frontier wars essay

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What Students Need to Know about the Frontier Wars

• Vance Skarstedt
• September 29, 2008
• National Security Program
• Program on Teaching Military History

For a number of reasons, one can say that the frontier wars are the most complex and difficult of all the nation’s wars to teach. The conflict that raged for centuries on the North American continent still touches nerves in contemporary American academic, cultural, and political circles. As the American people continuously debate and struggle to define their history, the frontier wars represent a continuing source of friction in discussing American history, morality, consistency, military conduct, and government policy. Simply put, as the debate over the status and treatment of American Indians goes on and becomes more politicized, so does the discussion of the long years of conflict that comprise the frontier wars.

While there are many schools of thought regarding the frontier wars throughout American scholarship, the predominant view leaves the American Indian as a hapless victim that was swarmed over by a never-ending wave of unscrupulous European and later, American settlers, soldiers and businessmen who, armed with superior technology, stole, infected, massacred and imprisoned the native peoples on their way to building the nation as we know it today.

In a recent edition of John Tebbel and Keith Jennison’s The American Indian Wars , the summary stated, “The Native nations, living in peace and prosperity for the most part, despite the intermittent but limited intertribal warfare, learned that the white invaders cold not be trusted, and that their object was not the peaceful intercourse of trade, which the Natives offered them, but flagrant conquest.” The term “conquest” along with others such as “encroachment,” “invasion,” “genocide,” and “subjugation,” appear in many historical discussions of the frontier wars, and while the American Indians lost a way of life they had known for thousands of years, to simply present the history of these wars as one society exterminating another is simplistic, inaccurate, and denies students the different aspects of what were truly fascinating, complex, and relevant wars. I say relevant because the outcome of those wars not only completed the establishment of the United States on the North American continent, but also generated invaluable lessons regarding warfare that are still being taught today.

The complexity involves the identity of the combatants, especially as it relates to the indigenous peoples whom the Europeans and later Americans encountered. To lump these people under one term such as Indians or Native Americans is very misleading. I would begin any course or class on the frontier wars by discussing the indigenous peoples themselves and who they really were. Historians have estimated that at the time Columbus landed, there existed almost 4 million people in three thousand tribes speaking more than 2,200 different languages. Hollywood images of nomadic tribal units wandering a vast wilderness wearing war bonnets and following bison herds pales when compared to the real history of the North American Indians. Their societies varied from being nomadic, to forest and coastal dwelling, to stationary tradesmen in cities. In teaching undergraduates, I always asked how many of them had ever heard of, let alone visited, Cahokia. I’d usually get one or two that had heard of it. Seldom had anyone who lived outside of a 20-mile radius of St Louis ever been there.

American students should know the diversity and advanced nature of the many pre-Colombian cultures. Cahokia was a thriving economic center and home to as many as 40,000 people. Evidence exists that Cahokian traders, or Mississippians as some refer to them, plied their goods as far away as the Atlantic Coast and as far south Mexico. These people created intricate tools, molded beautiful jewelry, demonstrated advanced agricultural techniques and actually devised ways to change the flow of the Mississippi River to irrigate their crops. They built structures of clay and dirt that rivaled the stone temples of Tenochtitlan, Angkor Wat and Thebes. Little else is known of this culture because, unlike the Egyptians, the Cahokians did not write in Sanskrit or hieroglyphics or some other ancient tongue lent towards translation by a Rosetta Stone. We’re sure they were peaceful due to the fact that, unlike the warrior Egyptians who went to their next world armed to the teeth, Cahokian graves included few if any weapons. Cahokia did not stand alone as an advanced culture. The Pueblo Indians of Taos built five-story apartment buildings and successfully irrigated crops in the New Mexico dessert. The cave-dwellers of Mesa Verde carved intricate and multi-storied communal structures in the sides of mountains. Again, little is known of these cultures due to a lack of written records of their time.

Archaeology has determined that most of these advanced cultures were gone 200-300 years before Columbus’s arrival and given that at the time Columbus arrived, the former domains of the peaceful Cahokians, Pueblos, and Anasazis were supplanted by the fierce Creek, Navajo, Comanche and Apache tribes. This leads to the next point I believe students should be aware of when studying the frontier wars, which is the war-fighting skills possessed by the tribes that were here when Europeans started to seriously colonize North America in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

My students often asked about the relevance of studying the combat of these wars. Today’s students can easily relate some war history to contemporary events, but they often do not see the point in devoting significant study to the frontier wars, as they seem so remote in terms of time as well as methods. Not to mention the fact, the generation we’re teaching did not grow up watching the Western genre in movie theaters, or at least Westerns that dealt with Indians. I always answer by showing them photos of Indian warriors like the famous shot of Geronimo and three of his comrades, which shows a variety of weapons ranging from a muzzle-loading musket to a cavalry carbine to a couple of lever-action repeating rifles. They’re armed with some good technology for the time, able to travel fast and given their experience and knowledge of their environment, would prove to be elusive and hard to pin down.

How did the U.S. Army deal with this kind of foe? With horse-mounted cavalry traveling in groups ranging from regimental size to small detachments of perhaps a dozen or fewer soldiers and Indian scouts. While these tactics never achieved the all time decisive victory Americans for some reason see as the only way to end a war, these tactics kept pressure on their Indian targets and eventually, when it became clear the Americans weren’t going to go away, the fiercest American Indian warriors, including Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Dull Knife, Red Cloud and Little Wolf, surrendered in the closing years of the frontier wars and represent the last of the American Indian generations that fought the U.S. government.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Again the United States finds itself involved in a fight against lightly yet lethally armed asymmetric fighters who are elusive, possess superior knowledge of the battlefield, and quite creative when it comes to thinking of ways to kill American soldiers. The United   States Armed Forces are utilizing a number of ways to combat unconventional foes such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda, utilizing many of the same means and tactics used by the horse soldiers of the nineteenth century. So, the tactics and lessons learned by the U.S. military in the 1870s were either put to good use, or as I suspect, relearned, by the U.S. military of the 21st century. To me, the frontier wars are as clear an example out there that history is always a relevant discipline.             

Students should also know that the frontier wars remain America’s longest wars. If one includes the period of colonization between the founding of Jamestown in the east and Santa Fe in the west to the American Revolution and goes to what is considered the last frontier battle in 1890, which was not really a battle, the frontier wars were continuously fought for almost four hundred years. The first century of the United States’ history was one of continuous warfare on the growing nation’s frontier. In one of its first engagements after the end of the Revolution, the American Army suffered what would be its worst defeat until the Civil War when the Miami Indians under the leadership of Michikinikwa, or Little Turtle, destroyed a force of 1,400 militia and regulars killing over 600 officers and men.

To help students understand so much history in a few lessons, I portray the frontier wars in three phases.

The first phase began with the settlements in the first decade of the seventeenth century on the east coast. During this phase the Europeans sought to establish a viable economic support system on the North American continent. Not only was their savage fighting between colonists and Indians; French, English and Spanish Colonists waged bitter wars amongst themselves. This phase came to an end with the American Revolution that ended in 1783.

The second phase involved pushing the Indians west across the Mississippi River. This phase ended in the late 1840s with the Blackhawk War and the pursuit of the Seminoles into the Everglades, where they still live today.

The final phase, which is the shortest phase but took place in the largest theater of all the phases, were the campaigns west of the Mississippi against the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, Comanche, Modoc, Nez Pierce and other tribes. This phase ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, though there were recorded instances of Indian resistance as late as 1911. It’s a good idea to break these phases down by significant wars and relate the important political and military events of each.

This different kind of fighting and Indians’ skill are some of the important reasons for the length of these wars. There was also the sheer size of the North American continent. These wars were fought in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, the Mississippi River Valley, Texas, the Midwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains; virtually every corner of the present-day continental United States saw combat between the Indians and the Europeans and Americans. Thomas Jefferson estimated that it would take 100 generations to settle America. It actually took five, but as the United States expanded westward by building communities, railroads and communications, it also had to pacify the diverse and rugged group of societies that were all very adept at warfare; from the Powhatan Indians of Virginia that almost destroyed Jamestown on more than one occasion to the Nomadic Sioux nation that for a century controlled the upper Great Plains from Minnesota to Wyoming and as far south as the Missouri River, to the Modoc Indians of California who with 51 fighters held off over 1000 U.S. Army cavalry and inflicted over 150 casualties while only losing five of their own in the combat.

When Europeans first arrived and the inevitable conflicts with the Indians began, the Europeans were surprised and shocked by the Indian way of making war. Instead of the lines of infantry on open battlefields the Europeans were used to, the Indians used stealth, camouflage, surprise, deception, and other small-unit tactics that utilized the terrain as cover and confused their conventional European opponents. The European colonists quickly adapted and became every bit as skilled and savage as the Indians in waging frontier war and began using Indian tactics when they fought each other. In short, the Indians were good because their environment and culture promoted armed combat as a necessary skill. From having to survive by matching wits against nature and wild game, to having to defend themselves against rival tribes, the North American Indians were some of the finest soldiers in the world by the time Columbus arrived. Those societies mentioned earlier that had perished by the fifteenth century did not seem to value warfare according to what archaeologists tell us. That may be a major reason they weren’t there.

Evidence of the Indians’ influence on the American military still is evident at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the United States Army Ranger School posts the standing orders of Robert Rogers. Rogers was a colonial militiaman who admired the Indian way of combat and built a unit that modeled itself after the Indians’ tactics. They traveled off-road, learned ambush and tracking tactics, and traveled light while garnishing their food from nature as them rapidly moved overland. They proved extremely effective against the French in the French-Indian War and subsequent units that fought for both British and American colonists also utilized tactics learned from the Indians by Rogers’ Rangers.

However, despite their skill as warriors and ability to survive in harsh environments, their culture and experience proved no match for the arrival of Western civilization. There were few battles with decisive winners and losers, and the supposed advantages in technology did not provide that big of an advantage to the Euro-Americans. In fact, not until the campaigns of Nelson Miles in the 1870s and 1880s did technology come into play and cause concern for the Indians. Students should know that the Indian defeat was not due to Euro-American military prowess, but the final destruction of the environment needed for Indians to maintain their culture. The biggest pure killer of Indians was not American or European arms but disease. Within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival, the Arawaks that first greeted him became extinct. Epidemics of typhus, smallpox and cholera devastated numerous Indian populations. It is estimated that one epidemic along the Missouri River in 1837 reduced the Plains Indian population by 50 percent. As far as casualties of war, the 100 years after the American Revolution saw just over 12,000 Indians and whites killed as a result of battle and/or raids.

Instead of military pressure, the Indians succumbed to economic and political pressure. The economic pressure was the loss of their environment. With the establishment of the railroad, transcontinental communication, technological developments in agriculture including barbed wire, and an ever-growing population of Euro-Americans, the Indians slowly ran out of territory for sanctuary. The great buffalo slaughter after the Civil War took the buffalo herd of the Plains from an estimated 12 million to fewer than 700 by 1889. This proved a devastating blow to the dominant tribes of the Plains as the buffalo was the central pillar of their economy. In short the Indians could not survive against the Western culture and economy of development and consumption.

Politically, the Indians suffered because they themselves could not unite. Many of the thousands of tribes were nursing centuries-old rivalries and hatred against other tribes when the Europeans arrived. In almost four hundred years, they could not set aside differences enough to unite against the greater threat. American Indian history has many farsighted individuals who realized this but none who succeeded.

Beginning with one of the first major wars between Indians and whites, King Phillip’s War in 1675, the Wampanoag Chief, Metacomet, sought to unite the various tribes of the region against the growing English settlements. For two years he was effective and almost destroyed major settlements at Deerfield, Medfield, Northfield, and Brookfield in what is now Massachusetts. However, Metacomet was assassinated by another Indian at the behest of the British in 1676 and King Phillip’s war ended in defeat for the Indians. Subsequent efforts by Indians to unite also failed. Pontiac of the Ottowas was murdered by another Indian near Cahokia after he had almost forced white settlers out of the Ohio Valley. This situation convinced King George to issue the proclamation of 1763 prohibiting colonists from settling in large numbers west of the Appalachians. Tecumseh had to ally with the British and even accepted a commission as a Brigadier in the British Army, but his failure to convince the Creeks to join his confederation led to his defeat and death at the Battle of the Thames in 1814. Osceola was tricked by English and rival Seminoles into surrendering and this led to his death in an English prison. Captain Jack, leader of the Modocs was betrayed by a tribal rival to the Americans and subsequently hung. The list goes on and on regarding great Indian leaders either totally or partially being undone by their fellow Indians. This inability to unite created tremendous opportunities for the dividing part of the divide-and-conquer strategies employed by the Euro-Americans against the Indians. Most of the intelligence and scouting used by the Europeans and Americans were provided by tribes that rivaled those the Euro Americans were pursuing. Modern Sioux and Blackfeet still despise each other for the role each other played in the Black Hills campaigns of 1874-76.

This failure to unite was probably the major reason the Indians lost. On the battlefield itself the Americans seldom enjoyed a numerical or technological advantage and one of the reasons for Custer’s disaster at Little Bighorn, was that the Indians were actually technically advantaged. Custer’s practice was to move light and fast, like Indians, and surprise small groups of Indians while they camped. This worked well for him until he surprised a large group of Indians camping along the Greasy Grass of the Little Bighorn River.

The Indians also proved very adept at adapting Western technology and tactics themselves, and that adaptation is another military lesson learned from the Indian Wars. North American Indians showed tremendous adaptability and their martial heritage came through in some of the absolutely brilliant leaders and tacticians they produced. Without a West Point or even formal education as the Euro-Americans knew, Indian leaders such as Chief Joseph of the Nez Pierce, Osceola of the Seminoles, and Red Cloud of the Sioux proved more than a match against their West Point counterparts. They are a critically important part of the American military heritage, though it would make great chiefs like Opechecanenough, Tecumseh, and Gall turn in their graves to hear that being said about them.

American military commanders also learned the importance of critical thinking. In the wilderness against a foe that possessed superior knowledge of the terrain and cut off from the major supply and logistics support networks, Army commanders had to devise tactics and methods for pursuing, isolating, and surprising fast moving and unpredictable groups of Indians. In the wars against the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache and Comanche, the Army learned to conduct operations at night and in bad weather as this proved most effective. Unfortunately, this led to Indian women and children being killed, since these attacks at places like the Washita River and Sand Creek led to attacks on tribal units and not just war parties. Even today, military commanders agree that much of their success in the field is due to the fact that experience and technology has enabled the U.S. Army to “own the night.”

Another important lesson learned from the frontier wars has to do with peacekeeping. Pacifying and keeping Indians under control is probably the first example of postwar peacekeeping done by the U.S. government. It’s not a great story, with corruption at one end of the policy and the deaths of innocents at the other. The greatest injustices to the American Indians usually came after Indians succumbed to American and European demands. The Trail of Tears, the squalid conditions at the Bosque Redondo Reservation, the Long Walk of the Navajos, and many other tragic stories relate that no matter how well-intentioned U.S. government policies such as President Ulysses Grant’s “Peace Policy,” a lack of dedicated and trustworthy officers in the field can lead to disaster.

American students need to know that there is much more to this conflict than popular culture has shown. They need to know of the American Indians themselves and what varied, rich, and accomplished cultures they possessed. They need to know that they put up one heck of a fight and did so because their various cultures emphasized combat skills, sacrifice, and discipline. They need to know that failure to unify beyond family or tribal limits provided a key element to their ultimate defeat as well as the loss of their environment and way of life. They need to know the lasting impact the frontier wars had on American history and culture. As Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out in his landmark work The Frontier in American History , pushing west forced settlers to change away from the European-like practices of the eastern city; support a communal society where participation and support of community decisions, elected leaders and plans meant survival; and to exercise the creative thinking and ingenuity needed to bring the wilderness under control. To me, this sounds very much like the American Indian way of doing things. From the Massasoit Indians who welcomed the Pilgrims to the Nez Pierce Indians who befriended the whites right up until they were forced to fight for their survival, they set the example in living as well as fighting and dying.

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Contact, conflict and dispossession on the Cape eastern or northern frontiers in the nineteenth century

The situation in the Eastern Cape in the early late 18th and early 19th century (approximately1780 - 1850) was as follows:

There were three groups of people:

• The Xhosa, who had lived there for hundreds of years.
• The Trekboers, who moved into the area from the Cape.
• The British settlers, who arrived from Britain in 1820.

Each group needed land for their families and their livestock.

• The Xhosa believed that land was for the use of all the people. People didn't own land. The chief of a village would allow people to use land for crops and grazing. There was also communal grazing land for everyone's livestock. The Xhosa's most precious possession was their cattle. Cattle gave them milk and meat, and wealth was measured in terms of the number of cattle a person had. Cattle were used for lobola and for ancestor worship. Without good grazing land, it was difficult to keep large herds of cattle.
• Dutch and British farmers had very different ideas about land ownership. They believed that people could own property and buy and sell land. It was very important to them that all adult men should own land.

Frontier wars on the eastern frontier of European settlement

The situation in the Eastern Cape led to a great deal of conflict between the Dutch and British settlers on the one side and the Xhosa on the other. Nine wars were fought over land and cattle between 1779 and 1878. This time is known as the 100-year war. The conflict started in 1778 when the Dutch governor of the Cape made the Great Fish River the eastern boundary of the Cape Colony. The Trekboers and the Xhosa got into conflict over grazing land and cattle theft. Three frontier wars between Dutch settlers and the Xhosa had already taken place by 1802. However, after the British took over the Cape in 1806, things became much worse. British soldiers were sent in to get Xhosa people off the land that they had been living on for many years. They argued that the Xhosa were stealing cattle from the settlers.

Soldiers and officials

After the British took over the Cape from the Dutch, in 1806, one of the things they had to deal with was the conflict between the Xhosa and white Trekboers on the Cape's eastern frontier. In 1811, Colonel John Graham was sent in to push the Xhosa beyond the Fish River, which at that stage was the recognised border between white settlers and the Xhosa. The British built a series of forts, military posts and signal towers along the Fish River.

British immigration

When the British took over the Cape in 1806, there were about 25 000 European settlers at the Cape (mainly Dutch). There had already been five frontier wars between the Xhosa and settlers before 1820. The Cape government wanted to increase the number of settlers in the area and enlist more British people to defend the Eastern frontier against the Xhosa.

In 1820, the government in Britain paid for a large group of about 4 000 unemployed British people and their families to go to the Cape as settlers. The ships carrying these settlers landed at Algoa Bay. Each family was given a small piece of farm land to grow crops.

Abolition of slavery 1836

During the late 18th century the British started to question the practice of slavery and their own involvement in the trading of slaves. In 1807, the British stopped the slave trade in all its colonies. However, this did not mean that slavery had ended. The ending of the trade in slaves did not help people who were already slaves. No new slaves could be brought into a British colony, but slaves could still be bought and sold within the colony itself.

Boers migrate and move into the interior: The Great Trek

The following issues made the Trekboers angry:

They felt the British government at the Cape did not protect them.

They felt that the Dutch language was losing out to English.

They were always in conflict with the Xhosa over land.

The Trekboers saw only one solution: to move out of the Cape Colony and settle away from the British in a place where they could make their own rules and organise their lives in the way they wanted.

From 1836 to 1846, thousands of Voortrekkers, as they are now known, left the Cape and moved into the South African interior. They grouped themselves into a number of trek parties under various leaders. The Trekboers were used to moving around in search of land for grazing. They packed their belongings into ox wagons, gathered their servants and slaves, and headed north in search of new homes. These journeys became known as the Great Trek.

As they moved into the South African interior, the Voortrekkers met many groups of indigenous people. The battles over land continued and, because the Voortrekkers had guns and horses, they often won the battles. They took land from local people and disrupted their way of life.

The Northern Frontier of European settlement

Expanding trade relationships on the northern frontier of European settlement

There were four main groups of people living across the border of the Cape Colony in the early 19th century:

A. The Khoisan

They were a mixture of Khoikhoi and San people.

B. The Boers

They were the descendants of the Dutch people from the Cape Colony.

C. The Oorlams

Their ancestors were from different groups - some were a mix of Boer and Khoikhoi, or slaves and Khoikhoi, or Boer and slaves. They spoke Dutch (Afrikaans).

D. The Tswana

They were African people who spoke Setswana and ruled by chiefs. They farmed cattle and sheep. They also hunted elephants and traded their tusks.

The Kora and Griqua were groups of people of mixed descent and runaway slaves who had left the Cape Colony. They traded manufactured goods, tobacco and pack oxen from the Cape.

The Kora originated from small groups of Khoikhoi who had lost their land to the Dutch in the south-western Cape. The groups included runaway slaves and people of mixed European and Khoikhoi descent. Most of the first Kora people had worked on Dutch farms and spoke Dutch. They knew how to use guns and ride horses. They lived in groups along the Gariep River in the central parts of southern Africa.

The Kora kept close contact with the Cape Colony. They got goods from the

Cape like material for making clothes, flour for making bread, and tobacco

that the Dutch farmers grew. The Kora traded these goods with the different

groups living along the Gariep River and beyond. They also traded pack

oxen, which they got from the Cape.

The Griqua were a group of people of Khoikhoi, slave and European descendants who had left the Cape in the late 1700s (18th century). They owned cattle, had guns and horses and used ox-wagons. They usually wore European style clothes, spoke Dutch and were Christians. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Griqua settled north of the Gariep River, in an area that later became known as Griqualand West. They were first group from the Cape to settle north of the Gariep River.

The Griqua took their name from the Khoikhoi group the Guriqua. The Griqua saw themselves more as Khoikhoi than Dutch. They traded material, flour, tobacco and oxen. The Griqua traded mainly with southern Tswana groups.

The southern borders of the Tswana world

The Tswana people also lived on the land across the Orange River. They had moved to that area in about the 16th century. They spoke Setswana. They grew crops such as grains and tobacco and herded cattle, sheep and goats. They were skilled at crafts such as wood carving, basket weaving and metal work. They also hunted elephants for their tusks, which they traded.

The Tswana traded with the Kora, Griqua and Boers:

The Tswana killed elephants for their tusks, which people sold for a lot of money. The Griqua were involved, as middlemen, in this trade.

They hunted and killed other animals for their skins, which they traded.

They also traded iron and copper, which they used to make farming tools.

They wanted to buy guns to protect themselves.

In the early 19th century, missionaries came into the Tswana territory. They converted many of the Tswana to Christianity and taught them how to read and write. They encouraged Tswana people to live like the Europeans. They built schools and churches.

Tswana walled towns

The Tswana lived in villages led by a chief. Their houses and kraals were inside the villages and the farmland was outside. Some of the bigger towns were surrounded by stone walls for protection. Some of the villages grew into towns with thousands of people living together. The Tswana allowed people who were not Tswana to join them, so their settlements grew in size. They also grew bigger because there was so much trade happening with the other people living in the region.

Three important cities were Marothodi, Molokwane and Kaditshwene:

Marothodi had a good water supply and fertile land. People there probably made things out of copper and iron.

Molokwane was in a fertile area that was close to good grazing land. The people of Molokwane probably traded with other towns (such as Marothodi) for tools.

Kaditshwene had a population about the same size as Cape Town. It was on a hill which was good for defence. The area was good for farming and grazing. People in Kaditshwene made metal goods.

In the early parts of the 1800s, there was much conflict among the peoples of southern Africa. Many people had to leave they places where they lived. When the Tswana were attacked, they left these cities and went to other places.

Missionaries and traders

European traders and missionaries started arriving in the area north of the Orange River after 1800. They explored areas that the Cape Colony did not know and drew up maps of these areas. Later, the colony used these maps to push its borders further north.

European traders could make big profits north of the Orange River. They could trade in ivory, furs from animals and feathers from birds. They also wanted to buy cattle from the Griqua and Tswana to sell as meat in the Cape Colony.

Many local people became powerful if they controlled the trade with Europeans. They could get guns and gunpowder from the Cape Colony. It was against the law to sell weapons to the people outside the colony's borders, but traders did it anyway because they could get ivory and other valuable goods in exchange.

Some missionaries became traders so that they could make more money. They also needed to get basic goods through trade. They traded goods such as buttons and beads which they brought to southern Africa. They also made friends with local chiefs by giving them gifts. Because of this, the chiefs let them stay in the area.

Missionaries

Missionaries from Europe wanted to spread Christianity. The people living north of the Orange River had their own religions. The Tswana people, for example, believed in Modimo, their god, and that their ancestors would help them. The missionaries moved into the area and lived among the local people. They set up permanent mission stations.

Missionaries learnt local languages to talk to people about Christianity.

They set up churches and taught the people to read and write so that they

could study the Bible. They wanted local people to become more like

Europeans in their clothes and customs. Some missionaries converted chiefs and then their followers to Christianity. The chiefs trusted them ad so they became important people in the area.

Some missionaries helped to protect the people they had converted. For example, Dr John Philip lived and worked with the Griqua. He arranged a treaty with the Cape Colony that said the Colony would help protect the Griqua in 1843.

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The Frontier Wars

The Frontier Wars began in 1788 and lasted until the 1930s. The Frontier Wars are defined as a series of conflicts and events that happened in the first 140 years of settlement in Australia.

First Nations people were involved in conflicts and battles to defend their country and Europeans carried out massacres to expand the British colony. 

1788 | The Frontier Wars begin with the British arriving in Botany Bay with 11 ships. On these ships they had prisoners, military and British officials ready to occupy the land. This marks the official beginning of the NSW colony, and the conflict between First Nations people and colonial forces.

1792-1802 | Pemulwuy was a very fierce warrior from the Sydney area where he waged a resistance for ten years. There were many noteworthy First Nations warriors throughout the Frontier Wars that held a resistance; Dundali, Yagan, Jandamarra, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, to name a few. Figures like Pemulwuy were not only known by First Nations people but they were also well known by the Europeans. Often when famous warriors died their remains were publicly shown or sent to England to be put in museums. 

1804-1830 | The Black War was a war waged in Tasmania. Towards the end of The Black War Europeans staged a battle called ‘the black line’ where they marched across the whole island looking for First Nations people to kill. At the end of The Black Wars in Tasmania a group of 16 First Nations people were sent to Victoria as pacified First Nations people to help pacify First Nations people in Victoria. Out of that 16, five escaped and waged a seven-week resistance in Melbourne. Out of that five, two were hung and the other three were sent back to Tasmania. One of those three was Truganini , who has been remembered as a very significant woman in Australian history.

December 1837 to January 1838 | The Waterloo Creek massacre. Major James Nunn carried out this massacre by arming settlers and pastoralists to hunt a band of First Nations warriors. The hunters found them at a water hole with other First Nations people.  This massacre plays a part in a series of massacres that lead up to the significant Myall Creek massacre on Gamilaraay country.

1838 | The Myall creek massacre occurred and is well-known around the world because of its outcome. There were 12 perpetrators involved, seven were charged and hung for participating in the massacre. This came as a surprise to everyone in the colony. It is a significant moment in history because it was the only time white people were found guilty or held accountable for their violence towards First Nations people during the Frontier Wars. 

1928 | The Coniston massacre is one of the last massacres to occur during the Frontier Wars. A WWI veteran Constable George Murray led a group to massacre First Nations people who were camped by a water hole in the Northern Territory, 400 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs.

The resourcefulness of First Nations people

First Nations people adapted quickly , often employing guerilla warfare tactics. That is, fast-moving, small-scale actions including ambushes, sabotage and raids.  First Nations people used traditional weapons as well as guns. Fire was used to burn off crops. Fire and dingoes were used to scare away cattle and sheep. Dingoes were also used to attack British soldiers. First Nations people also used their deep knowledge of Country to aid them in battle - they had the home ground advantage. 

First Nations convicts from around the globe

As early as 1804 First Nations people in Australia were being incarcerated in the convict system . This was happening to other Indigenous people from other British colonies around the world such as New Zealand and South Africa. As a result of the Frontier Wars in Australia, and also the broader British colonial frontier, Indigenous men were taken  as convicts as punishment for their involvement in the resistance. These men served whatever their sentence was on an island and were left there to die. The islands that were used for this purpose were Norfolk Island, Tasmania, Goat Island, Cockatoo Island and Rottnest Island. 

The effects of the Frontier Wars are still felt today

The Frontier Wars may seem like they happened a long time ago. But the trauma of what happened to First Nations people has been passed down through the generations. It is important to remember that just because Europeans stopped killing First Nations people under the Frontier Wars, it doesn’t mean that First Nations people have stopped dying as a result of British invasion and the ongoing processes of colonisation. First Nations people are still dying at an alarming rate today.

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Lest We Forget: why we need to remember the Frontier Wars

Opinion | conflict was protracted and anguishing, but our warriors’ resistance was widespread and persistent, writes jidah clark..

'Warriors of New South Wales' by Dubourg 1786-1808 Source: National Library of Australia

How the wars played out

Time to remember

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• Frontier wars

This article looks at the Frontier Wars that occurred during the invasion and colonisation of what we now call ‘Australia’. We will discuss acts of oppression and violence in some detail against our people and there will be images and videos depicting the conflict. Children should speak to a trusted adult before reading.

In 1788, sometime between the 16th and 20th of January, the 11 ships that encompassed the ‘first fleet’ arrived in Sydney’s Botany Bay. On board were just over 1000 people, majority of whom were convicts and their families. They planned to begin a penal colony (settlement used to exile prisoners) that would later become the ‘Australia’ we know today. Around a week later in ‘Sydney Cove’, on the 26th January, Captain Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack and claimed the land for Britain. This marked the beginning of the invasion and colonisation of ‘Australia’ and the many years of fighting and resistance that would occur.

An overview

The Frontier Wars refer to all the massacres, wars and instances of resistances beginning from the arrival of colonists in 1788. Officially the Wars are said to have ended as late as 1934 however many acts of violence and oppression against our community continue today, as does our resilience.

The death toll resulting from the Frontier Wars is hard to know for certain, but it is estimated that around 2000 – 5000 colonists were killed over the years while the death toll is for Aboriginal people is unknown as it is so high. In ‘Queensland’ alone it is estimated that 60,000 Aboriginal people died (the Guardian). While the true death toll for Aboriginal people across the continent is impossible to know for certain due to most of the instances being covered up or not reported, it is estimated that around 90% of the Aboriginal population prior to invasion was killed during the wars. This is a result of both colonial violence and foreign illnesses the colonists brought with them such as the flu, measles, tuberculosis and smallpox.

Conflict on the Rufus. Image Source: State Library of Victoria .

Massacres and wars

The Frontier Wars and the massacres that occurred are very rarely talked about and historically we have relied on white sources, oral history and some written documentation to prove that they occurred. However, as research continues to be done more evidence is being discovered and old evidence is being documented to ensure the history is not lost. 

The University of Newcastle has created an interactive map that allows you to see and read about the many massacres that occurred after invasion which you can access here .

Below we have given brief descriptions on a few of the massacres within the Frontier Wars. Please be aware that there are acts of violence against our people being discussed and that reader discretion is advised.

For more information about invasion and warfare in Victoria, read this article .

The Black War (The Tasmanian War)

The Black War is one of the biggest acts of violence that occurred in the Frontier Wars.

The Black War occurred in ‘Tasmania,’ beginning in 1824 and ending 7 years later in 1831. At least 1000 Aboriginal people were killed according to official records however the actual number is most likely much higher. 

Martial Law was declared by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur. This essentially gave settlers who killed Aboriginal people immunity from any sort of legal consequence. Towards the end of the war, in late 1830 the Black Line occurred. Over 2000 colonists formed a series of offensive lines that stretched across the land and drove the Clans away from their homes and away from land the colonists had taken or wanted to take. The aim was to either kill or move Aboriginal Tasmanian people to the Tasman Peninsula in the southeast where the colonists planned to have them remain permanently imprisoned. Many died in this line as they were shot on sight if they didn’t immediately escape. 

The Black War resulted in the near-destruction of all Aboriginal people living in ‘Tasmania’ due to frequent mass killings. Many of our Mob view the Black War as an act of genocide (intentional action to destroy a an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group of people). Despite this dark history, Aboriginal people have survived in Tasmania and are a strong Community today.  

Image: A community in Tasmania celebrate with a Corroboree. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales .

Pinjarra Massacre (The Battle of Pinjarra)

The Pinjarra Massacre occurred in 1834 in ‘Western Australia’ and was the result of an attack by colonists on a group of an estimated 80 Binjareb (also spelled Pindjarup, Pinjareb) men, women and children in retaliation to an earlier fight that left a colonist dead.

This attack was led by Governor James Stirling and a detachment of 25 colonists and they conducted the mass killing of somewhere between 15 – 30 Bindjareb people, including children.

Kilcoy and Whiteside poisonings

In 1842 in Kilcoy and in 1847 in Whiteside (both in Queensland), colonists ‘gifted’ bags of flour to the local Clans. This flour was purposefully laced with strychnine, a strong poison.

The poisonings claimed the lives of around 70 Aboriginal people in the Kilcoy district and another estimated 70 in Whiteside. 

Coniston Massacre 

The Coniston Massacre occurred in the Northern Territory in 1928 and is credited as one of the last mass killings by colonists during the Frontier Wars. It is said to have been the result of the death of a colonist, Fred Brooks. Two Warlpiri men were arrested and tried but were later acquitted for the death after eyewitness accounts pointed to another man as the true killer. 

The man said to have killed Fred Brookes was Kamalyarrpa Japanangka. He did so after Brooks breached Warlpiri marriage lore by putting demands on Kamalyarrpa Japanangka’s wives and possibly assaulting one. A revenge party was formed, led by Mounted Constable George Murray, and over several months they shot and killed over 60 Anmatyerre, Kaytetye and Warlpiri people, includin children.

You can read more about the Coniston Massacre in this Common Ground article.

Coniston memorial plaque. Image Source: The New Daily .

Despite the massacres, the wars and the genocide, we have survived. This is because we fought back and resisted with all we had. 

There are many instances of resistance throughout ‘Australia’s’ post-invasion history and when we think of resistance fighters there are many names that come to mind. Pemulwuy was a Bidjigal man who fought against the colonists violence and theft by burning crops and raiding food stores. Jandamarra was a Bunuba man who went from police assistant to resistance fighter, leading his people against the forces invading their land. The Fighting Gunditjmara were known for fighting back and resisting the violence and invasion of their home lands.

No matter what Mob you come from you are a child of leaders, of people who fought back and resisted the violent invasion of their land and you are proof that they were successful in saving their people and their culture.

You can read more about Aboriginal resistance in our Standing Strong article.

Legacy 

The Frontier Wars are still not acknowledged as official wars of our history and many of the atrocities that occurred continue to be ignored. Unfortunately, violence against our people continues today with little justice for our Mob.

Despite the many injustices we face and the pain that is inflicted on us we are still fighting, and we are still resisting. We have not given up our fight to exist in this country and we should all be proud of who we are and where we come from because of that.

Sources & Further Reading

• What are the Frontier Wars?, NITV
• Common Ground
• Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930, University of Newcastle
• The Killing Times, The Guardian
• 'Incarceration Nation' - Documentary - SBS On Demand.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons in photographs, film, audio recordings or printed material. To listen to our Acknowledgement of Country, click here .  

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Albanese’s remarkable words on the frontier wars should have been said at the war memorial

The Labor leader’s assertion of the historical ‘holes in national memory’ around frontier violence and resistance is commendable and important

Ever since Australian troops fought under a British flag in the disastrous Gallipoli invasion and retreat, mainstream national politics has been beset with historical memory loss.

A contradiction of history, thanks to wartime prime minister Billy Hughes, who spun disastrous military defeat into the national moment, has eclipsed so much critical continental experience that came before and after Anzac by which we might otherwise define ourselves.

Subsequent political leaders of a continent that has staged 60,000, 80,000, perhaps 100,000 years – and counting – of continuous Indigenous civilisation, have done little to depart from the trope of national foundation in that military operation on a (then) obscure finger of the Ottomans.

Federation’s first great external challenge – to raise the 1st Australian Imperial Force from disparate former colonies to fight overseas and die in multitudes under the British flag – is, according to the trope, the birth moment of the nation. Forget the European invasion, the frontier wars, the land-grab upon which the federation was built – and the first business of a neophyte federal parliament, the White Australia policy.

Federal parliament and key cultural institutions of national commemoration (think the Australian War Memorial, and 26 January and Anzac Day holidays) have long paid lip service to Indigenous resistance in the conflicts across this continent that, by reliable estimate, violently killed more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Queensland alone than Australian soldiers in the first world war .

That’s why Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s parliamentary speech last week marking 13 years since Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generation was important to so many First – and other – Australians.

He spoke elegantly of the imperative for historical “truth-telling” called for in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart , its centrepiece a constitutionally-enshrined voice to parliament (cynically rejected by consecutive conservative governments but supported by Labor).

Truth-telling, he said, “must fill the holes in our national memory”. Nothing could be truer.

“I spoke recently at the War Memorial about those Indigenous Australians who donned the khaki and fought for a nation that was not prepared to fight for them. They fought for a continent for which their own people had fought during the frontier wars, wars we have not yet learned to speak of so loudly. They, too, died for their loved ones. They, too, died for their country. We must remember them just as we remember those who fought more recent conflicts.”

Yes, the Labor leader had spoken two weeks earlier at the Australian War Memorial in acknowledgment of Indigenous personnel who had fought for the Australian nation (the memorial makes much of “Black Diggers” but refuses to meaningfully or extensively tell the story of Indigenous frontier resistance). His written speech for the memorial went further, acknowledging the Indigenous resistance fighters of the frontier, too. But when he spoke at the AWM the critical words about frontier war were (unintentionally, he says) omitted.

You’d be aware of course that nobody yet in a position similar to yours & at a similarly official event within the War Memorial has found the stones to actually say what the par you omitted contained, what needs to be said. You had a great opportunity to show leadership on this. https://t.co/4YJJdHCm7Z — Jack Latimore (@LatimoreJack) February 4, 2021

Albanese’s assertion in parliament of the historical “holes in national memory” around frontier violence and resistance is commendable and important. But it’s worth considering how much more weight it might have carried if delivered at the war memorial, a place where intransigence on the issue is long-running and baffling.

Some context.

The war memorial is, at once, Australia’s most revered and controversial national institution. It is revered as the nation’s secular shrine to Anzac. But it is increasingly controversial and criticised (including for years by myself and a legion of historians, former directors and others) for its refusal to anywhere near adequately tell the story of frontier conflict.

It has long been largely deaf and blind to much Indigenous sensibility, and resistant to reform. On its six flagpoles facing Anzac Parade snap six Australian flags. Except, that is, for two weeks a year (Naidoc and Reconciliation weeks) when it will fly the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ensigns.

Two weeks a year! Most commonwealth buildings do so as a matter of course. The governing council (comprising largely senior serving or former defence personnel and former prime minister and all-things-military-enthusiast Tony Abbott) does not want to change the status quo on that (or much else) it seems.

It is also infamous for its other historical omissions (including Australian war-related atrocities, not least those alleged in the ongoing Afghanistan conflict) and for a pending, unnecessary $500m expansion (supported, largely without question, by the Labor opposition).

Like the white-hatted Anzac myth it enshrines, the memorial is a political shibboleth. Woe betide, perhaps, the political leader who questions the pervasive Anzac myth – or its shrine, the war memorial – and what both omit from history. Especially in a speech in the memorial itself.

So potently has Australian history become militarised that federal politicians who once merely marked the opening of each parliamentary session with attendance at a religious service, now also go to the Australian War Memorial to give thanks with similar solemn, ecclesiastic fervour.

It was in that context – “in the lion’s den of the nation’s preferred narrative” as Indigenous writer and activist Jack Latimore notes – that Albanese could have spoken of those national memorial holes.

Albanese’s fine words in federal parliament about frontier wars are remarkable and laudatory. They’d have been more so if spoken at the war memorial.

A great hypocrisy among many of Australian military memorialisation is the lauding of some supposedly egalitarian experience of the “Black Digger” in uniform and the parallel denial of memorial agency to Indigenous resisters of white invasion.

It’s time a mainstream political leader said so in the lion’s den.

• Anthony Albanese
• Postcolonial
• Labor party
• Australian War Memorial
• Indigenous Australians
• Australian politics
• Uluru statement from the heart

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Stories from the Archives

Queensland state archives, queensland frontier wars.

An essay by historian Dr Jonathan Richards on frontier violence in Queensland, as documented in the records at Queensland State Archives .

detail: QSA ITM103525 . Letters received – Surveyor General’s Department, letter no. 1860/725

Histories of violence

Our nation’s longest war occurred during Australia’s colonial and post-colonial periods. State-sanctioned racially-based violence – an issue that many Australians are either ignorant of, or deny occurred – was often carried out by uniformed mass-murderers. This was an integral part of the nation’s creation history. The violence is distressing and confronting.

The truth of our national history stands at complete odds with popular imaginings of Australia as a peaceful continent that has never experienced war. Media, politicians and many citizens deny that a brutal genocide – based on race and colour – ever occurred in the past, and continues to this day. Wars only “happened in other places”, or when “others” attempted to invade Australia. The long and violent British conquest of the southern continent was not, according to this logic, a “war”.

In truth, so-called “collisions” of European invaders and Indigenous resistors occurred throughout the continent, and across the adjacent waters and islands. Disease, starvation and introduced addictive substances (alcohol, sugar, tobacco and other drugs) killed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Dislocation and destruction of Indigenous communities and families began with the First Fleet and continues today.

Settler-colonists formulated specific operational responses to Indigenous resistance. These included denial of their existence (“terra nullius”), the dehumanising of First Nations people (“primitive savages”) and the forced clearance of the landscape (“exterminate the blacks”).  Non-government agents (the employees of early graziers and pastoralists), who often formed spontaneous “posses” or killing squads, did much of the secret killing on the frontier. The number of violent deaths during these “unofficial” events remain unknown.

Two important points need stressing. Firstly, colonisation is a long continuing nightmare, but many non-Indigenous people have little or no idea about the terror inflicted on First Nations people in Australia. Secondly, this fractured history continues through multi-generational trauma and ongoing community disruption.

Our country is not unique in this regard. Similar tragedies occurred in other parts of the British empire, and around the world in other European empires. The dislocation, dispossession, dehumanisation and removal of Indigenous peoples by Westerners has been, and continues to be, a “standard practice” around the world. Any attempt to deny these two crucial aspects of imperialism and colonisation begins with a fundamental misunderstanding of history.

Colonisation is built on historical linkages between capitalism, empire-building, and the Western (or Western European) ideology of materialism. Settler-capitalism depends on the constant expansion of control over ‘underdeveloped’ regions. Slavery, claimed to be ‘right’ and ‘proper’ under prevailing religious and ideological beliefs, was accepted and promoted by politicians, preachers and the press. Many Westerners saw dark-coloured races as incapable of ‘civilisation’ and ‘redemption’. Most members of the white races believed it was their “duty” to ‘take on the burden’ of developing the world.

The hunt for resources such as land, water, minerals and timber underpinned the entire colonial project. Therefore, Indigenous peoples around the world became obstacles to the “progress” and “industry” of the ‘white race’. Western notions of civilisation and justice are key factors in the self-justification of territorial rapaciousness and settler-colonial capitalism. Our official records graphically reflect this intention and achievement.

Queensland history

The primary instrument of government policy towards Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people in Queensland from 1860 up to about 1900 was the Native Police. This  force (sometimes called the ‘Native Mounted Police’) consisted of armed and mounted Aboriginal soldier-police commanded by European officers. The sole purpose of this formation was the violent elimination – often called “dispersal” – of any Indigenous resistance to settler occupation. Units such as the Native Police existed in many colonies.

This essay discusses the written records of this brutal period, and the government agencies and policies that underlay the creation of these archival documents. This includes the files held in this state’s most important repository of paper records, the Queensland State Archives. The records were created by one side of the country’s First Wars – the invaders – and not by the other – Australia’s First Nations. As noted, many unrecorded deaths also occurred.

Our knowledge of frontier violence – the First Wars involving Australians – in Queensland has developed over the last four decades. It began with Henry Reynolds’ and Raymond Evans’ ground-breaking work during the 1970s, followed in the 1980s by Noel Loos’ early survey of frontier violence records. Further research has added to these important contributions. Once, descendants of the British invaders and the European migrants (who flocked to Australia seeking a better life) did the research. Now we have a much richer understanding of the past as Indigenous historians have contributed their perspectives on frontier experiences, which they call “The Killing Times”.

Recent work on archival records has greatly helped our understanding of policies and practices during this period. Digital platforms such as Trove and other newspaper archives give us access to more historical documents. We can now begin to estimate how many colonial records have survived floods, fires, disposal and theft. Governments tried to ensure that the public learned as little as possible about the racial violence occurring in secret, in their name. We know that some white people stole records, or successfully requested their closure to “protect” the reputations of their families.

The surviving records allow us to begin a discussion on Queensland’s true past. We can start to see how the First Wars have inflicted massive inter-generational trauma on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Race-based violence underpins the creation and maintenance of the Australian state, and reverberates down through the generations to the present-day. A careful examination of the records held in the Queensland State Archives can greatly help us in this regard.

The documents that illustrate this bloody history include the official Despatches between successive Governors of the colony and the seat of imperial power in Great Britain, and the correspondence files of the colony’s senior public officer (the Colonial Secretary, later the Chief Secretary and Premier). Records created by the Commissioner of Police are important, as are the files of the Department of Justice, the Colonial Treasury, and the Lands, Mines and Works Departments.

Conflict before 1850

Between 1790 and 1860, the northeast quarter of the Australian continent was part of Britain’s original super-colony in the southern continent, New South Wales. Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) was the second colony and the base for the beachhead of Port Phillip (Melbourne, later Victoria). Settler-colonialism expanded north and west from Sydney, particularly after the European invaders reached the open plains west of the Great Dividing Range. Communication, horses, wheeled vehicles and firearms gave the British colonisers immense logistical and tactical advantages over Indigenous people. Land-hunters, searching for pastoral rewards, pushed out from the “settled districts” controlled by government. They reached inland parts of what would become Queensland during the 1830s and 1840s.

There was sustained and successful Aboriginal resistance in what was then the Northern Districts of New South Wales, particularly on the Condamine and McIntyre rivers. In 1848, the New South Wales government created a northern Native Police Corps, modelled on a similar body already in action throughout the Port Phillip (Victoria) districts. The northern Native Police accompanied the leading wave of graziers and pastoralists throughout southern and central Queensland. As the British expansion continued north and west, Native Police units led the way. Each detachment consisted of six or eight Aboriginal Troopers led by one European officer.

Some records of the (New South Wales) Native Police between 1848 and 1859 have survived, and a number are currently held in the Queensland State Archives. Other documents are held in the New South Wales State Archives. Documents about the attack at Hornet Bank station, in the Dawson River district, have survived. The deaths of twenty Europeans and hundreds of Aboriginal people occurred there in 1857.

Separation, 1859

Queensland’s Separation from New South Wales in 1859 meant the transfer of all government agencies to the new colony, including policing. Authorities in London were well-informed of “progress” on the frontier. In 1860, Queensland’s first Governor, Sir George Bowen, wrote to England, advising that he had organised a local constabulary. This included, he said, ‘the Native Mounted Police, a corps of 100 black troopers stationed in detachments in the remote pastoral districts of the interior, for the protection of the outlying settlers from the attacks of the aborigines’ ( QSA ID ITM3681991 ). He hoped to extend the force to ‘those inland districts, where the settlers are still exposed to danger from the native tribes, which are far more numerous and more formidable in Queensland than in any other portion of Australia’ ( QSA ID ITM3681991 ).

A Parliamentary Committee took evidence in May 1861 on the ‘working of the Native Police’. The resulting report, which criticised some officers for allowing the ‘indiscriminate slaughter’ of Aboriginal people, concluded that ‘the Natives … are addicted to cannibalism … and are sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism’ ( Queensland Parliamentary Votes & Proceedings , 1861 ). This attitude persevered for decades.

Hopes for peaceful relations between British and Aboriginal people virtually ended after an attack in late 1861 at Cullin-la-Ringo station, in Central Queensland, resulting in the deaths of nineteen colonists. Native Police and private reprisal squads quickly killed hundreds of Aboriginal people throughout the region. The Colonial Secretary thanked local pastoralists for ‘so promptly coming forward to avenge the killed’, and informed residents that the government would use ‘every effort to protect life and property’ ( QSA ID ITM3682008 and I TM3690309 ).

Governor Bowen told authorities in London that ‘an uncontrollable desire for vengeance took possession of every heart’ ( QSA ID ITM3682012 ). Aboriginal people sought refuge in towns, hoping that the proximity of other settlers might reduce retaliation by the Native Police and graziers. The graphic history of Indigenous dislocation in Queensland can be traced through records of episodes such as this.

The Secretary of State for the Colonies wrote from Britain to Governor Bowen in 1862: ‘The first lesson of importance which a savage ought to learn from a civilized Government is the difference between discriminating justice and indiscriminate vengeance. I do not know why the Australians should be incapable of learning this lesson and I hope the Government of Queensland is not incapable of teaching it’ ( QSA ID ITM3682019 ).  

There is no record of Governor Bowen and the Queensland government responding to this question. Instead, he reported in glowing terms on ‘the wave of pastoral settlement’ that had spread northwards; ‘during the short space of eighteen months, our pastoral settlers have practically added to the British Empire and pushed on the margin of Christianity and civilisation over a territory as extensive as Great Britain itself’ ( QSA ID ITM3682026 ).  

Governor Bowen wrote to London in mid-1863, describing Aboriginal people as ‘cannibals’, who ‘have no hereditary chiefs or settled form of Government, and no religious rites’ ( QSA ID ITM3682026 ). His ignorance of Indigenous culture was no great impediment, in his eyes, to any possibility of better understanding or negotiation. By the mid-1860s, settler-colonial encroachment extended from Queensland’s southern districts to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in the colony’s northwest, and along the eastern coast, north to the tip of Cape York Peninsula.

Queensland’s first Commissioner of Police, 1863

In October 1863, the Queensland Parliament passed the colony’s Police Act. David Seymour, the first Commissioner of Police, would supervise the Native Police. The Commissioner could recommend, but the Colonial Secretary, the Governor and the Executive Council appointed and dismissed officers. Detailed Regulations controlling the Native Police were proclaimed in 1866 ( Queensland Government Gazette , 1866, Vol. 7, No. 28:258-61 ).

Governor Bowen wrote to his superiors soon after: ‘the Queensland Parliament legalized its existence for the first time’ and ‘these Regulations were carefully revised by the Attorney General’ ( QSA ID ITM3682041 ). Officers knew if they could ‘prove that a felony has been committed’, and had ‘reasonable cause to suspect an individual’, they were ‘justified in apprehending him, and using force if resisted’. Caution was necessary as ‘blacks are so much alike’. According to Bowen, ‘in every case the same law applies to Blacks as to Whites, and if the Officers go beyond the law they do so at their own risk’ ( QSA ID ITM3682041 ). There is little evidence of the law being enforced.

The town or ‘ordinary’ police, also had frequent involvement with Indigenous people. They dealt with Aboriginal people who sought refuge in villages and towns from the Native Police and the private revenge gangs. In 1871, a constable killed an Aboriginal man, at Tiaro near Maryborough. ‘It was’, he said, ‘absolutely necessary … that firearms or some other deadly weapon should be used’ ( QSA ID ITM2722206 ). Others were killed while resisting arrest, or while trying to escape. One grazier said the ‘shooting of a blackfellow’ was ‘a good riddance’ ( QSA ID ITM2725339 ). Native Police officers also killed ‘runaway’ Aboriginal troopers who deserted in greater numbers than new recruits joined the force.

The first Native Police officer accused of the murder of an Aboriginal man, and dismissed from the force in 1863, was Lieutenant J. Donald Harris. The Executive Council decided ‘the act was barbarous, and showed extreme neglect of duty’ ( QSA ID ITM2720467 , ITM3682029 , ITM3690310 and ITM3699921 ). They dismissed another officer, Acting Sub Inspector Myrtil Aubin, after his detachment killed a number of Aboriginal people near Rockhampton. His superior officers decided it ‘was clearly Mr. Aubin’s duty to disperse that mob of Blacks and it is very much to be regretted that they did not do so quietly’ ( QSA ID ITM3682581 , ITM3690311 , ITM3690312 and ITM3690313 ).

There were many other violent episodes during the 1860s. In 1864, for example, the son of a New South Wales judge died in western Queensland, and there was no Native Police detachment in the district. Station-workers took ‘measures thought best’ and killed an unknown number of Aboriginal people at Thouringowa station on the Bulloo River in retaliation ( Queensland historical manuscripts, 1822-1930; MS 3460, Sir John Ferguson Collection, NLA ). First-hand accounts of frontier reprisals, such as this, are very rare. One often-quoted episode  occurred at the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1868, but the full details were never recorded ( QSA ID ITM3682584 and The Queenslander , 13/6/1868:4 & 7 ).

Aboriginal Commissioners

Not all settler-colonists advocated violence, but the loudest critics of the Native Police were those wanted the force to be more “efficient” in ‘exterminating’ Indigenous people. Others called for the killing to stop. Humanitarians in urban centres increased their condemnation of the violence at the margins of settler society. The shipwreck of the “Maria” in early 1872 resulted in the deaths of about fourteen European men. Widescale retaliations by Native Police troopers, Royal Navy sailors and civilian ‘volunteers’ in the Cardwell district caused the deaths of hundreds of Aboriginal people.

At first, the Queensland government rejected calls for a Royal Commission into the treatment of Aboriginal people ( QSA ID ITM3690318 ). In June 1872, politician Arthur Palmer stated that claims of ‘extermination’ were ‘an atrocious libel’. ‘The Government’, he said, ‘never followed a policy of extermination in dealing with the blacks. Their policy had been one of repression’ ( Brisbane Courier , 19/6/1872:2 ). Then, in late 1873, after sustained criticism, the government appointed a Royal Commission ‘to enquire into and report upon the condition of the aborigines throughout the colony, with a view to the amelioration of the race and the utilization of their labor’ ( Telegraph , 20/10/1873:2 ).

The “Maria” reprisals prompted Charles Heydon and Andrew McDougall to write to the newspapers in early 1874. Heydon described the situation of Aboriginal people in Queensland as far worse than the South Sea Islander labour trade. ‘A system of slavery far more atrocious and degrading, and a system of native slaughter far more merciless and complete. Public opinion in North Queensland calls for blood, and yet more blood’, he said. ‘Queensland has deliberately adopted the system of arming the savage for the extermination of the savage’ ( Sydney Morning Herald , 2/2/1874:3 ).

The first report of the Aboriginal Commissioners dealt with Aboriginal evidence and did not mention the Native Police ( Queensland Parliamentary Votes & Proceedings , 1874, Vol 2:439-442 ). The Commissioners thought legislation was more important because ‘the Aborigines have been almost exempt from both the protection and penalties of our laws’. ‘Most persons prefer to submit to losses or inconvenience, or take the administration of punishment into their own hands’ ( Queensland Parliamentary Votes & Proceedings , 1874, Vol 2:439-442 ).

Some rejected the report, including one newspaper editor: ‘What would any average person, past or living, of common humanity think of our treatment of the aborigines, and especially of our Native Police? ( Telegraph , 12/5/1874:2 ). Another described the report as ‘such a timid and milk-and-water character as to be unworthy of republication’. ‘How is it, by the way, that the Commission, have not a word to say, either in praise or blame, of this “peculiar institution” – the Native Police?’ ( Maryborough Chronicle , 19/5/1874:2 ).

The letters reached the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who asked Governor Normanby in Queensland to ‘inquire into the truth of these statements’ ( QSA ID ITM3682627 ). The British government advised the Aborigines Protection Society that ‘the statements made will prove to be incorrect or greatly exaggerated’ ( Records of the Aborigines Protection Society [as filmed by the Australian Joint Copying Project], M2431, NLA ). Queensland’s Commissioner of Police rejected the claims made about the Native Police. ‘No instances of the wholesale slaughter of the blacks alluded to have ever come under my notice privately or officially, during a residence of nearly fourteen years in the colony’ ( Queensland Parliamentary Votes & Proceedings , 1875, Vol 1:625-627 ).

The Governor’s response reached London, and was sent to the Aborigines Protection Society: ‘The natives in the North and West are numerous, savage, treacherous, and very commonly cannibals, and will generally murder any unarmed white man who may come within their reach. Stringent orders are given to the officers of the native police not to use force when it can possibly be avoided’ ( Queensland Parliamentary Votes & Proceedings , 1875, Vol 1:624-5 ).

Australian correspondents informed the Aborigines Protection Society: ‘Public opinion in Queensland is all against the blacks’. ‘The extermination goes on day after day’ ( Colonial Intelligencer , 1/8/1874:101-111 ). The Society reminded the Queensland Governor of the Queen’s instructions: ‘That you do by all lawful means prevent and restrain all violence and injustice which may in any manner be practised or attempted against them’ ( Colonial Intelligencer , 1/8/1874:101-111 ). They noted that ‘the Commissioners made no allusion whatever to the question of the Mounted Native Police Force’, which meant the committee could not see ‘any investigation as satisfactory or complete which, from whatever cause, has failed to take cognizance of the crimes attributed to the mounted native police’ ( Queensland Parliamentary Votes & Proceedings , 1875 Vol 1:627 ).

In January 1875, Governor Cairns arrived at Brisbane. He informed the Secretary of State for the Colonies in mid-April that the Aboriginal Commissioners were busy with ‘their ordinary duties’. They could not examine charges against the Native Police ( QSA ID ITM3699920 ). Several weeks later, however, he asked the Commissioners to hold an inquiry of ‘a complete and exhaustive nature, into the alleged malpractice of the native police’ ( QSA ID ITM3682634 ). The Commissioner of Police, stating ‘the cases existed but in imagination’, rejected this idea ( QSA ID ITM3690319 ).

John Douglas, a former politician and public servant, wrote to the Aborigines Protection Society. ‘The native police is less effective than it was. I mean by this that it is less under control … and, in my opinion, not strong enough. There is a sustained guerrilla warfare productive of very unsatisfactory results. We are less alive to our duties to the aboriginal than any other Australian colony. It is a question of expenditure’ ( Colonial Intelligencer , 1/6/1875:202-203 ).

In May 1875, the Aboriginal Commissioners submitted their second Report to the Queensland government: ‘We do not consider that any useful or satisfactory result could be arrived at by inquiry at the present time … hitherto no practicable substitute has been suggested  … without an armed force the frontier settlement could not be maintained’ ( Telegraph , 8/4/1876:5 ). European settlers often argued that the only alternative to the Native Police was the complete abandonment of the colony. The fact that the Commissioners, who were appointed to ‘ameliorate the condition of the Aborigines of Queensland’, argued for the force’s continuation is a perfect illustration of the attitude of most settler-colonists towards Indigenous peoples.

The Commissioners recommended two Travelling Inspectors be appointed in the Native Police, and ‘a general Depot established in a central position where both Officers and Troopers can be drilled, and otherwise instructed in their duties’. Governor Cairns informed London: ‘The condition or status of the Native Police does not appear to require that an investigation into their discipline and general habits’. ‘There is no reason to believe that the officers overlook inhumanity towards the wild tribes, or that such inhumanity is that all of frequent occurrence’ ( QSA ID ITM3682638 ). No depot was ever established.

Professor W. Stanley Jevons informed the Society ‘there will soon be no aborigines for them to protect … a fierce private war of extermination is now proceeding in North Queensland, uncontrolled by government, and conducted with little regard to anything but the safety of the English invaders, can hardly be doubted’ ( Spectator , 27/5/1876:679 ). 

‘Your case is hopeless’: police under investigation

In 1876, charges of violence towards Aboriginal people were laid against three Native Police officers, Sub Inspector John Carroll, Sub Inspector Hervey Fitzgerald and Sub Inspector Frederick Wheeler. Fitzgerald, accused of whipping an Aboriginal woman, was advised: ‘Your case is hopeless’ ( QSA ID ITM3700113 ). Mildly reprimanded, Fitzgerald was transferred from the Native Police to the Gold Escort, ‘where his duties will not bring him into contact with Aborigines’ ( QSA ID ITM3690314 , ITM3690235 , ITM3690315 and ITM3690233 ). Two years later, he returned to the Native Police ( QSA ID ITM3690320 ). The government dismissed Carroll, charged with ‘killing a native trooper’, but found not guilty of murder ( QSA ID ITM3690321 , ITM3690322 and ITM3690233 ).

Frederick Wheeler joined the Native Police in 1857. He was chastised in 1858 for advocating the indiscriminate killing of Aboriginal people, and in 1861 for his involvement in the murder of several old Aboriginal men at Fassifern, west of Brisbane ( QSA ID ITM2720202 , ITM3690323 , ITM3690324 , ITM3682000 , ITM3690325 and ITM3681995 ). In 1876, he was committed for trial, charged with the murder of a young Aboriginal man at a Native Police camp in Central Queensland ( QSA ID ITM3690316 ). Released on bail, Wheeler absconded from the colony ( QSA ID ITM3690326 , ITM3690327 and Records of the Aborigines Protection Society [as filmed by the AJCP], M/2427, NLA ).

Despite – or as a result of – the ineffectiveness of the Aboriginal Commissioners, the Queensland government rejected further allegations about the indiscriminate massacre of Aborigines by the Native Police. One file was noted ‘If there is any evidence or information in support of these crimes mentioned, it should have been supplied to the Colonial Secretary or to the Commissioners for Ameliorating the Condition of the Aborigines’ ( QSA ID ITM3690430 ).

An editorial from late 1876 offers a good insight into the differing views of the Native Police by colonists: ‘The force seems to be rotten throughout’. Then, ‘Every pioneer who has had experience of the difficulties of establishing settlement on the frontiers is agreed in pronouncing the protection of an armed force an absolute necessity to avert loss of valuable lives among men of our own race, and in declaring that the only efficient force is one of which aborigines form the rank and file’ ( The Queenslander , 7/10/1876:16-17 ).

A massacre by Troopers under the command of Sub-Inspector Stanhope O’Connor occurred near Cooktown in early 1879 ( Brisbane Courier , 9/6/1880:3 ). William Drew resigned in protest as an Aboriginal Commissioner, because of ‘the actions of the Native Police under Sub Inspector O’Connor’. His reasoning was noted by officials as: ‘a downright absurdity’ ( QSA ID ITM3690431 ). Mathew Hale, the Bishop of Brisbane, (who was Chairman of the Aboriginal Commission in 1879), also wrote to the Colonial Secretary. He only received a brief reply ‘declining to answer any questions’ ( QSA ID ITM3690433 , ITM3690434 , ITM3690435 and ITM3690432 ). One paper pronounced ‘The Aboriginal Commission’ was finished ( Brisbane Courier , 9/6/1880:3 ).          

Soon after, O’Connor and his troopers travelled to Victoria, where they joined the hunt for the Kelly Gang ( Victorian Public Records Office, VPRS/4967/1 ). Despite Kelly’s alleged ‘fear’ of the troopers, O’Connor wrote to The Queenslander in late 1880, saying Aboriginal people on Cape York Peninsula told him: ‘a white man always shot at a blackfellow when he had a chance’ ( The Queenslander , 18/12/1880:786 ).

Opinions continued to polarise, with some criticising the violence of Native Police. From 1880, newspapers carried articles and editorials such as ‘Black and White’, ‘White and Black’ and ‘Civilising the Blacks’ ( The Queenslander , 15/5/1880:625-6 ; The Queenslander , 29/5/1880:688 ; The Queenslander , 19/6/1880:784 ; Queensland Figaro , 5/7/1884:8 ). Supporters of the force’s operations thought that retaliation was “essential”.

In late 1881, a telegram reached Brisbane saying native canoes had been seen at Lizard Island near Cooktown. Mary Watson, her baby and two Chinese men, left there by her husband, could not be found. Troopers searched the surrounding islands and coast ( QSA ID ITM3690436 and ITM3690437 ). One of the officers involved was Hervey Fitzgerald, reinstated and promoted to Inspector. Police destroyed Aboriginal camps during the search, and several Aboriginal men made false “confessions” to her murder. The number of killings was not recorded. The discovery of her body in early-1882 revealed that Mary and her baby actually died of thirst. The water-tank that she had used to escape from Lizard Island was later installed at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane.

QSA ITM3690437 . Telegram from B.Fahey. Extract from Treasury Department general correspondence, letter no. 1881/2029,  p.217

Massacres and humanitarians

More Native Police killings occurred in the Cloncurry district during 1883 and 1884. Sub Inspector Frederic Urquhart (appointed in 1882) reported that his detachment shot dozens of people in reprisal of the murder of one European ( QSA ID ITM3690438 and ITM665853 ). Public sentiment towards Native Police operations further divided after the detachment under Sub Inspector William Nichols killed a number of ‘inoffensive’ Aboriginal people at Irvinebank, North Queensland, in late-1884. They burned the bodies in an attempt to conceal the murders ( QSA ID ITM2727097 ). Police charged six troopers with murder. Nichols, tried with being an accessory, was dismissed for his ‘inexcusable conduct’, and the government sacked the troopers ( QSA ID ITM3690439 ; ITM3690440 and ITM3690441 ).

Journalist Archibald Meston (who soon afterwards reinvented himself as a humanitarian Protector of Aborigines) commented. ‘If a native police officer is to be any use at all he must occasionally shoot blacks: if he never shoots them he is neither use nor ornament. Undoubtedly it is necessary sometimes to shoot blacks’ ( Brisbane Courier , 27/12/1884:3 ). Other writers expressed a different attitude. ‘We arm aboriginals, put them in uniform, teach them drill, make them an erring marksman, and then detail them out to deliberately massacre other aboriginals not of their own tribe. We actually seek the extermination of the blacks by murders ordered by the state’ ( Queensland Figaro , 14/2/1885:199 ).

Governor Musgrave wrote to the Secretary of State for Colonies in 1886. He described Queensland as ‘a comparatively uneducated community which has shown itself notably regardless of the commonest rights of humanity in respect of the black native tribes within its own territory’ ( QSA ID ITM3690504 ). He added that successive Governors had been unable to shift colonial political views. In 1890, Meston expressed a radical change in his attitude towards Aboriginal policy. ‘The sooner all concerned are aware of the actual work done in the past and still being done by the native police in North Queensland, the sooner that body of licensed professional slaughterers will be abolished’ ( Brisbane Courier , 30/9/1890:2 ).

Native Police and armed volunteers crossed Torres Strait on several occasions in the 1880s, intending to “punish” New Guinea villagers who had attacked islands in the Strait ( QSA ID ITM3690442 ; ITM3690443 and ITM3690444 ). The southern part of New Guinea was proclaimed a British Possession in 1888, and in 1890, Queensland authorities oversaw the creation of the British New Guinea Armed Constabulary composed of Melanesian troopers led by European officers, some of whom had previously served in the Native Police. Queensland supplied firearms to the new force.

One final case from the early 1890s serves as a potent symbol of racial violence. Grazier Henry Jones, who had constantly threatened to shoot an Aboriginal youth named Joker, was found dead at his cattle station near Laura in 1890. Joker was arrested by the Native Police and admitted killing Jones in self-defence. He was tried at Cooktown, but the lack of European witnesses meant that he was discharged at Court. However, the Police Magistrate at Cooktown recommended that he be sent to New Guinea because ‘local feelings’ against him were ‘so strong’ that he would be killed if he stayed ( QSA ID ITM3690445 ). Joker served for several years in the Armed Constabulary before returning to Queensland.

Aboriginal Protection legislation 1897

There had been a persistent reluctance by Queensland Parliamentarians to deal with frontier massacres and the well-being of Queensland’s First Nations peoples. Urban liberals, led by Samuel Griffith, gained control of the parliament during the 1880s and 1890s. They slowly began to respond to calls and lobbying from missionaries and church leaders, especially Presbyterians in Victoria, who decried the extermination of the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander peoples. Meston, who had once described Indigenous people as ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ but now called himself their ‘friend’, stated that they needed to be “separated and segregated” for ‘their protection’.

In September 1895, Meston demanded the Colonial Secretary ‘address the plight of the Queensland Aborigines’, and urged him not to postpone the Aboriginal question. He sent a copy of his pamphlet ‘Queensland Aboriginals: Proposed System for their Improvement and Preservation’. Meston added: ‘If you decide to do nothing, it will come before the colony in a shape that will not be pleasant for Queenslanders to contemplate’.

The government employed Meston as a Special Commissioner in 1896 to report on the distribution of rations to ‘the Aboriginals’. The Commissioner of Police was also instructed at the same time to investigate possible changes in the Native Police. The Queensland government ignored Meston’s recommendation for a ‘total abolition’ of the force, and small Native Police units continued in the Gulf and Cape York districts until the early decades of the twentieth century.

The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act , passed in late 1897, gave police, politicians and public servants the power to control every aspect of the lives of First Australians, including employment, residency and marriage. Clauses in the Act also permitted the forced removal of people to missions and reserves far from their homelands. The brutality and violence of the colonial period morphed into a draconian “Protection” regime that has lasted up to the present-day.

This essay has discussed some of the conflict and violence revealed in records held at Queensland State Archives. Much of the brutality and killing went unrecorded, and the perpetrators were never brought to justice. We can gain a good understanding of the number of European deaths on the Queensland frontier, but we will never learn the total number of First Nations’ fatalities.

Records only tell us a partial story. We will never know exactly how many Indigenous people died on the frontier from starvation, disease and other causes, where they died and who killed them. As previously noted, non-government agents perpetrated much of the frontier violence. The number of people that they killed will probably always remain unknown.

Western belief in racial and cultural superiority was – and remains – paramount. The colonial and post-colonial periods in Queensland – when skin colour determined status – was a time when religious and political beliefs became excuses for violence and killing. European settler-colonists often created simplistic arguments which they thought justified their actions.

“Terra nullius” (Indigenous people never owned land), “primitive savages” (First Nations people failed to industrialise) and “exterminate the blacks” (in other words, ethnic cleansing), were their reasons. This is a shameful part of our history that many Australians still either ignore or deny. Many contemporary politicians share that view, denying that genocide ever occurred, steadfastly rejecting calls for historical injustices and widespread dispossession to be investigated.

The investigation of the experiences of Indigenous people after European colonisation began is never, it seems, seen as an important or urgent task for the nation. This means that individuals, without proper funding or support, have conducted most of the research to date. Impediments to this research continue, despite repeated calls from many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for mainstream attention to the importance of history in explaining the current situation of First Nations people in Australia.

The basic truths of our history are evident. Indigenous peoples were dispossessed by Westerners throughout the world in the name of empire-building, resource-raiding and ideology. Everywhere, the colonial project depended on the exploitation of resources. First Nations peoples became “obstacles” to “progress”, and this ideology was used to  legitimise their removal by any means necessary. We know that the violence and terror of the colonial period continues to wreck Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, families and individuals through intergenerational trauma, but we still refuse – as a nation – to investigate the full truth and circumstances of this great wrong. We cannot begin to make any kind of “conciliation” for the future until we learn about our past.   

About Dr Jonathan Richards

Jonathan Richards is a professional historian who lives in Brisbane, researching Queensland history through letters and documents held at the Queensland State Archives. He has devoted many years to intensive historical research for Native Title claimants, community organisations and government bodies, and published numerous articles on colonial law and policing. He holds degrees in Australian Studies and History, and was awarded a doctorate in 2005 for his dissertation on Queensland’s Native Police.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors are advised that this website contains images, names and voices of people who have died. The website also contains historical records that contain offensive and derogatory terms which are unacceptable today, as well as information or photographs which some people may find distressing or offensive.

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• Unsettled This land was not peacefully settled - Unsettled uncovers the untold histories behind this nation’s foundation story. With more than 80 significant cultural objects and over 100 contributions by First Nations peoples across the country.
• Dark Days: A photo essay by Brendan Beirne Brendan Beirne’s landscapes illustrate the unquiet places where Aboriginal people have been slaughtered. Using infrared camera technology to capture a sense of the unseen history through the seemingly peaceful landscapes, these images allow us to see that the lands we live, work and play on remain unsettled.

INTERACTIVE MAPS OF FRONTIER CONFLICTS

• Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930 From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued until the 1960s massacres became a defining strategy to eradicate that resistance. As a result thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children were killed. This site presents a map, timelines, and information about massacres in Australia from 1794 when the first massacre was recorded until 1930
• The Killing Times The colonisation of Australia was brutal and bloody, but many stories of the frontier have been hidden or denied. This series for the Guardian tells some of them and asks, are we ready for truth telling? It includes a massacre map of the frontier wars.

USEFUL WEBSITES

• Australian Frontier Conflicts 1788-1940s This website seeks to document the conflicts between European colonists and Australian Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples.
• Monuments and memorials within Australia associated with the Indigenous conflicts Monument Australia documents the many monuments and memorials associated with the conflicts between European settlers and the Indigenous Australians during the frontier wars. Massacre and other sites are listed
• 8 war heroes you didn't learn about in school The Frontier Wars was the bloodiest conflict on Australian soil. This article looks at eight of the warriors who fought for their people and their land against colonial forces.
• Archaeology on the Frontier This blog is about research relating to frontier conflict and especially the native mounted police in Queensland
• From invasion to resistance in Australia overeign Union provides the background to the conflict between settlers and the Indigenous people: the complex societies, invasion, inevitable conflict, and resistance.
• Frontier Wars This page about the Frontier Wars tells of prisoner abuse, freedom-fighters, massacres, and Aboriginal habitats and villages before and after slaughter and displacement.

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• Yagan When Lieutenant-Governor James Stirling established Western Australia's Swan River colony (later the city of Perth) in 1829, times were tough. Food was scarce and the initially good relations between British settlers and local Noongar people spiralled tragically out of control into a conflict over land and resources. Murdered and cruelly beheaded in 1833 by those he trusted, the return of Yagan's skull to Noongar country was a momentous occasion for Australian Indigenous people nationwide. This is his story.
• Pemulwuy - A War of Two Laws Pemulwuy was a traditional lawman of the Bidgigal clan, the original Woodlands people of Toongabbie and Parramatta in Sydney. When the First Fleet arrived in 1788, Pemulwuy, along with his better-known Bidgigal clansman Bennelong, tried to coexist with the colonists. But Pemulwuy saw the white man breaking his law and he began a 12-year guerrilla war of retribution which almost brought the young colony of New South Wales to its knees.
• They Must Always Consider Us as Enemies This is a hideous story of a land war engaged by the settlers as tribe af ter tribe of Aborigines fought for their territory. A story about native title, genocide and a most unpleasant jolt to our sensibilities.

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Frontier wars

The frontier wars were a series of violent conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While conflicts and skirmishes continued between European land holders and Traditional Owners, the military instrument of the Queensland Government was the Native Police.

The Native Police was a body of Aboriginal troopers that operated under the command of white officers on the Queensland frontier from 1849 to the 1920s. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men were often forcefully recruited from communities—already diminished due to colonisation—that were normally a great distance from the region in which they were to work. They were offered low pay, along with rations, firearms, a uniform and a horse. Many deserted.

Although we will never know exactly how many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were killed during the frontier wars, estimates range from thousands to tens of thousands. Regardless of the number, many First Nations peoples were killed on the land that became known as Queensland.

Queensland State Archives (QSA) holds records that were created or received by Queensland Government departments (sometimes called agencies). The records do not usually express the views of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander peoples.

As the Native Police were a government-directed force, many records relating to their activities and operations are held at QSA. Records relating to individual violence—perpetrated by pastoralists, squatters, miners and Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander peoples—can be found in Courts and Prison series. See below for more information.

QSA does not hold personal or private records such as diaries, journals or private correspondence, nor do we hold newspapers, military records or birth, death or marriage certificates.

Finding records

These records contain graphic content and may cause distress. They include descriptions of violence, racist and offensive language and sexual assault.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are warned that the records may include the names of people who have passed away.

• View a selected annotated list of records relating to frontier wars and the Native Police.
• View selected digitised records on the ArchivesSearch catalogue —many of these records also have transcriptions.
• Read an essay by historian Dr Jonathan Richards on Queensland’s frontier wars, as documented in the state’s archival collection, providing the historical context of the period.

Records relating to frontier violence exist throughout the archival collection, but mostly reside in records created by agencies involved in establishing the Colony of Queensland, and from 1901, the State of Queensland.

Listed below are the main government departments or agencies that have records referring to frontier violence in Queensland. To see the records of these agencies, click on the “Browse created records” button at the bottom of the agency page.

• Executive Council
• Governors’ Despatches
• Colonial Stores
• Department of Works
• Colonial Architect
• Native Police
• Police Commissioner
• Protectors of Aboriginals
• Chief Protector of Aboriginals Office
• Colonial Secretary’s Office
• Home Secretary’s Office
• Police stations
• Mines and Works Department
• Land and Works Department
• Department of Justice .

Note that most of these records have not been digitised. If digitised records are not available, you can  visit us in person to view the original records in person, or  request copies of records.

The main source of Native Police records in each agency reflects that agency’s part in the constitution and operations of colonial law and government.

The  Executive Council files demonstrate the evolution of government policy, and the machinery of control over all branches of the colonial authorities. For instance, the Executive Council approved appointments, dismissals, promotions, retirements, and reductions in rank. Records of the large number of Native Police issues that came before the Executive Council are worth special attention. They tell us which matters were senior appointments, scandals, and dismissals.

The decisions made by the executive arm of the Queensland Government were relayed to the operational forces via the  Colonial Secretary’s Office and the  Commissioner of Police . General orders, memos and staff files are found in the Commissioner’s records.

After separation from New South Wales in 1859, the administration of Aboriginal affairs was transferred to the Queensland Government. The Colonial Secretary’s Office (and from 1896 the  Home Secretary’s Office ) was the main department for this task. The correspondence records of the Colonial Secretary’s Office consist of letters and reports covering a wide range of topics including reports from the Native Police, letters relating to ‘outrages’ committed by traditional owners, and requests for Native Police protection.

The Colonial Secretary’s Office, which functioned as the government’s main co-ordinator of important letters, petitions, and executive decisions, forwarded paperwork on to other agencies, including the Attorney General and the  Justice Department . Justice Department records include dozens of coronial inquests into sudden and violent deaths of Aboriginal people at the hands of the Native Police, along with associated correspondence and court records.

Other sources

• Murders by the Aborigines on the Dawson River, Report from the Select Committee, Legislative Assembly, New South Wales, 1858
• Native Police Force Report, Legislative Assembly, Queensland, 1861
• John Oxley Library at the State Library of Queensland
• State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales
• Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
• The Australian Wars , produced by SBS and Blackfella Films
• The Australian Wars: Evidence from the archives , produced by Queensland State Archives
• Land wars , produced by NITV
• The Queensland Native Mounted Police Research Database: Archaeology on the frontier
• The Native Police of Queensland, History Compass
• Native Police, Queensland History Atlas
• Australian Frontier Conflicts: 1788-1940s
• Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1788 to 1930
• Oscar’s sketchbook, National Museum Australia
• Trove —digitised historical newspapers
• Frontier War Stories
• The Secret War , by Jonathan Richards
• Police of the Pastoral Frontier , by LE Skinner
• Exterminate with Pride , by Bruce Breslin
• Invasion and Resistance , by Noel Loos
• Frontier Lands & Pioneer Legends , by Pamela Lukin Watson
• The Way We Civilise: black and white, the native police,  by Carl Feilberg
• The Other Side of the Frontier , by Henry Reynolds
• Forgotten War , by Henry Reynolds
• Truth-telling , by Henry Reynolds
• This Is What Happened , edited by Luise Hercus and Peter Sutton
• The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838 , by John Connor
• Education, Culture is Life 
• Deadly story—Frontier Wars
• First Fighters: Teaching and Learning Overview, AIATSIS

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• The Healing Foundation

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QSA supports the  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services .

Friday essay: ‘but we already had a treaty’ – Tom Griffiths on a little known 1889 peace accord

Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Tom Griffiths does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and/or images of people who have passed away.

In July 2019, the Queensland Government launched a series of community consultations as part of its Path to Treaty initiative. The then Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships explained that “when Queensland was settled, there was no treaty agreement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first custodians”.

“First Nations peoples,” continued the government statement, “were displaced from their land without any negotiation, resulting in political, economic and social inequalities that continue to this day.” On 11 November 2019, one of 24 public consultations around the state was held in Birdsville in the Channel Country of south-western Queensland.

At the Birdsville meeting to discuss Treaty, Mithaka Elder Betty Gorringe said just one thing from the back of the room: We already had a treaty: the Debney Peace. It’s in Alice’s books.

What was the Debney Peace, when and where was it negotiated, and why is it nationally significant in 21st-century Australia?

And who was Alice?

Harrowing decades of war

In May 1889, after more than two decades of brutal conflict on the Queensland frontier, a five-day peace ceremony was performed on Mithaka Country. It was orchestrated by the Mithaka as part of a traditional regional gathering for initiation ceremonies and drew 500 Aboriginal people from across the Channel Country as well as from the Barcoo and Warrego rivers to the east.

The event became known by settlers as the Debney Peace in honour of the white leaseholder of Monkira Station, George Debney, who helped to organise proceedings. The peace functioned as a negotiated truce in the frontier war, an unwritten agreement solemnised in ritual and ceremony.

On the vast plains of the Channel Country, the Cooper Creek, Diamantina and Georgina rivers flare out into a myriad of braided channels, revealing an intricate web of arteries. It is a boom-and-bust ecosystem, an arid land animated by water flows from elsewhere, a place where monsoonal rain falling hundreds of kilometres away to the north-east periodically floods down dry channels, bringing a spectacular pulse of life to the plains.

The flush of water occasionally reaches all the way to the salt pan of Lake Eyre, a continental rain gauge. More than 500,000 square kilometres in size, the basin is the largest inland draining system in the world. Aboriginal peoples of the region hold up the open palm of their hand to signify the basin; their fingers are the rivers that drain into it.

For tens of thousands of years, people lived in this place. Every tree, rock, dune and channel had a name and a story. Water defined these people. Anthropologist A.P. Elkin said of Aboriginal peoples in the lower Channel Country that

one never asks the name of a person’s camp, ngura, but of his water, kapi. Man is tied from his birth to his death to the rock holes and soaks, and to the tracks between them.

In spite of erratic water, the land sustained permanent habitation. In the early 1900s, after decades of dispossession and war, there were still 13 Aboriginal dialects spoken within 80 kilometres of Mooraberrie, a pastoral station between Windorah and Birdsville.

Journalist George Farwell, in his book Land of Mirage (1950), recorded a settler near Cooper Creek claiming that he used to stand on a hillock and see the flat beyond full of Aboriginal women “as thick as sheep grazing” as they bent over in search of seeds, roots and small bulbs.

This density of population was high for this arid region of Australia, and First Nations peoples lived in communities larger than many outback towns today.

This remote south-western corner of Queensland had been a place of trauma, violence and disruption from the 1860s, accentuated by the ecological extremes. The sheep and cattle of the invading pastoralists destroyed the native grasses and waterholes, and conflict increasingly erupted between Indigenous owners and the newcomers.

By 1875 most of the Diamantina channels were leased to pastoralists and by the early 1880s almost all the Channel Country had been parcelled and claimed for stock. The 1870s and 1880s were harrowing decades of war. There was a long, tense, violent struggle for possession and control of the land and its resources.

First Nations peoples speared cattle and sheep and occasionally killed settlers; the newcomers massacred whole clans in revenge. Mary Durack, whose forebears colonised the Channel Country, wrote that by the mid-1870s

many settlers now openly declared that Western Queensland could only be habitable for whites when the last of the blacks had been killed out – “by bullet or by bait”.

A Native Mounted Police force operated in Queensland for more than 60 years up to 1910 (when, from 1848 to 1859, the area was part of New South Wales, and then a separate colony) and was more lethal than in any other colony.

Historian Jonathan Richards describes this force of mounted Aboriginal troopers led by white officers as a paramilitary organisation, and Raymond Evans calls it a counterinsurgency force. It operated under the direct control of the executive council of the colonial administration and functioned secretively. It was effectively deployed as a death squad.

Read more: How unearthing Queensland's 'native police' camps gives us a window onto colonial violence

Although specific frontier violence was shrouded in silence, many colonists were willing, indeed determined, to speak openly both for and against what was going on. “From what has come within my own knowledge I can believe that the atrocities you have published are true in their general statements,” wrote “Outis” to The Queenslander in June 1880. “We must admit that a war of extermination is waging on all sides.”

He accused the Native Police force of committing “wholescale murder”. The strategy of their detachments was to surround Aboriginal settlements and fire into them at dawn, killing men, women and children; they then burnt the evidence of the bodies.

More than a dozen major massacres are known and remembered in the Channel Country. Most began at waterholes where people gathered and lived, often in large numbers. Some were reprisals for the theft of cattle, while others were provoked by the Aboriginal execution of lone white men who raped Black women. The Native Mounted Police were generally involved.

Large ceremonial gatherings were targeted and death tolls from single events could total more than a hundred, even up to 200. The waterholes – the precious jewels of the arid country – were transformed into a grim roll-call of places of death.

Sometimes the conflict seemed to challenge the very possibility of long-term European settlement of the Channel Country. By 1885, leases forfeited were nearly as numerous as runs leased for the first time, and by 1890 fewer than one in five of those who had initially leased runs remained.

Aboriginal labour had also become essential to the white pastoral economy. As Mithaka survivors dealt with long-term British pastoralism on their lands, they also proved indispensable to the newcomers. Most Channel Country pastoralists could not have stayed on their land without the cheap labour of the locals.

The invading pastoralists, although very strange in many of their customs, had characteristics that were recognisable to the original inhabitants. The whites were nomadic, prized waterholes, had ties of kinship with their white neighbours and ran an economy centred on the management of animals over wide territories.

First Nations peoples often advised where homesteads should be built to avoid periodic flooding, counselled on signs of drought and rain, and knew where to find water. Work on the stations, both pastoral and domestic, relied on them heavily. They were the best riders and horse breakers, proficient at mustering and knew where to seek straying cattle.

But they were paid little or nothing and generally received scant rations of food and clothing instead of wages. They suffered from introduced diseases and the effects of alcohol and opium, and on some stations Black women were coerced into sexual servitude to white workers. The economic and social dependence of remote European pastoralism on unpaid and exploited Aboriginal workers remained long unrecognised in Australian histories.

In remote regions where the land was so vigorously contested and where a cheap Aboriginal workforce underpinned the economy, local agreements were sometimes made between European pastoralists and First Nations peoples.

And occasionally, in attempts to keep wholesale slaughter at bay, broader regional settlements were reached. A negotiated truce – a ceremonial accord – could offer some kind of future for both sides. All of this led to the Debney Peace.

Frontier warfare and vengeance parties

George Leonard Debney (1843–1908) was a tall, bearded man with blue eyes, personal charisma and a dignified bearing. He arrived in the Channel Country about a decade after Patsy Durack and John Costello had established their stations on Cooper Creek. When Debney became managing partner of Monkira Station on the Diamantina in 1879, he already had experience of frontier warfare.

In 1868, following a spate of sheep stealing at Mundowdna Station in north-eastern South Australia, Debney and his partner John Woodforde were involved in what the South Australian Register called a “serious native affray”. After a struggle, the pastoralists shot two Aboriginal men, whose bodies were carried away by their countrymen; the station homestead was burnt to the ground as a retaliatory action.

Lacking bodies of the victims and judging that the white men fired in self-defence, the government did not pursue proceedings. Debney thus had personal insight into the cost of occupation without negotiation. “Where you don’t see any blacks is where they are sure to be and thickest,” he would say.

When Debney and his family arrived to live at Monkira in the early 1880s, they encountered stern resistance from the locals. “The Murranuddas”, as the local Mithaka clan was called, were renowned as a fierce and assertive people and on several occasions they subjected the homestead to siege.

Detachments of Aboriginal warriors, known as the “storm birds” and “dingo men”, conducted guerrilla-style warfare against the pastoralists of the region.

Debney, learning from his earlier experience, became a respected mediator of conflict, helped sick Aboriginal people and was once “an honoured guest of a fierce war-like tribe” when he was injured while mustering alone. It soon became apparent to Debney “that the head men of the tribes would have to be got together”.

Debney had been a Justice of the Peace and a court magistrate in South Australia before coming to the Channel Country, and in 1884 he was sworn in as a JP at Monkira. This meant that he had a formal role as a “protector” of the Aboriginal peoples of his region. By 1887 his acquisition of Monkira was complete and he probably wished to secure its future.

With the help of Barralong, a Monkira stockman, he began two years of consultations with First Nations leaders, including two he had known for many years: Winjan of the Eaglehawks and Knuppa-pip-pa Budgeree of the Wonkamurras.

Debney was worried that further unrest would bring the attention of the Native Mounted Police and that they “would set upon the myalls and shoot them down like wild dogs”. The Mithaka shared his fear: in early 1888, during a “great commotion” at Mooraberrie Station, it was reported that “the blacks here have a wholesome dread of the black troopers”.

The local Native Police force was led by a man of Debney’s age, Robert Kyle Little (1841–1889), an Irishman who had served in the British Army in the Crimean War and established the first Native Police camp on Eyre Creek (the Mulligan River) at Bedourie in the early 1880s.

It was Little who led a vengeance party at Cooninghera Waterhole when the head of a cook was found in a camp oven following the rape of Black women.

As later told to George Farwell and reported in Land of Mirage, Little “chased the whole tribe all over the country, overtaking the first of them six miles from the waterhole, where they were shot out of hand”.

Little killed others at Coongie Lake and more still at Coonchere sandhill. This was the representative of white law with whom George Debney and other Channel Country pastoralists had to work.

The Debney Peace settlement

In May 1888, Senior Inspector Little wrote from Eyre Creek to the commissioner justifying his job on the remote edge of settlement and confirming the Native Mounted Police were “still very much required out here”. He argued that

Should the N.M. Police be removed it would be the old story over again; outrages by the blacks and retaliation from the Squatter.

Inspector Little died suddenly of “sunstroke” or “heat apoplexy” in Birdsville in January 1889. But, according to local oral history, he had already given the nod to Debney’s consultations with Indigenous leaders.

This was crucial, for a successful regional peace depended on the assent of the Native Police. It’s unlikely, however, that Little mentioned the negotiations in official reports (which were, in any case, deliberately destroyed by government in 1939): it was not in his interest to record any “peace settlement”.

His duty was to clear the country. Furthermore, sanctioning such negotiations may have constituted official recognition of a state of war, which would have been unacceptable to the Crown. Nor did pastoralists want to advertise the event, for any willingness to negotiate with the land’s original owners could have suggested weakness – or even acknowledgement of their rights.

To be effective, the Debney Peace needed to be known among First Nations peoples, a select group of local pastoralists and the leadership of the Native Mounted Police. But otherwise it would not be for public report. This is why knowledge of the event survives only in the early oral history recorded “in Alice’s books”.

‘Alice’s books’: a rich ethnographic source

I was 14 when I came across one of “Alice’s books” in a library. The dusty volume was sitting unobtrusively on a shelf of “Australiana”, but it looked different to its companions and immediately attracted me.

Even its title was mysterious: Where Strange Paths Go Down . The book described happy childhood memories of warmth and companionship with Aboriginal women and men at home on their own country. I was drawn into its glowing stories, and the compelling strangeness of the book stayed with me.

Its author, Alice Duncan (later Duncan-Kemp) , was born in 1901, the year the Australian colonies federated. She grew up on Mithaka Country. Her parents, William and Laura Duncan, managed the pastoral property known as Mooraberrie on Farrars Creek west of Windorah, where they employed Mithaka men and women at the homestead and in the paddocks. William Duncan (1858–1907) emigrated from Scotland as a young man, worked in western NSW and arrived in the Diamantina in the late 1880s about the time of the Debney Peace.

Knowledge of the agreement may have encouraged him to take on the run: George Debney was a near neighbour and friend. Winjan, the Elder who knew Debney, showed Duncan where he could safely site his homestead. In 1898 Duncan married Laura Davis from Parramatta, the daughter of a Sydney solicitor whose sister had married another neighbouring pastoralist, Allen Alexander of Daroo Station.

As an amateur ethnologist, William was fascinated by the history of human migration and took a strong and sympathetic interest in the people whose lands he had usurped.

Alice remembered that her father believed it to be “an uncontestable fact that Aborigines are the rightful owners” of the land on which they lived, and it was his habit to refer to Mithaka Elders as “the landlords”.

Mithaka people determined which sections of the property were accessible at particular seasons, and when cultural considerations should prevail over pastoral routines; they advised on the life cycle of grasses and forecast the weather. They built the homestead, established the garden, cleaned the house and lived nearby in a settlement by the creek. At grace before dinner the Duncan family gave thanks to “white pioneers, black saviours”.

Alice had an older brother, David (“Poppy”), who died of diphtheria aged four, and two little sisters, Laura and Beatrice. In 1907 her father died prematurely from an illness exacerbated by a fall from his horse. Alice, together with her sisters, was nursed, cared for and tutored by Mithaka people.

She was made welcome at the “kindergartens” of her young Mithaka playmates and absorbed everything they were taught. Soon she was writing it down, for she picked up pen and paper from an early age and always carried a notebook. Young Alice was a gatherer of facts and asked questions endlessly to clarify matters. As an older child she joined mustering journeys for weeks and spent days in the saddle and nights by the campfire listening to the yarning of Elders Black and white.

Her beloved companions and teachers were Mary Ann Coomindah, head of the homestead domestic staff, Moses Yoolpee, a stockman, gardener and tracker with some European schooling, and Bogie, a stockman and rainmaker who had survived a massacre at Kaliduwarry as a teenager in the late 1870s.

‘Twice-born’

Alice’s Mithaka teachers regarded her as “twice-born”. At the age of two, she had survived an accident while crossing the flooded Bulloo River with her father and two Mithaka stockmen. The stockmen, Wooragai (Chookie) and Bogie, struggled to get the buggy and horses (one of which was badly injured) onto dry land before lighting a small fire and beginning a sacred chant.

The Mithaka believed that the accident revealed Alice as a reincarnation of a powerful spirit, the appearance of whom they had been awaiting. When Alice was a little older, her nurse, Mary Ann, took her to Kulkia, a flat-topped hill, where her Mithaka teachers were gathered at a small fire within a circle of white stones.

They inscribed Alice’s forehead with ochre and touched her with the heated stone tip of a naming spear, giving her the name Pinningarra (the Leaf Spirit). She was presented with a small, thin spear made of acacia, pointed at both ends, which Alice treasured. It remains in the Duncan-Kemp family today, a beautiful object. For the rest of her life, Alice bore a faint burn scar on her left breast from the naming ceremony.

Alice grew up with a feeling of deep gratitude, respect and love for her Mithaka teachers. These years of cross-cultural learning were the most important of her life and she spent the next 60 years remembering and celebrating her unusual education. As well as becoming a farmer, wife and mother, Alice (who married Fred Kemp) was a writer – and her subject was the Mithaka people she had known and loved as a child and young woman.

She wrote four books: Our Sandhill Country (1933), Where Strange Paths Go Down (1952), Our Channel Country (1961) and Where Strange Gods Call (1968). A further manuscript, People of the Grey Wind: Life with a Stone Age People , was published posthumously by her family in 2005. All her published writing was autobiographical non-fiction relating to the first 20 years of her life at Mooraberrie.

She had lived in a kind of “wonderland”, a world animated by the parallel universe of Mithaka stories and traditions. In her memoirs, she chose an Aboriginal style of storytelling: “I have always tried to tell and to write things as they themselves would have told it.”

Her narrative style of interwoven journeys and memories, rendered in vivid detail, led many readers and scholars over the years to believe that she was fictionalising her experience and inventing characters and encounters.

As an outback woman – a writer, a sympathiser with Aboriginal spirituality and a pastoralist memorialising the frontier in rather a different way – Alice found that her books could make people uncomfortable or confused. There has been a steady stream of disparagement of her work, from white locals believing that “a bloody woman had no right to be able to get the material” to a senior academic dismissing Alice’s work with hardly a glance at it.

One reviewer labelled her narratives “tall stories”, saying that it was “impossible to take many of them seriously”.

Frontier denialism

In 2018, the commissioned historians of the Barcoo Shire – in a book entitled Their Promised Land – dismissed Alice’s evidence because she was “only a child or a very young woman” when she had her Mithaka education, and added that Aboriginal people were not in any case capable of the kind of defence of Country that Duncan-Kemp described. This is Australian frontier denialism at work.

To accept Alice’s testimony is to confront the tragic scale of the human loss that accompanied violence and dispossession on the Queensland frontier .

There is so much cultural material in Alice’s books that it is easier to dismiss them as “colourful” or “fanciful” than to understand them. The very detail of her account saw people assume she embroidered or imagined it. How could official records describe a people as “miserable, tattered remnants” while this woman remembered a rich cultural and religious life still in existence?

It was possible for both to be true, as anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner found in the Daly River in the 1930s and 1950s, and as is becoming still clearer across the continent through the resilience of Indigenous ceremonial life and belief systems in the face of trauma and dispossession. Duncan-Kemp reveals a violent frontier where cross-cultural learning and compassion were still possible, where there was joy among the darkness. Alice’s books have also attracted champions.

Read more: Friday essay: the 'great Australian silence' 50 years on

Many contemporaries admired her work – A.P. Elkin, Charles Barrett, Charles Mountford, Nan Chauncy, Olaf Ruhen and Nina Durack, for example. The greatest contemporary tribute came from Dr Lindsey Winterbotham (1887–1960), a doctor of medicine who became the honorary Curator of Anthropology at the University of Queensland. Winterbotham solicited Aboriginal information and artefacts from around the state and corresponded with Alice from 1948 to 1957. He asked her:

Do you realise that the different letters that you have written to me in past times have contained the fullest and most scientific knowledge that I have received from any correspondent?

Dr Winterbotham made Alice a foundation member of the Anthropological Society of Queensland, read her books and asked her questions, to which she replied seriously and at length. He read out her letters at Anthropological Society meetings and submitted her material (under their joint names) for publication in the journal Mankind . Alice’s “scientific” letters to Winterbotham are consistent with the stories in her books.

Scholars who have since looked at Duncan-Kemp’s work in detail – historians Pamela Lukin Watson and Yvette Steinhauer and anthropologists Tony Jefferies and Paul Gorecki – have come away humbled and impressed. Linguist Luise Hercus , at first suspicious of Alice’s unsystematic recording, found herself increasingly respectful of her knowledge.

Alice’s descriptions of plants and animals have won the regard of desert scientists, and she is one of Australia’s most significant and exuberant nature writers, recently celebrated in Luke Stegemann’s Amnesia Road (2021). Crucially, the Federal Court of Australia considered the evidence of her books in its Native Title consent determination for the Mithaka people in 2015.

In my own engagement with the Duncan-Kemp books and papers, I have tested Alice’s stories by seeking parallel sources and have concluded that she rarely invented substantive detail. In other words, she felt a sacred responsibility to record the stories of her Mithaka teachers accurately. Caution in interpreting her work is warranted: Alice did occasionally paraphrase other authors and sometimes drew without acknowledgement on sources beyond her region.

But overwhelmingly, her testimony was from personal experience. I have thus become open to the exciting truthfulness of her memoir – one tinged by innocence and nostalgia and prey to the glitches of memory, but faithfully told. A precious possibility emerges that Alice’s books comprise one of the richest ethnographic sources Australia possesses.

She was an oral historian of both Black and white lore at a time of tragic transformation. She relied on the yarning of homestead visitors as well as the stories of the Mithaka families; she asked questions of everyone and wrote it all down from an early age.

Far from being disadvantaged by her youth, she was given unusual privileges in terms of access and cultural permission and absorbed everything with the enduring clarity of childhood. Her father told local stories at night in the homestead and after his death she had access to his journals, since destroyed by other members of her family.

These were the sources of her account of the Debney Peace and the reasons she could write vividly of an event that took place a dozen years before her birth.

The peace ceremony in detail

In a chapter that occupies ten pages of Our Channel Country, Alice describes The Debney Peace:

Debney, alone and unarmed, guided by an old man of the Eaglehawks, moved silently across to the waterhole and out on to a rising slope of sandstone. Here, screened with a light break of brush-willow boughs, burned a fire, and beside it lay bundles of aboriginal tools and weapons. This was the “peace” place or dhooraba (altar), and the white man stood, as aboriginal etiquette demanded of strangers, a little distance back from the fireside. The white man stood watching the great Mulka-mukana (peace) ceremony, watched the procession five hundred strong march across the claypan … At the head of the Eaglehawks strode Winjan, and with him came Knuppa-pip-pa Budgeree of the Wonkamurras … There was dead silence as Debney stooped to pluck a lighted brand from the fire and hand it to Knuppa-pip-pa Budgeree, taking his torch in exchange.

Although the pastoralists named the peace after one of their own, it was chiefly orchestrated by First Nations peoples. Alice records the name of the ceremony as “Mulka-mukana, the vow of peace and the seal of goodwill”.

Linguist David Nash believes that the term draws on the Karnic (Eyre Basin) language stems of malka (“mark” or “sign”) and muka (“sleep”) and he regards Alice’s translation as plausible. The ritual was grafted onto an event in the existing Aboriginal calendar, a large five-day gathering for initiation ceremonies.

Debney had to ride 60 miles to participate in it. The ceremony was held not on his station but on a tract of country with special significance for Aboriginal peoples of the region – the “Common Ground” or “neutral territory” of the Pharmaleechie Channel. The location chosen had special status as “a sort of buffer state” or “diplomatic immunity area”, as Alice described it to Dr Winterbotham.

Mithaka stories recorded by Alice tell of this site’s significance as neutral ground in pre-contact times when a council was formed to negotiate ancient tribal rivalries and land was set aside as “a hunting ground and meeting place for all but permanent home to none”.

It was an Indigenous event with few if any European features. There were no documents, signatures or gifts, but there was fire, smoke, singing and stamping, a blaze of torches, an illuminated procession through a natural arch of four great gum trees, an exchange of burning torches, a corroboree and the ritual letting of blood.

The performance featured the sudden arrival of 200 armed men from “a strange tribe” who were solemnly greeted before they circled the fire and laid down their spears. Debney “took their spears and carefully arranged them in order of tribal precedence, each in its correct totemic group”.

In this, the white man played his allocated role. It is likely that the peace festival was as much about relationships between the various First Nations communities as it was about dealing with the white intruders. Debney knew several Aboriginal languages and had long been interested in Indigenous lore about plants and animals, but he was out of his depth that night in the shadows and firelight of the sandhills.

Contemporaries and local historians acknowledged 1889 as a turning point in frontier conflict in the region, seeing it as the year when widespread violence ceased, without mentioning or knowing about the peace.

What if Mithaka people had demanded a written document as well as their traditional verbal and ceremonial formalities? Alice belatedly provided one. Her written record is a significant inscription and reminds us that there may be others out there to be rediscovered.

Read more: Indigenous treaties are meaningless without addressing the issue of sovereignty

Treaties and sovereignty

The idea of Treaty goes to the heart of the moral and legal anxieties that underlie the Australian nation. The Debney Peace was not explicitly about sovereignty, or even about land, although its location did recognise and consolidate a specific area of neutrality and safety. It was an unadvertised peace in an undeclared war. The peace was an act of desperation by both parties, designed to save lives and livelihoods. Peace-making was one of the purposes of treaties.

The only documented “treaty” in Australian history – John Batman’s two signed deeds with Kulin peoples at Port Phillip in 1835 – was a private contract quickly disowned by government. Although Batman used the term “treaty” and Aboriginal leaders such as William Barak and William Cooper later reinforced the significance of that word, the 1835 agreements were not prosecuted on behalf of the Crown.

In his book Possession (2009), Bain Attwood beautifully analyses the legal confusion about British sovereignty in relation to Aboriginal peoples, especially in this period, when the Port Phillip Association made their attempt at land purchase and called it a “treaty”.

A government treaty with Indigenous peoples would have had implications for sovereignty and raised questions about whether the frontier was a theatre of war. As Raymond Evans has explained in his forensic histories of the Queensland frontier, declaring war would have meant recognising Indigenous peoples as invaded sovereign peoples rather than as “British subjects” whose resistance could be legally defined as criminal.

But an undeclared war, if pursued secretly, could proceed without regard to the conventions of war. There was no need to respect protocols about prisoners and certainly no place for truces or treaties. In Queensland a secret war was waged until a district could be declared “quiet”.

In this way, the title of Douglas Pike’s history of Australia, The Quiet Continent (1962), published a decade before Aboriginal history made an impact on scholarship, now has a sinister ring to it.

In his recent book, Truth-Telling , Henry Reynolds has argued that when the British chose not to pursue treaty-making in Australia (as they did, for example, in New Zealand and Canada) they laid the ground for a much more violent frontier and brought about many more Indigenous deaths.

Not to consider treaties was, he suggests, a “radical departure from accustomed colonial practice”. It was a policy that generated conditions where tensions could only be relieved by violence and where any accommodations or agreements had to be private and unacknowledged. Reynolds concludes that such agreements probably took place all over the country, but “most of them have been lost to the historical record”.

Read more: Friday essay: it's time for a new museum dedicated to the fighters of the frontier wars

The Debney Peace joins a long lineage of formal appeals to the invaders since 1788: petitions on bark and paper, parliamentary pilgrimages and performances, Rom ceremonies, respectful pleas, dialogues, conferences, promises, campaigns, statements, reckonings, conciliations and makarratas that have been patiently prosecuted across more than 200 years.

It was distinct in that it sought to put an end to devastating violence, as its name conveys. Colonial conquest did not happen in an instant with the raising of a flag; it was incremental, resisted, sometimes negotiated and forever unfinished.

Visiting Mooraberrie, and Mithaka Country

I first visited Mooraberrie in 2000 and again in 2009, soon after the Kidman pastoral company acquired the property from the Duncans and before the Native Title determination for the Mithaka people in 2015. I was moved to finally see this landscape about which Alice had written so passionately, but I had to look at it out of the corner of my eye. Every historical fact and insight had to be gained against the inclination of the landholders.

Kidman’s managers were suspicious of my interest in First Nations histories. I learnt that the historic pisé homestead built by the Mithaka had recently been bulldozed into the creek, and the homestead collection of Indigenous artefacts had been thrown out. The managers had never heard of Alice, whose family had lived there for more than a century. I later posted them a first edition of Our Sandhill Country for their station collection so that the book could come home again.

When, in 2009, I visited neighbouring Bedourie, I was surprised that the little settlement’s good collection of local books and histories did not include any by Alice Duncan-Kemp. But the omission was national as well as local. In 1987 The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia recognised only one writer from the Channel Country: the drover Barcroft Boake , who visited south-western Queensland for a few months in 1889 and wrote one poem called Where the Dead Men Lie about a desolate, uninhabited wasteland. Duncan-Kemp’s half-million published words on a populated landscape were not mentioned.

In 2019 I made a very different visit to Mooraberrie. I was invited to return by the general manager of the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, Josh Gorringe , and this time I was working as part of a research team led by Mithaka people and the archaeologist Michael Westaway of the University of Queensland.

Read more: Friday essay: how our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu's idea of Aboriginal 'agriculture' and villages

Our aim was to bring Mithaka memories together with ethnographic, historical and archaeological evidence to identify significant story places. It was a joy to be on Country with Mithaka people. They welcomed my questions and we talked constantly of the history of the land. They have fought all their lives to retain and rebuild their connection with it.

I had Alice’s books with me and we talked about them too. One day we investigated a vast stone quarry site, mapped it with drones and walked some of its 15 hectares. There were artefacts as far as I could see, large and small – flakes, cores, blanks, choppers, knives, chips and grind- stones, broken and perfect, stacked up like dry-stone walls metres high, an industrial-scale production site.

Some white locals still explain this stunning feature as the result of “a meteor shower”. But these millstone quarries were part of an “Indigenous Silk Road” – dynamic factories at the centre of a vast transcontinental trade exchanging grindstones for pituri (a plant that is a stimulant), ochre, fibre and resin, songs and dances.

Archaeological work by Michael Westaway and his team is confirming the high-density populations described by Alice and finding signatures of peoples poised between the hyper-productivity of flood years and the lean economy of an otherwise dry, hard land.

On a gentle rise near this quarry were stone arrangements and lines of cobbles where strange paths go down. It is exhilarating to work from book to earth, translating words on the page into features of the landscape. As we walked the strange paths, Michael confided to me: “It’s a bit like Heinrich Schliemann reading the Iliad and finding Troy.”

This was the story of an amateur archaeologist named Schliemann who turned Homer’s Trojan War of legend into material, historical reality in 1871 when, with the Iliad in hand, he went in search of the great sites of the Greek Bronze Age and found Troy. The classical reference beautifully conveys the significance of books in our quest. Like Homer, Alice distilled the oral histories of generations.

One evening at dusk as we sat in a circle in the tall iron farm shed, Michael read aloud Alice’s account of the Debney Peace. I marvelled that her words had returned to this place of origin and that we were commemorating, with Mithaka people, an event that took place 130 years earlier.

The next day Josh Gorringe gunned his four-wheel drive over the red sandhills to the Pharmaleechie Channel in search of the ceremony site. The place we found was where Alice said it would be: a majestic setting with a stone arrangement at the foot of a knoll next to a flat-topped mesa, with a waterhole nearby and a claypan large enough for a gathering of 500.

What took place here on this ancient common ground in the late 19th century left a firm fossil imprint in the drifts of the sandhill country. The Debney Peace made possible the continued presence of Mithaka people on their land in a time of war, created the conditions for cross-cultural conversations on Mooraberrie and enabled the education of young Alice.

Much tragedy and loss followed – people were exploited for labour, ravaged by the influenza pandemic of 1919 and forcibly removed by government in 1901 and 1932. But a diaspora of Mithaka families clung on to Country and won Native Title determination, drawing in part on the rich evidence in Alice’s books, the gift of her beloved teachers.

We stood together there – and stand together in this place today – because the promise of the peace fire was, in this mysterious way, realised.

Author’s note: I would like to thank the Gorringe family, the Duncan-Kemp family, the Debney family and the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation for their strong support for this research. I also thank Michael Westaway, Trish FitzSimons, Grace Karskens, Tim Rowse, David Nash, Paul Gorecki and David Trigger – and Dawn Duncan-Kemp (1932-2021) for her dedication in preserving the archive of her mother-in-law, Alice.

This essay was originally published in Griffith Review 76 Acts of Reckoning .

Kirrenderri, Heart of the Channel Country, an exhibition on Mithaka history and culture is currently open at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum and will be touring regional Australia.

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Why Australia needs a national Frontier Wars museum

• 16 September 2021

The Australian Frontier Wars were fought from 1788 to the 1930s between the First Nations people of this land and an invading coalition of white settlers, militia, police, and colonial soldiers. Respected Australian historian Professor Henry Reynolds has estimated that in total the conflict claimed between 20,000 to 30,000 Aboriginal lives and the lives of between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans. Recent research suggests this number could be even higher with Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted–Jensen from the University of Queensland suggesting that the number of casualties could be at least 60,000 in Queensland alone. This was undoubtedly a defining conflict in the history of this country.

However, despite the undeniable significance of the Frontier wars to our shared history, there has been little to no official recognition of these conflicts.

In the absence of such leadership, a growing number of communities are now taking it upon themselves to commemorate their own local histories. Notable examples include Myall Creek, Appin, Coniston, One Tree Hill and Elliston where annual ceremonies are held and monuments now stand to somberly and respectfully remember the blood spilt in the Frontier wars.

Although these local commemorations are undoubtably promising and encouraging, the truth telling process remains limited due to the lack of political will at Federal, State and Local levels of government to remember our first war in any meaningful way. The ongoing refusal of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to acknowledge the Frontier Wars is emblematic of this.

Despite a general consensus amongst military historians that the Frontier Wars indeed demonstrated all the characteristics of a war and should be categorized as such, there remains a distinct lack of political leadership on this issue.

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The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

By Frederick J. Turner, 1893

Editor's Note: Please note, this is a short version of the essay subsequently published in Turner's essay collection, The Frontier in American History (1920). This text is closer to the original version delivered at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, published in Annual Report of the American Historical Association , 1893, pp. 197–227.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” 1 So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Prof. von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the “settled area” of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness; but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.

Stages of Frontier Advance

In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the “fall line,” and the tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half of the eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed the Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the first quarter of the century. 2 Gov. Spotswood, of Virginia, made an expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. 3 The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats. 4 In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement. Settlements had begun on New River, a branch of the Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad. 5 The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763, 6 forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled. 7 When the first census was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near the coast of Maine, and included New England except a portion of Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and eastern Georgia. 8 Beyond this region of continuous settlement were the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio, with the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important character to the frontier. The isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American tendencies, and the need of transportation facilities to connect it with the East called out important schemes of internal improvement, which will be noted farther on. The “West,” as a self-conscious section, began to evolve.

From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred. By the census of 1820, 9 the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded Indian areas, and the management of these tribes became an object of political concern. The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor’s American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade, 10 and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements. 11

The rising steam navigation 12 on western waters, the opening of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton 13 culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: “It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress.” 14

In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country. 15 Minnesota and Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions, 16 but the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners, and in Oregon, and the settlements in Utah. 17 As the frontier has leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains needed means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the far West. The United States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory.

By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.

In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: The “fall line;” the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri, where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.

The Frontier Furnishes a Field for Comparative Study of Social Development

At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the “prim little townships of Sleswick” for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers. 18 He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Rockies, 19 and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new States has found in the older ones material for its constitutions. 20 Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed farther on.

But with all these similarities there are essential differences, due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historian’s labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there result a more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.

Loria, 21 the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications. “America,” he says, “has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history.” There is much truth in this. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from west to east we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system. 22 This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the “range” had attracted the cattle-herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing manufacture, is a State with varied agricultural interests. But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain-raising, like North Dakota at the present time.

Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas and changes? 23

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, far trader, miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and the farmer’s frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders’ pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader’s birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.

The Indian Trader’s Frontier

Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the trader’s frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery, The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected, even plainer for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and Clarke, 24 Fremont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased fire-arms—a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. “The savages,” wrote La Salle, “take better care of us French than of their own children; from us only can they get guns and goods.” This accounts for the trader’s power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indians increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was dominated by its trading frontier; English colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Duquesne to the Iroquois, “Are you ignorant of the difference between the king of England and the king of France? Go see the forts that our king has established and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night.”

And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this because the trader’s “trace;” the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the South, the far West, and the Dominion of Canada. 25 The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburg, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. 26

The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany congress of 1754, called to treat with the Six Nations, and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous cooperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.

The Rancher’s Frontier

It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the eighteenth century found the “cowpens” among the canebrakes and peavine pastures of the South, and the “cow drivers” took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. 27 Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market. 28 The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the rancher’s frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.

The Farmer’s Frontier

The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer’s frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts.

The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement. 29 In this connection mention should also be made of the Government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clarke. 30 Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance.

Salt Springs

In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn 31 has traced the effect of salt upon early European development, and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration. A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752, Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina, “They will require salt & other necessaries which they can neither manufacture nor raise. Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles distant * * * Or else they must go to Boling’s Point in Va on a branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here * * * Or else they must go down the Roanoke—I know not how many miles—where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear.” 32 This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast. 33 This proved to be an important educational influence, since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky, and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.

From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard, a new order of Americanism arose. The West and the East began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains kept connection with the rear and had a certain solidarity. But the overmountain men grew more and more independent. The East took a narrow view of American advance, and nearly lost these men. Kentucky and Tennessee history bears abundant witness to the truth of this statement. The East began to try to hedge and limit westward expansion. Though Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics, yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer’s frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. Daniel Boone, the great backwoodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle-raiser, farmer, and surveyor—learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands on the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians, left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader whose posts were on the Red River in Kentucky of its game and rich pastures, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and his party are said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Col. A. J. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the Government. Kit Carson’s mother was a Boone. 34 Thus this family epitomizes the backwoodsman’s advance across the continent.

The farmer’s advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck’s New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage:

Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a “truck patch.” The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or “deadened,” and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the “lord of the manor.” With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he “breaks for the high timber,” “clears out for the New Purchase,” or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.

The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, court-houses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on.

A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.

The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the west. Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners. 35

Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward.

Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for.

Composite Nationality

First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early colonial days. The Scotch Irish and the Palatine Germans, or “Pennsylvania Dutch,” furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier. Governor Spottswood of Virginia writes in 1717, “The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants, and, being out of their time, settle themselves where laud is to be taken up and that will produce the necessarys of life with little labour.” 36 Very generally these redemptioners were of non-English stock. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality or characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. Burke and other writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania 37 was “threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners, and perhaps even inclinations.” The German and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the South were only less great. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their colonization. 38 Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also English.

Industrial Independence

In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food. Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, writes in the middle of the eighteenth century: “Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills we could gather from other places for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with, which are settled with very industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us.” 39 Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumer’s wharfs, and carry away staple crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for what Washington called “the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.”

Effects on National Legislation

The legislation which most developed the powers of the National Government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the civil war slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst (to take an example) in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title “Constitutional History of the United States.” The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his History of the United States since the compromise of 1850, has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle.

This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects. Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward. 40 But the West was not content with bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay—“Harry of the West”—protective tariffs were passed, with the cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier.

The Public Domain

The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the Government. The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the ordinance of 1787, need no discussion. 41 Administratively the frontier called out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the General Government. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: “In 1789 the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the States.”

When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with the frontier. The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. John Quincy Adams was obliged to confess: “My own system of administration, which was to make the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing internal improvement, has failed.” The reason is obvious; a system of administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Adams states the situation as follows: “The slaveholders of the South have bought the cooperation of the western country by the bribe of the western lands, abandoning to the new Western States their own proportion of the public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands into their own hands.” Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. At the same time he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both Houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, 1832, formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the States in which the lands are situated. 42

“No subject,” said Henry Clay, “which has presented itself to the present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of greater magnitude than that of the public lands.” When we consider the far-reaching effects of the Government’s land policy upon political, economic, and social aspects of American life, we are disposed to agree with him. But this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson. Said Senator Scott of Indiana in 1841: “I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers.”

National Tendencies of the Frontier

It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements—the American system of the nationalizing Whig party—was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs. But it was not merely in legislative action that the frontier worked against the sectionalism of the coast. The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had closer resemblances to the Middle region than to either of the other sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed-plot of frontier emigration, and, although she passed on her settlers along the Great Valley into the west of Virginia and the Carolinas, yet the industrial society of these Southern frontiersmen was always more like that of the Middle region than like that of the tide-water portion of the South, which later came to spread its industrial type throughout the South.

The Middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an open door to all Europe. The tide-water part of the South represented typical Englishmen, modified by a warm climate and servile labor, and living in baronial fashion on great plantations; New England stood for a special English movement—Puritanism. The Middle region was less English than the other sections. It had a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local government, a varied economic life, many religious sects. In short, it was a region mediating between New England and the South, and the East and the West. It represented that composite nationality which the contemporary United States exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English groups, occupying a valley or a little settlement, and presenting reflections of the map of Europe in their variety. It was democratic and nonsectional, if not national; “easy, tolerant, and contented;” rooted strongly in material prosperity. It was typical of the modern United States. It was least sectional, not only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way. 43

The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally broke down the contrast between the “tide-water” region and the rest of the State, and based Southern interests on slavery. Before this process revealed its results the western portion of the South, which was akin to Pennsylvania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to fall away from the faith of the fathers into internal improvement legislation and nationalism. In the Virginia convention of 1829–30, called to revise the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water counties, declared:

One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention, that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal car.

It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the war of 1812, the West of Clay, and Benton, and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a solidarity of its own with national tendencies. 44 On the tide of the Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a nation. Interstate migration went steadily on—a process of cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: “I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the other.” Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effects reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World.

Growth of Democracy

But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, 45 has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.

The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and with all of its evil elements. 46 An interesting illustration of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention already referred to. A representative from western Virginia declared:

But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians; and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and uncontaminated.

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as it benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency. 47 The West in the war of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of States. Thus each one of the periods of lax financial integrity coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers, for the most part. The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest importance. 48

Attempts to Check and Regulate the Frontier

The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic tributaries and allowed the “savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade should decrease.” This called out Burke’s splendid protest:

If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence, “Increase and multiply.” Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater Virginia 49 and South Carolina 50 gerrymandered those colonies to insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana purchase north of the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. “When we shall be full on this side,” he writes, “we may lay off a range of States on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply.” Madison went so far as to argue to the French minister that the United States had no interest in seeing population extend itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it. When the Oregon question was under debate, in 1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond the Mississippi, complaining that the seaboard States were being drained of the flower of their population by the bringing of too much land into market. Even Thomas Becton, the man of widest views of the destiny of the West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the Rocky mountains “the western limits of the Republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down.” 51 But the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World.

Missionary Activity

The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier came through its educational and religious activity, exerted by interstate migration and by organized societies. Speaking in 1835, Dr. Lyman Beecher declared: “It is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West,” and he pointed out that the population of the West “is assembled from all the States of the Union and from all the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the waters of the flood, demanding for its moral preservation the immediate and universal action of those institutions which discipline the mind and arm the conscience, and the heart. And so various are the opinions and habits, and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse are the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost perfection and power. A nation is being ‘born in a day.’ * * * But what will become of the West if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind and the conscience and the heart of that vast world. It must not be permitted. * * * Let no man at the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West. * * * Her destiny is our destiny.” 52

With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West. The dread of Western emancipation from New England’s political and economic control was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her religion. Commenting in 1850 on reports that settlement was rapidly extending northward in Wisconsin, the editor of the Home Missionary writes: “We scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements. While we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country, we can not forget that with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less.” Acting in accordance with such ideas, home missions were established and Western colleges were erected. As seaboard cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of Western trade, so the various denominations strove for the possession of the West. Thus an intellectual stream from New England sources fertilized the West. Other sections sent their missionaries; but the real struggle was between sects. The contest for power and the expansive tendency furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier must have had important results on the character of religious organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which needs study.

Intellectual Traits

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; 53 that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Since the meeting of the American Historical Association, this paper has also been given as an address to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893. I have to thank the Secretary of the Society, Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites, for securing valuable material for my use in the preparation of the paper.

1. Abridgment of Debates of Congress, v., p. 706.

2. Bancroft (1860 ed.), III, pp. 344, 345, citing Logan MSS.; [Mitchell] Contest in America, etc. (1752), p. 237.

3. Kercheval, History of the Valley; Bernheim, German Settlements in the Carolinas; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, V, p. 304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, IV, p. xx; Weston, Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, p. 82; Ellis and Evans, History of Lancaster County, Pa., chs. iii, xxvi.

4. Parkman, Pontiac, II; Griffis, Sir William Johnson, p. 6; Simms’s Frontiersmen of New York.

5. Monette, Mississippi Valley, I, p. 311.

6. Wis. Hist. Cols., XI, p. 50; Hinsdale, Old Northwest, p. 121; Burke, “Oration on Conciliation,” Works (1872 ed.), I, p. 473.

7. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, and citations there given; Cutler’s Life of Cutler.

8. Scribner’s Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; MacMaster, Hist. of People of U. S., I, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, Western Territory of America (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America (London, 1799); Michaux’s “Journal,” in Proceedings American Philosophical Society, XXVI, No. 129; Forman, Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1780–‘90 (Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram, Travels Through North Carolina, etc. (London, 1792); Pope, Tour Through the Southern and Western Territories, etc. (Richmond, 1792); Weld, Travels Through the States of North America (London, 1799); Baily, Journal of a Tour in the Unsettled States of North America, 1796–‘97 (London, 1856); Pennsylvania Magazine of History, July, 1886; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, VII, pp. 491, 492, citations.

9. Scribner’s Statistical Atlas, xxxix.

10. Turner, Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series IX), pp. 61 ff.

11. Monette, History of the Mississippi Valley, II; Flint, Travels and Residence in Mississippi; Flint, Geography and History of the Western States; Abridgment of Debates of Congress, VII, pp. 397, 398, 404; Holmes, Account of the U. S.; Kingdom, America and the British Colonies (London, 1820); Grund, Americans, II, chs. i, iii, vi (although writing, in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out of western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, Guide for Emigrants (Boston, 1831); Darby, Emigrants’ Guide to Western and Southwestern States and Territories; Dana, Geographical Sketches in the Western Country; Kinzie, Waubun; Keating, Narrative of Long’s Expedition; Schoolcraft, Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi River, Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, and Lead Mines of the Missouri; Andreas, History of Illinois, I, 86-99; Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities; McKenney, Tour to the Lakes; Thomas, Travels through the Western Country, etc. (Auburn, N. Y., 1819).

12. Darby, Emigrants’ Guide, pp. 272 ff.; Benton, Abridgment of Debates, VII, p, 397.

13. De Bow’s Review, IV, p. 254; XVII, p. 428.

14. Grund, Americans, II, p. 8.

15. Peck, New Guide to the West (Cincinnati, 1848), ch. IV; Parkman, Oregon Trail; Hall, The West (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel; Murray, Travels in North America; Lloyd, Steamboat Directory (Cincinnati, 1856); “Forty Days in a Western Hotel” (Chicago), in Putnam’s Magazine, December, 1894; Mackay, The Western World, II, ch. II, III; Meeker, Life in the West; Bogen, German in America (Boston, 1851); Olmstead, Texas Journey; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life; Schouler, History of the United States, V, 261–267; Peyton, Over the Alleghanies and Across the Prairies (London, 1870); Loughborough, The Pacific Telegraph and Railway (St. Louis, 1849); Whitney, Project for a Railroad to the Pacific (New York, 1849); Peyton, Suggestions on Railroad Communication with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the Indian Islands; Benton, Highway to the Pacific (a speech delivered in the U. S, Senate, December 16, 1850).

16. A writer in The Home Missionary (1850), p. 239, reporting Wisconsin conditions, exclaims: “Think of this, people of the enlightened East. What an example, to come from the very frontiers of civilization!” But one of the missionaries writes: “In a few years Wisconsin will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization, any more than western New York, or the Western Reserve.”

17. Bancroft (H. H.), History of California, History of Oregon, and Popular Tribunals; Shinn, Mining Camps.

18. See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, The Institutional Beginnings of a Western State.

19. Shinn, Mining Camps.

20. Compare Thorpe, in Annals American Academy of Political and Social Science, September, 1891; Bryce, American Commonwealth (1888), II, p. 689.

21. Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, II., p. 15.

22. Compare Observations on the North American Land Company, London, 1796, pp. xv,144; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, I, pp, 149–151; Turner, Character and Influence of Indian Trade in Wisconsin, p. 18; Peck, New Guide for Emigrants (Boston, 1837), ch. iv; Compendium Eleventh Census, I, p. xl.

23. See pages 220, 221, 223, post, for illustrations of the political accompaniments of changed industrial conditions.

24. But Lewis and Clarke were the first to explore the route from the Missouri to the Columbia.

25. Narrative and Critical History of America, VIII, p.10; Sparks’ Washington Works, IX, pp. 303, 327; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, I; McDonald, Life of Kenton, p. 72; Cong. Record, XXIII, p. 57.

26. On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of migration, see the author’s Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin.

27. Lodge, English Colonies, p. 152 and citations; Logan, Hist. of Upper South Carolina, I, p. 151.

28. Flint, Recollections, p. 9.

29. See Monette, Mississippi, I, p. 344.

30. Cones’, Lewis and Clarke’s Expedition, I, pp. 2, 253–259; Benton, in Cong. Record, XXIII, p. 57.

31. Hehn, Das Salz (Berlin, 1873).

32. Col. Records of N. C., V, p. 3.

33. Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year 1,794 (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 35.

34. Hale, Daniel Boone (pamphlet).

35. Compare Baily, Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America (London, 1856), pp. 217–219, where a similar analysis is made for 1796. See also Collot, Journey in North America (Paris, 1826), p. 109; Observations on the North American Land Company (London, 1796), pp. XV, 144; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina.

36. “Spottswood Papers,” in Collections of Virginia Historical Society, I, II.

37. [Burke], European Settlements, etc. (1765 ed.), II, p. 200.

38. Everest, in Wisconsin Historical Collections, XII, pp. 7 ff.

39. Weston, Documents connected with History of South Carolina, p. 61.

40. See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of Representatives, January 30, 1824.

41. See the admirable monograph by Prof. H. B. Adams, Maryland’s Influence on the Land Cessions; and also President Welling, in Papers American Historical Association, III, p. 411.

42. Adams Memoirs, IX, pp. 247, 248.

43. Author’s article in The Ægis (Madison, Wis.), November 4, 1892.

44. Compare Roosevelt, Thomas Benton, ch. i.

45. Political Science Quarterly, II, p. 457. Compare Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Chs. ii–vii.

46. Compare Wilson, Division and Reunion, pp. 15, 24.

47. On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation, see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Ch. iii.

48. I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics of the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler and desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes of California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows, United States of Yesterday and To-morrow; Shinn, Mining Camps; and Bancroft, Popular Tribunals. The humor, bravery, and rude strength, as well as the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left traces on American character, language, and literature, not soon to be effaced.

49. Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829–1830.

50. [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, I, p.43; Calhoun’s Works, I, pp. 401–406.

51. Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, I, 721.

52. Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.

53. Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 98, and Adams’s History of the United States, I, p. 60; IX, pp. 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at the close of the war of 1812, a period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy. Grund, Americans, II., ch. i.

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The Next Frontier in New York’s War on Rats: Birth Control

A new City Council bill would deploy contraceptives in hopes of reducing the rat population and protecting wildlife, like Flaco the owl, from being poisoned.

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons

For nearly 60 years, New York City leaders have understood that they could not kill their way out of the rat problem.

Rats are prodigious breeders, with one pair having the potential to produce 15,000 descendants in a year . City officials have tried repeatedly to give them contraceptives and diminish their ranks, but the rats have prevailed.

Now, citing advancements in rodent birth control and trash storage, the City Council wants to try again.

A new bill being introduced on Thursday would require the city’s health department to deploy salty pellets that sterilize both male and female rats in two neighborhoods as part of a pilot program. The pellets would be used within so-called rat mitigation zones covering at least 10 city blocks.

The bill’s sponsor, Shaun Abreu, a council member from northern Manhattan, predicted that this attempt would be more effective than past efforts, particularly when paired with the city’s broader push to fight rats, which involves putting trash in containers and expanding composting .

“We believe that we need to take a shock-and-awe approach to the rat problem by throwing everything we have at it,” he said.

There is another potential benefit: Contraceptives are not likely to harm wildlife like Flaco, the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl whose death was blamed in part on rat poison .

“Birds of prey shouldn’t have to eat rats that have rodenticide,” said Mr. Abreu.

The major question is whether the city can finally get rat birth control right.

In 1967, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller announced a plan to give rats contraceptives by dissolving a form of estrogen used in human birth control pills in a vegetable oil solution and dipping meat and grains in it. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority sought to tackle the problem a decade ago by setting out rat contraceptives in the subway . Bryant Park tried the same thing unsuccessfully last year .

Other tactics have been used against rats — poison, traps, dry ice , ghoulish drownings , targeting so-called rat reservoirs and a rat academy to involve members of the public in eradication efforts — in what has felt at times like a Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner caper. Somehow the rats always win.

While precise estimates are difficult, a pest control company said there were as many as three million rats in the city .

Joseph J. Lhota, who served as the city’s “rat czar” under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and has opined that eliminating rats is a Sisyphean feat, praised the new bill. He said that contraceptives must be part of the solution.

“Will we ever eradicate rats? I don’t think so,” he said. “But you should do everything you can to reduce the size of the population.”

Mayor Eric Adams has made fighting rats a signature initiative. He installed his own rat czar, Kathleen Corradi , and started an ambitious plan to move trash from fetid garbage bags off the streets and into European-style containers.

Liz Garcia, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said in a statement on Wednesday that his office would review the legislation. The administration has “taken a whole-of-government approach” to fight rats, she said, adding, “we will continue to work with all of our partners in government on rat-reduction strategies.”

Mr. Abreu has been working with Loretta Mayer, a scientist who created ContraPest, a rat contraceptive that transit officials said had showed promising results when used in the subway. The bait contains active compounds that target ovarian function in female rats and lead to infertility in male rats by disrupting sperm cell production.

Dr. Mayer, who now runs a nonprofit dedicated to humane animal population control , said in an interview that the pellets were full of fat and salt and they were so delicious that rats preferred them to digging through the trash.

“It’s better than pizza,” she said.

Dr. Mayer said the greatest challenge would be scaling up to have enough pellets to distribute the contraceptives more broadly. She said the cost was low, at about $5 a pound.

Other cities have tried rat contraceptives, including Boston , Columbus, Ohio , and Hartford, Conn . Mr. Abreu said that past attempts in New York City had been unsuccessful because officials were not persistent enough. Or they used liquid bait instead of pellets, he said, and did not pair it with trash containerization, which gives rats fewer culinary alternatives.

Mr. Abreu has become an evangelist for the mayor’s “trash revolution,” and his district is where the city’s trash containerization pilot is taking place .

Some animal welfare groups support his bill, arguing that contraceptives are a more humane way of dealing with rats and will help other animals higher in the food chain.

Flaco the owl captured the city’s imagination after he escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and his death in February after a year of freedom was met with an outpouring of grief.

He died after apparently striking an Upper West Side building, but a necropsy found that he had a life-threatening amount of rat poison and pigeon virus in his system.

“Honestly, it took the death of Flaco for people to really pay attention to this issue and the fact that his tragic death could have been avoided,” said Kathy Nizzari, the chair of the Lights Out Coalition, a group dedicated to protecting wildlife. “Why is the government spending millions of dollars on poison when it doesn’t even work?”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall Bureau Chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration. More about Emma G. Fitzsimmons

Explore Our Coverage of the Adams Administration

Contacting the Mayor’s Office: Mayor Eric Adams is now requiring any elected official, including members of Congress , to submit a lengthy online request to speak to an administration official.

Campaign Inquiry : Federal authorities investigating Adams’s campaign fund-raising have been examining valuable flight upgrades  they believe he received from Turkish Airlines that elevated him to its highest class of seats available on international trips.

Burger King and Baptisms: Adams keeps finding eye-catching ways to seize the spotlight on the issue of public safety , even when the narrative turns against him.

Gun-Detecting Technology: Adams announced that New York City planned to test technology  to detect guns in its subway system as officials seek to make transit riders feel safe after a deadly shoving attack.

Grappling With Acts of Violence: Adams was recently confronted with two tragic events that crystallized some people’s persistent fears  about the city: the shooting death of Police Officer Jonathan Diller  and a man being fatally pushed into the path of a subway train  in an unprovoked attack.

Sexual Misconduct Accusations: A woman has accused Adams  in a lawsuit of asking her for oral sex in exchange for career help in 1993 and sexually assaulting her when she refused. Adams said the accusation was completely false .