American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

I. Openings

1.  Openings Not until the end of the seventeenth century did European colonists establish a permanent presence on the east bank of the Mississippi River between the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers; not until the middle of the eighteenth century did Europeans found a town on the western side of the Mississippi in the confluence region. But a frontier history of the American confluence need not wait for the arrival of colonizers from overseas. Long before the intrusion of Europeans, Indians moved up and down the rivers and in and out of the region. With waterways acting as conveyors, their confluence became North America’s most prominent meeting point. From these minglings emerged new peoples and new ways. Too often, frontier histories dismiss the precolonial past as mere prehistory. That is unfortunate, for it leaves so much of the history of the place and its people out. Just as Europeans who came to the confluence of the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi drew on discrete regional cultures and divergent prior colonialisms , so, too, the Indians of the area came from different places at different times, speaking dissimilar languages and bearing disparate traditions. In short, like Europeans from various kingdoms, these Indians of diverse backgrounds brought AMERICAN CONFLUENCE  2 distinct histories that later molded their responses to colonial intruders . Close encounters in the period before direct and sustained colonization also shaped the frontiers that opened between Indians and Europeans. In the 1540s, Spanish seekers ventured near the confluence region. The impact of European things reverberated across the area in the seventeenth century, although only in the 1670s did French explorers find the Mississippi and its major tributaries. In the decades that followed, a few hundred Frenchmen settled on the eastern side of the Mississippi, while a handful of missionaries and fur traders crossed the river and traveled Map 1. Physical Geography of the Confluence Region.  3 Openings  3 up the Missouri. These settlements and explorations laid the basis for immense French claims in the Mississippi valley. Vast claims, however, in no way signaled colonial domination of the confluence region before the middle of the eighteenth century. Rather, the Osages, benefiting from their positioning between woodlands and grasslands, between Indians to their east and west, and between French and Spanish orbits, made themselves the foremost power in the lower Missouri valley. Prior Occupants When Europeans first came into the area where the Missouri and Ohio rivers join the Mississippi, they found Indians living in scores of villages. In what is now Illinois lived a loose confederacy of Algonquin-speaking tribes who later gave their name to the state. The Illinois, whose domain stretched into parts of what are now Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin, inhabited more than sixty towns. Included within the confederacy, which had no formal political structure, were Kaskaskias, Cahokias, Peorias, Michigameas, Moingwenes, and Tamaroas. Neighboring groups to the north, south, and east included Sac and Fox, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, Piankashaws, Weas, and Miamis. Across the Mississippi in what is now Missouri lived various Siouan-speaking peoples: Otos, Iowas, Quapaws, Missouris, and Osages. At the entrance of Europeans, the last of these, the Osages , were the most populous and powerful nation in the confluence region.1 Viewing the confluence region’s Indians as people without history , European newcomers slighted the dynamism of the precolonial past. Before Europeans arrived in the confluence region, people came and went, and cultures rose and fell. What drew the earliest inhabitants was an environment rich in wildlife. By 8000 bce, however, changes in climate along with the activities of human predators had resulted in the extinction of a number of species of large mammals upon which hunters had previously depended. As the supply of certain game thinned, some people moved on, while others made do. Archaeological records suggest that in the ensuing “archaic” period inhabitants displayed more AMERICAN CONFLUENCE  4 diversity and developed a heightened sense of territoriality. The region warmed and cooled and experienced long periods of drier and wetter times. These changes continued to force people to adapt. Yet, even in this distant past, inhabitants did not simply let the “environment” happen to them; they also changed it, most dramatically by burning forests to improve their yields from hunting and gathering. Even more decisive changes came about two thousand years ago during a cooler and wetter period with the introduction...