How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [54]
Also ultimately, the union of states did rupture into the Civil War. Nathaniel Pope, however, did not witness that turn of events. He died on January 22, 1850.
Six months prior to his passing, Judge Pope received, as he often did, a request for a letter of recommendation:
Dear Sir:
I do not know that it would, but I can well enough conceive that it might, embarrass you now to give a letter recommending me for the General Land Office.… Having at last concluded to be an applicant, I have thought … to show the influences which brought me to the conclusion.
Your obedient servant,
A. Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln did not get that job. In time he got a better one, in which he saved the Union, whose frail future Nathaniel Pope had sought to ensure. During the Civil War, the Union army was aided in no small part by more than 256,000 soldiers from the state of Illinois.
MISSOURI, ARKANSAS
JOHN HARDEMAN WALKER
Putting the Boot Heel on Missouri
The bill coming before the House for admitting us [Missouri] into the union … lops off that part of the boundary … between the White River and 36°30 north latitude and west of the river St. Francis.… The enemies to our prosperity … [believe] the new state should have a pretty, geometrical appearance on the map.
—JACKSON [MISSOURI] HERALD, SEPTEMBER 4, 1819
No private citizen has left a more obvious irregularity in the shape of a state than John Hardeman Walker, the man responsible for the “boot heel” of Missouri. Not only did he succeed in altering the southern boundary of Missouri that Congress was contemplating, but he did so in his early twenties.
Already known as “the czar of the St. Francis River Valley,” Walker owned extensive amounts of land emanating west of present-day Caruthersville, Missouri. When Missouri was preparing for statehood, Walker realized that the southern boundary being proposed would put his land below Missouri, in what would later become the state of Arkansas. As the map makes clear, he did not want that.
Why did Walker care? Slavery would not have been his motive since Missouri, which already had slavery, was seeking admission as a slave state. Some historians have speculated that he may have been impatient to be part of a state, with its attendant voting rights.1 Indeed, the far less-populated region of Arkansas would not become a state for another fifteen years. He himself never said. But actions he took throughout his life reveal that John Hardeman Walker understood raw power.
John Hardeman Walker (1794-1860) (photo credit 17.1)
The boot heel of Missouri
Walker did not come from a powerful or wealthy family. His pioneering family had left Kentucky in 1809 and moved to a small village, Little Prairie, on the western bank of the Mississippi. Today Little Prairie no longer exists. “The bank of the river where the village stood,” he later reminisced, “has washed away near three quarters of a mile back … so that the happy scenes of my boyish days are extinct.”2
The Walkers were the only English-speaking family in Little Prairie. Their neighbors were French settlers from the days, only recently ended by the Louisiana Purchase, when France owned the land. Walker became close friends with a townsman named Jean-Baptiste Zegon. Together they would go on hunting expeditions, during the last of which Walker’s land acquisitions were made possible.
On December 16, 1811, Walker and Zegon were hunting across the Mississippi River in the wilderness of western Tennessee. In the middle of the night, as Walker later recalled,
We were awakened by a noise like distant thunder, and a trembling of the earth, which brought us both to our feet. The dash of the water