with as little question on the frontier as in the East. No testimony to this is stronger than that which was given unconsciously by the prophet of the most militant of the border sects, Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. This leader announced in 1830 that it had been revealed to him that his church was to conduct missions among the Gentiles who were to be won back to the fold and among the Indians whose savagery was to be reclaimed. In this year he printed his bible, The Book of Mormon, completed the formal organization of the church and dispatched missionaries to the Indian Country. In the following summer, led by the reports of the first missionaries, he declared that revelation had indicated the spot where the church was to be established for all time. He named Independence, Missouri, as "the land of promise and the place of the city of Zion,' and visited it in person to dedicate the tabernacle. Here with the Gentiles on one hand and the Indians on the other, he expected the Mormon Church to fulfill its mission.

The Mormon Church, first under Smith and then under his more stable successor, Brigham Young, played an active part in frontier thought for thirty years. Its rise and structure indicate the intellectual and spiritual uneasiness of the border settlements. Its spectacular trek in search of Zion brings it in line with the other forces that carried American interests toward the Pacific in the decade after the Jacksonian migration.

The ferment of the twenties included many revolts besides the beginnings of Mormonism. Jacksonianism was one manifestation of it, and the most pervasive. Anti-masonry was one, giving the first view of the aspirations of the new community around the eastern end of Lake Erie. Scientific thought was in upheaval because of the speculations of the young scientists just back from their studies at the new German universities. Occasional historical students, drilled in the new critical scholarship of Niebuhr, were challenging

W. A. Linn, The Story of the Mormons (1902).

tradition with evidence. Individuals were breaking from the creeds of every Christian church and were demanding the right to give their own interpretation of the documents containing the revelations of Jesus Christ. Even so broad a body as the Society of Friends, that had no creed, was split into followers of the orthodox faith and those of Elias Hicks. Ralph Waldo Emerson laid down his preaching as a minister of the Unitarian Church and took up the teachings of a philosopher at large. On the frontier, where religion had ever been more emotional than elsewhere in the United States and where the waves started by the great revival of 1801 had not entirely spent their force, strong preachers took their congregations with them and founded personal churches. Humanitarianism was afoot, and movements for temperance and abolition of slavery were taken up with religious passion. It was a poor prophet who could not gain a few converts, whatever he taught; and an unstatesmanlike one who could not build them into a new church. The nation was ripe for spiritual leadership and yearned for voices speaking with authority. Scores of new movements came to light. Those that outlasted the voice and personality of the founder became important indexes of the religious capacity of the United States. Of these none was more significant than the church that Joseph Smith established.

Palmyra, New York, lies in that region south of Lake Ontario to which the Erie Canal brought tumultuous development in the twenties. Before 1817 the country was almost untouched by white men; a decade later it gave birth to the Anti-Masons who upset the political balance of Jackson and developed into the new Whig Party. Among the pioneer families who came early to Palmyra was one from Vermont, bringing with it a lad named Joseph Smith. Smith was so inconspicuous in boyhood that the later recollections of his contemporaries seem artificial and forced. He was never identified with either steady farm work or any trade. He began to dream visions in the early twenties, and in 1827 had revealed to him the golden plates on which was inscribed the Book of Lehi. No one else saw the plates, for it was revealed to Smith that if any unhallowed eye gazed on them, the individual would be consumed by holy fire. He translated them from behind a curtain, his writer taking down the words as he dictated the history of the lost tribes of Israel, who were no other than the American Indians. The narrative of the Book of Lehi was lost, but a later, fuller narrative, the Book of Nephi, was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. It