The bluffs above the Des Moines rapids on the Mississippi River could seem magical to travelers in the 1820s, a place where âPrinces might dwell ⊠and possess handsomer seats than any of them can boast of in the old world.â But the Iowa shore was uncrowned by any mansions, and would be for decades to come. Beyond what was then the farthest frontier of lawful settlement, those bluffs were in the 1820s still home to the Sac and Mesquakie (sometimes called Fox) people, and the rapids a favorite spot for a summerâs evening fishing, âtheir lights on the rapids in a dark night were darting about appearing and disappearing like so many fire flies, â as the explorer and historian Caleb Atwater would recall. Daylight, though, revealed that âa few places are opened by half breeds,â he added. The most remarkable of all was a âdouble log houseâ surrounded by a palisade of logs and saplings. There, behind a gate made of a pair of elk antlers, an aging adventurer, fur trader and former US Office of Indian Trade sub-agent named Maurice Blondeau had settled. â[H]is family were owners of a considerable extent of this fine tract of landâ Atwater reporting, mistaking the nature of the âfine fertileâ farm with its long rows of corn parading up a hillside that Blondeau had made. Princely in manner, ânothing would do but I go with him to his farm,â yet another traveler recalled. Blondeau, son of a Canadian fur trader and a Mesquakie chiefâs daughter, âtook me all over the half breed reservation, as fine country as I ever saw, and finally remarked that he would give me all the land I wanted if I should happen to make a match with his niece, Louise,â the young fur trader Charles Larpenteur wrote decades later. He nearly accepted Blondeauâs lordly offer to settle on the Iowa Half Breed Tract, land set aside by treaty for descendants of Sac or Mesquakie women and white fathers. âLouise was one of the handsomest girls I ever saw,â he wrote later. â[I]t cost me many long sighs to leave her, and more afterward.â But he moved on up the river. It was probably just as well. Neither the princely Blondeau nor the beautiful Louise was ever able to secure their place on the bluffs.1
In that moment when Larpenteur said his farewells and pushed his canoe away from that muddy Iowa riverbank there is a small, familiar tale: the temptation of home, its face the sweet vision of a pretty young woman, contesting with the lure of the distant horizon. It is a story about the place in the world that people seek, and sometimes find. Larpenteur opted for the seeking. He found a kind of place in the world: the wandererâs, stopping here for a time, or there, welcomed for the trade goods he brought with him or the pelts he carried back to St. Louis or St. Paul. Yet there is another, less-told story to be found in that moment on the banks of the Mississippi. It can be seen by shifting our gaze from the dashing young man and beautiful young woman who are the usual central actors in the drama of the tempted drifter. Glance instead at the regretful uncle, the old fur trader Maurice Blondeau, as he watched Larpenteur paddling off. Blondeauâs story, too, is about a search for a place.
A place, that is, not a property. That is why this history starts with the bluffs along the Des Moines rapids of the Mississippi River, and the flickering torches of summer fishers, the dreams of princely palaces and regrets of a departing wanderer. Place is an ideaâor, perhaps, better described as a notion, a feeling, a dream. It is a conception about land, but also about how individuals see themselves and the people around them fitting onto that landâthe beliefs and the feelings that law and economics and the political structure of communities try to formalize. The idea of place, in its variations and evolution at a critical moment in the development of American society, is the subject here.
On those bluffs, the idea of place would be contested for more than three decades, unresolved by the 1824 treaty that Blondeau had helped negotiate. That treaty had, as a kind of afterthought, reserved some 119,000 acres of Iowa prairie and wooded bottomlands for descendants of Sac and Mesquakie women and men from the United States, British North America and Europe. The idea of place would be contested, too, after a treaty in 1830 with ten additional Native American nations created similar reservations on the shores of Lake Pepin in Minnesota and between the Great and Little Nemaha rivers in what is now the southeastern corner of Nebraska. On all these so-called Half Breed Tracts, however, the treaties left undefined who, exactly, would hold rights to land and how, exactly, they were to live there. It was unclear, moreover, not only because those rights holders were seen as neither obviously Native American nor indisputably members of any US community, but also because the idea of place was not yet a settled question for Americans on the frontier.
Formally speaking, both of the treaties said it was the chiefs of a dozen different Native polities who wanted to grant a part of their land as a place for âtheir half-breeds.â The United States went along, underscoring the particular possessive pronoun used here with language insisting that the Tracts were to be held âby the same title, and in the same manner, that other Indian titles are held.â Title to the land, that is, was with what Chief Justice John Marshall would shortly describe as a âdomestic dependent nation,â although there was no such nation of Half Breed Tract rights holders. They were assumed to be a community simply by virtue of their parentage.2
Yet the Sac and the Mesquakie (Fox), who granted the Iowa Half Breed Tract, reckoned descent patrilineally, as did the Omaha, Otoe, BĂĄxoÇ°e (Ioway) and NiĂșachi (Missouria) chiefs who granted the Nemaha Half Breed Tract. Normally, the place of âtheir half breedsâ would have been derived from their non-Native fathers, in other words. The Dakota-speaking Mdewakanton, SisĂthuĆwaĆ (Sisseton); WaÈpĂ©khute, WaÈpĂ©thuĆwaĆ (Wahpeton), IhĂĄĆkthuĆwaĆ (Yankton ) and Santee were matrilineal societies, so that âtheir half breedsâ with rights to the Minnesota and Nemaha Half Breed Tracts would normally inherit a place in a community and property through their mothers. In any event, however, the place that all the chiefs seemed to envision for their peoplesâ mixed-race relatives was to be separate from their nationsâ own lands and own communities. The United States negotiators also intended for the treaty rights holders to live apart from their paternal relatives. For their American contemporaries, the unenumerated individuals with treaty rights to the three Tracts were simply alien: âhalf breeds,â or âmixed bloodsââor sometimes simply âIndianâ or âFrenchman.â They were people caught between two societies. They were a part of neither.3
Under the terms of the treaty, their land, under its âIndian title,â was to be held by self-governing communitiesâbut these were communities that did not in fact exist. Unlike the couple of thousand MĂ©tis of Canadaâs Red River, Assiniboine and Saskatchewan river valleys, individuals with treaty rights to the Tracts had no shared institutions, no government, no agreed traditions of rights to access or use of land and no alliances with still-powerful Native peoples. Unlike the MĂ©tis, who had been in those Canadian river valleys for two or three generations, raising families, working the land and forming self-governing communities, treaty rights holders on the Half Breed Tracts were, for the most part, not even living near one another, or indeed on the reservations themselves. Unlike the several hundred members of the Creole communities described by historians Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Tanis Thorne at former old fur-trading posts in Wisconsin and Missouri, there were no institutions of US state authority to dictate a framework of land rights and community membership or neighbors whose shared heritage would support a social network that could last for generations. Unlike the few hundred individuals and families granted plots of land near their maternal relatives by US treaties with the Quapaw, Osage, Kaw (Kansa), Potawatomie, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Ponca and Pawnee nations, holders of rights to Half Breed Tract land were unnamed and scattered widely. Finally, unlike the Native nations of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, where many of the sons of Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw women and their British or American husbands assumed roles as chiefs and large landholders, Half Breed Tract treaty rights holders were not able to use the institutions of their mothersâ peoples to assume the power to dictate the use and occupation of that land.4
Histories of frontier settlement meanwhile routinelyâeven casuallyâconflate land hunger with a hunger to own land, and see in the urge to own the genius of democratic government. âAmericans came to believe that all men should own land, and that widespread ownership of land was characteristic of a virtuous society,â historian William B. Scott wrote in his classic study of American concepts of property, while Michal Rozbicki notes that by the late 1770s, ârepresentations of America as a country âabounding with free men ⊠where estates are held in fee simple,â had become customary.â In the United States âthe seemingly limitless landâ led people to see âopportunity for each individual to enjoy the property privileges reserved for the elite in England and Europe,â Richard Andrews argues in his environmental history, a point John Weaver reiterates and extends to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. The view that protection of property rights was a central aim of American self-government, dating back to the earliest days of settlement in the seventeenth century, has been a theme in American historiography since at least George Bancroft completed his magis...