Chapter 16: The American West
Great Plains
- During the 1860s, agricultural settlements stretched roughly until the 98th meridian, where the Great Plains began.
- The Great Plains were described by Horace Greeley in 1859 as ““a land of starvation,” “a treeless desert,” baking in heat in the daytime and “chill and piercing” cold at night.”
- The idea of a Great American Desert did not appeal to most Americans, and it appeared that the only vegetation resistant to the harsh climate were the grasses that were native to it.
- Although, the Great Plains sustained a rich wildlife dominated by grazing antelope and buffalo.
· Indians of the Great Plains
- There were probably over 100,000 Native Americans that lived on the Great Plains in the mid-nineteenth century.
- They were divided into 6 linguistic families and at least 30 tribal groupings.
- Along the Missouri River, there were the…
- Mandans
- Arikaras
- Pawnees
- These tribes were ravaged by smallpox and measles when they were introduced by Europeans.
- In the Southwestern parts of the Great Plains were the…
- Kiowas
- Comanches
- On the central plains were the…
- Arapahos
- Cheyennes
- To the north were the…
- Blackfeet
- Crow
- Sioux
- Who were by far the greatest of any Native American nation on the Great Plains during this time period.
· The Sioux
- Originally, the Sioux hailed from the eastern part of the Great Plains, but then many migrated west following game trails.
- From there, they became a nomadic people, claiming the entire Great Plains north of the Arkansas River as their land.
- They survived primarily off the buffalo (properly known as bison).
- Although you might expect the Sioux to have patriarchal gender roles, they were not so.
- Women, until the men acquired horses and could do so by themselves, played pivotal roles in the hunting of bison by helping to get them to stampede.
- Sioux women did not see themselves as subordinates, rather, their unrelenting labor was their allotted share in a partnership on which the proud, nomadic life of the Sioux depended.
· Sioux Religion
- Because the Sioux depended so largely on nature for survival, they worshiped every manifestation of the natural world with sacred meaning. For example…
- Wi – the sun
- Skan – the sky
- Inyan – the rock
- These three were the most important, and then came the moon, the wind, the buffalo, and so on.
- Medicine men provided instruction on religious matters, however, religious experience and expertise was personal and open to both sexes.
- When a Sioux had a vision, it would attach itself to an object, which would then become that person’s lifelong talisman.
- The Lakota (meaning “allies”) Sioux were not self-contained however, they had trade networks set up with…
- The agriculturalist tribes of the Pawnees and the Mandans near the Missouri River
- And they also traded with Europeans when they appeared on the northern Great Plains in the 18th century.
· Wagon Trains, Railroads, and Ranchers
- In its first encounters, Americans thought the Great Plains were unfit for settlement, and thus in 1834, Congress formally designated the Great Plains as permanent Indian country.
- The army sought to have border forts made of stone so they would last longer in order to oversee the Indian country more effectively.
- However, trade with the Indians would continue, but now it would be closely supervised and licensed by the federal government.
- This “permanent Indian country”, however, was soon seen as a pathway to the Pacific, to the lands of Oregon and California.
- The first wagon train went from MO to OR in 1842, and soon thousands more emigrants traveled the Oregon Trail.
· The Railroads
- Discussion about railroads that advanced all the way to the pacific soon arose, and thus the Indian country soon became “crisscrossed by overland freight lines”.
- A year after the South began their rebellion (so in 1862), the federal government finally moved forward with the transcontinental rail projects.
- Because it would be so expensive, not many companies jumped at the chance to build these transcontinental railways, however, two eventually did…
1. The Union Pacific
2. The Central Pacific
- The Union Pacific built westward while the Central Pacific was built eastward and they planned on meeting somewhere in the middle.
- They eventually met in Promontory, Utah, in 1869.
- Ideas about the Great Plans soon began to change as railroad tycoons saw business opportunities.
- In the 1880s, 40,000 miles of track were laid west of the Mississippi River.
· The Cattle Kingdom
- The Great Plains made a solid case for raising cattle, because of the native buffalo that had been sustained by it for centuries.
- However, “the buffalo had to go” first.
- The demand for buffalo hides had been small for a number of years, but when eastern tanneries learned how to cure buffalo hide, the demand skyrocketed.
- Within 10 years, the great herds almost vanished from people bent on making a quick dollar.
- As an added “bonus”, General Philip H. Sheridan pointed out that exterminating the buffalo would starve the Indians into submission.
- In southern TX, there were about 5 million head of long-horn cattle already grazing on ranches.
- Because of the expanding railroad networks, ranchers soon realized that “a longhorn worth $3 in Texas might command $40” elsewhere.
- Thus began the long cattle drives in which Texas ranchers hired cowboys to head to the longhorn cattle hundreds of miles north to the railroads that were pushing west across KS.
- When railroads reached southern TX, however, the long cattle drives were abandoned.
- News of this “easy money” traveled quickly…
- Calves cost $5, steers sold for almost $60 in Chicago.
- By the early 1880s, the plains overflowed with cattle – nearly 7.5 million of them.
- It was not to last however, as bad weather inevitably came…
- In 1885, there was a hard winter, followed by a severe drought the following summer, and then record blizzards the next winter.
- Hundreds of thousands of cattle died, and the cattle boom collapsed and investors fled, leaving behind a more enduring ecological catastrophe… the destruction of the grasses native to the Great Plains.
- Open-range ranching came to an abrupt end, as ranchers entered into a more placid, domesticated era.
- Ranchers even began to raise sheep, which was previously scorned, in the sparser high country.
· Buffalo Bill and the Mythic West
- As the romance of open-range ranching ended, the American imagination flowered and Colonel William F. Cody was perhaps the one who benefitted the most from this imagination.
- Col. Cody was dubbed “Buffalo Bill” because he was hired after the Civil War by railroad companies to provide buffalo meat for their employees.
- His second claim to fame was as an army scout in 1868, when Indian wars broke out.
- From all this material, novelists clamored to write books about, such as Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men by Ned Buntline in July of 1869.
- Along with the novels, Cody began to play himself in staged shows (as an actor).
- The show idea became full blown in his Wild West Show, which was…
- First staged in 1883.
- Offered…
- Displays of horsemanship.
- Sharp-shooting.
- Real Indians.
· Homesteaders
- While Buffalo Bill’s stories were well-liked, they were far from the brutal truth that awaited the settlers who migrated to the Great Plains.
- Railroad companies, land speculators, transatlantic steamship lines, the western states, and the federal government did all they could to advertise these lands to migrants.
- The migration was painful, however, as families went from established communities to “such a lonely country”.
- On the Great Plains, prescribed gender roles began to break down as women shouldered more and more work.
- It was thought that farming was primarily men’s labor, but women also participated as well as selling eggs and butter and other goods to provide a steadier income for her family.
- Marriage and farming were extremely interlinked, and this can be seen when looking at Nebraska women in 1900, for only 2.4% had never been married.
- As the established agricultural states along the Mississippi began to fill up, more and more people were drawn to the plains.
- It even drew Europeans, and at the peak of “American Fever” in 1882, 105,000 Scandinavians immigrated to the US.
- For most Americans and Europeans, they migrated so as to better themselves economically.
- However, most blacks migrated to the plains in hopes of something else, racial freedom.
· Taming the Land
- Taming the Great Plains was perhaps the biggest challenge to homesteaders.
- Homesteaders soon learned that entire crops could be destroyed within hours by a brush fire or a hailstorm.
- They learned that for shelter, they often had to cut dugouts into hillsides or erect houses made of turf cut from the ground.
- In the mid-1880s, the dry years came and wrecked the livelihoods of thousands of families that came to settle on the Great Plains.
- For example, between 1885 and 1890, the Dakotas lost 50,000 settlers.
- Soon, farmers began to think of farming as conquering nature.
- However, many of the practices they utilized were, in fact, detrimental to the very task they were attempting, such as…
- Plowing under the native bunch grasses rendered the soil vulnerable to erosion and gigantic sandstorms.
- That farming the Great Plains opened pathways for exotic, destructive pests and weeds.
- They thought that letting the land lie fallow periodically (which worked elsewhere) was suppose to slow the depletion of the soil, but in actuality, it raised the amount of salt in the soil to destructive levels.
- Looking back on the Great Plains experiment, it has been called, “the largest, longest-run agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.”
· Farmers’ Woes
- Farmers embraced their new life, which consisted largely of…
- Chicago, being the hub of the Midwest, and to where all crops and livestock went to be distributed elsewhere.
- Chicago, from where building supplies and farming supply catalogues flowed back to western ranches and homesteads.
- As farmer’s learned that agriculture was “like all other businesses,” in that there was a newfound enthusiasm for…
- Cash crops.
- Land speculation.
- Borrowed money.
- New technology.
- However, farmers were still at a decisive disadvantage, because they realized how little control they had over the prices of their crops.
- Thus, in 1867, Oliver H. Kelley, who was a government clerk, founded the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, in hopes that it would improve the social life of farm families.
- As it progressed, it added other cooperative programs, such as setting up its own banks, insurance companies, and other institutions necessary for Great Plain’s farmers.
- Although these ventures eventually failed, it created the cooperative idea, which was highly resilient, and would be embraced in future farmers’ movements.
- Wheat farmers were the most at risk, because wheat was a global commodity, and thus it was the most at risk of deflationary periods.
- This meant that farmers who were in debt had to pay even more to get out of debt because of deflation.
· The Fate of the Indians
- The Native Americans who inhabited the Great Plains were largely pushed aside, despite the fact that provisions for a permanent Indian country had been written into federal law and ratified by treaties with various tribes.
- Many of the tribes hoped that by resisting as best they could, the whites would tire of the struggle and leave them in peace.
- Those who resisted the most were…
- The Apaches in the southwest.
- The Cheyennes and Arapahos in Colorado.
- The Sioux in the Wyoming and Dakota Territories.
- However, the federal government did not give up; instead it formulated a new policy for dealing with the Western Indians.
· The Reservation Solution
- Few whites questioned the necessity of moving the Native Americans out of the path of settlement.
- However, a new strategy accompanied this plan – “a strategy for undermining the Indians’ tribal way of life.”
- They sought to have them be wards of the government until they learned “to walk on the white man’s road.”
- The government set aside two extensive areas, allocating…
- The southwestern quarter of the Dakota Territory to the Lakota Sioux tribes.
- What is no Oklahoma to the southern Plains Indians, along with the major southern tribes – the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole – and eastern Indians who had been removed there 30 years before.
- Scattered reservations went to the Apaches, Navajos, and Utes in the southwest and to the mountain Indians in the Rockies and beyond.
- That the Plains Indians would resist was inevitable.
- One such case was Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, who led his people in 1877, including women and children, on an epic 1,500-mile march from eastern Oregon to escape confinement in a small reservation.
- He was, however, eventually cornered and forced to surrender in Montana near the Canadian border.
- Resisting the reservation solution, the Indians fought on for years.
- Seen most in the Apaches and the Sioux.
- However, it wasn’t Indian resistance, but white greed that wrecked this solution.
- In the mid-1870s, prospectors began to dig for gold in the Black Hills, land sacred to the Sioux and entirely inside their Dakota reservation.
- The government forced the tribes to cede the western third of their Dakota reservation in 1877.
- Also, in Oklahoma, a similar situation came to pass.
- There was 2 million acres in the heart of the territory that had not been assigned, and white homesteaders jumped at the chance.
- Eventually, the government reluctantly placed the Oklahoma District under the Homestead Act, allowing settlement by thousands upon thousands of homesteaders.
· Undermining Tribal Culture
- While all the controversy was taking place over the Reservation Solution, the campaign to move the Indians onto “the white men’s road” was well under way.
- During the 1870s, the Office of Indian Affairs developed a program to train Indian children for farm work and prepare them for citizenship.
- This program included…
- Reservation schools.
- Distant boarding schools.
- Indian children being forced to dress in “Mother Hubbard dresses.”
- The Office of Indian Affairs also advocated efforts to undermine tribal authority.
- Most importantly, they stressed the idea of private property, a concept known as “severalty”, or land ownership by individuals.
- The result of this stressed idea was the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), which authorized the president to carve up tribal lands, with each family head receiving an allotment of 160 acres and individuals receiving smaller parcels.
- After the land was held for 25 years, the owners would be granted citizenship.
- Remaining reservation lands would be sold off, with the proceeds placed in an Indian education fund.
· The Last Battle: Wounded Knee
- The Sioux were among the first to bear the brunt of the Dawes Severalty Act, and homesteaders flooded into lands that were even then occupied by Indians.
- However, there was news of salvation for the Indians.
- An Indian messiah, a holy man who called himself Wovoka, was preaching a new religion on a Paiute reservation in Nevada.
- In a vision, Wovoka had gone to heaven and received god’s word that the world would be regenerated – that the whites would disappear, and that life on the Great Plans would be as it was before the white man appeared.
- This was supposed to pass in the spring of 1891.
- Indians were also supposed to practice the Ghost Dance, which was a day-long ritual that sent the spirits of the dancers rising to heaven.
- When resident whites became alarmed by the “Ghost Dance” and called for army intervention, the results were disastrous.
- In the “last” conflict, when American soldiers attempted to disarm the Indians, a battle exploded in the encampment near Wounded Knee Creek.
- 25 U.S. soldiers were killed.
- 146 men, women, and children were killed among the Indians, many of them as they fled.
- Tribal life had now become a shadow of what it had been in the past, and the Native Americans on the Great Plains became the vast minorities when they once were the top of the food chain.
The Far West
- The western edge of the Great Plains included mountainous terrain, and it was clear to Americans that this territory would be settled as others had been before.
- Instead, the strategy of “planting of an island of settlement in a vast, often barren landscape” was utilized.
- When the United States first acquired the entire Far West, there were only 100,000 people living there.
· The Mining Frontier
- Because agricultural practices were not advanced enough at this time, the Far West became the “mining frontier”.
- As gold was found in…
- California
- Nevada’s side of the Sierra Nevada
- Colorado Rockies
- Fraser River in British Columbia
- Montana
- Wyoming
- Black Hills of South Dakota
- Coeur d’Alene region of Idaho
- It was always followed by that wild, remote area turning (almost overnight) into a mob scene of prospectors, traders, gamblers, prostitutes, and saloon keepers.
- Prospectors soon gave way to high bidders, who soon gave way to entrepreneurial development and large-scale mining.
- These mining settlements, however, became ghost towns before long.
- In its last stage, the mining frontier entered the industrial world.
- As people realized how profitable it could be to mine the more widely used metals of copper, lead, and zinc.
- Also miners organized themselves into labor and trade unions.
· The Pacific Slope
- If the Far West had not been the “mining frontier” then its history would have been much different then what it is today.
- Because of the bonanza mining economy, other states were allowed to grow off them economically and demographically.
- Oregon and Washington during the 1870s had scarcely 100,000 settlers each, but by1890, both were nearly to 750,000.
- Portland (OR) and Seattle (WA) both blossomed into important commercial centers with mixed economy’s containing farming, ranching, logging, and fishing.
- Because of the draw of the “mining frontier”, Far West states’ economies were boosted and then became self-sustaining.
- San Francisco was the metropolis for the entire Far West.
· Hispanics, Chinese, Anglos
- California was the anchor for two distinct far western regions…
1. The Pacific Slope (with OR and WA)
2. The Southwest (with AZ, NM, and TX)
· The Hispanic Southwest
- The first Europeans to enter the Far West were Hispanics moving north out of Mexico.
- They settled cities like Santa Fe, El Paso, and Tucson, which had populations in the thousands.
- The economy of the majority of the Southwest was pastoral, consisting primarily of cattle and sheep ranching.
- They had a very stratified social order…
- At the top was the elite – the dons occupying royal land grants.
- After that was the laboring class of servants, artisans, cowboys, and farm hands.
- The exception to this social order was southern Texas, where ranches were run by families.
- New Mexico was one place where the mixture of European and Native American cultures “managed a successful, if uneasy, coexistence”.
- However, in California, this was not the case, and the Native Americans were almost wiped by first the Hispanics, and later the aggressive Anglo miners and settlers.
· Anglo-Hispanic Conflict
- The fate of the American Southwest’s culture depended on the rate of Anglo immigration into the region.
- NM, fared well compared to the rest of the SW, by incorporating the slowly coming Anglo newcomers “into Hispanic society through intermarriage and business partnerships.”
- CA, on the other hand, fared much worse than NM.
- Although the US government told Mexico that they would honor the Californios property rights, most Anglo settlers did not and by the 1880s, very few of the original Hispanic families still retained their Mexican land grants.
- As Hispanic lands became sparser, they could on longer graze their cattle and sheep and had to look for money elsewhere.
- Many went seasonally to the Colorado mines and sugar-beet fields.
- There was conflict between the two groups, which could be seen by the multitude of masked night-riding raiders across the Southwest, determined to harass the Anglos and the culture they were forcing upon them.
· Mexican Migrants
- More and more immigrants were drawn to the US from Mexico as economic activity picked up all across the Southwest.
- For example; TX had 20,000 Mexicans in 1850 and 165,000 Mexicans by 1900.
- Virtually all of the Mexican migrants were relegated to the lowest-paying and most back-breaking work, such as contract workers for railway gangs or harvest crews.
- And all of them were discriminated against.
· The Chinese Migration
- There was a large influx of Chinese migration to America for numerous reasons…
- The California gold rush brought 200,000 Chinese to the US between 1850 and 1880.
- Part of a worldwide Asian migration that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century and was driven primarily by poverty.
- The majority of them travelled as indentured servants, however, as this was not allowed in America, they were free once on American soil.
- So instead they went into debt for their passage money.
- Once in America, Chinese immigrants normally entered the orbit of the Six Companies, which was a powerful confederation of Chinese merchants in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
- Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women 13:1, and thus the majority of women worked either as servants or prostitutes.
- It seemed the Chinese were always willing to do any job, as they…
- Labored in the gold fields.
- Worked on the transcontinental railroad.
- After the railroad was completed, many stayed in railroad construction gangs, while others labored in CA’s Central Valley as agricultural workers, or (the lucky ones) became small farmers or orchardists.
· Anti-Chinese Agitation
- Because of the lacking numbers of blacks in California, racism was directed at the Chinese.
- This racism climaxed in the late 1870s, when CA Democrats and Republicans joined together to write a new state constitution replete with anti-Chinese provisions and pressuring the federal government to do the same.
- Congress complied with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
- Although the Chinese found many ways around this law, the flow of immigrants slowed to a trickle.
- Coincidentally, this came at a time in CA’s history when more workers were needed as they switched from growing primarily wheat to growing primarily fruits and vegetables.
- This extensive agriculture was “not white men’s work” White Californians would say.
- Thus they turned to Japanese immigrants to do it, however, soon anti-Japanese agitation closed off that population flow (in 1908).
- Lastly, they turned to Hispanics, who became the (essentially permanent) source of migratory workers for CA’s booming commercial agriculture.
- Ironically, California was a racially torn society, simultaneously exploiting and despising the Hispanic and Asian minorities whose hard labor helped make California, and the rest of the Far West, the “enviable land it was.”
· Golden California
- While California had all that the modern world of 1890 had to offer, the fact was, it was still a long ways away from the rest of America.
- Its location, environment, and history all conspired to set CA somewhat apart from the American nation.
· Creating a California Culture
- Californians sought to have their own cultural traditions.
- Early writers such as Mark Twain and Bret Harte started this with their numerous short stories.
- In 1884, Helen Hunt built upon it further with her novel Ramona, which tells the tale of a half-Indian girl caught between two cultures.
- While she was attempting to advance the cause of the Native Americans, it only rang a bell because of the fact that in came in the evocative context of early CA.
- Now that lost world of “sun, silence, and adobe” became all the rage.
- Movements began to restore Catholic missions to Native Americans.
- In its Spanish past, California found the cultural traditions it needed, and all across the southwest the same discoveries were being made.
· Land of Sunshine
- Southern California was known as the land of sunshine, and a dizzying real estate boom occurred in the 1880s.
- Los Angeles County had 3% of CA’s population in 1870, but 12% by 1900.
- It was the first region to translate climate into riches.
- Also, agriculture changed once again, as people realized they could take advantage of this Mediterranean climate.
- They began crowing oranges, almonds, and raisins.
- By 1910, CA had essentially abandoned wheat, which had been its staple crop for decades.
· John Muir and the Great Outdoors
- John Muir was a young naturalist and he arrived in California in 1868.
- Muir was a leading environmental researcher and demonstrated for the first time that Yosemite was the product of glacial action (and he went on to study glaciers around the world).
- There were 3 main results of Muir’s zeal…
1. The creation of CA’s national parks in 1890 – Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant (later part of King’s Canyon).
2. A campaign launched after the national parks were established to mandate a system of national forest reserves.
3. The formation in 1892 of the Sierra Club, which became a powerful voice for the defenders in CA’s wilderness.
- In the end, Muir and other naturalists normally came out on the short end.
- However, something else was added to CA’s culture – the linking of a society’s well-being with the protection of its natural environment.
- This signified that the country had accepted that the age of heedless westward expansion had ended.