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?

Bad Company

Heather Cox Richardson

Like Randall, I’ve been keeping bad company lately.

My unsavory companion has been South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond, a leading figure before the American Civil War, who served as a US Senator from 1857 to 1860. Hammond was one of the South’s wealthiest planters, owner of hundreds of slaves, a member of the South’s elite. He was also arrogant, clueless, and a sexual predator.

On March 4, 1858, Hammond stood up in the Senate and delivered a speech that most people know for its famous line: "Cotton is king."

Historians tend to point to this speech for its misguided conviction that, if the tensions between the sections came to war, the South would win handily. In his speech, Hammond pointed out that the South encompassed 850,000 square miles—more territory than Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain—with a population more than four times what the colonies had had when they successfully revolted against England. The South had fine soil and good harbors, and it grew the crop on which industrial societies depended: cotton. If the South withheld its cotton from market for a year, entire countries would fall to their knees, Hammond declared. Cotton was king, indeed, according to Hammond.

As notable as this speech was for its assertion of Southern power, it was even more astonishing for its view of human society. It was here that Senator Hammond outlined what Abraham Lincoln later called the "mudsill" version of life. According to Hammond, all societies were made up of two classes. On the bottom were the "mudsills": drudges who were lazy, stupid, loyal, and happy with their lot. On this class rested civilization: the wealthy, educated, cultured men who advanced society—men like Hammond. This class should always lead society, for only its members knew what was best for a nation. If the mudsills ever got power, they would demand wealth redistribution, and human progress would halt.

This was, of course, the same era that saw extraordinary upward mobility in the United States. Immigrants were pouring into the North, beginning their climb to economic security or even prosperity. Young men and women were moving west, pushing Indians out of the way to improve their own lot, as well. At a time when wage workers were actually moving upward at an extraordinary rate, Hammond dismissed them as dimwits, condemned to drudgery to support the lifestyle of people like him.

Hammond’s vision was troubling enough, but his arrogant elitism was worse. When Hammond spoke, the nation was convulsed over a civil war in Kansas. Events there were very complicated, but by 1858 it was clear to everyone that the machinations of a pro-slavery legislature had enabled a rigged convention to draft a state constitution that the vast majority of settlers in Kansas loathed. This presented a legal conundrum, but while different sides argued, people died, in particularly brutal ways. Kansas was the issue of the day, and had been for almost four years.

What did sitting Senator Hammond, one of those to whom society should be trusted, say about this horror?

"The whole history of Kansas is a disgusting one, from the beginning to the end. I have avoided reading it as much as I could. Had I been a Senator before, I should have felt it my duty, perhaps, to have done so; but not expecting to be one, I am ignorant, fortunately, in a great measure, of details; and I was glad to hear [Senator Stephen Douglas's speech], since it excuses me from the duty of examining them."*

Why should he have bothered to learn anything about the major issue of the day? He already knew how a successful society should work. He didn’t have to bother about facts.