CHAPTER, IV. 
Military Character of the Route. 
Prom the period of the establishment of this government, the policy to he observed in respect 
to the Indian tribes within our borders, and the selection of sites for the military posts designed 
to secure the objects of this policy, have been questions surrounded by difficulties. 
Kind treatment, the payment of annuities which enable the Indian to live without resort to 
plunder, and the maintenance of friendly and peaceful relations—which now seem the fixed 
policy of the government—have to some extent simplified the question of military positions, 
although neither the prosperity of the Indian nor the security of the white man seems to have 
been greatly promoted. 
So long as the Indians to be controlled occupied the fertile valleys of the Mississippi and its 
tributaries, a glance at the map exhibiting the districts of country occupied by the various tribes 
was sufficient to determine the positions of the military posts designed for their control. The 
entire region then occupied by the Indians over whom we claimed jurisdiction was so amazingly 
fertile, and of such vast natural advantages, that the military posts which insured even partial 
security became at once nuclei for settlements, which increased in number and prosperity with 
such surprising rapidity, and so soon superseded the necessity of military protection, that the 
posts themselves became almost encampments of troops, whose movement to the westward was, 
although gradual, uninterrupted. The incorporation of New Mexico and California, the occu¬ 
pation of Utah and Oregon, and the acquisition of the immense deserts which separate them 
from the valley of the Mississippi, have surrounded this question with difficulties which, up to 
this time, have not been entirely overcome. 
The necessity of occupying, with the small force at our command, an immense region of 
country doomed by nature to perpetual sterility, possessing not one requisite for the support of 
a military post, and far from points where even the necessaries of life can be procured, yet 
traversed by several great highways of travel and emigration to our possessions in New Mexico 
and on the Pacific, and infested by bands of hostile Indians whose number is yet unknown to 
us, has brought other and new elements into the consideration of our military arrangements. 
Every j^ay renders more manifest the necessity of providing more ample means of accommo¬ 
dation and protection to the immense rush of emigration from the valley of the Mississippi to 
the Pacific ocean; and a consideration of this subject would seem to point to the establishment 
of some one great highway for this purpose, which should be common to all the emigrants. 
With, the small force of our regular army, and in view of the immense difficulty and enor¬ 
mous expense of supplying or maintaining a chain of military posts across the plains, it would 
be clearly impossible to occupy or render secure more than one such line; and the selection of 
a route affording as many facilities as possible for travel, and for the supply of the posts, would 
seem to be a matter of primary consequence. 
While our possessions were confined to the fertile and comparatively limited region along the 
valleys of the Mississippi and its tributaries, the establishment of routes for emigration was a 
matter requiring little consideration; but occupying, as we now do, the immense deserts which 
extend from the frontiers of the western States to the .Rocky mountains—over which thousands 
of emigrants are constantly pushing forward to the Pacific, who require protection in a country 
in which it is next to impossible to establish military posts—the determination of a route which 
