The Conquest of the Far West
Griffin Weiss
Mr. Arroyo
U.S. History II Advanced Placement
1 September 2013
Chapter 16 Outline: The Conquest of the Far West
The Societies of the Far West (434-441)
The Western Tribes
* Indian tribes were the most important group before the Anglo-American migration in the Far West * Western tribes developed several forms of civilization * More than 300,000 Indians lived along the pacific coast among them were Serrano, Chumash, Pomo, Maidu, Yurok, and Chinook * When the Spanish arrived disease and destruction followed for the Native tribes * By mid-nineteenth century 150,000 Indians remained, some lived within the Hispanic society with Mexican and Spanish settlers * Pueblos of the Southwest had lived largely as farmers and settled the land permanently long before the Spanish came there * Pueblos grew corn, built towns, had elaborate forms of irrigation, and participated in trade and commerce * Their relationship with the Spanish produced an alliance against the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches of the area * Caste System * Interaction between the Pueblos, Spanish, and Indian tribes created a caste system in the Southwest * Top were Spanish or Mexicans, who controlled trading and owned large estates * Pueblos were largely free but still below the Spanish * Apaches, Navajos, and those who were captured or voluntarily left their tribes were at the bottom, they were called genizaros * This system represented Spanish pre-occupation * Plains Indians * This was the most widespread and diverse group of Indians in the west * Some formed alliances with each other, others were in constant conflict, some lived sedentary lives, some lived nomadic lives * Despite differences tribes shared traits such as their cultures were based on close and extended family networks and a close relationship with nature * Tribes were subdivided in bands of 500 people * In each band men and women had separate roles, women’s roles were domestic and artistic: raising children, cooking, making clothes, gathering food, and creating many of the tribes pieces of art * Men were hunters and traders and supervised the religious and military life * Religion was centered around spiritual power and the natural world * Buffalo were often the main source of food the Plains tribes hunted * Economic Importance of the Buffalo * Buffalo provided the economic basis for Plains tribes * Every part of the buffalo was used skin for clothing, bones for arrow tips, tendons for string, and meat for food * Indian Weaknesses * Plains Indians were extremely proud at their ability to fight and hunt and male members of tribes were essentially a warrior class * Plains tribes proved to the greatest threat to settlers in the west and the only weakness they had (like all Indian tribes) was that they were not willing to unite against white aggression * Like Eastern tribes they refused to band together in a coalition and would even fight each other while fighting white settlers * Some tribes were able to band together such as the Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, who had created a powerful alliance and ruled the northern Plains * The tribes ultimate weakness was to eastern diseases * Smallpox and other diseases wiped many western tribes out
Hispanic New Mexico
* For centuries much of the Far West had been apart of the Spanish Empire and later, the Mexican Republic * Land acquired by the United States in the 1840’s had Mexicans living on it who had suddenly become residents in American territory * Spanish communities were spread throughout the Southwest * Arrival of Anglo-American migrants and the expansion of American capitalist changed the small towns * New Mexico had descendants from the original Spanish settlers in the seventeenth century * These descendants lived alongside Pueblo Indians and American traders and then there was a small aristocracy of great land owners * Mexican peasants and large groups of Indians (either slaves or indentured servants) works on the large estates owned by the land owners * Taos Indian Rebellion * After the United States acquired New Mexico from the Mexican War, General Stephen Kearney tried to establish a territorial government that excluded the established Mexican ruling class * He drew most of the officials from the 1,000 Anglo-Americans and ignoring the 50,000 Hispanics * There was widespread fears from Indians and Hispanics that the new American authority would take their lands * In 1847 Taos Indians rebelled and killed the new governor and other Anglo-American officials * The United States army put them down and New Mexico was under military rule until 1850 * In the 1870’s New Mexico was dominated by a notorious “territorial ring” * These rings consisted of business men, and politicians * In Santa Fe the ring used its influence to gain over 2 million acres of land, much of which belonged to original Mexican residents of the area * Even without its former power the Hispanic society survived and even grew * The U.S. Army finally broke the power of Navajo, Apache, and other tribes that had harassed the New Mexico people and prevented them from expanding * This lead to a substantial Hispanic migration into as far north as Colorado * Most of the expansion was by peasants looking for new opportunity * Hispanic Residence * Hispanic societies survived in the Southwest in part because they were far away from centers of English- speaking societies * Mexican Americans also fought to preserve their societies an example would be in modern day Nevada Mexican peasants fought off encroachment if English-speaking cattle ranchers * Such successes were the exemption by then railroads had come into the Southwest and with it English-speaking settlers * The expansion of the economy from the railroad attracted more than 100,00 Mexican immigrants to cross the border to find new opportunity * The Anglo-Americans restricted them to low paying jobs
Hispanic California and Texas
* In California, Spanish settlement began in the eighteenth century with the building of Christian missions along the coast * The missionaries welcomed Indians into their communities and baptized around 50,000 of them * The Indians served as a labor force for the flourishing economy * The Spanish forced them into a state of servitude little different than slavery * The missions had herds of animals that were maintained by the Indian work force * Decline of Spanish Mission Society * Due to the new Mexican government reducing the power of the church, the mission society largely collapsed in the 1830’s * In its place a secular Mexican aristocracy emerged, they controlled large estates and most of the fertile land west of the Sierra Nevada mountains * For them the arrival of Anglo-Americans was their downfall * English-speaking immigrants outnumbered californios and they had little power to resist them * English business men purposely excluded them from mines during the gold rush and a lot lost their land through corrupt bargains or through seizure * In Southern California there were fewer immigrants at first so land owners held on for a time against the immigrants * The booming economy of the north created a high demand for cattle from southern rancheros * In the 1860’s due to a severe drought and reckless expansion the cattle economy collapsed and by the 1880’s the Hispanic aristocracy had largely ceased to exist * Mexicans and Mexican Americans eventually ended up at the bottom of society * Declining Status of Hispanics * A similar pattern happened in Texas, where after joining the U.S. Mexican landowners lost their land due to fraud, coercion, and the inability to compete with Anglo-American ranching kingdoms * Juan Cortina led an armed challenge in Brownsville, when he led a raid on a jail and freed all the Mexican prisoners * He kept on harassing the Anglo communities until 1875 when he was captured by the Mexican government * Mexicans became an impoverished working class regulated to industrial and unskilled farm work * The whole Anglo-American migration to the west was less disastrous for the Mexicans than it was the Indians * Some Mexicans gained new opportunity and wealth from it but, Mexican governments were destroyed and Hispanics were demoted to the lowest working class
The Chinese Migration
* While Europeans crossed the Atlantic into the New World, many Chinese crossed the Pacific in search of better lives from their poverty-stricken home * A few Chinese came to California before the gold rush but after 1848 the flow dramatically increased and by 1880 more than 200,000 Chinese lived in the U.S., mostly in California * Racism * At first the Chinese were welcomed in California because they were considered extremely hard workers and the governor even recognized their value and ordered more immigration * The Chinese soon became very industrious and successful and the white Americans saw them as rivals * Chinese immigrants struggled to advanced economically, while dealing with racism and discrimination * In the1850’s large numbers of Chinese immigrants worked in the gold mines, but eventually, like the Mexicans, were excluded from mining gold * The “foreign miners tax” helped exclude the Chinese * The addition of more laws designed to discourage Chinese immigration in the territory and the hostility of whites drove the Chinese out of prospecting * The ones that remained in the mountains were primarily hired by independent companies * Building the Transcontinental railroad * As mining decreased as a source of wealth for Chinese immigrants, railroad employment grew * In 1865 over 12,000 Chinese worked on the transcontinental railroad and Chinese workers formed 90 percent of the labor force on the Central Pacific * Chinese workers worked hard, demanded very little, and accepted low wages * Work on the Central Pacific was dangerous, but the Chinese workers were expandable to the railroad companies * In 1866 5,000 workers went on strike and demanded higher wages, but the railroad companies starved them until they went back to work ending their strike * In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was complete and thousands of Chinese were out of work * Many of them became various types of farmers. But increasingly more flocked to cities * Establishments of “Chinatowns” * By 1900 nearly half the Chinese population of California lived in urban areas * The largest Chinese community was in San Francisco * Much of the life in these “Chinatowns” were run by powerful organizations (Usually Chinese from the same clan in China * These organizations served as political machines in immigrant communities and protected them from outside persecution and became employment brokers, unions, arbitrators of disputes, and dispensers of social services * Other organizations were “tongs” these groups were often associated with crime and had wars between each other called tong wars * Work for Chinese was limited in urban areas to only the lower rung jobs, workings as laborers, servants, and unskilled factory hands * Some owned their own businesses especially laundries because laundries required very little money to start * The low amount of women in the communities fared even worse, almost half of them were sold into prostitution * Later on Chinese and Anglo reformers tried to stamp out prostitution
Anti-Chinese Sentiments
* Anti-Coolie Clubs * As Chinese communities grew in size, Anti-coolie clubs formed in the 1860’s and 1870’s * They sought bans against employing Chinese and organized boycotts against products made by Chinese * They started attacking Chinese workers and setting fire to their factories * The democratic party took up the call to the political value of attacking the Chinese in California and so did the Workingmen’s Party of California (created in 1878 by Denis Kearney) this party gained popularity due to its hate of Chinese * By the mid 1880’s anti-Chinese agitation spread up and down the entire Pacific coast * Their arguments were not just based on economy reasons but also on cultural and racial arguments * Henry George (a critic of capitalism and a champion of rights of labor) described the Chinese as a product a civilization that failed to progress * Chinese Exclusion Act * In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration in the U.S. for ten years and stopped Chinese already living in the U.S. from becoming natural citizens * The law was supported throughout the entire nation and helped protect American workers in their minds * The law was renewed for another ten years in 1892 and was made permanent in1902 and the Chinese population reduced by more than 40 percent in the next forty years * Chinese Resistance * Chinese were shocked by these laws and insisted that they came from a great civilization * They did not understand why Irish, Jews, Italians, and other immigrants were welcomed while Chinese were discriminated against
Migration from the East
* The postwar migration that came after the Civil War * In previous migrations settlers came in thousands, they now came in millions and they spread out into the vast western spaces * Most of the new settlers were from Anglo-American towns in the east, but a substantial number were foreign born * Immigrants from all across Europe and Russia came, they numbered about 2 million * They were attracted by gold, silver, pastures for cattle and sheep, the sod of the plains (which were good for farming), and the completion of the transcontinental railroad helped the territory expand * Homestead Act * The Homestead Act allowed settlers to buy 160 acres of land for a small fee if they occupied the land for five years and improved it * The act promoted expansion in the west but settlers who bought the land faced unforeseen difficulties * They thought that the simple act of buying the land gave them a farm, but they did not realize how mechanized farming was now, they based their cost of operating a farm off of eastern agricultural experiences * 160 acres was not enough land for the grazing and grain farming of the Great Plains and many farmers did stay of their land for the five years, but a much larger number abandoned the land * Government Assistance * Farmers looked to Congress for help and in return they passed three new acts * The Timber Culture Act of 1873 permitted homesteaders to have another 160 acres as long as 40 acres of trees were planted on it * The Desert Land Act of 1877 provided that claimants could buy 640 acres at $1.25 an acre provided they irrigated part of their holdings within three years * The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 authorized sales at $2.50 an acre * These acts made it possible for settlers to buy up to 1,280 acres of land cheaply, but due to companies running rampant with fraud millions of acres of land was taken from public domain * Following the settlement political organization came to the west with Nevada becoming a state in 1864, Nebraska in 1867, Colorado in 1876, and in 1889 North and South Dakota, Washington, and Montana won admission * Utah was denied by Congress until the Mormon leaders convinced them that polygamy was gone in 1896 and Arizona and New Mexico were not states at the turn of the new century due to them not wanting to be one state, having a white minority, and being Democratic in a Republican era * Oklahoma was granted territorial status in 1889-1890
The Changing Western Economy (442-447)
Labor in the West
* As commercial activity increased farmers, ranchers, and miners found it necessary to hire a labor force * Since they were unwilling to hire Indian workers and they were far away from major towns they were forced to hire workers at higher wages * Once the jobs were done usually thousands of workers would find themselves all of a suddenly out of work * The unemployed gathered in communities in the few towns that were around and others roamed from place to place looking for work * Limited Social Mobility in the west meant that the pre-notion of it being a land of opportunity was false and the wealth in the area was distributed like it was in the east * Racially Stratified Working Class * The western working class was very multiracial with races like African Americans, English-speaking whites, Filipinos, Chinese, Europeans, Mexicans, and Indians * In almost every place of the western economy whites would hold the highest tier jobs (management and skilled jobs), while lower tier jobs (unskilled work in the mines or in agriculture) were taken by all non whites * Racial myths reinforced this dual labor system * The myths said that Mexicans, Filipinos, and Chinese were better accustomed to the heat and would tolerate low wages because they were unambitious and unconcerned about material comfort * This system helped employers but also reserved what little social mobility there was for the whites
The Arrival of the Miners * The first economic boom in the west came through mining and migrants would settle in mountains and plateaus in search of quick money through precious metals * The life span was short though it started in the 1860’s through to the 1890’s then suddenly declined * Life Cycle of a Mining Boom * As news of a gold or silver strike would come to the towns people would flock to the areas it was reported in * First individual prospectors came to exploit the first deposits of ore by hand and after then corporations came to engage in quartz mining, which required digging farther down, and then finally farmers came in to set up a more permanent economy * The first great mineral strikes after the California gold rush occurred in 1858 * Gold was discovered in the Pike’s Peak district in the soon to be state of Colorado, then the following year 50,000 prospectors came to the land * The mining camps blossomed into “cities” and after the frenzy died down corporations revived some profits from the gold boom, and the new supple of silver found supplied a new wealth * Comstock Lode * While the Colorado gold rush of 1859 was in progress, news of a new strike in Nevada drew miners there, but the most valuable mineral in the Comstock Lode was silver * The first prospectors were from California and they dominated the settlement and development of Nevada * Nevada offered no supplies through its lands, and everything had to be shipped from California * After surface deposits depleted California and eastern capitalists bought the lands from the prospectors and began to go through quartz mining * After a few years of retrieving silver from the deeper ore veins the corporations bullion amounted to $306 million and then the mines quickly played out * The next important mineral discoveries came in 1874, when gold was found in the Black Hills of south-western Dakota territory * Prospectors cam to the area like all other strikes and after they were gone corporations took over again * While silver and gold generated excitement, in the long run other, less glamorous natural resources proved more important to the growth of the west * The great Anaconda copper mine launched by William Clarke in 1881 marked the beginning of an industry that would remain important to Montana for decades * Other mining operations had success with lead, tin, quartz, and zinc * These operations were often more profitable in the long run than the usually short silver and gold rushes * Boomtown Life * Life in the boomtowns had a hectic tempo and a spirit of optimism, that gripped almost everyone * The “bonanza kings” were the few miners that struck the wealth most dreamed of * The miners that did become enormously wealthy did come from modest backgrounds often * Gender Imbalance * Due to the presence of precious cargo and precious minerals there were many outlaws in these boomtowns, they operated as individuals or in gangs * When the situation became unbearable members of a community reverted to vigilante justice * These vigilantes did not abide by the normal laws and therefore did not go through any form of due process * Men greatly outnumbered women in the mining towns, the young men often could not find companionship due to large age differences with most women * Most women came to the west with their husbands and were reverted to the same domestic jobs as eastern women * Single women, or women whose husbands were earning no money, did choose to work as cooks, laundresses, and tavern-keepers * Thousands of people who flocked to mining towns in search of quick wealth had often failed * They usually stayed and worked as wage laborers in corporate mines * Working in the mines was extremely hazardous to these workers and it caused many deaths along with a lung disease called silicosis * Technological developments cut deaths to 1 in every 80 miners and 1 in every 30 were disabled * The second important element in developing the western economy was cattle * The vast open grasslands of the Great Plains were perfect for cattle raisers * Railroads first gave the cattle raisers access to markets and eventually they ended it by bringing farmers to the land * Mexican Origins * The western cattle industry was Mexican and Texan by ancestry * Long before U.S. citizens came to the Southwest, Mexican ranchers deployed the same techniques and equipment cattlemen and cowboys would later employ in the Great Plains * Americans in Texas adopted their techniques carried them to the northernmost ranges of the cattle kingdom * Texas had the largest herds of cattle in the country; the animals descended from Spanish stock wiry, hardy Longhorns-and allowed to run wild or semi wild in Texas * The horses cattlemen and cowboys used also came from Texas, the small, muscular broncos or mustangs were well suited for the cattle country * At the end of the Civil War around 5 million cattle roamed the Texas ranges * Eastern markets offered large prices for the cattle, but this presented the problem of getting the cattle to the railroad because getting to the Missouri Pacific railroad was not easy * The ranchers would lead herds that could be as large as 260,000 over rough terrain and along with that Indians, outlaws, and property conscious farmers caused heavy losses * These ‘long drives” were the first link between Texan cattle ranchers and the eastern market * Chisholm Trail * These journeys presented the opportunity to start towns where the cattle would be driven * Facilities grew up in Abilene, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and it resided for years as the railhead of the cattle kingdom * Between 1867 and 1871,cattlemen drove around 1.5 million cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene * By the mid-1870’s, agriculture development in western Kansas was eating away at the open land * Cattlemen therefore developed new trails to other markets and as the railroad extended farther west, towns like Dodge City and Wichita started to rival Abilene as the main railhead * The sight of one of these long drives was spectacular and it became and romanticized aspect of western life * It began in the spring when cattlemen would meet up with their cowboys at a specified place to round up cattle in open ranges * They gathered cattle from all different owners with only their brands to distinguish the cattle * Cows and calves were taken into the pasture while yearling steers (year-old males) were left behind, at the end the herd would usually number from 2,000 to 5,000 * Cowboys accompanied the ranchers on the trip, most cowboys were soldiers from the Confederate army * The next largest group of cowboys were African Americans and were usually assigned wrangler or cook jobs * Every cattlemen owned permanent bases from which to operate, they were called ranches * These ranches started out small but as the business grew so did the size of the ranches * Texas fever (a disease that was transmitted by ticks) could decimate herds in open ranges and Indians and Rustlers would often seize large numbers of cattle * Competition with Farmers * As settlement in the plains increased, new problems rose for the ranchers * Sheep breeders put their flocks on ranges to compete for grass and farmers put fences around their claimed land, blocking trails and breaking up the open range * “Range wars” occurred between the three groups for and large amounts of people were killed * Lofty profits were often accounted for in the cattle business-it was said $5,000 would return $45,000 in four years * Corporations started coming into the cattle business and in one year 20 corporations with a combined $12 million were chartered in Wyoming * This frenzy caused cattlemen to become overstocked with not enough grass to support the cattle * Two severe winters in 1885-1886 and 1886-1887, with a searing summer in-between them, stung and destroyed the plains and killed a majority of the cattle * The open range industry never recovered and died, but the closed fenced ranges survived because of the extra stocks of hay for winter feed and they grew and prospered * As ranching became more sedentary more women came to them and by 1890, more than 250,000 women owned ranches or farms in the western states * The west provided opportunities for women in politics * Political gain for Women * Women won the vote in the west earlier than in the rest of the nation for different reasons in different places * In Utah, the Mormons granted suffrage to women to take criticism off of their practice of polygamy * In other places they won by saying they would have a “moral” voice * Other places believed they would be more generous than men in politics
The Romance of the West (447-452)
The Western Landscape
* The Rocky Mountain School * The allure of the west was obvious, the vastly diverse landscape was different from anything white Americans had ever seen before * Painters of the new “Rocky Mountain School”- of whom the best known were Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran- celebrated the west in grandiose canvases * Some of the paintings were taken on tour around the eastern and western states * The paintings captured the ruggedness and the spirit of the western region * The interest in the paintings brought a growing wave of tourism in the 1880’s and 1890’s * As the railroad moved further west and Indian wars died down, resort hotels opened up near some of the most spectacular landscapes in the west
The Cowboy Culture
* Even more appealing than the landscape, perhaps was the rugged, free-spirited lifestyle that many Americans associated with the west * This lifestyle was the opposite of the stable and ordered life of the east * Myth of the Cowboy * Americans came to romanticized, especially, the figure of the cowboy and he quickly transformed into a powerful figure of the west * People rarely thought about all the negatives of the cowboys job: the low wages, loneliness, and physical discomforts * Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) was a novel that helped easterners romanticized about the freedom from social restraints, closeness to nature, and the supposed propensity for violence the cowboy had * The character in the novel had a natural decency, courage, and compassion that made him a powerful symbol to people living in the east * This was the first western novel that swept the nation and appeared everywhere in the media * This symbol of the cowboy will last into the twenty-first century and remain popular in social media
The Idea of the Frontier
* Romantic Image of the West * The west was believed to be the last frontier by many Americans * Ever since the first settlement in the east the image of a free life always comforted Americans, but now with all of the land slowly being settled that pull was stronger than ever * Mark Twain became one of the greatest American writers and he gave a strong romantic voice to the west particularly in the novel Roughing It (1872) * The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) both had main characters that were not constrained by society and tried to escape into a natural world * Frederic Remington * Painter and sculptor Frederic Remington also captured the romance of the west in his artworks * He portrayed the cowboy as a natural aristocrat, living in a natural world free of the normal structures of civilization * The quality of his work made him beloved in the nineteenth century and is still popular today * * Theodore Roosevelt, who was like Wister and Remington, a man born and raised in the east, traveled to the Dakota Badlands in the mid-1880’s to recover from the death of his young wife * He saw the west as a place of physical regeneration- a place where a man could gain strength through rugged activity * His time spent in the Badlands cemented his love for the west and he later published a four volume history of the west called The Winning of the West
Frederick Jackson Turner
* Turner’s Frontier Thesis * The clearest and most influential statements of the romantic view of the west came from Turner * In 1893 he handed in the paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he said the end of the “frontier” marked the end of the biggest democratizing forces * Turner’s assessments were both inaccurate and premature * The west was never a “frontier” in the way he meant it: an uncivilized land * Indians had been living there long before Europeans even came to America and people simply pushed them off the land when they reached them * An accurate statement from him was that a vast majority of the good farming land had been taken
The Loss of Utopia
* Psychological Loss * As the west was settled more rapidly the romanticized view of the west slowly died * Henry Nash Smith wrote in the Virgin Land (1950), that the view of the west was that it was a virtual Garden of Eden and now that view is passing * In late nineteenth-century fiction, such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Romana, the setting for Utopia was no longer the New World and had shrunk to just the west
The Dispersal of the Tribes (453-457)
White Tribal Policies
* Traditional policy of the federal government was to regard tribes simultaneously as independent nations and as wards of the president, and to negotiate treaties with them that would be ratified by the Senate * This limited concept of Indian sovereignty was the reason for the government’s attempt before 1860 to make the area west of the Missouri River as permanent Indian territory * The white settlers though would always settle on Indian territory and almost all of the treaties in U.S. history would be broken * “Concentration” Policy * The early 1850’s gave way to the idea that all tribes could live in one great area * White people wanted to live on the land that many tribes had already settled on * A new reservation policy, known as “concentration” * In 1851 each tribe was given its own reservation, these reservations were confirmed by many treaties * These treaties were often illegal and did not have proper people to represent them, these people were called “treaty chiefs” * The new arrangements held many benefits for white settlers, but very few benefits for tribes * The best land would be taken by the whites and tribes were divided to make them easier to control * In 1867 after a series of bloody conflicts, Congress established an Indian Peace Commission * It was composed of soldiers and civilians, and their goal was to make a permanent Indian policy * The new idea was to put the Plains Indians into two new reservations in Oklahoma and the Dakotas * Government agents tricked leaders of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, an other tribes into agreeing to the treaties * Poorly Administered Reservations * This solution worked little better than previous policies * The agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had little understanding of how to help the Indians in their new reservations * The agents were often incompetent and dishonest, and the agents who were morally straight still had little knowledge of Indian affairs * Another problem was that whites had been slaughtering buffalo herds relentlessly * Decimation of the Buffalo * The tribes way of life depended on the buffalo, but due to high demand for their meet and hides they were hunted by large groups of whites * Even railroad companies would hire hunters to kill them to get out of the way of railroads being built * The decimation of open plains also greatly impacted the buffalo population * The army and agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged killing of the buffalo because they knew it would kill the tribes way of life
The Indian Wars
* Indian Resistance * From the 1850’s to the 1860’s, as Indians struggled against the growing white populations, there was constant fighting between the two sides * Raiding parties from Indians attacked anything they could that was associated with white settlers * During the Civil War, the Sioux in Minnesota all of a suddenly rebelled in their reservation and killed more than 700 whites * They were lead by Little Crow and were eventually subdued by the army and 38 were hanged, and the rest were banished to the Dakotas * Sand Creek Massacre * At the same time resistance flared up in eastern Colorado * Arapaho and Cheyenne came into conflict with white miners and attacked settlements and stagecoach lines * The whites created a large militia to put down these Indian bands * Government officials urged friendly Indians to camp near forts for protection * One Arapaho and Cheyenne band under Black Kettle, camped near Fort Lyon on sand Creek in November 1864 * Black Kettle believed he was protected and showed no hostile intention, however Colonel J. M Chivington led a volunteer militia to slaughter the Indians * 133 Indians were killed, 105 of them women and children * Four years later Black Kettle and his Cheyenne were captured by Colonel George A. Cluster, Cluster and his troops killed him and every other Cheyenne * “Indian Hunting” * At the end of the Civil war, white troops stepped up their war against Indians * White vigilantes started to kill Indians and the act became known as “Indian hunting” * The whites that killed Indians scalped them as proof, often these killing were for no reason and other times they were in response to raids * A high amount of whites were committed to the goal of total elimination of the Indian tribes, a goal that rested on the belief that Indians were inhumane and they could not exist with the white population * Treaties made in 1867 brought a brief lull in the conflicts * New white settlers destroyed those treaties when they crossed into Dakota territory that was promised to the tribes * New Indian resistance rose and the Sioux left their reservation and united under two leaders: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull * Little Bighorn * Three army columns set out to put down the Sioux resistance * Colonel George A. Cluster was in charge of the Seventh Cavalry * In southern Montana in 1876 Cluster and 264 of his men were surrounded and killed by nearly 2,500 Indians (one of the largest Indian armies assembled in the United States) * The battle at Little Bighorn was the single greatest Indian victory because for one of the few times tribes united together against whites * The united tribes would not stay together for long and soon the warriors broke off into bands to raid white settlements * Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull accepted life on the reservations and both were later killed by reservation police for showing signs of resistance * Chief Joseph * The Nez Perce were a small peaceful tribe that lived unmolested by whites until 1877 when they accepted to move to a reservation * On the way to the reservation several young and drunk warriors killed four white settlers * American troops attacked the tribe in retribution, but were defeated at the battle of White Bird Canyon * The tribe scattered in different directions, Chief Joseph led a band of 200 men and 350 women in an attempt to reach Sioux that lived in Canada * They covered 1,321 miles in seventy-five days, with the army constantly following them * They were caught just short of the Canadian boundary and Joseph finally gave up and surrendered to General Nelson Miles * In exchange he was promised that the Nez Perce would live together on a reservation, but this promise was broken and the tribe was split up * The last fighters against the whites were the Chirichau Apaches, who fought from the 1860’s to the 1880’s * The two chiefs that led them were Mangas Colorados and Cochise * Mangas was murdered by soldiers during the Civil war and Cochise agreed to a peace treaty in 1872, but Cochise died in 1874 * Geronimo succeeded Cochise and was not willing to bow to the whites * He fought for another decade until his band dwindled into only 30 people * He surrendered and it marked the end of formal warfare * During the Apache wars many atrocities were committed by whites, for example when Indians accepted peace treaty meetings with the army, soldiers would sometimes slaughter them during the negotiations * “Ghost Dance” * A prophet named Wovoka led a religious revival for the Sioux * He told of a messiah coming to save the Indians * The “Ghost Dance” was a mass that gave visions to the Indians, these visions included images of whites retreating from the plains * Reservation agents were astounded by the dances * Wounded Knee * On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry tried to round up 350 cold and starving Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota * Fighting broke out in which about 40 white soldiers were killed and up to 200 Indians were killed * This fight soon turned to a one sided massacre, as white soldiers used their new machine guns to decimate the Indians
The Dawes Act
* Even before Wounded Knee the federal government pushed to destroy tribal structure * They believed this was to help the Indians because they would all die if none of them assimilated with whites * Assimilation * The Dawes Severely Act of 1887 provided the gradual elimination of tribal ownership of land and the allotment of individual ownership * 160 acres to the head of the family, 80 acres to a single adult or orphan, 40 acres to each child, and Adult owners were given United States citizenship (They could not legally gain full title to their land for twenty five years) * The act applied to most western tribes and by applying the act, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was promoting assimilation with the tribes * Agents would even take children away and send them to boarding schools * Indians were still resisting forced assimilation and eventually the government gave up on the movement all together * The Burke Act of 1906 tried to resume the assimilation act, but again it ultimately failed
The Rise and Decline of the Western Farmer (457-460)
* Even before the Civil War, farmers had moved into the plains region and begun challenging the ranchers and Indians for dominance * By the 1870’s, farmers had moved into the plains and into enclosed Indian territory * The late 1870’s and early 1880’s brought an agricultural economic boom * The farmers grew too much and the demand was not high enough for them to sell all their crops, and this brought a long decline in the farming economy
Farming on the Plains
* The completion of the transcontinental railroad line in the west allowed people to easily travel to the west * The subsidiary lines that came off of the main railroad allowed farmers to easily get to the plains and they helped grow agricultural settlement * Key Role of the Railroad * Railroad companies themselves promoted settlement in the plains to both provide customers and increase the value of their large landholdings * They set the rates so low that any one could afford the trip to the west * Contributing to the growing agricultural expansion of the plains was that for several years in succession rain fall was well above the average * Barbed Wire * Fencing was important to farmers to protect their land from open-range cattle, but wood or stone fences were too expensive and would not keep the cattle out * In 1873, however, tow Illinois farmers, Joseph H. Glidden and I. L. Ellwood, solved this problem by making and marketing barbed wire * Another problem for farmers was water * Much of the land west of the Mississippi was considerably more arid than the land in the east * Farming in the west depended on irrigation because of this * Water was diverted from rivers and streams and into the farmlands, or wells would be drilled into the land * Drought * The water problems created an epic disaster in 1887 * A series of dry seasons began and farmers either had to use drought resistant crops or dig wells to survive them * These projects required government assistance, but the government was not prepared to fund the projects * Hard Times for Farmers * Most of the people who had moved into the plains area had previously been farmers in the Middle West, the East, or Europe * The booming early years convinced the farmers that they would easily be able to pay off their debts * Due to the arid late 1880’s- during which crop prices declined while production became more expensive- thousands of farmers could not pay their debts * This caused a revers migration: white settlers started to move back east
Commercial Agriculture
* Farming in the late nineteenth-century soon changed from the independent farmer to the commercial farmer * Commercial farmers were not self-sufficient and they bought all the food and household items they needed to live from a town * They sold cash crops in national or world markets * This kind of farming when successful, raised the farmers living standards, but it also made them dependent on bankers and interest rates, railroads, national and European markets, world supply and demand * Between 1865 and 1900, agriculture became an international business * Farm output increased across the world and at the same time, modern forms of communication and transportation wee creating new markets around the world * American commercial farmers produced more crops than the U.S. economy needed and they depended highly on international markets * Consequences of Overproduction * Beginning in the 1880’s, world wide overproduction led to a drop in prices in crops * This lead to the 6 million American farming families being in financial distress
The Farmer’s Grievances
* American farmers knew something was wrong, but they had no idea at the amount of overproduction in the world * Further grievances for the farmer was that railroads charged higher freight rates for farm goods and charged storage rates for warehouses they owned in buying centers * Farmers Grievances * Farmers resented institutions controlling credit- banks, loan companies, and insurance companies * Farmers had to take loans on any terms they were given and they had to tried to pay off their loans in years when prices were dropping and currency was becoming scarce * Their third grievance concerned prices * Both the prices they received for crops and the price that they paid for goods were not in their favor * They could plant crops when prices were high and when they harvested them the prices would have declined
The Agrarian Malaise
* Isolation * These economic difficulties produced a series of social and cultural resentments * Some farm families were virtually cut off from the outside world and human companionship * Many farmers lacked access to adequate education for their children, proper medical facilities, to recreational activities, to virtually anything and relied of themselves for everything * Older farmers saw their children leave them for the cities * This sense of isolation found its way into late nineteenth-century literature * The writers romanticized about the rugged life of a cowboy, but for the farmer the image was very different * Hamlin Garland wrote in the novel Jason Edwards (1891) about how the west use to be the last land of wealth and freedom and happiness and now all of that was disappearing
Mr. Arroyo
U.S. History II Advanced Placement
1 September 2013
Chapter 16 Outline: The Conquest of the Far West
The Societies of the Far West (434-441)
The Western Tribes
* Indian tribes were the most important group before the Anglo-American migration in the Far West * Western tribes developed several forms of civilization * More than 300,000 Indians lived along the pacific coast among them were Serrano, Chumash, Pomo, Maidu, Yurok, and Chinook * When the Spanish arrived disease and destruction followed for the Native tribes * By mid-nineteenth century 150,000 Indians remained, some lived within the Hispanic society with Mexican and Spanish settlers * Pueblos of the Southwest had lived largely as farmers and settled the land permanently long before the Spanish came there * Pueblos grew corn, built towns, had elaborate forms of irrigation, and participated in trade and commerce * Their relationship with the Spanish produced an alliance against the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches of the area * Caste System * Interaction between the Pueblos, Spanish, and Indian tribes created a caste system in the Southwest * Top were Spanish or Mexicans, who controlled trading and owned large estates * Pueblos were largely free but still below the Spanish * Apaches, Navajos, and those who were captured or voluntarily left their tribes were at the bottom, they were called genizaros * This system represented Spanish pre-occupation * Plains Indians * This was the most widespread and diverse group of Indians in the west * Some formed alliances with each other, others were in constant conflict, some lived sedentary lives, some lived nomadic lives * Despite differences tribes shared traits such as their cultures were based on close and extended family networks and a close relationship with nature * Tribes were subdivided in bands of 500 people * In each band men and women had separate roles, women’s roles were domestic and artistic: raising children, cooking, making clothes, gathering food, and creating many of the tribes pieces of art * Men were hunters and traders and supervised the religious and military life * Religion was centered around spiritual power and the natural world * Buffalo were often the main source of food the Plains tribes hunted * Economic Importance of the Buffalo * Buffalo provided the economic basis for Plains tribes * Every part of the buffalo was used skin for clothing, bones for arrow tips, tendons for string, and meat for food * Indian Weaknesses * Plains Indians were extremely proud at their ability to fight and hunt and male members of tribes were essentially a warrior class * Plains tribes proved to the greatest threat to settlers in the west and the only weakness they had (like all Indian tribes) was that they were not willing to unite against white aggression * Like Eastern tribes they refused to band together in a coalition and would even fight each other while fighting white settlers * Some tribes were able to band together such as the Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, who had created a powerful alliance and ruled the northern Plains * The tribes ultimate weakness was to eastern diseases * Smallpox and other diseases wiped many western tribes out
Hispanic New Mexico
* For centuries much of the Far West had been apart of the Spanish Empire and later, the Mexican Republic * Land acquired by the United States in the 1840’s had Mexicans living on it who had suddenly become residents in American territory * Spanish communities were spread throughout the Southwest * Arrival of Anglo-American migrants and the expansion of American capitalist changed the small towns * New Mexico had descendants from the original Spanish settlers in the seventeenth century * These descendants lived alongside Pueblo Indians and American traders and then there was a small aristocracy of great land owners * Mexican peasants and large groups of Indians (either slaves or indentured servants) works on the large estates owned by the land owners * Taos Indian Rebellion * After the United States acquired New Mexico from the Mexican War, General Stephen Kearney tried to establish a territorial government that excluded the established Mexican ruling class * He drew most of the officials from the 1,000 Anglo-Americans and ignoring the 50,000 Hispanics * There was widespread fears from Indians and Hispanics that the new American authority would take their lands * In 1847 Taos Indians rebelled and killed the new governor and other Anglo-American officials * The United States army put them down and New Mexico was under military rule until 1850 * In the 1870’s New Mexico was dominated by a notorious “territorial ring” * These rings consisted of business men, and politicians * In Santa Fe the ring used its influence to gain over 2 million acres of land, much of which belonged to original Mexican residents of the area * Even without its former power the Hispanic society survived and even grew * The U.S. Army finally broke the power of Navajo, Apache, and other tribes that had harassed the New Mexico people and prevented them from expanding * This lead to a substantial Hispanic migration into as far north as Colorado * Most of the expansion was by peasants looking for new opportunity * Hispanic Residence * Hispanic societies survived in the Southwest in part because they were far away from centers of English- speaking societies * Mexican Americans also fought to preserve their societies an example would be in modern day Nevada Mexican peasants fought off encroachment if English-speaking cattle ranchers * Such successes were the exemption by then railroads had come into the Southwest and with it English-speaking settlers * The expansion of the economy from the railroad attracted more than 100,00 Mexican immigrants to cross the border to find new opportunity * The Anglo-Americans restricted them to low paying jobs
Hispanic California and Texas
* In California, Spanish settlement began in the eighteenth century with the building of Christian missions along the coast * The missionaries welcomed Indians into their communities and baptized around 50,000 of them * The Indians served as a labor force for the flourishing economy * The Spanish forced them into a state of servitude little different than slavery * The missions had herds of animals that were maintained by the Indian work force * Decline of Spanish Mission Society * Due to the new Mexican government reducing the power of the church, the mission society largely collapsed in the 1830’s * In its place a secular Mexican aristocracy emerged, they controlled large estates and most of the fertile land west of the Sierra Nevada mountains * For them the arrival of Anglo-Americans was their downfall * English-speaking immigrants outnumbered californios and they had little power to resist them * English business men purposely excluded them from mines during the gold rush and a lot lost their land through corrupt bargains or through seizure * In Southern California there were fewer immigrants at first so land owners held on for a time against the immigrants * The booming economy of the north created a high demand for cattle from southern rancheros * In the 1860’s due to a severe drought and reckless expansion the cattle economy collapsed and by the 1880’s the Hispanic aristocracy had largely ceased to exist * Mexicans and Mexican Americans eventually ended up at the bottom of society * Declining Status of Hispanics * A similar pattern happened in Texas, where after joining the U.S. Mexican landowners lost their land due to fraud, coercion, and the inability to compete with Anglo-American ranching kingdoms * Juan Cortina led an armed challenge in Brownsville, when he led a raid on a jail and freed all the Mexican prisoners * He kept on harassing the Anglo communities until 1875 when he was captured by the Mexican government * Mexicans became an impoverished working class regulated to industrial and unskilled farm work * The whole Anglo-American migration to the west was less disastrous for the Mexicans than it was the Indians * Some Mexicans gained new opportunity and wealth from it but, Mexican governments were destroyed and Hispanics were demoted to the lowest working class
The Chinese Migration
* While Europeans crossed the Atlantic into the New World, many Chinese crossed the Pacific in search of better lives from their poverty-stricken home * A few Chinese came to California before the gold rush but after 1848 the flow dramatically increased and by 1880 more than 200,000 Chinese lived in the U.S., mostly in California * Racism * At first the Chinese were welcomed in California because they were considered extremely hard workers and the governor even recognized their value and ordered more immigration * The Chinese soon became very industrious and successful and the white Americans saw them as rivals * Chinese immigrants struggled to advanced economically, while dealing with racism and discrimination * In the1850’s large numbers of Chinese immigrants worked in the gold mines, but eventually, like the Mexicans, were excluded from mining gold * The “foreign miners tax” helped exclude the Chinese * The addition of more laws designed to discourage Chinese immigration in the territory and the hostility of whites drove the Chinese out of prospecting * The ones that remained in the mountains were primarily hired by independent companies * Building the Transcontinental railroad * As mining decreased as a source of wealth for Chinese immigrants, railroad employment grew * In 1865 over 12,000 Chinese worked on the transcontinental railroad and Chinese workers formed 90 percent of the labor force on the Central Pacific * Chinese workers worked hard, demanded very little, and accepted low wages * Work on the Central Pacific was dangerous, but the Chinese workers were expandable to the railroad companies * In 1866 5,000 workers went on strike and demanded higher wages, but the railroad companies starved them until they went back to work ending their strike * In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was complete and thousands of Chinese were out of work * Many of them became various types of farmers. But increasingly more flocked to cities * Establishments of “Chinatowns” * By 1900 nearly half the Chinese population of California lived in urban areas * The largest Chinese community was in San Francisco * Much of the life in these “Chinatowns” were run by powerful organizations (Usually Chinese from the same clan in China * These organizations served as political machines in immigrant communities and protected them from outside persecution and became employment brokers, unions, arbitrators of disputes, and dispensers of social services * Other organizations were “tongs” these groups were often associated with crime and had wars between each other called tong wars * Work for Chinese was limited in urban areas to only the lower rung jobs, workings as laborers, servants, and unskilled factory hands * Some owned their own businesses especially laundries because laundries required very little money to start * The low amount of women in the communities fared even worse, almost half of them were sold into prostitution * Later on Chinese and Anglo reformers tried to stamp out prostitution
Anti-Chinese Sentiments
* Anti-Coolie Clubs * As Chinese communities grew in size, Anti-coolie clubs formed in the 1860’s and 1870’s * They sought bans against employing Chinese and organized boycotts against products made by Chinese * They started attacking Chinese workers and setting fire to their factories * The democratic party took up the call to the political value of attacking the Chinese in California and so did the Workingmen’s Party of California (created in 1878 by Denis Kearney) this party gained popularity due to its hate of Chinese * By the mid 1880’s anti-Chinese agitation spread up and down the entire Pacific coast * Their arguments were not just based on economy reasons but also on cultural and racial arguments * Henry George (a critic of capitalism and a champion of rights of labor) described the Chinese as a product a civilization that failed to progress * Chinese Exclusion Act * In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration in the U.S. for ten years and stopped Chinese already living in the U.S. from becoming natural citizens * The law was supported throughout the entire nation and helped protect American workers in their minds * The law was renewed for another ten years in 1892 and was made permanent in1902 and the Chinese population reduced by more than 40 percent in the next forty years * Chinese Resistance * Chinese were shocked by these laws and insisted that they came from a great civilization * They did not understand why Irish, Jews, Italians, and other immigrants were welcomed while Chinese were discriminated against
Migration from the East
* The postwar migration that came after the Civil War * In previous migrations settlers came in thousands, they now came in millions and they spread out into the vast western spaces * Most of the new settlers were from Anglo-American towns in the east, but a substantial number were foreign born * Immigrants from all across Europe and Russia came, they numbered about 2 million * They were attracted by gold, silver, pastures for cattle and sheep, the sod of the plains (which were good for farming), and the completion of the transcontinental railroad helped the territory expand * Homestead Act * The Homestead Act allowed settlers to buy 160 acres of land for a small fee if they occupied the land for five years and improved it * The act promoted expansion in the west but settlers who bought the land faced unforeseen difficulties * They thought that the simple act of buying the land gave them a farm, but they did not realize how mechanized farming was now, they based their cost of operating a farm off of eastern agricultural experiences * 160 acres was not enough land for the grazing and grain farming of the Great Plains and many farmers did stay of their land for the five years, but a much larger number abandoned the land * Government Assistance * Farmers looked to Congress for help and in return they passed three new acts * The Timber Culture Act of 1873 permitted homesteaders to have another 160 acres as long as 40 acres of trees were planted on it * The Desert Land Act of 1877 provided that claimants could buy 640 acres at $1.25 an acre provided they irrigated part of their holdings within three years * The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 authorized sales at $2.50 an acre * These acts made it possible for settlers to buy up to 1,280 acres of land cheaply, but due to companies running rampant with fraud millions of acres of land was taken from public domain * Following the settlement political organization came to the west with Nevada becoming a state in 1864, Nebraska in 1867, Colorado in 1876, and in 1889 North and South Dakota, Washington, and Montana won admission * Utah was denied by Congress until the Mormon leaders convinced them that polygamy was gone in 1896 and Arizona and New Mexico were not states at the turn of the new century due to them not wanting to be one state, having a white minority, and being Democratic in a Republican era * Oklahoma was granted territorial status in 1889-1890
The Changing Western Economy (442-447)
Labor in the West
* As commercial activity increased farmers, ranchers, and miners found it necessary to hire a labor force * Since they were unwilling to hire Indian workers and they were far away from major towns they were forced to hire workers at higher wages * Once the jobs were done usually thousands of workers would find themselves all of a suddenly out of work * The unemployed gathered in communities in the few towns that were around and others roamed from place to place looking for work * Limited Social Mobility in the west meant that the pre-notion of it being a land of opportunity was false and the wealth in the area was distributed like it was in the east * Racially Stratified Working Class * The western working class was very multiracial with races like African Americans, English-speaking whites, Filipinos, Chinese, Europeans, Mexicans, and Indians * In almost every place of the western economy whites would hold the highest tier jobs (management and skilled jobs), while lower tier jobs (unskilled work in the mines or in agriculture) were taken by all non whites * Racial myths reinforced this dual labor system * The myths said that Mexicans, Filipinos, and Chinese were better accustomed to the heat and would tolerate low wages because they were unambitious and unconcerned about material comfort * This system helped employers but also reserved what little social mobility there was for the whites
The Arrival of the Miners * The first economic boom in the west came through mining and migrants would settle in mountains and plateaus in search of quick money through precious metals * The life span was short though it started in the 1860’s through to the 1890’s then suddenly declined * Life Cycle of a Mining Boom * As news of a gold or silver strike would come to the towns people would flock to the areas it was reported in * First individual prospectors came to exploit the first deposits of ore by hand and after then corporations came to engage in quartz mining, which required digging farther down, and then finally farmers came in to set up a more permanent economy * The first great mineral strikes after the California gold rush occurred in 1858 * Gold was discovered in the Pike’s Peak district in the soon to be state of Colorado, then the following year 50,000 prospectors came to the land * The mining camps blossomed into “cities” and after the frenzy died down corporations revived some profits from the gold boom, and the new supple of silver found supplied a new wealth * Comstock Lode * While the Colorado gold rush of 1859 was in progress, news of a new strike in Nevada drew miners there, but the most valuable mineral in the Comstock Lode was silver * The first prospectors were from California and they dominated the settlement and development of Nevada * Nevada offered no supplies through its lands, and everything had to be shipped from California * After surface deposits depleted California and eastern capitalists bought the lands from the prospectors and began to go through quartz mining * After a few years of retrieving silver from the deeper ore veins the corporations bullion amounted to $306 million and then the mines quickly played out * The next important mineral discoveries came in 1874, when gold was found in the Black Hills of south-western Dakota territory * Prospectors cam to the area like all other strikes and after they were gone corporations took over again * While silver and gold generated excitement, in the long run other, less glamorous natural resources proved more important to the growth of the west * The great Anaconda copper mine launched by William Clarke in 1881 marked the beginning of an industry that would remain important to Montana for decades * Other mining operations had success with lead, tin, quartz, and zinc * These operations were often more profitable in the long run than the usually short silver and gold rushes * Boomtown Life * Life in the boomtowns had a hectic tempo and a spirit of optimism, that gripped almost everyone * The “bonanza kings” were the few miners that struck the wealth most dreamed of * The miners that did become enormously wealthy did come from modest backgrounds often * Gender Imbalance * Due to the presence of precious cargo and precious minerals there were many outlaws in these boomtowns, they operated as individuals or in gangs * When the situation became unbearable members of a community reverted to vigilante justice * These vigilantes did not abide by the normal laws and therefore did not go through any form of due process * Men greatly outnumbered women in the mining towns, the young men often could not find companionship due to large age differences with most women * Most women came to the west with their husbands and were reverted to the same domestic jobs as eastern women * Single women, or women whose husbands were earning no money, did choose to work as cooks, laundresses, and tavern-keepers * Thousands of people who flocked to mining towns in search of quick wealth had often failed * They usually stayed and worked as wage laborers in corporate mines * Working in the mines was extremely hazardous to these workers and it caused many deaths along with a lung disease called silicosis * Technological developments cut deaths to 1 in every 80 miners and 1 in every 30 were disabled * The second important element in developing the western economy was cattle * The vast open grasslands of the Great Plains were perfect for cattle raisers * Railroads first gave the cattle raisers access to markets and eventually they ended it by bringing farmers to the land * Mexican Origins * The western cattle industry was Mexican and Texan by ancestry * Long before U.S. citizens came to the Southwest, Mexican ranchers deployed the same techniques and equipment cattlemen and cowboys would later employ in the Great Plains * Americans in Texas adopted their techniques carried them to the northernmost ranges of the cattle kingdom * Texas had the largest herds of cattle in the country; the animals descended from Spanish stock wiry, hardy Longhorns-and allowed to run wild or semi wild in Texas * The horses cattlemen and cowboys used also came from Texas, the small, muscular broncos or mustangs were well suited for the cattle country * At the end of the Civil War around 5 million cattle roamed the Texas ranges * Eastern markets offered large prices for the cattle, but this presented the problem of getting the cattle to the railroad because getting to the Missouri Pacific railroad was not easy * The ranchers would lead herds that could be as large as 260,000 over rough terrain and along with that Indians, outlaws, and property conscious farmers caused heavy losses * These ‘long drives” were the first link between Texan cattle ranchers and the eastern market * Chisholm Trail * These journeys presented the opportunity to start towns where the cattle would be driven * Facilities grew up in Abilene, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and it resided for years as the railhead of the cattle kingdom * Between 1867 and 1871,cattlemen drove around 1.5 million cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene * By the mid-1870’s, agriculture development in western Kansas was eating away at the open land * Cattlemen therefore developed new trails to other markets and as the railroad extended farther west, towns like Dodge City and Wichita started to rival Abilene as the main railhead * The sight of one of these long drives was spectacular and it became and romanticized aspect of western life * It began in the spring when cattlemen would meet up with their cowboys at a specified place to round up cattle in open ranges * They gathered cattle from all different owners with only their brands to distinguish the cattle * Cows and calves were taken into the pasture while yearling steers (year-old males) were left behind, at the end the herd would usually number from 2,000 to 5,000 * Cowboys accompanied the ranchers on the trip, most cowboys were soldiers from the Confederate army * The next largest group of cowboys were African Americans and were usually assigned wrangler or cook jobs * Every cattlemen owned permanent bases from which to operate, they were called ranches * These ranches started out small but as the business grew so did the size of the ranches * Texas fever (a disease that was transmitted by ticks) could decimate herds in open ranges and Indians and Rustlers would often seize large numbers of cattle * Competition with Farmers * As settlement in the plains increased, new problems rose for the ranchers * Sheep breeders put their flocks on ranges to compete for grass and farmers put fences around their claimed land, blocking trails and breaking up the open range * “Range wars” occurred between the three groups for and large amounts of people were killed * Lofty profits were often accounted for in the cattle business-it was said $5,000 would return $45,000 in four years * Corporations started coming into the cattle business and in one year 20 corporations with a combined $12 million were chartered in Wyoming * This frenzy caused cattlemen to become overstocked with not enough grass to support the cattle * Two severe winters in 1885-1886 and 1886-1887, with a searing summer in-between them, stung and destroyed the plains and killed a majority of the cattle * The open range industry never recovered and died, but the closed fenced ranges survived because of the extra stocks of hay for winter feed and they grew and prospered * As ranching became more sedentary more women came to them and by 1890, more than 250,000 women owned ranches or farms in the western states * The west provided opportunities for women in politics * Political gain for Women * Women won the vote in the west earlier than in the rest of the nation for different reasons in different places * In Utah, the Mormons granted suffrage to women to take criticism off of their practice of polygamy * In other places they won by saying they would have a “moral” voice * Other places believed they would be more generous than men in politics
The Romance of the West (447-452)
The Western Landscape
* The Rocky Mountain School * The allure of the west was obvious, the vastly diverse landscape was different from anything white Americans had ever seen before * Painters of the new “Rocky Mountain School”- of whom the best known were Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran- celebrated the west in grandiose canvases * Some of the paintings were taken on tour around the eastern and western states * The paintings captured the ruggedness and the spirit of the western region * The interest in the paintings brought a growing wave of tourism in the 1880’s and 1890’s * As the railroad moved further west and Indian wars died down, resort hotels opened up near some of the most spectacular landscapes in the west
The Cowboy Culture
* Even more appealing than the landscape, perhaps was the rugged, free-spirited lifestyle that many Americans associated with the west * This lifestyle was the opposite of the stable and ordered life of the east * Myth of the Cowboy * Americans came to romanticized, especially, the figure of the cowboy and he quickly transformed into a powerful figure of the west * People rarely thought about all the negatives of the cowboys job: the low wages, loneliness, and physical discomforts * Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) was a novel that helped easterners romanticized about the freedom from social restraints, closeness to nature, and the supposed propensity for violence the cowboy had * The character in the novel had a natural decency, courage, and compassion that made him a powerful symbol to people living in the east * This was the first western novel that swept the nation and appeared everywhere in the media * This symbol of the cowboy will last into the twenty-first century and remain popular in social media
The Idea of the Frontier
* Romantic Image of the West * The west was believed to be the last frontier by many Americans * Ever since the first settlement in the east the image of a free life always comforted Americans, but now with all of the land slowly being settled that pull was stronger than ever * Mark Twain became one of the greatest American writers and he gave a strong romantic voice to the west particularly in the novel Roughing It (1872) * The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) both had main characters that were not constrained by society and tried to escape into a natural world * Frederic Remington * Painter and sculptor Frederic Remington also captured the romance of the west in his artworks * He portrayed the cowboy as a natural aristocrat, living in a natural world free of the normal structures of civilization * The quality of his work made him beloved in the nineteenth century and is still popular today * * Theodore Roosevelt, who was like Wister and Remington, a man born and raised in the east, traveled to the Dakota Badlands in the mid-1880’s to recover from the death of his young wife * He saw the west as a place of physical regeneration- a place where a man could gain strength through rugged activity * His time spent in the Badlands cemented his love for the west and he later published a four volume history of the west called The Winning of the West
Frederick Jackson Turner
* Turner’s Frontier Thesis * The clearest and most influential statements of the romantic view of the west came from Turner * In 1893 he handed in the paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he said the end of the “frontier” marked the end of the biggest democratizing forces * Turner’s assessments were both inaccurate and premature * The west was never a “frontier” in the way he meant it: an uncivilized land * Indians had been living there long before Europeans even came to America and people simply pushed them off the land when they reached them * An accurate statement from him was that a vast majority of the good farming land had been taken
The Loss of Utopia
* Psychological Loss * As the west was settled more rapidly the romanticized view of the west slowly died * Henry Nash Smith wrote in the Virgin Land (1950), that the view of the west was that it was a virtual Garden of Eden and now that view is passing * In late nineteenth-century fiction, such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Romana, the setting for Utopia was no longer the New World and had shrunk to just the west
The Dispersal of the Tribes (453-457)
White Tribal Policies
* Traditional policy of the federal government was to regard tribes simultaneously as independent nations and as wards of the president, and to negotiate treaties with them that would be ratified by the Senate * This limited concept of Indian sovereignty was the reason for the government’s attempt before 1860 to make the area west of the Missouri River as permanent Indian territory * The white settlers though would always settle on Indian territory and almost all of the treaties in U.S. history would be broken * “Concentration” Policy * The early 1850’s gave way to the idea that all tribes could live in one great area * White people wanted to live on the land that many tribes had already settled on * A new reservation policy, known as “concentration” * In 1851 each tribe was given its own reservation, these reservations were confirmed by many treaties * These treaties were often illegal and did not have proper people to represent them, these people were called “treaty chiefs” * The new arrangements held many benefits for white settlers, but very few benefits for tribes * The best land would be taken by the whites and tribes were divided to make them easier to control * In 1867 after a series of bloody conflicts, Congress established an Indian Peace Commission * It was composed of soldiers and civilians, and their goal was to make a permanent Indian policy * The new idea was to put the Plains Indians into two new reservations in Oklahoma and the Dakotas * Government agents tricked leaders of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, an other tribes into agreeing to the treaties * Poorly Administered Reservations * This solution worked little better than previous policies * The agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had little understanding of how to help the Indians in their new reservations * The agents were often incompetent and dishonest, and the agents who were morally straight still had little knowledge of Indian affairs * Another problem was that whites had been slaughtering buffalo herds relentlessly * Decimation of the Buffalo * The tribes way of life depended on the buffalo, but due to high demand for their meet and hides they were hunted by large groups of whites * Even railroad companies would hire hunters to kill them to get out of the way of railroads being built * The decimation of open plains also greatly impacted the buffalo population * The army and agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged killing of the buffalo because they knew it would kill the tribes way of life
The Indian Wars
* Indian Resistance * From the 1850’s to the 1860’s, as Indians struggled against the growing white populations, there was constant fighting between the two sides * Raiding parties from Indians attacked anything they could that was associated with white settlers * During the Civil War, the Sioux in Minnesota all of a suddenly rebelled in their reservation and killed more than 700 whites * They were lead by Little Crow and were eventually subdued by the army and 38 were hanged, and the rest were banished to the Dakotas * Sand Creek Massacre * At the same time resistance flared up in eastern Colorado * Arapaho and Cheyenne came into conflict with white miners and attacked settlements and stagecoach lines * The whites created a large militia to put down these Indian bands * Government officials urged friendly Indians to camp near forts for protection * One Arapaho and Cheyenne band under Black Kettle, camped near Fort Lyon on sand Creek in November 1864 * Black Kettle believed he was protected and showed no hostile intention, however Colonel J. M Chivington led a volunteer militia to slaughter the Indians * 133 Indians were killed, 105 of them women and children * Four years later Black Kettle and his Cheyenne were captured by Colonel George A. Cluster, Cluster and his troops killed him and every other Cheyenne * “Indian Hunting” * At the end of the Civil war, white troops stepped up their war against Indians * White vigilantes started to kill Indians and the act became known as “Indian hunting” * The whites that killed Indians scalped them as proof, often these killing were for no reason and other times they were in response to raids * A high amount of whites were committed to the goal of total elimination of the Indian tribes, a goal that rested on the belief that Indians were inhumane and they could not exist with the white population * Treaties made in 1867 brought a brief lull in the conflicts * New white settlers destroyed those treaties when they crossed into Dakota territory that was promised to the tribes * New Indian resistance rose and the Sioux left their reservation and united under two leaders: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull * Little Bighorn * Three army columns set out to put down the Sioux resistance * Colonel George A. Cluster was in charge of the Seventh Cavalry * In southern Montana in 1876 Cluster and 264 of his men were surrounded and killed by nearly 2,500 Indians (one of the largest Indian armies assembled in the United States) * The battle at Little Bighorn was the single greatest Indian victory because for one of the few times tribes united together against whites * The united tribes would not stay together for long and soon the warriors broke off into bands to raid white settlements * Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull accepted life on the reservations and both were later killed by reservation police for showing signs of resistance * Chief Joseph * The Nez Perce were a small peaceful tribe that lived unmolested by whites until 1877 when they accepted to move to a reservation * On the way to the reservation several young and drunk warriors killed four white settlers * American troops attacked the tribe in retribution, but were defeated at the battle of White Bird Canyon * The tribe scattered in different directions, Chief Joseph led a band of 200 men and 350 women in an attempt to reach Sioux that lived in Canada * They covered 1,321 miles in seventy-five days, with the army constantly following them * They were caught just short of the Canadian boundary and Joseph finally gave up and surrendered to General Nelson Miles * In exchange he was promised that the Nez Perce would live together on a reservation, but this promise was broken and the tribe was split up * The last fighters against the whites were the Chirichau Apaches, who fought from the 1860’s to the 1880’s * The two chiefs that led them were Mangas Colorados and Cochise * Mangas was murdered by soldiers during the Civil war and Cochise agreed to a peace treaty in 1872, but Cochise died in 1874 * Geronimo succeeded Cochise and was not willing to bow to the whites * He fought for another decade until his band dwindled into only 30 people * He surrendered and it marked the end of formal warfare * During the Apache wars many atrocities were committed by whites, for example when Indians accepted peace treaty meetings with the army, soldiers would sometimes slaughter them during the negotiations * “Ghost Dance” * A prophet named Wovoka led a religious revival for the Sioux * He told of a messiah coming to save the Indians * The “Ghost Dance” was a mass that gave visions to the Indians, these visions included images of whites retreating from the plains * Reservation agents were astounded by the dances * Wounded Knee * On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry tried to round up 350 cold and starving Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota * Fighting broke out in which about 40 white soldiers were killed and up to 200 Indians were killed * This fight soon turned to a one sided massacre, as white soldiers used their new machine guns to decimate the Indians
The Dawes Act
* Even before Wounded Knee the federal government pushed to destroy tribal structure * They believed this was to help the Indians because they would all die if none of them assimilated with whites * Assimilation * The Dawes Severely Act of 1887 provided the gradual elimination of tribal ownership of land and the allotment of individual ownership * 160 acres to the head of the family, 80 acres to a single adult or orphan, 40 acres to each child, and Adult owners were given United States citizenship (They could not legally gain full title to their land for twenty five years) * The act applied to most western tribes and by applying the act, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was promoting assimilation with the tribes * Agents would even take children away and send them to boarding schools * Indians were still resisting forced assimilation and eventually the government gave up on the movement all together * The Burke Act of 1906 tried to resume the assimilation act, but again it ultimately failed
The Rise and Decline of the Western Farmer (457-460)
* Even before the Civil War, farmers had moved into the plains region and begun challenging the ranchers and Indians for dominance * By the 1870’s, farmers had moved into the plains and into enclosed Indian territory * The late 1870’s and early 1880’s brought an agricultural economic boom * The farmers grew too much and the demand was not high enough for them to sell all their crops, and this brought a long decline in the farming economy
Farming on the Plains
* The completion of the transcontinental railroad line in the west allowed people to easily travel to the west * The subsidiary lines that came off of the main railroad allowed farmers to easily get to the plains and they helped grow agricultural settlement * Key Role of the Railroad * Railroad companies themselves promoted settlement in the plains to both provide customers and increase the value of their large landholdings * They set the rates so low that any one could afford the trip to the west * Contributing to the growing agricultural expansion of the plains was that for several years in succession rain fall was well above the average * Barbed Wire * Fencing was important to farmers to protect their land from open-range cattle, but wood or stone fences were too expensive and would not keep the cattle out * In 1873, however, tow Illinois farmers, Joseph H. Glidden and I. L. Ellwood, solved this problem by making and marketing barbed wire * Another problem for farmers was water * Much of the land west of the Mississippi was considerably more arid than the land in the east * Farming in the west depended on irrigation because of this * Water was diverted from rivers and streams and into the farmlands, or wells would be drilled into the land * Drought * The water problems created an epic disaster in 1887 * A series of dry seasons began and farmers either had to use drought resistant crops or dig wells to survive them * These projects required government assistance, but the government was not prepared to fund the projects * Hard Times for Farmers * Most of the people who had moved into the plains area had previously been farmers in the Middle West, the East, or Europe * The booming early years convinced the farmers that they would easily be able to pay off their debts * Due to the arid late 1880’s- during which crop prices declined while production became more expensive- thousands of farmers could not pay their debts * This caused a revers migration: white settlers started to move back east
Commercial Agriculture
* Farming in the late nineteenth-century soon changed from the independent farmer to the commercial farmer * Commercial farmers were not self-sufficient and they bought all the food and household items they needed to live from a town * They sold cash crops in national or world markets * This kind of farming when successful, raised the farmers living standards, but it also made them dependent on bankers and interest rates, railroads, national and European markets, world supply and demand * Between 1865 and 1900, agriculture became an international business * Farm output increased across the world and at the same time, modern forms of communication and transportation wee creating new markets around the world * American commercial farmers produced more crops than the U.S. economy needed and they depended highly on international markets * Consequences of Overproduction * Beginning in the 1880’s, world wide overproduction led to a drop in prices in crops * This lead to the 6 million American farming families being in financial distress
The Farmer’s Grievances
* American farmers knew something was wrong, but they had no idea at the amount of overproduction in the world * Further grievances for the farmer was that railroads charged higher freight rates for farm goods and charged storage rates for warehouses they owned in buying centers * Farmers Grievances * Farmers resented institutions controlling credit- banks, loan companies, and insurance companies * Farmers had to take loans on any terms they were given and they had to tried to pay off their loans in years when prices were dropping and currency was becoming scarce * Their third grievance concerned prices * Both the prices they received for crops and the price that they paid for goods were not in their favor * They could plant crops when prices were high and when they harvested them the prices would have declined
The Agrarian Malaise
* Isolation * These economic difficulties produced a series of social and cultural resentments * Some farm families were virtually cut off from the outside world and human companionship * Many farmers lacked access to adequate education for their children, proper medical facilities, to recreational activities, to virtually anything and relied of themselves for everything * Older farmers saw their children leave them for the cities * This sense of isolation found its way into late nineteenth-century literature * The writers romanticized about the rugged life of a cowboy, but for the farmer the image was very different * Hamlin Garland wrote in the novel Jason Edwards (1891) about how the west use to be the last land of wealth and freedom and happiness and now all of that was disappearing
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