This Land in My Land

Traveling back in time to a wide open West.  Before the Gold Rush.  A nearly empty continent west of the Allegheny Mountains.  The Great Land Rush of the 19th century in America.  When there was no government rule, just land for the taking.  Or was there?

The western public lands were technically under the control of the Federal government headquartered in the East.  The belief was that you could not deal with land at a distance without an accurate definition of what you were dealing with.  This led to surveying the lands into rectangle townships - each six miles square with 36 sections, each a mile square of 640 acres.  The sale of these large tracts of land to those in the East with money seemed the simplest and most orderly way of settling the West.  Beginning with Ohio in 1803 (the first public land state) the government kept the title to all ungranted land with the exception of that for education.  Nice and orderly...

That's not how it actually happened though...the first settlers, called "squatters" were those that got there first and they didn't wait for any laws or deeds to tell them they owned the land.  They cared less and knew even less what the government said.  To have waited for protection by law would have been to lose all the advantages of being there first.  So they made their own laws.

These settlers came without proper documentation, nor the intention of adhering to any program or surveys.  They stopped here, they stopped there, according to how the land looked, how the wagon was faring, if the oxen were tired.  More times than not they didn't stay put and moved on - not really knowing where their final destination was, but hoping for the best land.  However orderly and neat might the Federal plan be, the settlement of the West was anything but that - nearly all westward movement in America in the 19th century was a land rush.

Next time...building a system of laws.

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Today in Pioneer History: "On June 15, 1846, the Oregon Treaty is signed between the US and Great Britain, establishing the 49th parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia as the boundary between the United States and British Canada.  The United States gained control of the Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana while the British retained Vancouver Island and navigation rights to part of the Columbia River. 

The Stewart Family Heads West

We last left Annie Stewart and her husband John (the hoarder lol) stuck on the trail with wagons too heavy to keep up with the rest of the family.  After rearranging their wagons, Annie and John kept moving but missed catching up with the rest of the family as expected.  A thousand miles later, they changed their destination and followed the southern route to California.  It was a year before the families even heard of one another again.

The elder Stewarts (Dad and his 2nd wife) also departed from the established route and took a new
road through Idaho Territory.  Along with hundreds of other emigrants they were brought close to starvation in the Cascade Mountains and did not reach Oregon until December.

The trail wore away at the emotional lives of women - it separated mothers, daughters, grandchildren.  It would be 3 years before the father and his wife would know that his daughter and her 11 children had made it to the West.  There were messages from people who had seen them, word that they had stopped at this place or that place, but his decision not to wait on his daughter and her husband had extended the time of anguish and uncertainty for the whole family.

This brings up another point - the subservience to the authority of husbands and fathers that women endured.  If journals are any proof of feelings, it generated a gulf of resentment between husbands and their wives.  Women didn't argue with a man's decision to stay or go - or to wait.  They "obeyed" whatever the man wanted, whatever he said - even if that meant never seeing your children again. Lucky for the Stewarts this was not the case.

One question about this story remains...why didn't the rest of the family share the possessions of Annie and John?  All the brothers and sisters, father, step-mother, friends certainly had room for a couple of pieces that would have lighten the wagon load and allow them to stay with the family.

 Two important patterns of the frontier in this story are the desire to hold a family together along with the desire to respond to the impulses of the road, to take the chance of the moment and move with freedom.  It seems that the father had more of the latter desire than the former.  The women, however, wrote of the agony of leaving family behind.

Next time...Rebecca Ketcham, single woman on the Overland Trail.

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This Day in Pioneer History: On October 20, 1803, On this day in 1803, the U.S. Senate approves a treaty with France providing for the purchase of the territory of Louisiana, which would double the size of the United States.