America’s frontier: The end of the myth

The Washington Memorial in Washington DC as seen from the Jefferson Memorial. Photo: Author’s collection

The seductive idea of America’s frontier was that it was never ending. As historian William Appleman Williams wrote in 1966, American expansion exhilarated because it could be projected to infinity. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the American political class steadily upped the ante pushing global engagement as a moral imperative. Then came Donald Trump. “I want to build a wall,” he said, and America’s racism and extremism had nowhere else to go. Trump was not America’s first racist president. Andrew Jackson drove a slave coffle and oversaw ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. Woodrow Wilson cultivated the Ku Klux Klan in his electoral coalition, while Nixon won the Neo-Confederate vote in 1968 thanks to his “southern strategy”. But the country no longer has a “divine, messianic” crusade to hold it together. America, says Greg Grandin, in his 2020 book of that title, is at The End of the Myth.

Grandin says British North America was conceived in expansion from Europe’s religious wars. Native Americans had to get out of the way or be murdered or enslaved. As Benjamin Franklin said, America’s vastness allowed for endless expansion and markets growing with supply. “We are scouring our planet,” Franklin said, “by clearing America of woods.” Then came the first worldwide war, not of 1914 but of the 1750s when Britain and France fought for control of India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. In North America both countries deployed standing armies, settler militias and indigenous allies. British rangers learned to live, dress and kill “like the Indians”.

Britain won the war and inherited an enormous swathe of forest land from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. But it could not reconcile local interests. Britain issued a 1763 proclamation prohibiting European settlement west of the Appalachians, which suited indigenous allies. But settlers like the rangers saw it as a violation of their right to move west. As authorities dithered, settlers moved west anyway, forming militias and terrorising Native Americans in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The 1776 Declaration of Independence was the settlers’ ultimate rebuke to the crown. Jefferson claimed they were the inheritors of Saxon freemen finding new lands. The 1783 Treaty of Paris laid down the borders of the new nation at the Mississippi River and Americans moved swiftly across the Appalachians.

Jefferson negotiated the right for US ships to moor on the Spanish bank of the Mississippi and demanded access to Florida’s waterways. Southern states claimed their territories ran all the way to the Pacific and settlers and war veterans purchased land west of the Mississippi. They were following James Madison’s 1787 Federalist paper advice on how to avoid an aristocracy. Madison’s solution was “extend the sphere” to dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism.

South America took a different tack. In the 1820s Spain’s former colonies had won independence setting their borders along the old colonial boundaries, based on the old Roman law uti possidetis, “as you possess”. This self-containment became the guiding principle of 20th century decolonising nations and modern Africa remains mostly aligned on colonial boundaries. In contrast, the US thought it was one of a kind, “the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom,” said Jefferson. Its constitution transformed western lands into territories which in time could become states. America doubled in size thanks to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France (which had obtained the territory from Spain). The new frontier was the Rockies and once again Americans poured into new lands. These lands were not empty, but Jefferson wanted Native Americans to be assimilated into settler life and give up valuable hunting lands. If mass murder was required, then it was Britain’s fault having seduced the tribes “to take up the hatchet against us.” Settlers executed “removal” operations to drive Native Americans further west towards “the frontier”.

Wealthy Tennessee businessman Andrew Jackson flouted laws to enter Indian territory. Jackson believed liberty was the freedom to do whatever he wanted and led a militia to exterminate Tennessee’s Creek Nation, ordering his men to cut noses off corpses to more easily tally the dead, paying off tribal leaders, and concluding a punitive treaty with survivors. He subdued Florida’s Seminoles and Tennessee’s Chickasaws using the same tactics of “terrorise, bribe and legalise.” Jackson became a national hero by defeating the British at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans and now wanted to make all of North America white. In 1829 the aristocratic Founding Fathers lost control of the presidency to the outsider Jackson and his mandate to remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, and extend slavery.

Jackson was a believer in “small government” but ensured his government would enforce enterprise and property rights, including the right to own human property. The Age of Jackson was a radical empowerment of white men at the expense of black men who were denied the vote they had in some northern states since colonial times. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act pushing Native Americans beyond the Mississippi and extinguishing their land rights. Settlers poured into Indian country, demanding military protection and prompting repeated cycles of forced removals. Indians must die out, said New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. “God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it,” Greeley said. In practice, speculators, railroads, ranchers and corporations claimed the best land for themselves.

By the 1830s attention turned to Texas, the northernmost part of Mexico. Spain founded Texas as a “slaver’s utopia” for Anglo settlers in the hope they would become a loyal buffer against American encroachment. But Mexico abolished slavery when it won independence in 1821 and the Anglo Tejanos revolted. In its time as a short-lived republic, Texas enshrined slavery in perpetuity and Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. Texans wanted to join the United States but its admittance would tip the balance of power to the slave states. Jackson protege and slaveholder James Polk won the presidency in 1844 promising to annex Texas to secure the frontier. In 1846 Polk declared war on Catholic Mexico, at the same time that “manifest destiny” was coined to described the belief Providence was guiding Anglo-Saxon Protestants across the continent. Migration west was a messianic mission.

In the war that followed, America’s armed superiority was overwhelming. They took Mexico City in 1847 and the following year the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferring not just Texas but Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado and southwest Wyoming to the US, some 100 million people in a half million square miles. The Jacksonian consensus kept together slave and free states as the border moved south and west. Settlers to Oregon, which also joined the union in 1848, didn’t want slavery or free blacks, passing laws to exclude them from the territory. But tensions over slavery could not be resolved and America waged war on itself in the 1860s. Millions of slaves were released in 1865 and Lincoln’s final legacy, his Freedmen’s Bureau, was a repudiation of Jacksonian politics as a federal initiative to resettle refugees, redistribute confiscated lands, levy taxes and regulate labour and the minimum wage. But new president Andrew Johnson hated it and believed ex-slaves should help themselves. Johnson ensured the southern planter class regained power and restored the Jacksonian myth of a minimal state and individualism. Thanks to more Lincoln legislation like the Homestead Act, which promised lots for working the soil, Americans looked west again. Native Americans were pacified in the 30 years following the civil war, and southerners were re-integrated into the federal army while Jim Crow laws were instituted across the south. The frontier, said late-1800s historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.”

Turner’s thesis held that America’s unique individualism gained strength “each time it touched a new frontier”. The frontier was not a physical border but a way of life. The American west encouraged an idea of political equality that seemed to go on forever, at least for white Anglo-Saxons. Turner ignored the removal of Native Americans and the invasion of Mexico and dismissed slavery as “an incident”. As America stood on the verge of global power, Turner’s ideas were expanded on by historians, economists, novelists and future presidents. Theodore Roosevelt celebrated frontier vigilantism and rough justice as “healthy for the community” while Woodrow Wilson justified the invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines as “a new revolution”. The myth of rugged individualism was used to define socialists and unionists as un-American. But it could only be maintained through ceaseless expansion.

Confederate and union flags flew together as the cotton-growing states enthusiastically supported the invasion of Cuba in search of new tariff-free markets. Grandin said that 1898 war transformed the south’s “Lost Cause” of slavery preservation into humanity’s cause for world freedom. President McKinley, who served the union in the civil war, wore a Confederate badge on his lapel in a victory tour of the south after Spain was defeated. The dormant Ku Klux Klan reemerged led by 1898 veterans who draped themselves in high ideals of reconciled national history. Resurgent racists formed “rifle clubs” which were fronts for white terrorist organisations and got away with lynchings, property confiscation, disenfranchisement, arbitrary prosecutions and chain gangs. Wilson won his second presidency in 1916 on the white southern vote, purging blacks from federal jobs, re-segregating Washington and legitimising the KKK.

America’s move across the Mexican frontier took a new form. Capital replaced settlers as American investors took over the Mexican economy dominating oil production, railroads, agriculture and ports. Thousands of Mexicans were deported from their homelands and forced to work on large plantations. American courts sanctioned vigilantes like the Texas Rangers who killed thousands more in mass executions in border regions. When the First World War came, the Rangers, now an official branch of law enforcement, defined anti-war activity as anything from organising a union to trying to vote, and rounded up and deported thousands of strikers. After the war the rejuvenated KKK fixated on many threats besides African Americans, including jazz, immorality, high taxes, and increasingly Mexicans. Border clans infiltrated church groups, school boards, police and national guards and suppressed the Mexican vote to reinforce minority rule. The New York Times worried it was “open season for shooting Mexicans” along the Rio Grande. America’s growing xenophobia was encoded in the 1924 Immigration Act which favoured Anglo-Saxon migrants. Though Mexico was exempted due to the need for its cheap labour force, white supremacists took control of the new US Border Patrol and turned it into a “vanguard of race vigilantism.”

Not everyone was intoxicated by America’s limitless power. Socialist editor of the New Republic, Walter Weyl, blamed the frontier for American ills such as racism, class domination and corruption. American individualism was doomed to defeat itself, said Weyl, “as the boundless opportunism which gave it birth became at last circumscribed.” The Great Depression seemed to do exactly that and Franklin Roosevelt said in 1932 that America had reached “its last frontier”. It was facing an economic and ecological disaster with intensive strip mining farming practices leading to dust storms, forcing many to leave the land. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the government’s biggest intervention since the Freedmen’s Bureau, resettling families, offering work, planting forests and expanding national parks. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace said what was needed was “not a new continent but a new state of heart”. But Roosevelt appeased southern planters by ensuring that rural workers, mostly black or Mexican, were excluded from laws allowing workers to unionise so agriculturalists would keep their supply of low wage farmworkers. Mexicans who weren’t illegal and subject to imprisonment were unprotected by labour laws. As one sugar planter said, “We used to own slaves, now we just rent them.”

With the coming of the Cold War, leaders moved the frontier to new geographies. Life magazine said the frontier was on the Elbe between East and West Germany. It was also between the two Koreas, the two Chinas and increasingly, up the Persian Gulf. Defence budgets soared as did profits for US capital. Truman integrated the military and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. Libertarians worried about expanding government bureaucracy and harked back to the Jacksonian “frontiersmen” who broke loose from the economic controls “that restricted their energies.” Nobel winning economist James Buchanan hailed the role of the frontier in breaking up collective identities of “the nanny state”.

Martin Luther King had different concerns. He believed rugged individualism was a faulty foundation for national identity and America was indeed socialist, only its wealth redistribution was upwards. “There is,” King said, “an individualism that destroys the individual.” He said the Vietnam War would exacerbate America’s worst sentiments including racism while diverting funds from progressive legislation. Sure enough, the war strengthened the position of southern segregationists in Congress who threatened to withhold military funding to veto civil rights laws. In 1967 King looked “beyond Vietnam” to see America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism” and a political culture where profit and property were more important than people. The LA Times attacked King for “linking these hard, complex problems” which would lead not to solutions, but “a deeper confusion”. Angry soldiers displayed Confederate symbols at every opportunity in South East Asia while at home pro-war demonstrations marched on Pittsburgh with a large Rebel flag, now the banner of those that felt “stabbed in the back” as America tried to wind back white supremacy. When Floridian William Calley was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre, Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign transformed him from a war criminal to a cultural wedge to weaponise southern grievances. Even in the 21st century Iraqi war, the Rebel flag remained a banner of “free-floating resentment” as Grandin calls it, hanging in the tent of Bagram torturers.

Nixon opened the floodgates to polarise the electorate, and following presidents would help create a permanent state of disequilibrium. None expressed the right to American limitlessness better than Ronald Reagan. His energy policy was “more, more, more” when it came to oil and gas, but the sunny sheriff of Washington also removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. His state department eschewed human rights in favour of individual rights which could be deployed on behalf of people trampled by tyranny but also act as a racist dog whistle. Reagan pushed through deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, and granted free speech rights to corporations. His Cold War revival and support for anti-Communist insurgents kept his base happy while his libertarian government chipped away at welfare, public education and weakened unions. “There are no limits to growth,” Reagan said. “Nothing is impossible.”

So it seemed to a triumphant America as the Berlin Wall and the USSR fell. Democrat Bill Clinton beat Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush in 1992 by channelling Reagan’s folksy optimism and outdoing the Republicans. Clinton supported free trade agreements, kept Wall Street unfenced, and increased military presence in the Gulf. While NAFTA destroyed Mexican small farms, American agribusiness kept their subsidies. Mexico’s vibrant dairy industry was destroyed as the country was overrun by American junk food, increasing obesity and malnutrition in tandem. Refugees eked out a living in the drug trade or migrated illegally across the border. They were joined by Central Americans whose economies were destroyed by American mining and biofuel corporations. NAFTA didn’t allow for freedom of movement of people and Clinton beefed up border operations with punitive immigration measures. Border patrol became the second largest law enforcement agency behind the FBI. Alarmed Republicans swung even further right spurred on by the growing power of Fox News, worried about undocumented migrants and “anchor babies”.

After 9/11 George W. Bush pledged to “extend the frontiers of freedom”. But Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters leaving America with huge military spending at a time of deep tax cuts. The long years of individualism led to increased racism and poverty, and war revanchism led to increasing fears around America’s borders. Violence against Latinos surged as vigilante groups like the Minutemen hunted for illegal immigrants in New York and other northern cities. “The border is no longer in the desert,” one Minuteman said, “It is all over America.” Backed by Fox News, they demanded a wall across the entire length of the border.

The rage of Nativists increased with the GFC followed by Barack Obama’s election. While the first black president packed “an emotional wallop”, his policies were moderate and he refused to think beyond 1990s-style Free Trade. Even that was too much for the growing Tea Party movement which merged with Minutemen in contempt for the political establishment while maintaining dominance over immigrants. The overseas wars raged on, and were mirrored at home by escalating massacres, school shootings and white supremacist rampages. The collapse of America’s military authority and the moral bankruptcy of the free trade growth model left Obama no outlet to rise above the polarisation. Nativists combined a “psychotropic hatred” of Obama with grievances over health care, taxes, war and especially migrants. As one border protest put it in 2014, “We can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of ourselves.” Two years later this community would vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Trump won in 2016 by running a Jacksonian outsider campaign against the entire legacy of the postwar order. His border wall became a stick with which to demonise migrants. The wall offers the illusion of simultaneously recognising and refusing limits. Trumpism feeds resentment that America has been too generous while encouraging a petulant hedonism expressed in the right to own guns or “rolling coal” where truck engines are modified to burn extraordinary amounts of diesel as “a brazen show of American freedom” targetted against enemies like walkers, joggers, cyclists, and hybrid and Asian cars. America was becoming defined by what it hated.

According to Grandin, Trump’s point was not to build the wall, but to constantly announce it. The frontier is closed and Madison’s sphere can no longer be extended. America is at the end of its myth, but instead of a critical, resilient and progressive citizenry, it has ended up with conspiratorial nihilism, rejection of reason and dread of change. Life expectancy is declining while infant mortality is increasing. Only the super-rich are emancipated from the rules and still dream of new frontiers, with billionaires creating floating villages beyond government control and plans to industrialise space. Grandin says nothing will change until America accepts there are limits to growth. The choice he says, is between barbarism and social democracy. As Trump remains a good chance to win back power in 2024, it’s far from clear which way America will go.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 86. Stampeders

Red Cloud (seated second left) and other Sioux leaders photographed sometime between 1865 and 1880. Photo: Public Domain

Though Meagher had signed the Fort Benton treaty in 1865, his Indian agent Upson had convinced him only force would subdue the Sioux. Problems had been growing since Alder Gulch gold finds and the thousands pouring into Montana wanted a more direct route than the Oregon Trail. In 1863 John Bozeman and John Jacobs found a shorter well-watered way from central Wyoming to Virginia City through the lush Yellowstone and Gallatin valleys though it lay in the heart of Sioux and Cheyenne hunting lands. As Montana gold finds continued through 1866, some 2000 individuals traveled the Bozeman Trail despite numerous Indian attacks.

With more trouble brewing in Fort Benton, Meagher used his first message to the Montana legislature to request cavalry from the War Department. He wanted 850 army men for a larger garrison. But that meant asking William T. Sherman, now commanding the Department of the Missouri and the army man still had not forgotten Meagher’s “envenomed martinet” comment after First Bull Run. Apart from their personal enmity, Sherman was well used to panicky westerners calling for troops at the first sign of trouble. In a letter dated February 17, 1866 which referred to Meagher as secretary not acting governor, Sherman said that if he was to grant one tenth of the calls on him from Montana to Texas, he would have to call for 100,000 men, “whereas I doubt if I should expect to have 10,000 in all.” In another letter to General Pope, Sherman worried that “civilians in the style of T. Francis Meagher may involve the frontier in needless war”. Sherman had a word for these people “stampeders”, or people who had “been frightened out of their propriety.”

Another in “the style” of Meagher was Hiram Upham, a clerk at the Blackfeet agency, who noted that Piegans were not respecting to their treaty stipulations either to whites or other Indians. “Things have got so here that even the travellers at this point are taking measures to protect themselves and property,” Upham wrote. “We are now organizing a vigilance committee here among the whites.” In an affidavit dated March 15, 1866, Upham told Meagher “the Bloods and Blackfoot Indians are the most hostile, although the young warriors of the Piegan camp accompany them on their expeditions.” Benton’s county sheriff used a letter to Meagher to complain of “Indian depradations (sic)” and called for a force sufficiently strong “to put an end to all Indian troubles” while white citizens had formed a war committee to “wipe out the rascally Red Skins”. Upham had also sent Meagher a petition from S.B. Mathews who wanted an escort of 100 men for his train of 26 wagons and 28 men. Mathews’s train was imperilled by “hostile Indians” who had “declared openly their intentions of making a general masacre (sic) of all white men.”

In the spring of 1866, government peace commissioners invited Lakota Sioux leaders including Red Cloud to Fort Laramie in Wyoming to sign a treaty. While Red Cloud wanted the government to close the Bozeman Trail, the whites planned to keep the trail open by bribing the various tribes with annuities. At the same time Col. Henry Carrington arrived with 700 men to construct three new forts, including Fort Phil Kearny, to protect immigrants along the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud was livid: “The Great Father sends us presents and wants us to sell him the road, but White Chief goes with soldiers to steal the road before the Indians say Yes or No.”

What became known as Red Cloud’s War consisted mostly of regular small-scale Indian raids and attacks on the soldiers and civilians at the three forts in the Powder River country. In one week in July 1866 Red Cloud’s warriors killed 24 soldiers and civilians along the Trail and by year end Fort Phil Kearny was under virtual siege. On December 21 Red Cloud and his men killed a group of 80 soldiers under Captain William Fetterman when they had marched out four days earlier from Fort Phil Kearny to protect woodcutters. After the Fetterman Fight, Montana was in a panic. There were wild rumours Red Cloud was going to lead 4000 warriors to drive the whites out of Virginia City. From Washington Green Clay Smith sent a request for mountain howitzers and then urged Meagher to maintain friendly relations with the Crow as a buffer between the Sioux and Virginia City settlers as there were rumours the Crow were also about to start an uprising. Grant sent Smith’s request to Sherman and though they would not provide soldiers, they agreed to provide 2500 weapons. “There is a good class of people in Montana and if they can protect themselves, it relieves us to that extent,” Sherman told Grant.

From the Gallatin Valley Bozeman wrote to Meagher saying they were “in imminent danger of hostile Indians” and unless the acting governor could protect them the valley would be evacuated. Reporting Bozeman’s letter the Montana Post suggested that if no action was taken, “we would probably have to fight the savages on our own door sill.” The city’s citizens held a meeting authorising Meagher to seek authority to raise a volunteer regiment “to serve against hostile Indians” until relieved by the army. These were actions Meagher could not ignore and he wrote directly to Grant to say there was great alarm in the valley. “The danger I am satisfied, is imminent, and will be overpowering unless measures for defence are instantly taken,” wrote Meagher. If Grant could not provide regular troops, he requested permission to raise a force of a thousand men “to be paid by the general government while on duty in the field.”

Meagher told Grant the danger would be “overpowering unless measures for defence are instantly taken.”. Grant sent the request onto War Secretary Stanton agreeing with the request but adding the rider that “the Governor should know what self defence requires these Citizens to do.” As for payment they should look to Congress for compensation “if the services rendered by them warrant it.” On April 27, Meagher telegraphed Stanton requesting authority to raise volunteers but Grant responded ambiguously saying there was no law authorising the call out of a militia but “the law of self defence will justify” the call out of troops for protection and Congress “must be looked to afterwards for reinbursement.” At a war meeting in Virginia City, volunteers signed up for a militia though merchants were reluctant to furnish supplies until they were sure federal authorities would pay them back.

The alarm increased after Bozeman was murdered on April 20, 1867 while traveling along the Yellowstone River to Fort C.F. Smith to secure an army flour contract. While there were suspicions that he was killed by his business partner or white enemies, the blame fell on the Blackfeet. On May 3, Sherman telegraphed Meagher to say General Augur was on his way north up the Missouri with muskets and ammunition and was “prepared to punish” the Sioux and Crow. Sherman reiterated Grant’s view that there “was no law to authorise enrolling troops in a Territory” though he could raise an informal force for “self protection”.

Two days after finding out about Bozeman’s death Meagher telegraphed Stanton for permission to raise a force. Meanwhile a Helena man named W. Nowland wrote to Sherman to say Bozeman’s death was his own fault because he foolishly travelled through Indian country without protection and the evidence did not warrant Meagher’s “preparations for war.” When Stanton sent Sherman Meagher’s telegram, the reply was blunt. “Meagher, in Montana, is a stampeder, and can always with a fair show of truth raise a clamor, and would have in pay the maximum number of men allowed,” Sherman said. From afar the New York Herald carried better judgement on Meagher. “If anyone can carry it to a successful issue, he is as good at a palaver as a fight, and his eloquence is just of the character to suit the Indians. He will quiet them by talking their heads off – a much less costly and more humane process than that of exterminating them.”

On May 4 Stanton’s office responded to a separate request from the mayor of Virginia Cty that Sherman had authority to “call out, organize, officer, arm and subsist such military force in Montana Territory as he deems necessary for the protection against hostile Indians” and people in Montana could make suggestions to Sherman on how to achieve that. On May 7 Sherman responded directly to Meagher telling him that “if Indians enter the Valley of the Gallatin” he could organise 800 volunteers to “drive them out” until the regular army arrived.” Though Sherman later accused Meagher of changing the key word “enter” to “threaten” the acting governor and his fellow white Montanans believed the justification was there for the militia and the government would pay for it. Meagher’s militia quickly set off from Virginia City and on May 9 Sherman angrily refused Meagher’s request for arms and equipment. “I believe you are stampeded until I hear of some fight in which you whip the Indians or they whip you,” he told Meagher.

Sherman instructed one of General Augur’s men, Major William H. Lewis up from Utah to investigate the situation and he arrived in Montana on May 19. Lewis told Sherman the Gallatin Valley was indeed in danger especially if the Sioux retreated north to avoid Augur’s campaign from the south. Sherman asked Lewis to muster a battalion of 800 men for three months at government expense. But Lewis found it impossible to carry out those orders as Meagher had already taken most suitable volunteers and locals merchants doubted the government would pay. Sherman reluctantly ordered Lewis to command Meagher’s force in the field. and after another month passed there was no sign of Red Cloud or his supposed raiders. Instead Indian troubles elsewhere forced Sherman to redirect Augur’s force to Kansas after a Cheyenne attack on a white settlement in June. He and Grant also faced requests for help from Minnesota, Dakota, New Mexico and Colorado as stampeding raged across America in 1867. Sherman told Grant that Meagher and the other western governors were using “events of this kind as means to secure local popularity”.

After Lewis told Sherman “all the excitement” in Montana was founded on Bozeman’s murder Sherman ordered the volunteers to be disbanded nor would the government honour “the debts created or the vouchers issued”. Even Meagher joked he led an “not an invincible but an invisible militia”. The militia guarded the roads but faded away after their patrols found likely gold panning sites they wanted to test out in the summer. Red Cloud’s war would continue in Wyoming. But Meagher’s Jesuit friend Father Kuppens was among many who believed the patrols in the valley had achieved their purpose by deterring an attack on Montana.

And Sherman had begrudgingly agreed to arm members of the militia in Helena. He promised 130 rifles which were expected to arrive up the river any day. With Green Clay Smith on his way back from Washington, and James Tufts also on his way to become secretary, Meagher’s last official duty was to collect the guns from Fort Benton. Meagher rode the 200 miles from Virginia City to Fort Benton to collect them. It was a longer journey than usual thanks to mud holes and buffalo wallows that had to be detoured and Meagher suffered from dysentery. Meagher departed Virginia City about June 17 accompanied by a dozen or so militiamen. Meagher arrived in Helena June 19, spent several days, and left in ill health for Fort Benton about June 22. The next day on the Benton road, the General met returning Governor Green Clay Smith and his family, who had arrived at Fort Benton two days earlier. With their brief meeting, Meagher again relinquished the governorship. Collecting the guns would be Meagher’s final act as a Montana official. Sadly it was his final act of any kind.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 81. Fort Benton Treaty

The Missouri River at Fort Benton, Montana. Photo: Author’s collection

Thomas Francis Meagher faced many pressing problems as acting governor but the most immediate and troubling was the growing conflict between the Indian tribes of central and eastern Montana and white traders and settlers. While there were similarities between the plight of the Indians losing their land and that of Meagher’s native Irish sufferings at the hands of the British, Meagher didn’t see it that way. His new job was to look after the interests of the settlers and in his December 1865 letter to Seward his most pressing request was for military support of one thousand cavalrymen. The flashpoint was Fort Benton, the uppermost navigable port on the Missouri, more than 3000 miles to salt water, and a bustling trade post linking the south to the 600-mile Mullan Road wagon trail heading north west.

Fur trappers came this way in the wake of Lewis and Clark’s reports of abundance and the American Fur Company established a trading post in Fort Benton in 1846, first dealing in beaver skins and later in buffalo. The fur trade made local tribes more dependent on trade goods. At Benton they would exchange buffalo robes and furs for sugar, paint, beads, calico, blankets and tobacco. Fur companies trespassed on Indian lands to build forts and trapped huge numbers of animals. Meanwhile intertribal violence increased as Indian people competed for access to the trading forts and the goods they provided. Many Blackfeet and other tribespeople were killed in a smallpox epidemic around 1840 while exposure to alcohol and Christianity also had a profound effect on traditional practices. The first steamboats arrived in Benton in 1860 and the town boomed as a transportation hub. After the Bannack gold rush in 1862, thousands descended on Montana whatever way they could, adding to the pressure on Indian lands.

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs was responsible for treaties and appointed two Indian agents to Montana, one on either side of the Rockies. The eastern agent oversaw the Gros Ventres and Blackfeet tribes including Piegans and Bloods, while the western agent supervised the Flatheads, Pend d’Oreilles and Kootenais. In March 1865 Congress passed an act authorising a treaty with the Blackfeet confederation to release lands south of the Missouri and Tetan rivers “known to abound in gold” as the Indian Bureau openly put it. Eastern agent Gad E. Upson, based at Fort Benton, was Congress’s treaty negotiator. Upson was far from even handed and in an October 1865 letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs said the “flourishing” influx of whites near Indian communities “had a tendency to create in their ignorant minds a jealousy and prejudice against the whites, amounting in several instances to open hostility.” Upson condemned Indian attacks on whites as “wholesale massacres” while white attacks on Indians were merely “drunken affrays” carried out by “irresponsible persons.”

The governor also had a role as the territory’s superintendent of Indian affairs and it was his job to ensure peaceful relations with the tribes. The Bureau told Upson to invite Edgerton to attend the Treaty negotiation, though it acknowledged it was a long way from Virginia City to Fort Benton. Before Edgerton left the territory, he recommended to his new Territorial Secretary that he should attend. Meagher was keen as he revealed in a later letter to Belgian Jesuit priest De Smet, and recruited others to join him including Judge Lyman Munson and former Fort Benton fur agent Malcolm Clarke. Meagher had high hopes for Clarke especially given his local knowledge, his Piegan wife, and his Catholic faith as an “active friend of the Jesuit fathers”. Munson was a Yale-educated lawyer appointed by Lincoln in early 1865 as US judge for the territory of Montana and he had earlier offered advice over Meagher’s ability to recall the Montana assembly. Munson and Meagher were probably the two best educated men in Montana but their relationship declined badly on the 130-mile trip east, as they found they had nothing in common, and their disrespect ended hopes of Meagher being supported by Montana’s Republican faction.

That was the unknown future when they set off in October, from the newly named town of Helena in an October “mid-summer day on the threshold of the winter.” It did not take long for them to cross the threshold into heavier weather. After a night at Clarke’s home, they stayed the night at a snowbound camp of a French Canadian trapper where Meagher made the best of the conditions. “After dinner I stretched myself upon my buffalo-robe, my saddle serving as a pillow; and, having lit my pipe, yielded myself in a luxurious rest to the visions and melodies of Shakespeare’s Tempest.”

Despite a warning that a blizzard was worsening they decided to continue their travel the following day and were dependant on the tracking skills of a Catholic Piegan scout named Iron, who somehow led them 12 miles in near-zero visibility conditions to St Peter’s Mission, run by another Belgian Jesuit priest Francis Xavier Kuppens. They were stuck together for two nights at the mission which despite its grand name was only a tipi capable of holding 16 people and which they had to share with other travellers. Munson noted with disapproval that they were “rolled up in blankets and lay around with heads and points at promiscuous angles.”

Though the snow continued to fall on the third morning, Kuppen led them on a 25 mile ride to another Jesuit mission near the Sun River led by Italian priest Anthony Ravalli, who had ministered to Indian tribes since 1845. Meagher was delighted to find out that a “smiling, hard-looking, zealous little lay-brother” off their horses was actually a fellow Meagher from Co. Tipperary. In all they spent a week as guests of the Jesuits on the way to Benton. Meagher noted that with the exception of the Catholic Clark, his fellow travellers “had never before shaken hands with a Jesuit, and, having preconceived anything but flattering ideas of the sons of Loyola, were rather astonished to find so much true nobility of heart and mind under a threadbare and patched soutane.” He was invigorated to find the Jesuits here so far from civilization and it brought back “golden recollections of the cloudless and unembittered days” of Meagher’s own childhood at Clongowes and Stonyhurst. “Even in the midst of that storm, and after years of no very friendly experience of the world, was the springtime of my life,” he told De Smet.

The party finally arrived at Fort Benson to find 7500 Blackfeet assembled in tribal regalia. There was no negotiation. The State Department had already set out the language of the treaty and it was the negotiators’ job to get the tribe to sign it. Congress had appropriated $15,000 for “expenses”, most of which was paid in bribes to chiefs and headmen to sign the treaty. The treaty took three days to conclude and on November 16 Upson and Meagher signed for the United States while over 40 chiefs signed for the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre tribes. The treaty hemmed the tribes into a narrow area of land north of the Missouri and Tetan Rivers up to the Canadian border. Whites were not allowed on their territory though roads could be built on Indian lands. The government committed to $50,000 a year for 20 years which could be used only for agriculture, stock animals, clothing and provisions. In his speech to the 1866 territorial assembly Meagher noted the treaty, once ratified, would give the United States “infallible title” while the “original owners of this vast domain” would be hemmed into “a comparative small reservation.”

The Montana Democrat said the treaty was “in the highest degree advantageous to the whites”, giving them access to a large area between the territory’s three largest towns Virginia City, Bannock and Helena. The Radical Republican Munson agreed saying this was Blackfeet country where they had an abundance of game all year round but with 40 steamers that season at Benton alone, “men poured into their country by the thousands” and they “read their doom in the evening sky”. White men would murder for plunder, scalp and mutilate victims and then report it as an Indian massacre to be followed by more attacks on Indians, Munson wrote.

Fort Benton itself was outside the territorial boundaries and remained a site of tension. No sooner had the delegation left when trouble broke out between two tribes, Young tribesmen stole horses and killed a herder while a Blood war party killed two men and paraded through Fort Benton with horses, saddles and arms. When Meagher heard about the incident he commandeered a small cannon and returned within 24 hours to restore the peace. After two similar incidents where at least six other whites died, Meagher was exasperated. In a speech at the opening of a Fenian library at Deer Lodge he said, “The rascalities in crimes, robberies and murders… might well be cited with condemnation of the costly and wasteful policy with which it was believed in Washington the Indians could be tamed and subsidised.”

Meagher could see no parallel between Irish dispossession and the crisis for the Native Americans tribes. In a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in December he noted that only one Blackfoot chief had attended the negotiation while “all the hostile Bloods” had fled across the border to Canada. “It strikes me forcibly that Indian tribes who voluntarily abandon their lands, seeking shelter and protection in a foreign country, cease to be essential parties to any treaty which the United States previous to their emigration might have held it necessary to conclude with them,” he wrote. He also believed horse stealing would continue despite the treaty because it was seen as “rather an heroic exploit by the best of these Indians and the habit has become so inveterate with them that until some of the thieves are severely punished I much fear it will not be relinquished.” Meagher suggested the superintendency be separated from the role of governor, given the vastness of the region and recommended another Treaty with the Crow but “as for the Sioux and their allies and accomplices, it is my clear and positive conviction that they will never be reduced to friendly and reliable relations with the whites but by the strong and crushing hand of the military power of the nation.”

Meagher left Upson to take the signed treaty back to Washington. Though Upson contracted tuberculosis and died on the journey, the document eventually made its way back to the Interior Department. However it was never presented to the Senate. A departmental letter to Interior Secretary James Harlan said the Indians had resumed hostilities since the signing and it quoted Meagher’s report on the Treaty on “its value and probable effect.” Meagher had created a rod for his own back. The treaty and its status would be a constant problem, even contributing to his eventual death.