Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [36]
Nearly forty years have since passed away; our rivers teem with commerce; their banks are covered with farms, with houses, villages, towns, and cities; the wilderness has been converted into fruitful fields; temples to God are erected where once stood the Indian wigwam, and the praises of the Most High resound where formerly the screams of the panther or the yell of the savage only were heard. O, “what hath God wrought!”
The same language can be found in the descriptive pamphlet that accompanied one of the great Mississippi panoramas:
In America the country itself is ever on the change, and in another half century those who view this portrait of the Mississippi will not be able to recognize one twentieth part of its details. Where the forest now overshadows the earth, and affords shelter to the wild beast, corn fields, orchards, towns and villages will give a new face to the scene, and tell of industry and enterprise, which will stimulate to new and untiring efforts. Places of small population will have swelled their limits, and there will be seen cities where are now beheld hamlets—mansions in the place of huts, and streets where the foot path and deer track are now only visible.
But this description is cast in the future tense—evidently God wasn’t working fast enough. And in fact that was the common experience of the settlers. They didn’t reach the river valley and find the orderly, stable, developed civilization that O. M. Spencer described; they found an ad hoc and jerry-rigged scaffolding for a civilization yet to be constructed.
By the time the largest waves of settlers arrived, the river valley had already been carved up into states, counties, and municipalities. But these were notional arrangements on maps and bills and legal briefs; they didn’t have much practical effect. The mechanism of government was feeble and attenuated, and it tended to break down at the simplest obstacles. The courts and government offices of the frontier were a hopeless morass—what one writer described as “a gulf of land-claims, settlement-rights, preemption-rights, Spanish grants, confirmed claims, unconfirmed claims, and New Madrid claims.” The simplest legal action routinely meant an eternity of bureaucratic frustration. One of the first pioneers, Christiana Holmes Tillson, described a typical encounter with the frontier government. She and her family were homesteading in western Illinois near the Mississippi, and her husband went to the state capitol at Edwardsville to register their claim. He found that the office of the recorder of deeds was so buried in unsorted paperwork that the clerks couldn’t tell him when, or even if, his documents would ever be filed. But the man in charge of the office, a Mr. Randall, offered a solution: “Mr. Randall proposed that he should enter the office as clerk and write until his deeds were recorded.” Tillson accepted the deal; the backlog was eliminated and his deeds were duly recorded. It only took a year and a half.
The story was unusual in one respect: it had a happy ending. Most people were left to flounder. This was one reason the people of the river valley so quickly developed a reputation for truculent independence. “The desire of an ignorant westerner to stand up for his ‘rights,’ as he called them,” Christina Tillson observed, “was the predominant feeling of his nature.” It was a necessary form of self-defense, even of survival, in a place where so many of the elements of a functioning society were absent. There were no schools, no hospitals, few roads, only the most rudimentary arrangements for public sanitation, an erratic and unpredictable mail service, a welter of free-floating paper that passed for currency, and little or nothing in the way of law enforcement. People were guided by their own sense of their natural “rights” because in most cases they had absolutely nothing