This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Mississippi River steamboat men back in the 1820s must have welcomed the news from Washington that the Government had come up with a better idea, a plan.
The new plan concerned treaties with the Indians living along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. By 1820, Americans were moving into the Midwest, and wanted those lands. Commissioners sent from Washington to negotiate treaties with the Indians found the process cumbersome and difficult. Indian councils were attended by the whole tribe, often with quarrelsome factions, not just a chief or two. Many of the Indians were bent on giving interminably long speeches and all of them expected to be fed and given gifts. Negotiations could drag on for days when each Indian had agreed to the terms of the treaty.
And so, the brilliant new plan: why not use steamboats to transport small delegations from each tribe to Washington to negotiate treaties? Negotiations would move faster; the Indians would be overawed by the power of the United States government and surrender their lands easily, saving both time and money.
In practice, however, the cost-benefit ratio turned out to be less than expected. It cost William Clark, Governor of Missouri, $2,908.80 to take his delegation of eighteen Sauk, Fox, Iowa, and Piankeshaw Indians to Washington in 1824. They were accompanied by an Indian agent, three interpreters, one servant and one hired man. The bill for provisions and tavern expenses came to $772.74. Transportation by boat came to $1,231.75.
A delegation of Sioux, Chippewa and Menominee Indians from Minnesota in 1824, led by Indian Agent Lawrence Taliaferro, proved even more expensive. Taliaferro billed the government $2,992.00 for the trip home from Washington to Minnesota—a trip that would have cost a similar non-government group less than seven hundred dollars.
Of course, of that 2,900 dollars, 19 went for presents, and another $13 for medicine, and $24.39 for sundries. The rest lined the pockets of a very contented steamboat captain who would certainly have agreed that Washington had come up with a better idea.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
