How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [55]
It was indeed an earthquake, the first of several that, in 1811 and 1812, devastated parts of what are today Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Making their way through forests where no traces could be found of the paths along which they’d come, Walker and Zegon eventually arrived at the point on the river across from their village. There, Walker tells us, his friend’s face “turned pale as death. The cause was soon visible. No smoke arose from the chimneys of our habitations, and not a single human being could be seen.” After fashioning a raft and crossing, they discovered that all the homesteads lay in shambles and that everyone had fled. They encountered only a neighbor, returning to assess the damage, followed by Walker’s father, desperate to find his son.
The French inhabitants of Little Prairie, determining that the structures were beyond repair, and knowing they were destined to become a minority now that their land had become part of the United States, opted to migrate to Canada. The Walkers returned to Kentucky, but John came back some months later, despite the fact that earthquakes and aftershocks were continuing. The unsteady ground presented a desolate landscape, absent of all but a few human beings, though evidence of their former presence remained scattered about—not the least of which was their cattle, now roaming free. In one of the greatest examples in American history of “Finders, keepers / Losers, weepers,” Walker took possession of the land and the cattle, enclosing the herds in far-reaching barriers he fashioned using the rivers and streams. He was, in his own words, “the natural heir to Little Prairie.”3
Land that Walker wanted but didn’t “inherit” he purchased at rock-bottom prices from owners who had opted, like those of Little Prairie, to leave the area, or whose livelihoods had evaporated in their absence. Walker’s holdings quickly spread west toward the St. Francis River.
Anyone who, as Walker demonstrated, so intuitively understood power would also have foreseen that Missouri would become the most powerful state in the region. It had access to the two most important rivers in the American hinterland (the Mississippi and the Missouri) and possessed the land where they converged: St. Louis. Not surprisingly, Walker’s efforts to include his land in Missouri commenced immediately after its initial petition for statehood. This 1817 document, circulated and signed primarily by citizens in the vicinity of St. Louis, proposed a southern border that simply extended the line that ran across the bottom of Virginia and Kentucky at (with some irregularities) 36°30’.4 Had it been adopted, this proposal would have put Walker’s land in Arkansas.
The following year, Missouri’s territorial legislature passed its own proposal for statehood. It sought far more extensive boundaries, including the region where Walker owned land, along with additional land below 36°30’. Clearly, residents of those regions had persuaded the legislature to rethink the citizens’ proposal. Yet between the time of the legislature’s 1818 proposal and the enactment of statehood by Congress in 1819, the area below 36°30 was reduced to include only Walker’s region between the Mississippi and St. Francis Rivers.
Missouri legislature’s proposal
Looking back some years later, Missouri Senator George W. Carleton spoke of how Walker had met with the people who would define the boundaries and so eloquently stated the reasons his region was more properly part of Missouri that he succeeded in persuading them.5 Nonpoliticians remembered things differently. The Kansas City Star reported that, after convincing the territorial legislature to propose boundaries including his land, Walker