Network: Transportation
"The Delaware tribe of Indians, entertaining the belief that the value of their lands will be enhanced by having a railroad... have expressed a desire that the said Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western Railroad Company shall have the preference of purchasing the remainder of their lands..."
- Treaty with the Delawares, May 30, 1860
In many treaties the U.S. negotiated the right to build transportation routes and to navigate rivers that passed through Indigenous nations. Among the signers of these treaties were men who then built and owned the resulting transportation systems. In the aftermath of treaties, U.S. signers recieved contracts to blaze trails and build roads and turnpikes that traversed well-established Indigenous trade routes.
As the movement of minerals and timber increased, traders and speculators such as J. P. Arndt, Hercules Dousman, Henry Sibley, and the Chouteau family diversified their interests into steamboats.
With burgeoning westward migration, two great transportation ventures were begun and operated by treaty signers. Wagon train routes were established, supplied and protected by men who helped shape U.S.-Indian relations. The greatest transportation scheme of the treaty-making era, the railroad, was directed by a who’s who of treaty signers. The right to build railroads was negotiated by men who owned that means of transportation, from local railways to the transcontinental railroad.
Shipping
The success of land speculation depended on the ability to move customers west, and to move farm goods east to urban markets. Fur trade companies shipped pelts to the East Coast, Europe and China. Resource extraction required the transport of minerals and timber. Men who signed U.S.-Indian treaties operated steamboats on all the major rivers west of the Appalachians, and owned the shipping lines that first opened international trade for the U.S. Immigrants and goods were not the only cargo on these ships. In 1836 a Chouteau clerk named Jacob Halsey carried smallpox up the Missouri River on a Chouteau-owned boat. The resulting epidemic killed 40% of the population of the upper Missouri region.
Trade and Immigration Routes
Aggressive U.S. expansion in the west involved the incision of roads through Indigenous nations. Wagon routes carried emigrants to California gold fields and settlements in the Pacific Northwest. In the Southwest, the U.S. developed new trade routes to capture markets in places such as Santa Fe. U.S. treaty signers forged these routes, supplied the travelers for profit, and ran the “Southwest trade.”
The consequent resistence of Indigenous nations to this invasive activity resulted in increased military presence west of the Mississippi. Treaties that sought to protect white immigration, control Indigenous nations, and broker the ends to various conflicts were often negotiated by U.S. military officers. Traders, fort sutlers, and territorial officials were often on hand to witness the treaties.
Railroads
Men who signed Indian treaties often rose to local prominence in territorial and state legislatures. Beginning in the 1850s, in a flurry of legislative acts from Michigan to Missouri, these treaty signers granted themselves the ownership of local railroad companies. Early railroads were often shell companies meant to attract eastern capital rather than lay rails, but over time significant railroads were built to transport more goods and a growing settler population.
As the U.S. seized control of western territory, a conflict arose over who would control that land and the passage of white people through it: southern slaveholding interests or northern industrial interests. When the South seceded, the U.S. passed a series of acts that transferred millions of acres to northern railroad companies. Treaty signers were among the owners of transcontinental railroads, surveyors of their routes, and developers of the many townsites that lined the rails.