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Louisiana Purchases: the US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley

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Louisiana Purchases: the US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley Louisiana Purchases: The US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley By Robert Edward Lee A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mark Peterson, Chair Professor Brian DeLay Professor Carolyn Merchant Summer 2017 Louisiana Purchases: The US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley © 2017 by Robert Edward Lee Abstract Louisiana Purchases: The US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley by Robert Edward Lee Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Mark Peterson, Chair “Louisiana Purchases” challenges the common reduction of the US-Indian treaty system to a cycle of conquest, spinning vaguely in the background of national narratives, by calling attention to a remarkable fact dug out of a century of federal budgets: between 1790 and 1890, about 12 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government went into the conquest of Indian country. Simply put, Indian dispossession by treaty was one of the most expensive and complex functions assumed by the young United States. This dissertation follows the money to the antebellum period, when civil expenditures on the Indian treaty system peaked, to recover the story of the St. Louis Superintendency, an arm of the Indian Office whose operations transformed the Missouri River Valley in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The project traces the history of the St. Louis Superintendency from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 through the era of Indian removal in the mid-1840s. The St. Louis Superintendency was the largest and longest lived of thirty-five Indian superintendencies that blanketed US territories between the 1780s and 1870s. Erected to implement trade and treaty relations across a shifting Indian boundary, these organizations managed clusters of agencies, regulated trade, negotiated cessions, distributed annuities, kept accounts, and mediated between Indians, agents, and squatters. In short, they stewarded territorial expansion on the ground, and at unprecedented rates. Since the onset of North American colonization, Indians lost 98% of their land in what is now the continental United States. About 70% of those losses happened in the ninety years after the Revolution, filtered through superintendencies whose operations have escaped scrutiny because historians have approached Indian treaties as a political anomaly. As the first sustained study of an Indian superintendency, “Louisiana Purchases” argues that federally administered Indian dispossession was instrumental to the formation of the United States, not just its tragic consequence. Created in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, the St. Louis Superintendency ushered millions of acres of Indian Country into the public domain before closing. By combining archival work with spatial analysis in GIS, this dissertation tracks how the pace, location, and interpretation of treaty provisions structured a shifting landscape of settler colonial opportunity, at a time when the emigrant 1 population in the Missouri River Valley exploded by more than 5,000%. The results show that the dual trajectories of indigenous dispossession and settler expansion did not simply run parallel, they spiraled together. “Louisiana Purchases” advances recent scholarship on settler colonialism and the early national state by excavating a story that has been hidden in plain sight. Given the St. Louis Superintendency’s obscurity, most readers will be surprised to learn of its role in a series of textbook events tracked in the dissertation’s chapters. After reassessing the long-term price of the Louisiana Purchase to account for the acquisition of Indian title, these chapters follow the legal incorporation of the Louisiana Territory into the United States, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Missouri Compromise, and Indian Removal. All of these events involved and were shaped by imperatives of Indian relations in general and the operations of the St. Louis Superintendency in particular. This dissertation excavates these connections to show that American expansion into the Missouri River Valley in the early American republic would not have looked the same without the actions of the St. Louis Superintendency. 2 For Doro i Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Price of the Purchase 17 Chapter 2: From la Louisiane to the Louisiana Territory 44 Chapter 3: The Indian Corps of Discovery 71 Chapter 4: Demographic Origins of the Missouri Compromise 113 Chapter 5: Indian Removal to the St. Louis Superintendency 142 Conclusion 180 Appendix: Expenditures on Indian Cessions in the Louisiana Territory, 1804-2012 186 Table 1: Original Payments Table 2: ICC Awards Table 3: Court of Claims Awards Table 4: Trust Settlements Table 5: Post ICC Settlements Bibliography 206 ii Acknowledgments This dissertation is a long time in coming, and a testament to the encouragement and support I’ve received over many years. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, Eric Foner, Ellen Baker, and Elizabeth Blackmar supported my interest in becoming an historian, while not sugar-coating the difficulties. After graduating, the Gilder Lehrman Collection at the New-York Historical Society hired me as a manuscript cataloger, and actually paid me to read eighteenth and nineteenth century documents. When I was ready to begin graduate work, I took a detour to the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, where I got to view the United States from the outside. During my time in Germany, Manfred Berg and Jeanette Jones served as exemplars for what it means to be an historian, and helped direct my meandering path toward Berkeley. This project would not have been possible without the mentorship I’ve received at the History Department at UC Berkeley. My committee—Mark Peterson, Brian DeLay, and Carolyn Merchant—is a microcosm of Berkeley’s much-deserved reputation for collegiality and rigor. They challenged me to take chances, follow up on barely-formed ideas, and chase stories through the archives wherever they led. I couldn’t have imagined a more inspirational, brilliant, or helpful steward through graduate school than Mark, my advisor. With a seemingly bottomless well of encouragement, useful references, and good-natured pushback, Mark has been central to helping me learn to think about the past and embrace new methods for its investigation. At every turn, Brian has challenged me to think bigger about the kinds of contributions this study can offer. The chapters that passed through his dissertation reading group were so much better for it; I only regret they weren’t all run through that ringer. Carolyn is the personification of a generous reader, one I can only hope to emulate. In direct and indirect ways, this project has also benefited from the guidance of Tom Laqueur, David Henkin, Mark Brilliant, and Robin Einhorn. Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with archivists, librarians, and historians all of whom left a stamp on my research. Peter Blodgett at the Hunting Library and Paul Erickson at the American Antiquarian Society provided especially useful guidance. The desk staffs at the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Beinecke Library, the Bancroft Library, the National Archives, and others guided me through collections and pointed me in fresh and fruitful directions. The archives team at the Missouri History Museum Archives not only helped me understand their holdings, but they kindly let me come in before they officially opened so I could maximize my time with their collections. As I wrote, I received feedback at a number of venues. The Front Range Early American Consortium hosted my first conference paper from this project. I’m grateful for the questions I received, especially from Peter Wood and Ben Irvin. That lively experience iterated at meetings of the American Historical Association, the American Society for Ethnohistory, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. The Association of American Geographers twice welcomed this historian, and the Bay Area Early America Seminar tolerated a very GIS-centric presentation that elicited questions about politics from Justin DuRivage and Jack Rakove that helped direct the argument in Chapter 4. Both Jessica Roney and Rachel Herrmann provided a close reading of that chapter after their conference, “On Edge: New Frontiers in Atlantic iii History.” At Berkeley, audiences and readers provided feedback at the Crossing Paths lecture series, the Empirical Legal Studies seminar, the Digital Humanities Faire, and the History Department’s International and Global History Graduate Student Conference. Several forums provided not only suggestions for improvement, but funding to come and air out my ideas. The Spring Academy at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies hosted me in Germany for good beer and good conversation. The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic defrayed the travel costs to deliver a PechaKucha presentation, which forced me to strip down an argument to its core. The Western History Dissertation Workshop hosted at Yale University brought incisive comments from Stephen Aron, followed by a round of discussion that helped orient the larger project and steer the first article from it into print. That article, which comprises Chapter 1, appeared in the Journal of American History through the good graces of the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award Committee, editor Ed Linenthal, and copy editor Kevin Marsh, who improved on it greatly. Andrew Kahn and John Swansburg at Slate magazine made it possible to put out a shorter, popular version. And Billy Smith graciously accepted the associated data into The Magazine of Early American Datasets on very short notice. My advisors let me work on that material longer than anyone should ever work on a dissertation chapter, and I can only thank them for their extraordinary patience. As this project highlights the significance of financial resources, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the funding that’s made my work possible.
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