How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [115]
Territory of Jefferson, 1859-61
The idea had originated a year earlier and spread rapidly among the men working in the gulches and ravines. Spending the upcoming winter making their own territory would be a welcome alternative to drinking, brawling, and shooting each other. When the snows began, they held a convention, sent a proposal to Congress, and, when Congress did nothing, elected as their governor Robert W. Steele, a man who had been in the region less than a year. He and the legislature elected along with him then proceeded to write themselves a constitution and laws. Legally speaking, it was all very woolly.
Robert W. Steele (1820-1901) (photo credit 33.1)
Were these just a bunch of bewhiskered varmints thinking they could simply take control? One need only glance at their legislation. Take, for example, their law for evicting some scoundrel or squatter from one’s property. “Judgment of forfeiture and eviction,” it began, “may be rendered against the defendant whenever the amount of damages so recovered is more than two-thirds the value of the interest such defendant has in the property wasted, and when the action is brought by the person entitled to the reversion.” That sounds like lawyer talk, and indeed it was. Steele was a lawyer, and he had been a member of the Nebraska territorial legislature.2 While he was serving in that legislature, word came of gold in the foothills of Pikes Peak. After his term expired, Steele set out for the region, established a stake and a homestead, and was soon joined by his wife and children.
Steele was clearly not a woolly varmint. Indeed, he and his cronies were trying to rein in the woolly varmints. Being hundreds of miles from the nearest Kansas sheriff, the region’s bandits, disputants, and liquored-up miners were misbehaving with impunity in the settlements that had sprung up in a matter of months. In lieu of threats, assaults, murders and vigilantes, Steele and his cohorts sought to substitute due process of law.
The Territory of Jefferson, which at first glance appears to have been a wild and rebellious creation, was actually the opposite. Its founders were seeking to create a government only because the established governments—both in Kansas and Congress—had failed to do so.
In fairness to Kansas, only a year earlier this western region of its sprawling territory had been nothing but desolate hills, described in an earlier military exploration as “uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.”3 When the discovery of gold suddenly brought hordes of inhabitants, Kansas, itself only four years old, had its hands full with the much bloodier issue of slavery.
Kansas struggled during its first four years to decide whether or not to permit slavery, as permitted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Among the thousands of advocates, pro and con, who entered the state to vote on this issue, many joined paramilitary armies that attacked each other’s settlements in pitched battles. Flattered as Governor James Denver may have been to have a gold rush town named after him, deciding whether to deploy his overwhelmed resources toward the suppression of paramilitary armies close to home or brawlers and gun slingers in the western mountains was a no-brainer.
Congress too could have stepped in by acting upon the proposal sent by the men who had convened at Denver. Indeed, Congressman Alexander Stephens proposed the creation of a Territory of Jefferson in January 1859. But Stephens, a Southerner, had been the floor manager for approval of Kansas’s first proposed constitution, which was proslavery.