Midwestern United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Midwestern United States holds 68,995,685 people, according to the 2020 census, spread across twelve states in the northern central part of the country. It sits between the Northeastern United States and the Western United States, with Canada to the north and the Southern United States to the south. For a long stretch of American history, this place was not called the Midwest at all. The U.S. Census Bureau officially named it the North Central Region until 1984. Earlier still, in British America and the early United States, this whole expanse was simply the West. The first recorded use of the word Midwestern arrived in 1886, Midwest in 1894, and Midwesterner only in 1916. So how did a region once seen as the frontier edge of the continent become the place Americans call the Heartland? What turned its rich, flat floodplains into the nation's breadbasket, and why does a stretch of cornfields and lake cities so often decide who wins a presidential election? The answers run through canoes and canals, through buffalo herds and steel plows, through immigrants who bypassed the coasts entirely to settle the interior.

• 2. From The West To The Heartland

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  By the early 19th century, anything west of the Appalachians counted as the American frontier. The Pacific seaboard was largely unknown, so the term West attached itself to lands that had not extended far from the Atlantic coast. Over time the frontier kept moving, eventually settling west of the Mississippi River and leaving the older interior behind a new boundary. The names carry their own fossils of this shift. Northwestern University in Illinois owes its name to the Northwest Territory, created by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and bounded by the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. During the colonial period the French settled the upper Mississippi watershed, taking in the valleys of the Missouri River and the Illinois River, and they called it the Illinois Country. One of the earliest late 19th-century uses of Midwest pointed specifically to Kansas and Nebraska, meant to mark them as the civilized areas of the West. Another label for the same ground was Heartland. The Census Bureau itself splits the region into two halves, the East North Central states and the West North Central states. That eastern half overlaps with the lands a historian named Richard White would later call the middle ground.

• 3. The Middle Ground

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  Richard White published The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 in 1991, and it reshaped how scholars see this region's early history. White defined the middle ground as the place in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non state world of villages. It was the area between the historical foreground of European invasion and the background of Indian defeat and retreat. He placed it in the lands bordering the rivers flowing into the northern Great Lakes and the lands south of the lakes to the Ohio. In modern terms that means Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, plus parts of Canada. The middle ground rested on mutual accommodation and common meanings worked out between the French and the Indians. The fur trade sat at its center, the system on which early European and Indian relations were built. The French called their exchange of goods a gift exchange rather than a trade, because the goods were inseparable from the alliance they created. In this system the French were cast as a metaphoric father expected to provide for the Algonquians, his metaphoric children, who in turn were obligated to assist and obey. That fragile arrangement degraded as the French lost their influence after defeat in the Seven Years' War and after the Louisiana Purchase.

• 4. Traders, Marriages, And Rivalry

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  French fur traders, the voyageurs and coureurs des bois, walked into Indian villages to maintain alliances through symbolic exchange. When the French fur trade temporarily closed from 1690 to 1716, many traders abandoned their posts, and those who stayed became illegal operators who often sought marriages to secure their safety. Marriage became central to the trade in both the Ohio River valley and the French pays d'en haut. Indian women were in charge of processing the pelts the fur trade depended on, so their work was integral and widely praised. One trader's failure was once blamed on the absence of an Indian woman from his operation. When the trade reopened in 1716, after traders discovered their overstock of pelts had been ruined, legal traders kept marrying Indian women and living in their villages. As women's influence grew, so did demand for cloth, which quickly became the most desired trade good. English traders entered the Ohio country as serious competitors around the 1690s. They almost consistently offered better goods at better rates than the French, and Indians played the two empires against each other to their own benefit. After the Seven Years' War, Britain tried to drop the practice of gift giving as unnecessary. That decision, combined with higher prices, fewer goods, and a sharp cut in the rum traders had long supplied, fed unrest that erupted into Pontiac's War in 1763.

• 5. Mapping And Settling The Interior

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  In 1673 the Governor of New France sent Jacques Marquette, a Catholic priest and missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trader, to map a route to the Pacific. They traveled through Michigan's upper peninsula, crossed Lake Michigan by canoe, and landed at present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. They entered the Mississippi River on the 17th of June 1673, becoming the first to map its northern portion. They confirmed that a traveler could go by water from the St. Lawrence through the Great Lakes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Officials led by LaSalle followed with a 4,000 mile network of fur trading posts. French control ended in 1763 after defeat in the Seven Years' War, though most of the several hundred French settlers in villages along the Mississippi stayed under British rule. Napoleon, having lost interest in a North American empire after the Haitian Revolution, sold the territory to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. American settlement pushed in over the Appalachians and through the Great Lakes. Fort Pitt, now Pittsburgh, became the main base for settlers, and Marietta, Ohio, became the first Ohio settlement in 1787. Large-scale settlement waited until Native American tribes were defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Settlers without legal claims, called squatters, had been pushing down the Ohio River since the 1760s. In 1785, soldiers under General Josiah Harmar burned the homes and destroyed the crops of squatters in the Ohio country.

• 6. Squatters, Soldiers, And Sioux

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  British General Thomas Gage called the squatters too Numerous, too Lawless, and Licentious ever to be restrained, and almost out of Reach of Law and government. The British long wanted a Native American buffer state in the Midwest to block American westward expansion. In Washington, Jacksonian Democrats such as Thomas Hart Benton favored squatter rights, wanting cheap land for poor farmers, while banker-oriented Whigs led by Henry Clay opposed them. The Democrats prevailed, and through preemption acts passed across the 1810s to 1840s the squatters became pioneers who could buy their land at the minimum price. The military story was bloodier. In 1791 General Arthur St. Clair led a punitive expedition toward Native American settlements near the headwaters of the Wabash River. On the 4th of November his force was routed by a tribal confederation under Miami Chief Little Turtle and Shawnee chief Blue Jacket. More than 600 soldiers and scores of women and children were killed in what became known as St. Clair's Defeat, still the greatest defeat of a U.S. Army by Native Americans. The Sioux, or Dakota, became the most powerful of the Plains tribes and the greatest threat to American expansion. Their Great Sioux Nation spread up into Minnesota and west into the Rocky Mountains, holding prime buffalo range. They split into three divisions by dialect, the Santee or Eastern Dakota, the Yankton and Yanktonai of the middle, and the Lakota of the west, known for their hunting and warrior culture. Apart from the short Black Hawk War of 1832, Native American warfare east of the Mississippi had ended.

• 7. Rivers, Rails, And The Auto

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  Three waterways shaped the Midwest, and the first was the Ohio River, which flowed into the Mississippi. Development stalled until 1795, when Pinckney's Treaty ended Spain's refusal to let American crops ship down the lower Mississippi to the Atlantic. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 completed an all-water route to New York City, and in 1848 the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Valley across the Chicago Portage. The Saint Lawrence Seaway, completed in 1959, opened the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean. The region also gave the country a literary voice in its rivers. In the 1870s and 1880s the Mississippi inspired Life on the Mississippi and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by native Missourian Samuel Clemens under the pseudonym Mark Twain. His hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, is now a tourist attraction. Chicago became the nation's railroad center, and by 1910 over 20 railroads ran passenger service out of six downtown terminals. The region had more interurban electric railroads than any other. In 1916 Ohio led all states with 2,798 miles of interurban track and Indiana followed with 1,825 miles. By 1900 Detroit was the world center of the auto industry. In 1903 Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, and alongside William C. Durant, the Dodge brothers, Packard, and Walter Chrysler, Detroit became the world's automotive capital. Greater Detroit remains home to General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford today.

• 8. The Breadbasket And Its Politics

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  Henry A. Wallace, a pioneer of hybrid seeds, declared in 1956 that the Corn Belt had built the most productive agricultural civilization the world has ever seen. The region's fertile soil and the steel plow turned it into the nation's breadbasket, producing corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, and barley. The dense prairie soil once defeated wooden plows that bounced and clogged, until an Illinois blacksmith named John Deere developed a steel moldboard plow in 1837 that cut the roots clean. Iowa State University became the nation's first designated land-grant institution when Iowa accepted the 1862 Morrill Act on the 11th of September 1862. Soybeans, barely grown before the early 1930s, rose so fast that by 1942 the United States was the world's largest producer. This soil also shaped American politics in ways that still echo. The Republican Party originated in the Midwest in the 1850s, with the first local meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, and the first statewide meeting in Jackson, Michigan. The Northwest Ordinance region was the first large area of the United States to prohibit slavery, with the Ohio River marking the border of freedom and slavery. Ohio provided the primary routes for the Underground Railroad, which by one estimate had carried 100,000 escaped slaves to freedom by 1850. The region's swing states remain heavily contested, and Illinois stands out as the most populous and racially diverse Midwestern state, ranked the single state most representative of the overall demographics of the United States.