The Kansas Gold Rush

Dan Allosso

Map of Kansas and Nebraska Territories, 1854

Kansas! For most East and West-coasters, it’s one of those flyover states.  Even for Midwesterners like me, it’s most frequently remembered as a long flat stretch of driving, on the way to someplace else.  With apologies to Kansans, for many other Americans Kansas is either a band from the 70s (“Point of Know Return,” remember? “Dust in the Wind”?), the gray place Dorothy lived before being swept into Technicolor Oz, or the scene of an early, bloody civil war that helped push the nation over the brink between the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and statehood in 1861.

So I was surprised today, when I discovered in a January, 1859 Ranney Letter that “more than two hundred persons in this county” in southern Michigan were planning to go to Kansas in search of gold the following summer.  It hadn’t occurred to me–maybe because I’m familiar with the flat, drive-through Kansas you can see on current maps–that the Nebraska and Kansas Territories extended to the Rocky Mountains and contained quite a bit of what is now Colorado and Wyoming, as well as a big section of the northern foothills (including the Black Hills) that in 1861 would become the Dakota Territory.

In other words, Gold Country.  Between 1854 and 1861, Kansas and Nebraska were part of The West in a way they no longer are.  Fort Laramie, the site of the 1868 Treaty between the U.S. and the Lakota, Dakota, and Arapaho nations, was originally in the Nebraska Territory.  Pikes Peak, now 100 miles south of Denver and 30 miles west of Colorado Springs, was in Kansas.

“How did I miss this?” I thought, with some alarm.  But when I flipped through the pages of books from the “Western” part of my library, such as Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest, I find a Kansas and Nebraska embroiled in Stephen Douglas’s expansionism.  Similarly, on my “Impending Crisis” shelf, David Potter’s book of that name devotes many pages to the 1854 Act and to the Lecompton Constitution.  But Lecompton is in the northeastern corner of present-day Kansas, and Stephen Douglas was from Illinois.  The free-state revolutionaries of Topeka and the Bleeding Kansas border war with Missouri were likewise situated on the eastern borders of the present state.

Published by Oliver Ditson, Boston, 1856

On the pages of the Kansas Historical Society’s website, I learned that the people of Kansas were apparently divided in 1859 over whether their state should be a “Big Kansas” including the western gold region, or a “Little Kansas” without it.  Kansas entered the Union in January, 1861, during the (extremely) lame-duck session between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, with a population of 107,206.  William Seward had introduced a bill in the Senate in February, 1860, to admit “Little Kansas” under its free-state Wyandotte Constitution, which fixed the border at 102 degrees west longitude, excluding the Rockies.  The bill was defeated by Democrats who opposed Kansas as a free state; but they also objected to the “Little Kansas” borders, saying the Wyandotte convention had exceeded its authority in changing the territorial boundaries.  Were they afraid that the country around Pikes Peak would soon have sufficient population (the target was 93,000) to become yet another free state?

It just goes to show, I guess, how much complex and interesting detail lies just under the surface of the broad brushstrokes we use to integrate local and regional histories into American History.  The Kansas State Historical Society’s site includes a reprint of a 1967 article from their journal written by Calvin A. Gower of St. Cloud (MN) State University, titled “‘Big Kansas’ or ‘Little Kansas,’” which describes the Pikes Peak gold rush and the controversy over Kansas’ borders.  We’re lucky to have more and more of these resources online at our fingertips.  Does their availability obligate us to rethink the relationship between the broad strokes and the details–at least for the regions where we live, write, and teach?

The Meaning of National Boundaries

Heather Cox Richardson

In a recent quest to explore American maritime history, I tumbled across Joshua M. Smith’s Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820. Smith tells the story of smuggling in Passamaquoddy Bay at the mouth of the St. Croix River between Maine and New Brunswick. As he explores what smuggling meant to those involved, he also investigates the attempts of different governments to enforce boundaries. That, in turn, got me to thinking about just how malleable national boundaries really are.

In retrospect, that seems like a no-brainer, and probably is for most historians. But I’m accustomed to thinking of national boundaries as lines that divide land, demarcations that are often as stark in reality as they are on a map. In The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, Beth LaDow explored the meaning of a hundred miles of border between Montana and Saskatchewan. She showed the power of national boundaries to change the fortunes of people escaping from the law on either side of the border. Most notably, perhaps, Sitting Bull and his people crossed that “medicine line” after the Battle of Little Bighorn, escaping to Canada to avoid the wrath of the U.S. soldiers sent to hunt them.

With examples like that in front of me, land boundaries have always seemed terribly clear.

Somehow, seeing Smith illustrate the concept of a boundary through water rather than land brought home just how hard it is to delineate a marker between nations. Men who smuggled in Passamaquoddy Bay spent very little time worrying about where the boundaries were, just as people who fish today often work hard not to notice when they “drift” into foreign waters. An artificial boundary dividing the bay had very little meaning for the everyday lives of people in Passamaquoddy, except when governments got involved.

That sudden realization—dawn breaks over Marblehead!—got me to thinking about national boundaries in general. To what extent are they entirely artificial, reflecting the wishes of a central state rather than the realities of life on a borderland? To what extent is the idea of a national boundary a modern concept? And if it is a recent idea, will it continue to be relevant as technology continues to break down borders?

Maybe I’m behind the curve on this idea, but it’s sure got me thinking . . .

American Geography and the Missouri River

Heather Cox Richardson

One of the things I insist all my undergraduates learn at the beginning of each of my classes in American history is basic American geography. This sounds terribly basic, I know, but no one ever bothered to teach it to me (or at least, if they did, I wasn’t paying attention), and once I started teaching it, I discovered that no one had ever taught it to most of my students, either.

I don’t do anything fancy. I start with a physical map of North America (with an inset of Hawaii, of course, pointing out the great piece of trivia that, thanks to Hawaii, America has six time zones. Then I tell them that they must know the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, Canada and Mexico, and three mountain ranges: the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. I talk a bit about why each has been important in some major development (using the Donner Party for the Sierra Nevada, to keep them awake). I point out the Great Plains and the Great Basin and explain the low rainfall and high winds that create such distinctive features there, showing some of the scenery from those sections.

But the natural elements on which I spend the most time in my introduction to American geography are the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, and the Missouri River.

The Mississippi is the great artery of what became the United States, and figures prominently in most economic developments until after the Civil War (this is an easy one, since most of them have heard of the Mississippi, and maybe even have read Huckleberry Finn).

Then I turn to the Ohio. No one can understand early American history without understanding the Ohio River, the incredible fertility of the land around it, the determination of Indians to hold it, the line it created between slavery and freedom. (Huck can help here, too, since he and Jim went down the Mississippi River to reach freedom—counterintuitive until I explain they were trying to get down the Mississippi far enough to get up the Ohio.)

Then, balancing the importance of the Ohio on the western side of the Mississippi, there’s the Missouri River. The Missouri gets short shrift in American History texts and courses, it seems to me, and it shouldn’t. It dominates the West as thoroughly as the Ohio dominated the East in an earlier time. Just a few obvious points: It was the Missouri that offered Lewis and Clark a highway to the West Coast at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The land around the upper Missouri has always had some of the best hunting in the country, making it highly prized both by the native people who managed the lands before the coming of easterners, and by the interlopers who started arriving in the 1860s. It was this region, of course, that produced Red Cloud and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and it was to wrest control of this land that General George A. Custer marched his men to the banks of the Greasy Grass in 1876. Only a few decades later, it was the Missouri River that seemed to offer the answer when the dry plains defeated hopeful western farmers. Fifteen dams now slow the river, creating reservoirs and taming floods to make the upper Northwest more productive and habitable.

And that, of course, is the reason for this post. How many of our students—at least those east of the Mississippi—paid any attention to the historic and terrifying flooding of the Missouri River this spring? A large melting snowpack has combined with torrential rains to create a flooding emergency that rivals Hurricane Katrina. Levies are breaking up and down the river, sending evacuees fleeing as the water covers homes and fields, as well as the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station in Nebraska (which does not appear to be in danger). Reuters is reporting that the floods along the Missouri and the Mississippi have damaged about 2.5 million acres of farmland in the U.S. which seems likely to hurt farm production. It’s probable that this will, in turn, drive up food prices. This is not an unimportant weather event.

Already, observers are speculating about what this disaster says about the way America has historically approached the taming of the Missouri. The management of water in the West has long been a subject that interests western historians, but seemed to have drifted by most people in the East. And now that debate has sprung pretty dramatically out of the pages of historical journals and into the headlines. This year’s disastrous flooding suggests that American historians might be able to do the country a service by making sure all their students know what the Missouri River is, why it’s been important in the past, and just how vital its management has been, and is still, to the nation today.

Developments in World History: A Roundup on Western Dominance, Lactose Tolerance, and Writing

Randall Stephens

Several provocative "big questions" essays recently appeared in full, on-line. These span over world history, east to west, and cover prehistory as well. I wonder how many other historians who read Ian Morris's, "Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History," History Today, 20 October 2010, are wondering, as I am: Don't ideas matter?! Anyhow, his essay and these other two got the rusty gears in my head a'turnin'. (Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily for the great culling work it does. Click image to enlarge this map of Asia in the 15th century.)

Ian Morris, "Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History," History Today, 20 October 2010.

Explaining why the West rules calls for a different kind of history than usual, one stepping back from the details to see broader patterns, playing out over millennia on a global scale. . . .

You may have noticed that all the historical examples I have mentioned – Italy, Greece, Israel, India, China – lie in a narrow band of latitudes, roughly 20-35° north, stretching across the Old World. This is no accident.>>>

Matthias Schulz, "How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe," Speigel Online, 15 October 2010.

* At around 7000 BC, a mass migration of farmers began from the Middle East to Europe.
* These ancient farmers brought along domesticated cattle and pigs.
* There was no interbreeding between the intruders and the original population.

Mutated for Milk

The new settlers also had something of a miracle food at their disposal. They produced fresh milk, which, as a result of a genetic mutation, they were soon able to drink in large quantities. The result was that the population of farmers grew and grew.>>>

Geraldin Fabrikant, "Hunting for the Dawn of Writing, When Prehistory Became History," New York Times, 19 October 2010.

The new exhibition by the institute, part of the University of Chicago, is the first in the United States in 26 years to focus on comparative writing. It relies on advances in archaeologists’ knowledge to shed new light on the invention of scripted language and its subsequent evolution. . . .

To Christopher E. Woods, associate professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago and the curator of the show, it was important to include examples from all four cultures because the goal of the exhibition was “to present and describe the four times in history when writing was invented from scratch.”>>>

The Past Mapped Out

Randall Stephens

As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without: a certaine habitation.

- Captain John Smith

Geography was many things without a doubt, but for the young Frenchmen shut in classrooms, in ugly and sullen study rooms (the bottom painted chestnut, the top in dirty ochre, and above the bent heads, the pale and stifling light of gas) . . . geography was fresh air, a stroll in the countryside. the journey back with an armful of broom and foxglove, eyes cleaned out, brains washed, and the taste of the "real" biting the "abstract."

- Lucien Febvre

As the semester revs up, quite a few history profs are looking on-line for primary source docs, web-based activities, digital images, and on-line map collections. I use a healthy does of maps and map progressions in the various courses I teach. I've also just started giving more map quizzes. As an undergrad, I always felt I gained a great deal from historical geography. Not sure if that's the same experience as my students. Yet, quite a few seem to appreciate the historic context of changing boundaries, the view of how landscape shapes culture, the movement of peoples, demographics, and the like. Here are some of the sources I turn to:

History Maps for the Classroom:

Map Central (Bedford/St. Martin's). World, western, and American maps.

American: A Narrative History (W. W. Norton). Map and image resources for American history.

Western Civilizations, 16th Edition (W. W. Norton). Features Map Player, a slide show with audio.

The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, Third Edition (Houghton Mifflin)

Stanford University Library, list of African Maps

Antique Maps:

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Harvard Maps Collection, Digital Maps

Library of Congress Map Collections

Also of Interest:

Benjamin Schwarz, "Geography Is Destiny: An epochal new book argues that the events of history we think consequential and monumental are, mostly, trivia," Atlantic Monthly (December 2008)

Caroline Webber reviews The Discover of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War, by Graham Robb, New York Times, November 4, 2007.

Historical Geography Specialty Group, James Madison University

Adam’s Ancestors

An Excerpt of Donald Yerxa's Interview with David Livingstone from Historically Speaking (June 2009)

David N. Livingstone is a professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. One of the most talented and perceptive scholars currently working on the history of science and religion, Livingstone is especially interested in exploring the spatial as well as the temporal contexts within which ideas are produced and consumed. Among his many books are Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and most recently Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa caught up with Livingstone on March 3, 2009, to discuss his latest book as well as his approach to intellectual history.

Donald A. Yerxa: Your most recent book, Adam’s Ancestors, is a history of pre-Adamite thinking. What is pre-Adamism?

David N. Livingstone: Pre-Adamism is actually a notoriously simple idea, though its consequences are multifaceted. It’s the idea that the Adam of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is not the first human being. In some incarnations Adam is simply the father of the Jewish people, whereas in other versions Adam is viewed as the father of Caucasian people. But the material point of pre-Adamism, at least in its early days, is that there were, and perhaps indeed continue to exist, peoples who are descended from a pre-Adamic or at least non-Adamic source. This would mean that there were at least two (and arguably more than two) creations of the human species. In pre-Adamism lie the origins of what anthropologists used to call polygenesis. And, indeed, that has been and continues to be something of an issue right up to contemporary paleoanthropology. Should we look at all humans as derived from a single source, let’s say, a “mitochondrial Eve”? Or did the human species emerge in many different places? So the debate in that sense, without the biblical significance of Adam, continues to be important in thinking about human origins more generally.

Yerxa: How significant was pre-Adamism in Western intellectual history prior to Darwin?

Livingstone: There are a couple of things to be said about this. Another historian who worked on this subject some years ago, Richard Popkin, made the arresting suggestion that pre-Adamic theory was much more destabilizing to European intellectuals in the 17th century than the Copernican revolution or indeed the mechanical universe of the Newtonians. Popkin reasoned that pre-Adamism challenged human beings’ sense of their own identity, of who they really were. For a very long time, going back to the church fathers, to Augustine, and indeed to much earlier times, descent from Adam came to be a definition of what it was to be human. So I’m inclined to agree with Popkin because while you can scarcely find an advocate for the idea after 1655 when it first began to achieve wider publicity, you find many, many refutations. Although pre-Adamism seems initially to have had few converts, a lot of people felt the need to refute it.

Yerxa: Throughout your book it is clear that this notion is quite versatile and can be adapted to a number of arguments. Could you speak to that?

Livingstone: Pre-Adamism can be used for many contradictory purposes and is hugely adaptable in different environments. Let me just pick out three or four of these. Initially, when it was first put forward in the 1650s by Isaac La Peyrère, it was rapidly castigated as a heresy. Emissaries from the Vatican picked up La Peyrère when he was traveling in what is now Belgium and took him off to Rome, where he was forced to recant before the pope. Clever devil that La Peyrère was, however, the recantation never really admitted he was wrong. Pre-Adamism was considered heretical because it plainly challenged a literal reading of the Genesis narrative. One has to rethink a sequence of other related theological precepts if one accepts the notion that there were pre-Adamites. For example, did they also fall from grace? How representative is Adam of the human race? How does original sin come into the world? How is it transmitted?

Pre-Adamism has been quite versatile, however. In the 19th century—and indeed on into the 20th century—the idea was promulgated by those who were much more conservative in their theological outlook. It was adopted in a new guise by conservative believers who wanted to hold onto the historic significance of Adam while at the same time take some notion of human evolution seriously. So pre-Adamism, once deemed a massive heresy, was later taken up by conservative, orthodox believers.

Let me provide another instance of its adaptability. In the 1650s La Peyrère thought that Adam was the father of the Jewish race, but he was convinced that we all, whether Jews or not, participate to some degree in the benefits of the Jewish religious tradition and divine action in the world through the children of Israel. So in that sense, pre-Adamism is inclusive, humanitarian, and sweeps all of humanity—whether Jewish, Adamic or non-Jewish, non-Adamic—into a human family that benefits in Israel’s redemption. But later, pre-Adamism was used for the grossest forms of racism by depicting certain racial groups as non-Adamic and thus inferior and perhaps even subhuman. So pre-Adamism has been used for both humanitarian and racist purposes. . . .

Yerxa: You were trained as a geographer, and yet much of your recent writing has been in the area of intellectual history and the history of science. Is this an unusual intellectual trajectory? Or is this question premised on a false assumption about what it is that geographers do?

Livingstone: Being trained in geography in my generation encompassed aspects of physical science as well as the humanities and social sciences. Geography integrates nature and culture, or environment and society. Since its institutionalization in the 19th century, geography has always had considerable interest in the history of exploration. If you go back to early examination papers at the University of Oxford, you will find papers dealing with the history of what was then called, in those colonially unconscious days, the Age of Discovery or the Age of Exploration. So there was always interest in the history of growing geographical knowledge about the globe. . . .