Westward Expansion 1803-1861

United States and Manifest Destiny

Nothing in Wilkinson's report intrigued government officials more than his reference to a salt prairie, which renewed interest in long-circulating rumors about a "salt mountain." In 1811, George C. Sibley, an Indian agent at Fort Osage, was finally able to confirm the reports when he visited the Great Salt Plains in Alfalfa County and the Big Salt Plain in Woods County. Impressed by the vast sheets of salt that glistened "like a brilliant field of snow" and by rocks of salt sixteen inches thick, Sibley reported that there was in northern Oklahoma an "inexhaustible store of ready made salt" just waiting to enter "into channels of commerce."

An expedition eight years later, undertaken as a private enterprise by the noted English botanist Thomas Nuttall, substantiated the growing sense that Oklahoma was a place of natural wonder and economic promise. In the spring of 1819, Nuttall accompanied a military unit out of Fort Smith that followed the Poteau and Kiamichi rivers to Red River. "Nothing," he enthused, "could exceed the beauty of these plains" with their uncommon variety of flowers, which possessed "all the brilliancy of tropical productions."

The image of Oklahoma as portrayed by Sibley and Nuttall was dramatically revised by reports published in the wake of a military expedition that crossed Oklahoma in the late summer 1820. Commanded by Maj. Stephen H. Long of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, its mission was to search out once and for all the sources of the Red and Arkansas rivers and to descend each to the Mississippi River. In June Long led his command west from Omaha to the Rocky Mountains and then south to the headwaters of the Arkansas River. There, as had Pike before him, he divided his column, sending Capt. John R. Bell and eleven men down the Arkansas while he continued south to the headwaters of the Red River.

Like Wilkinson fourteen years earlier, Bell found the Arkansas route tough going. Only this time the problem was not cold but hot temperatures. Three soldiers deserted, taking with them the journals of zoologist Thomas Say. Bell and his remaining men were glad to reach Fort Smith on September 9, 1820. Based upon his memory rather than his notes, Say later published an account of the expedition that described the Arkansas River valley in unenthusiastic terms.

In the meantime, Major Long continued southward from the Arkansas, looking for the headwaters of the Red River. His party also included a noted scientist, Edwin James. In due time, Long encountered a broad stream which he took to be the Red River. Although cognizant of abundant wildlife, botanist James was more impressed by the scorching, mid-August heat and the dry bed of what turned out to be the Canadian River. From his perspective, the entire region was little more than a "wide sandy desert" and should "forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, the prairie wolf and the marmot." Its only value to the nation was as a barrier to the "ruinous diffusion" of the American people. James and his superior, Major Long, reached Fort Smith on September 13, embarrassed that they had explored the wrong river but relieved that the "Great American Desert" was behind them.

Although separated by one year only, the portraits of Oklahoma as presented by Nuttall and the military explorers were as different as night and day. One, painted in the spring, was hopeful and enthusiastic; the other, painted in late summer, was pessimistic and apathetic. Given their time and place, both observations were probably correct. At least for the next one hundred twenty years, however, the perception of the Long expedition prevailed in the national consciousness. Oklahoma was part of the Great American Desert twelve months a year, an image that eastern power brokers would use to shape its future.

While some Americans traversed Oklahoma in the interest of scientific knowledge, others explored it in the interest of financial profit. Among the latter were the Chouteau brothers, Pierre and Auguste, as well as Joseph Bogy, who had established profitable fur trading houses in the Three Forks region (where the Verdigris and Neosho rivers enter the Arkansas River) at about the same time the United States acquired Louisiana. Over the next decade, they were joined by Nathaniel Pryor, George W. Brand, Henry Barbour, Tom Slover, Hugh Love, and A. P. Chouteau. Because of their commercial interests and activities, their collective knowledge of Oklahoma's resources and people made the "discoveries" of Pike and Wilkinson in 1807 and Long and Bell in 1819 old news. Hunters like Alexander McFarland, who operated out of Pecan Point on the Kiamichi River and entrepreneurs like Natchez-based Anthony Glass possessed similar knowledge regarding the Red River. In 1808, Glass spent most of the year with the Wichita Indians at their Twin Village site trading for horses and searching for a meteorite the tribe considered sacred.

Following the negotiation of the Adams-Onís Treaty with Spain in 1819, the activities of the Three Forks and Red River traders foreshadowed an even greater commercial, natural, and strategic interest in Oklahoma. Among other things, the treaty set the southern and western boundary with Texas. Spain had hoped that a clearly defined border would assure its continued possession of Mexico, but its officials miscalculated. In 1821 the colony declared and won its independence. This unexpected development galvanized the Three Forks traders and merchants into extraordinary commercial activity.

Assuming that new authorities in Mexico would welcome American manufactured goods in Santa Fe, something that Spanish colonial officials had not, two notable trading expeditions left Three Forks for New Mexico in 1821. One, led by Hugh Glenn and Jacob Fowler, was formed from residents of the Three Forks area; the other, led by Thomas James, was organized in St. Louis. Both carried trade goods for Mexican as well as Indian customers; both were prepared to trap for furs if the opportunity presented itself.

On the way west, the two groups took different routes. The Glenn-Flower party followed the Arkansas River, while the James party followed the Cimarron River. With the former stopping near Pueblo, Colorado, to trade with the Indians and to trap for beaver, only the latter enjoyed a hearty welcome in Santa Fe. It was not the first American party, however, to set out goods in Market Square. That honor belonged to William Becknell of Franklin, Missouri, who arrived a few days earlier by following an overland trail that cut across the Panhandle of Oklahoma. Over the next thirty years, tens of thousands followed this Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico, including the noted Josiah Gregg.

In purchasing Louisiana Territory, President Jefferson had envisioned it as an area suitable for the relocation of American Indian people east of the Mississippi River who declined to embrace the cultural and political sovereignty of the people and government of the United States. By 1820 this aspiration had become settled government policy, with removal first voluntary and then mandated (Indian Removal and Trail of Tears). Government officials very early selected Oklahoma, already identified in the national psyche as marginally useful for agriculture, as a suitable Indian Colonization Zone, or Indian Territory. No decision or event impacted Oklahoma more. Most obvious was that tens of thousands of tribal people poured into the region.

Equally important was that the designation accelerated American expansion into Oklahoma. Not only did the population of tribal people increase, but so too did the number of individuals and groups who exchanged goods, provided services, and secured peace. These included commercial entrepreneurs like Holland Coffee, who opened a trading post on Cache Creek in 1836, and Abel Warren, who operated a trading house in Love County after 1837. It also included missionaries like Cyrus Byington, Cyrus Kingsbury, Robert Loughridge, William S. Robertson, Evan Jones, and Joseph S. Murrow, artists like John Mix Stanley, and writers like Victor Tixier. Above all, it included the U.S. Army.

In Oklahoma, the principal role of the army was to keep the peace between resident tribes (the Osages, Wichitas, Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas) and emigrant tribes (Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles). Early on, the conflict between the two groups threatened to undermine the entire removal policy by discouraging eastern emigration. To institute and enforce a peace, the army first established Fort Smith on the Arkansas River (1817), Fort Gibson on the Neosho River (1824), and Fort Towson on the Red River (1824). As Indian removals accelerated during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, tension between the emigrant tribes and the resident tribes, especially the Plains tribes, increased. In 1834 the number of posts more than doubled, including Fort Coffee (on the Arkansas River), Camp Holmes (on the Canadian River), Camp Arbuckle (in Tulsa County), and Camp Washita (on the Washita River).

The army seldom, if ever left one of these posts to do battle with a "hostile" tribe. At the same time, commanders often dispatched troops on reconnaissance missions designed to impress all tribal groups with the military muscle of the United States. In 1833 one such mission of Mounted Rangers out of Fort Gibson became world famous. It included the noted American writer Washington Irving and two prominent Europeans, Charles Latrobe and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, all three of whom wrote notable memoirs of the experience. The next year the Rangers and a new unit, the First U.S. Dragoon Regiment, participated in an even more remarkable mission, known as the Leavenworth-Dodge Expedition.

Commanded by Gen. Henry Leavenworth and junior officers Henry Dodge, Nathan Boone, and Jefferson Davis, the five-hundred-man expedition hoped to facilitate a peace between the Osages and the Kiowas, Wichitas, and Comanches. The warfare between these four tribes had been a principal concern of the so-called Stokes Commission, appointed in 1832 by President Andrew Jackson to bring peace to Indian Territory. Riding some three hundred miles southwest of Fort Gibson to the Wichita villages and back, a journey documented ethnographically by artist George Catlin, the column met its strategic goals. Specifically, the Comanches and Wichitas signed treaties of peace and amity with the Stokes Commission at Camp Holmes (or Mason in Cleveland County) in 1835, and the Kiowas signed at Fort Gibson in 1837. But the mission exacted a huge price. Some 150 dragoons died in the Oklahoma heat, including General Leavenworth.

While the army was facilitating the occupation of Oklahoma by tens of thousands of eastern Indians, it was also marking trails and building roads utilized by both Indians and non-Indians. Among the more important of these were local roads that connected the different forts. Some roads, however, had national significance. In April 1849, following the discovery of gold in California, Capt. Randolph B. Marcy with the help of a trusted Delaware guide, Black Beaver, marked a route west from Fort Smith along the south bank of the Canadian River. The next year they selected the site for Camp Arbuckle, commissioned to protect travelers along the road. Camp Arbuckle was relocated and renamed Fort Arbuckle in 1851. The road paralleled ones described a decade earlier (1839 and 1840) by the noted Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg and by the 1845 expedition that Lt. James W. Abert had led eastward from Santa Fe. Marcy's return route through Texas and Indian Territory to Fort Smith was subsequently followed by thousands of argonauts going to the gold fields and became the route of the Butterfield Overland Mail. In 1853, Lt. Amiel Weeks Whipple, with artist Balduin Möllhausen in his command, traversed the same course along the 35th Parallel, reviewing it as a suitable corridor for an intercontinental railroad to California.

The army also conducted new boundary and additional topographical surveys. In 1850 and 1851, for example, two different expeditions that included noted naturalist S.W. Woodhouse marked the boundary between the Creek and Cherokee Nations. In1852 Marcy systematically surveyed the sources of Red River, a goal set one-half century earlier by President Jefferson.

By 1861, then, most of Jefferson's expectations for the Louisiana Purchase had been realized, at least in Oklahoma. Early official and unofficial exploring parties demonstrated that it was a land of natural beauty brimming with exploitable resources. Subsequent expeditions proved its value as a barrier to the diffusion of the American population and to the northward expansion of Spanish influence. Three Forks and Red River traders demonstrated that Oklahoma had commercial potential, especially in exchanges with the Osages, Wichitas, Comanches and Kiowas, but also as a gateway to Santa Fe and even California. The successful concentration of eastern Indians illustrated the appropriateness of Oklahoma as a resettlement zone for tribal people who did not welcome American hegemony. And the administrative and peacekeeping activities under taken by the U.S. Army proved that colonies like Indian Territory were expensive. In all of this, Oklahoma faithfully fulfilled the expectations of eastern centers of economic and political power, a pattern of cause and effect that shaped the course of the state's history then and now.