The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808-1826

Abstract

A pivotal year for the United States and for the Native Americans who lived in the borderland regions of the early republic was 1803. The most significant and best-remembered event was Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. Historians often note that the purchase doubled the territory of the United States, but in 1803 Spain disputed the extent of Louisiana, arguing that the territory amounted to nothing more than narrow strip of land on the west bank of the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans.' Britain, for its part, had not recognized the Spanish retrocession of Louisiana to France in 1800, and thus questioned the legitimacy of the American purchase altogether. The purchase, in short, did not guarantee American control of the West. Rather, in 1803 the United States entered into complex competition for sovereignty in the trans-Mississippi West with Britain, Spain, and the Native Americans whose commercial and political allegiances were to these European powers. One of Jefferson's institutional efforts to extend American sovereignty into the Indian borderlands was the so-called system, network of federally owned trading posts, or factories. By subsidizing the operations of the factories, the federal government hoped to detach Native Americans from their commercial ties to foreign fur traders. Beyond this goal, Jefferson hoped that the factory system would means of shifting lands from Indian to American control. In February 1803, two months before finalizing the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson wrote an infamous letter to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, suggesting that the government factories would be glad to see the good and influential Indians among them run into debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individual can pay, they become willing to lop them off by cession of land.2 Suggestions such as this one prompted the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace to criticize a degree of ruthlessness in Jefferson's dealings with the Indians, the ruthlessness of benevolent zealot who would do virtually anything to insure that his new, free, American republic survived and grew.3 However ruthless Jefferson's designs may have been, in the multilateral borderlands of the Louisiana Territory where Native Americans could seek commercial and political alliances with Britain or Spain, Jefferson and his subordinates in the factory system could not enforce their will. Rather, in the borderlands, compromise and accommodation was the rule. Or, at least, compromise and accommodation ruled until the market revolution overswept the borderlands in the aftermath of the War of 1812. The changes that the market revolution wrought in the Louisiana Territory were best exemplified by George Champlin Sibley, Jefferson's chief factor in the region. Initially appointed to manage the factory at Fort Osage on the Lower Missouri River, Sibley embraced important aspects of Jefferson's political economy and Indian policy; he believed that commerce between natives and unscrupulous fur traders-especially noncitizens-corrupted the virtue of Indians and the national interests of the United States.4 In the early years of his career, Sibley enthusiastically pursued his mission to regulate trade in order to stabilize relations between Indians and Americans in the Lower Missouri borderlands. Notwithstanding Jefferson's musings about land cessions, Sibley and most of his superiors in the Indian service believed that American expansion would best accomplished by measured progression of American influence in the region that integrated Indians into pastoral economy, rather than headlong rush for the profits of the Indian trade in furs and pelts. By the mid-1810s, however, Sibley began speculating in lands and dabbling in trade. His personal transformation paralleled societal shift in the United States in the years immediately after the War of 1812, as piecemeal regional markets cohered into national economy based on commercial agriculture, exploitation of natural resources, and fledgling manufacturing. …