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Looking for Margaret Davenport

2023; American studies; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2023.a913946

2153-6856

Jane Simonsen,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Looking for Margaret Davenport Jane Simonsen (bio) On the northern bank of what’s now called Arsenal Island in the Mississippi River between present-day Rock Island, Illinois (where I work) and Davenport, Iowa (where I live) stands the federal-style home of trader-turned-entrepreneur Colonel George Davenport. A British immigrant, he first set up shop there in 1816 as a sutler for the U.S. Army, which had arrived to defend its new territory from Native nations in the region. A decade later, he operated a string of independent trading posts from the Des Moines rapids near the present-day Missouri state line up to the lead mines at Galena, Illinois; he eventually joined up with the American Fur Company running out of St. Louis. As early as 1829 he began buying up public lands from under the homes and gardens of his indigenous associates. When the U.S. Army and Illinois militia violently expelled the Sauk and Meskwaki from their land west of the Mississippi in 1832, the government agreed to pay off their trade debts. Within months, the deaths of his two partners had made Davenport the largest single beneficiary of the government’s payout. Just a year after the treaty was signed, he started building his home, at that time the grandest on the upper Mississippi.1 I can see the restored house, now open to visitors, from the second-story window of my own home. On the main floor of the restored home, visitors encounter the Daven-port family tree superimposed on a sepia-toned historic image of the Iowa riverfront town that bears his name (Fig. 1). This implied link between civic [End Page 43] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Davenport Family Tree at the Davenport home. Colonel Davenport Historical Foundation. Photo by the author. [End Page 44] and personal history is more explicit on the Colonel Davenport Historical Foundation’s website: “Davenport was a settler, provider, homesteader, businessman and counselor. His history equals the Quad City’s history shaping its growth and development. On a much larger scale, it reflects the settling of the West.”2 Similar stories are repeated in the annals, historic sites, and museums of most every midwestern community, where figures like Davenport signify that Midwestern history begins with Euro-American settlement. Doug Kiel describes the “absolute replacement” of the region’s complex, contested colonial past with a history that begins with settlement by European immigrants as “colonial amnesia.”3 Indeed, by the mid-1850s, when the first history of the city was written, Davenport was already cast as a central figure: adventurous, entrepreneurial, generous, fair. The trial of the thieves who killed him in 1845 may have provided inhabitants of the nascent river towns with the chance to remake the region as modern, bourgeois, and settled, casting off its history as an unstable outpost on the edge of empire.4 During the preceding three decades, the multiethnic, multinational, and often extralegal relations that had sustained the upper Mississippi fur trade were overlaid by less flexible definitions of family, personhood, race, and property relations that cohered around individual white men and the official documents—wills, deeds, affidavits, trade agreements—that they produced. These in turn produced them as entities who stood “before the state” while casting others as “non-persons.”5 In this respect, Davenport’s history, and the writing of it, reflects not just the story of one midwestern town, but the complexities of empire building that many white Midwesterners are reluctant to claim. Yet those emerging definitions of family, and of the men who headed them, were often more prescriptive than real; official documents may have structured, but didn’t supplant, lived experience.6 The Davenport family tree posted on the wall of the historic home both reflects and deflects such experiences. Davenport’s portrait covers the tree’s trunk; branches hold placards with the names of his descendants. There is no accompanying text to clarify that some of these branches represent the extramarital dalliances of the Davenport men, who had children with Meskwaki women and servants both white and Black. Davenport’s two sons, George L’Oste and Bailey, were the children...