U.S. History II: The Conquest of the Far West (Chapter 16)

Frederick Jackson Turner

American historian who said that humanity would continue to progress as long as there was new land to move into. The frontier provided a place for homeless and solved social problems.

long drive

Refers to the overland transport of cattle by the cowboy over the three month period. Cattle were sold to settlers and Native Americans.

1865-1867

Sioux Wars

coolies

workers from China on US railroads and gold rush

Little Bighorn

(1876) Battle during which the Sioux Tribe defeated the U.S. Army forces led by Colonel George A. Custer.

Chinese Exclusion Act

(1882) Denied any additional Chinese laborers to enter the country while allowing students and merchants to immigrate.

Homestead Act

1862 - Provided free land in the West to anyone willing to settle there and develop it. Encouraged westward migration.

Wounded Knee

1890 confrontation between U.S. cavalry and Sioux that marked the end of Indian resistance

The Cattle Kingdom

A second important element of the changing economy of the Far West was cattle ranching. The open range—the vast grasslands of the public domain—provided a huge area on the Great Plains where cattle raisers could graze their herds. The western cattle industry was born slowly and through the pioneering work of Mexicans, Texans, white settlers, and free and enslaved blacks. Long before citizens of the United States entered the Southwest, Mexican ranchers had developed the techniques and equipment that the cattlemen and cowboys of the Great Plains later employed: branding, roundups, roping, and the gear of the herders. Americans in Texas, with the largest herds of cattle in the country, adopted these methods and carried them to the northernmost ranges of the cattle kingdom. The challenge facing the cattle industry lay in getting the animals from the range to the railroad centers. Early in 1866, some Texas cattle ranchers began driving their combined herds, up to 260,000 steers, north to Sedalia, Missouri, on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. The caravan suffered heavy losses. But the drive proved that cattle could be driven to distant markets and pastured along the trail. This earliest of the long drives established the first, tentative link between the isolated cattle breeders of west Texas and the booming urban markets of the East. Market facilities soon grew up at Abilene, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and for years the town reigned as the railhead of the cattle kingdom. But by the mid-1870s, agricultural development in western Kansas had eaten away at the open-range land. Cattlemen had to develop other trails and other market outlets. There had always been an element of risk and speculation in the open-range cattle business. Rustlers and Indians frequently seized large numbers of animals. But as the settlement of the plains increased, new forms of competition arose. Farmers ("nesters") from the East threw fences around their claims, blocking trails and breaking up the open range. A series of "range wars"—between sheepmen and cattlemen, ranchers and farmers—erupted out of the tensions among these competing groups. Accounts of the lofty profits to be made in the cattle business tempted eastern, English, and Scottish capital to the plains. Increasingly, the structure of the cattle economy became corporate. The result of this frenzied, speculative expansion was that the ranges, already shrunk by the railroads and the farmers, became overstocked. There was not enough grass to support the crowding herds or sustain the long drives. Two severe winters, in 1885-1886 and 1886-1887, and a searing summer between them scorched the plains. Streams and grass dried up. Hundreds of thousands of cattle died. Princely ranches and costly investments disappeared in a season. The open-range industry never recovered, and the long drive finally disappeared for good. Railroads displaced the trail as the route to market for livestock. But some established cattle ranches survived, grew, and prospered, eventually producing more beef than ever.

How did the arrival and settlement of substantial numbers of Anglo-Americans transform the society and the economy of the west?

Anglo-Americans were migrating from the east, which was ahead of the west in industrialization. They made it a part of the capitalist economy of the east.

Geronimo

Apache chieftain who raided the white settlers in the Southwest as resistance to being confined to a reservation (1829-1909)

1887

Dawes Act

1877

Desert Land Act

1873

Barbed wire invented

The Farmers' Grievances

American farmers were painfully aware that something was wrong. But few people yet understood the implications of national and world overproduction. Instead, they concentrated their attention and anger on more immediate, more comprehensible—and no less real— problems: inequitable freight rates, high interest charges, and an inadequate currency. The farmers' first and most burning grievance was against the railroads. In many cases, the railroads charged higher rates for farm goods than for other goods, and higher rates in the South and West than in the Northeast. Farmers also resented the institutions controlling credit—banks, loan companies, insurance corporations. Since sources of credit in the West and South were few, farmers had to take loans on whatever terms they could get, often at interest rates ranging from 10 to 25 percent. Many farmers had to pay these loans back in years when prices were dropping and currency was becoming scarce. As a result, expansion of the currency became an increasingly important issue to farmers. A third grievance concerned prices. A farmer could plant a large crop at a moment when its price was high and find that by the time of the harvest the price had declined. Farmers' fortunes rose and fell in response to unpredictable forces. But many farmers became convinced (often with some reason) that "intermediaries"—speculators, bankers, regional and local agents—were conspiring with one another to fix prices so as to benefit themselves at the growers' expense.

Anti-Chinese Sentiments

Anti-Chinese activities, some of them bloody, reflected the resentment of many white workers toward Chinese laborers for accepting lower wages. As the political value of attacking the Chinese grew in California, the Democratic Party took up the call. So did the Workingmen's Party of California—founded in 1878 by Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant—which gained significant power in the state largely because of its hostility to the Chinese. By the mid-1880s, anti-Chinese agitation and violence had spread up and down the Pacific Coast and into other areas of the West. In 1882, Congress responded to the political pressure and the growing racial violence by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration into the United States for ten years and barred Chinese already in the country from becoming naturalized citizens. Congress renewed the law for another ten years in 1892 and made it permanent in 1902.

Labor in the West

As commercial activity increased, many farmers, ranchers, and miners found it necessary to recruit a paid labor force. Labor shortage led to higher wages for some workers than were typical in the East. But working conditions were often treacherous, and job security was almost nonexistent. The western working class was highly multiracial. English-speaking whites worked alongside African Americans and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, as they did in the East. The workforce was highly stratified along racial lines. In almost every area of the western economy, white workers (whatever their ethnicity) occupied the upper tiers of employment: management and skilled labor. The lower tiers— unskilled work in the mines, on the railroads, or in agriculture—were filled overwhelmingly by nonwhites. The western economy was, however, no more a single entity than the economy of the East. In the late nineteenth century, the region produced three major industries, each with distinctive history and characteristics: mining, ranching, and commercial farming.

1890

Battle of Wounded Knee

1876

Battle of the Little Bighorn

How did racial, ethnic, and cultural prejudice affect western society?

Because of racial and ethnic prejudice, a caste system placing Mexicans on top, over Indian tribes, and over genizaros- Indians who left their tribe, was created. Indians were exploited for slave-like labor on Hispanic missions in California. Anti-coolie clubs worked to ban Chinese employment, and the Chinese Exclusion Act forbid Chinese immigration and naturalization.

Dawes Severalty Act

Bill that promised Indians tracts of land to farm in order to assimilate them into white culture. The bill was resisted, uneffective, and disastrous to Indian tribes

1874

Black Hills gold rush

Commercial Agriculture

By the late nineteenth century, the sturdy, independent farmer of popular myth was being replaced by the commercial farmer—attempting to do in the agricultural economy what industrialists were doing in the manufacturing economy. Commercial farmers specialized in cash crops that were sold in national or world markets. They did not often make their own household supplies or grow their own food but bought them from merchants. This kind of farming, when it was successful, raised farmers' living standards. But it also made them dependent on bankers and interest rates, railroads and freight rates, national and European markets, world supply and demand. And unlike the capitalists of the industrial order, they could not regulate their production or influence the prices of what they sold. Between 1865 and 1900, farm output increased dramatically. Beginning in the 1880s, worldwide overproduction led to a drop in prices for most agricultural goods and hence to great economic distress for many of the more than 6 million American farm families. Commercial farming made some people fabulously wealthy. But the farm economy as a whole was suffering a significant decline relative to the rest of the nation.

1882

Chinese Exclusion Act

The Dawes Act

Even before the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee tragedies, the federal government had moved to destroy forever the tribal structure that was the cornerstone of Indian culture. Reversing its policy of nearly fifty years, Congress abolished the practice by which tribes owned reservation lands communally. The new policy required Indians to become landowners and farmers, to abandon their collective society and culture and become part of white civilization. Some supporters of the new policy believed they were acting for the good of the Indians, whom they considered a "vanishing race" in need of rescue by and assimilation into white society. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 provided for the gradual elimination of most tribal ownership of land and the allotment of tracts to individual owners. Adult owners were given United States citizenship, but unlike other citizens, they could not gain full title to their property for twenty-five years (supposedly to prevent them from selling the land to speculators). The Bureau of Indian Affairs relentlessly promoted the idea of assimilation that lay behind it. Not only did agents of the bureau try to move Indian families onto their own plots of land, they also took many Indian children away from their families and sent them to boarding schools run by whites. They moved as well to stop Indian religious rituals and encouraged the spread of Christianity and the creation of Christian churches on the reservations. White administration of the Dawes Act was so corrupt and inept that ultimately the government simply abandoned most efforts to enforce it. Much of the reservation land, therefore, was never distributed to individual owners.

range wars

Fights caused by some farmers in the Great Plains wanting to build fences and other farmers not wanting to, so they cut each other's barbed-wire fences and shot each other, Typically fought over water rights or grazing rights to unfenced/unowned land, it could pit competing farmers or ranchers against each other

Hispanic New Mexico

For centuries, much of the Far West had been part of the Spanish Empire and, later, the Mexican Republic. When the United States acquired its new lands there in the 1840s, it also acquired many Mexican residents. In New Mexico, the centers of Spanish-speaking society were farming and trading communities established in the seventeenth century. When the United States acquired title to New Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican War, General Stephen Kearny tried to establish a territorial government out of the approximately 1,000 Anglo-Americans in the region, ignoring the more than 50,000 Hispanics. There were widespread fears among Hispanics and Indians that the new American rulers would confiscate their lands. In 1847, before the new government had established itself, Taos Indians rebelled, killing the new governor and other Anglo-American officials. New Mexico remained under military rule for three years, until the United States finally organized a territorial government there in 1850. The United States Army finally broke the power of the Navajo, Apache, and other tribes in the region. The defeat of the tribes led to substantial Hispanic migration into other areas of the Southwest and as far north as Colorado. The Anglo-American presence in the Southwest grew rapidly once the railroads penetrated the region in the 1880s and early 1890s. With the railroads came extensive new ranching, farming, and mining. This expansion of economic activity attracted a new wave of Mexican immigrants, who moved across the border in search of work. Mexicans often got the least stable and lowest paying jobs.

What various ethnic and racial groups populated the American West, and how were the cultural characteristics of these groups reflected in the West?

For many years, Indian tribes, the Mexican, British and French Canadians, Asians, and others lived in the West. By the mid-1840s, Anglo-Americans were beginning to migrate to the west too. The culture of the different groups was reflected in what was built and done within western society.

Farming on the Plains

Many factors combined to produce the surge of post-Civil War western agricultural settlement, but the most important was the railroads. Before the war, the Great Plains had been accessible only through a difficult journey by wagon. But beginning in the 1860s, a great new network of railroad lines made huge areas of settlement accessible for the first time. The building of the transcontinental train line was a dramatic and monumental achievement. But the construction of subsidiary lines in the following years proved of greater importance to the West. State governments, imitating Washington, subsidized railroad development by offering direct financial aid, favorable loans, and more than 50 million acres of land. The railroad companies also actively promoted settlement. The companies set rates so low for settlers that almost anyone could afford the trip west. And they sold much of their land at very low prices and with liberal credit to prospective settlers. Contributing further to the great surge of white agricultural expansion was a pronounced but temporary change in the climate of the Great Plains. For several years in succession, beginning in the 1870s, rainfall in the plains states was well above average. White Americans now rejected the old idea that the region was the "Great American Desert." Even under the most favorable conditions, farming on the plains presented special problems. First was the problem of fencing. Farmers had to enclose their land, but materials for traditional wood or stone fences were unavailable. In the mid-1870s, however, two Illinois farmers, Joseph H. Glidden and I. L. Ellwood, solved this problem by developing and marketing barbed wire, which became standard equipment on the plains and revolutionized fencing practices all over the world. The second problem was water. Water was scarce even when rainfall was above average. After 1887, a series of dry seasons began, and lands that had been fertile now returned to semidesert. Some farmers dealt with the problem by using deep wells pumped by steel windmills, by turning to "dryland farming" (a system of tillage designed to conserve moisture in the soil by covering it with a dust blanket), or by planting droughtresistant crops. In many areas of the plains, however, only large-scale irrigation could save the endangered farms. Most of the people who moved into the region had previously been farmers in the Midwest, the East, or Europe. In the booming years of the early 1880s, with land values rising, the new farmers had no problem obtaining extensive and easy credit. But the arid years of the late 1880s—during which crop prices fell while production became more expensive—changed the farmers' prospects. Tens of thousands of farmers could not pay their debts and were forced to abandon their farms. There was, in effect, a reverse migration: white settlers moving back east, sometimes turning once-flourishing western communities into desolate ghost towns.

Californios

Mexicans who lived in California

1862

Homestead Act

Hispanic California and Texas

In California, Spanish settlement began in the eighteenth century with a string of Catholic missions along the Pacific Coast. In the 1830s, after the new Mexican government began reducing the power of the church, the mission society largely collapsed. In its place emerged a secular Mexican aristocracy, which controlled a chain of large estates in the fertile lands west of the Sierra mountains. For them, the acquisition of California by the United States was disastrous. So vast were the numbers of English-speaking immigrants that the californios (as the Hispanic residents of the region were known) had little power to resist the onslaught. English-speaking prospectors organized to exclude them. Many californios also lost their lands—either through corrupt business deals or through outright seizure. Mexicans and Mexican Americans became part of the lower end of the state's working class, clustered in barrios in Los Angeles or elsewhere or laboring as migrant farm workers. Even small Hispanic landowners who managed to hang on to their farms found themselves unable to raise livestock. A similar pattern occurred in Texas after it joined the United States. Many Mexican landowners lost their land—some as a result of fraud and coercion, others because even the most substantial Mexican ranchers could not compete with the emerging Anglo-American ranching kingdoms. In 1859, angry Mexicans, led by the rancher Juan Cortina, raided the jail in Brownsville and freed all the Mexican prisoners inside. Mexicans in southern Texas became an increasingly impoverished working class, relegated largely to unskilled farm or industrial labor.

Plains Indians

Included people from many Indian nations including Cheyenne, Arapahos, Piutes, and Sioux. Came into great conflict with settlers because settlers did not respect the Indian land.

The Arrival of the Miners

The first economic boom in the Far West was the result of mining. The mining boom began around 1860 and flourished until the 1890s. Then it abruptly declined. The California gold rush of 1849 was the first and most famous gold rush. But it was followed by others. Individual prospectors would pan for gold, extracting the first shallow deposits of ore largely by hand, a method known as placer mining. After these surface deposits dwindled, corporations moved in to engage in lode or quartz mining, which dug deeper beneath the surface. Then, as those deposits dwindled, commercial mining declined, and ranchers and farmers moved in and established a more permanent economy. The first great mineral strikes (other than the California gold rush) occurred just before the Civil War. In 1858, gold was discovered in the Pike's Peak district of what would soon be the territory of Colorado; the following year, 50,000 prospectors stormed in. Denver and other mining camps blossomed into "cities" overnight. News of another strike drew miners to Nevada. Gold had been found in the Washoe district. Even more plentiful and more valuable was the silver found in the great Comstock Lode (first discovered in 1858 by Henry Comstock) and other Washoe veins. The first prospectors to reach the Washoe fields came from California, and from the beginning, Californians dominated the settlement and development of Nevada. When the first placer (or surface) deposits ran out, Californian and eastern capitalists bought the claims of the pioneer prospectors and began to use the more difficult process of quartz mining, which enabled them to retrieve silver from deeper veins. The next important mineral discoveries came in 1874, when gold was found in the Black Hills of southwestern Dakota Territory. Prospectors swarmed into the remote area. Like the others, the boom flared for a time, until surface resources faded and corporations took over—above all, the enormous Homestake Mining Company—and came to dominate the fields. Less glamorous natural resources proved more important to western development. The great Anaconda copper mine, launched by William Clark in 1881, marked the beginning of an industry that would remain important to Montana for many decades. In other areas, mining operations had significant success with lead, tin, quartz, and zinc. Men greatly outnumbered women in the mining towns, and younger men in particular had difficulty finding female companions of comparable age. Those women who did gravitate to the new communities often came with their husbands. Single women, or women whose husbands were earning no money, did work for wages at times, as cooks, laundresses, and tavernkeepers. And in the sexually imbalanced mining communities, there was always a ready market for prostitutes. The thousands of people who flocked to the mining towns in search of quick wealth and failed to find it often remained as wage laborers in corporate mines after the boom period, working in almost uniformly terrible conditions.

Rocky Mountain school

It was a group of Landscape painters in the Rocky Mountains who painted mostly Western landscapes. Thomas Moran, Thomas Hill, Albert Bierstadt, and William Keith are referred to as belonging to the Rocky Mountain School. It made people want to move westward, because it was so beautiful.

Chief Joseph

Leader of Nez Perce. Fled with his tribe to Canada instead of reservations. However, US troops came and fought and brought them back down to reservations

The Idea of the Frontier

Many Americans considered it the last natural frontier. Since the earliest moments of European settlement in America, the image of uncharted territory to the west had always comforted and inspired those who dreamed of starting life anew. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), he produced characters who repudiated the constraints of organized society and attempted to escape into a more natural world. This yearning for freedom reflected a larger vision of the West as the last refuge from the constraints of civilization. One of the most beloved and successful artists of the nineteenth century was Frederic Remington, a painter and sculptor whose works came to represent the romance of the West. He portrayed the cowboy as a natural aristocrat, much like Wister's The Virginian, living in a natural world in which all the normal supporting structures of "civilization" were missing. Theodore Roosevelt also contributed to the romanticizing of the West. In the 1890s, he published a four-volume history, The Winning of the West, with a heroic account of the spread of white civilization into the frontier. Perhaps the most influential statement of the romantic vision of the frontier came from the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in a memorable paper he delivered as a thirtytwo-year-old in Chicago in 1893 titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." In it he boldly claimed that the experience of western expansion had stimulated individualism, nationalism, and democracy; kept opportunities for advancement alive; and made Americans the distinctive people that they were. The Turner thesis was widely accepted by his contemporaries, but later historians have challenged it. In accepting the idea of the "passing of the frontier," many Americans were acknowledging the end of one of their most cherished myths. As long as it had been possible for them to see the West as an empty, open land, it was possible to believe that there were constantly revitalizing opportunities in American life. But by the end of the nineteenth century, there was a vague and ominous sense of opportunities foreclosed.

The Chinese Migration

Many Chinese were crossing the Pacific in hopes of better lives. Not all came to the United States. Many Chinese—some as "coolies" (indentured servants whose condition was close to slavery)—moved to Hawaii, Australia, Latin America, South Africa, and even the Caribbean. A few Chinese traveled to the American West even before the gold rush, but after 1848 the flow increased dramatically. By 1880, more than 200,000 Chinese had settled in the United States. Almost all came as free laborers. Very quickly, however, white opinion turned hostile—in part because the Chinese were so industrious and successful that some white Americans began considering them rivals. In the early 1850s, large numbers of Chinese immigrants joined the hunt for gold. In 1852, the California legislature began trying to exclude the Chinese from gold mining by enacting a "foreign miners" tax. Gradually, the effect of the discriminatory laws, the hostility of white miners, and the declining profitability of the surface mines drove most Chinese out of prospecting. As mining declined as a source of wealth and jobs for the Chinese, railroad employment grew. Beginning in 1865, over 12,000 Chinese found work building the transcontinental railroad, forming 90 percent of the labor force of the Central Pacific. Work on the Central Pacific was arduous and often dangerous. In the winter, many Chinese tunneled into snowbanks at night to create warm sleeping areas for themselves, even though such tunnels frequently collapsed, suffocating those inside. In the spring of 1866, 5,000 Chinese railroad workers rebelled against the terrible conditions and went on strike to demand higher wages and a shorter workday. The company isolated them, surrounded them with strikebreakers, and starved them into submission. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed, and thousands of Chinese lost their jobs. Some moved into agricultural work, usually in menial positions. Increasingly, however, the Chinese flocked to cities. By far the largest single Chinese community was in San Francisco. Much of community life there, and in other "Chinatowns" throughout the West, revolved around organizations, somewhat like benevolent societies, that filled many of the roles that political machines often served in immigrant communities in eastern cities. Other Chinese organizations were secret societies, known as "tongs." Some of the tongs were violent criminal organizations, involved in the opium trade and prostitution. Few people outside the Chinese communities were aware of their existence. The Chinese usually occupied the lower rungs of the employment ladder. Many worked as common laborers, servants, and unskilled factory hands. Some established their own small businesses, especially laundries. By the 1890s, Chinese constituted over two-thirds of all the laundry workers in California. During the earliest Chinese migrations to California, virtually all the relatively small number of women who made the journey did so because they had been sold into prostitution. As late as 1880, nearly half the Chinese women in California were prostitutes. Gradually, however, the number of Chinese women increased, and Chinese men in America became more likely to seek companionship in families.

1889

Oklahoma opened to white settlement

Frederic Remington

Painter and sculptor, his works portrayed the cowboy as a natural aristocrat, living in a natural world in which all the normal supporting structures of "civilization" were missing.

The Western Landscape and the Cowboys

Part of the attraction of the West was its spectacular natural landscape. Painters of the new "Rocky Mountain school"—of whom the best known were Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran—celebrated the new West in grandiose canvases. Gradually, paintings and photographs inspired a growing wave of tourism among people eager to see the natural wonders of the region. In the 1880s and 1890s, resort hotels began to spring up near some of the region's most spectacular landscapes. Many nineteenth-century Americans came especially to idealize the figure of the cowboy. Western novels such as Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) romanticized the cowboy's supposed freedom from traditional social constraints, his affinity with nature, even his supposed propensity for violence. Wister's character— one of the most enduring in popular American literature—was a semi-educated man whose natural decency, courage, and compassion made him a powerful symbol of the supposed virtues of the "frontier." Among the reasons for the widespread admiration of the cowboy were the remarkably popular Wild West shows that traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Most successful were the shows of Buffalo Bill Cody, a former Pony Express rider, Indian fighter, and hero of popular dime novels for children. Cody's Wild West show, which spawned dozens of imitators, exploited his own fame and romanticized the life of the cowboy through reenactments of Indian battles and displays of horsemanship and riflery (many of them by the famous sharpshooter Annie Oakley). Buffalo Bill and his imitators confirmed the popular image of the West as a place of romance and glamour and helped keep that image alive for later generations.

Turner thesis

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier was the key factor in the development of American democracy and institutions; he maintained that the frontier served as a "safety valve" during periods of economic crisis.

What were the three major industries involved in the development of the West, and how did these industries transform the western economy?

The labor, mining, and cattle industries aided the development of the west.

The Western Tribes

The Indian tribes made up the largest and most important western population group before the great white migration. Some were members of eastern tribes who had been forcibly resettled west of the Mississippi. But most were members of indigenous tribes whose roots stretched back generations. More than 300,000 Indians had lived on the Pacific Coast before the arrival of Spanish settlers. They supported themselves through a combination of fishing, foraging, and simple agriculture. The most widespread Indian groups in the West were the Plains Indians. They were, in fact, made up of many different tribal and language groups. Some lived more or less sedentary lives as farmers, but many subsisted largely through hunting buffalo. Tribes moved through the grasslands following the herds, constructing tepees as temporary dwellings. The buffalo, or bison, provided the economic basis for the Plains Indians' way of life. The flesh of the large animal was their principal source of food, and its skin supplied materials for clothing, shoes, tepees, blankets, robes, and utensils. The Plains warriors proved to be the most formidable foes the white settlers had encountered. But the tribes were usually unable to unite against white aggression. At times, tribal warriors even faced white forces who were being assisted by guides and even fighters from rival tribes. Some tribes, however, were able to overcome their divisions and cooperate effectively. By the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne had forged a powerful alliance that dominated the northern plains. Indians were highly vulnerable to eastern infectious diseases, such as the smallpox epidemics and the tribes were, of course, at a considerable disadvantage in any longterm battle with an economically and industrially advanced people.

Debating the Past: the Frontier and the West

The emergence of the history of the American West as an important field of scholarship can be traced to a paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white Americans—"the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward"—was the central story of the nation's history. In the first half of the twentieth century, virtually everyone who wrote about the West echoed at least part of Turner's argument. Ray Allen Billington's Westward Expansion (1949) was almost wholly consistent with the Turnerian model. In The Great Plains (1931) and The Great Frontier (1952), Walter Prescott Webb similarly emphasized the bravery and ingenuity of white settlers in the Southwest. Serious efforts to displace the Turner thesis as the explanation of western American history began after World War II. In Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith examined many of the same heroic images of the West that Turner and his disciples had presented; but he treated those images less as descriptions of reality than as myths. Earl Pomeroy challenged Turner's notion of the West as a place of individualism, innovation, and democratic renewal. The western historians who emerged since the late 1970s launched an even more emphatic attack on the Turner thesis and the idea of the "frontier." "New western historians" such as Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, William Cronon, Donald Worster, Peggy Pascoe, and many others challenged the Turnerians on a number of points. Turner saw the nineteenth-century West as "free land" awaiting the expansion of Anglo-American settlement and American democracy. The more recent western historians reject the concept of an empty "frontier," emphasizing instead the elaborate and highly developed civilizations that already existed in the region. White, Englishspeaking Americans, they have argued, did not so much "settle" the West as conquer it. The Turnerian West was a place of heroism, triumph, and above all progress, dominated by the feats of brave white men. The West that the new western historians describe was a less triumphant (and less masculine) place in which bravery and success coexisted with oppression, greed, and failure; in which decaying ghost towns, bleak Indian reservations, impoverished barrios, and ecologically devastated landscapes have been as characteristic of western development as great ranches, rich farms, and prosperous cities.

How did the actions and policies of the federal government affect the fate of the Indians in the west?

The federal government adopted a "concentration" policy- separate tribes onto their own reservations negotiated illegitimately by "treaty chiefs." They also tried to assimilate the tribes into American society through the Dawes Act- eliminated tribal ownership of land and instead allotted it to the head of a family.

Migration from the East

The scale of post-Civil War white migration to the American West dwarfed everything that had preceded it. In previous decades, the settlers had come in thousands. Now they came in millions. Most of the new settlers were from the established Anglo-American societies of the eastern United States, but substantial numbers—over 2 million between 1870 and 1900—were foreign-born immigrants from Europe: Scandinavians, Germans, Irish, Russians, Czechs, and others. Settlers were attracted by gold and silver deposits, by the short-grass pasture for cattle and sheep, and ultimately by the rich sod of the plains and the meadowlands of the mountains. The completion of the great transcontinental railroad line in 1869, and the construction of the many subsidiary lines that spidered out from it, encouraged rapid settlement. The Homestead Act of 1862 permitted settlers to buy plots of 160 acres for a small fee if they occupied the land they purchased for five years and improved it. The Timber Culture Act (1873) permitted homesteaders to receive grants of 160 additional acres if they planted 40 acres of trees on them. The Desert Land Act (1877) allowed claimants to buy 640 acres at $1.25 an acre, provided they irrigated part of their holdings within three years. These and other laws ultimately made it possible for individuals to acquire as much as 1,280 acres of land at little cost. By the mid-1860s, territorial governments were in operation in the new provinces of Nevada, Colorado, Dakota, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Statehood rapidly followed. Nevada became a state in 1864, Nebraska in 1867, and Colorado in 1876. In 1889, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington won admission; Wyoming and Idaho entered the next year. Congress denied Utah statehood until its Mormon leaders convinced the government in 1896 that polygamy (the practice of men taking several wives) had been abandoned. At the turn of the century, only Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma remained outside the Union.

White Tribal Policies

The traditional policy of the federal government was to regard the tribes simultaneously as independent nations (with which the United States could negotiate treaties) and as wards of the president (who would exercise paternalistic authority over the Indians). The concept of Indian sovereignty had supported the government's attempt before 1860 to erect a permanent frontier between whites and Indians. The belief in tribal sovereignty and the treaties or agreements with the Indians were not strong enough to withstand the desire of white settlers for more and more Indian lands. By the early 1850s, the government created a new reservations policy known as "concentration." In 1851, the government assigned each tribe its own defined reservation, confirmed by individual treaties. The new arrangement had many benefits for whites and few for the Indians. It divided the tribes from one another and made them easier to control. It allowed the government to force tribes into scattered locations and to take over the most desirable lands for white settlement. In 1867, Congress established the Indian Peace Commission to recommend a new and presumably permanent Indian policy. The commission recommended that the government move all the Plains tribes into two large reservations—one in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the other in the Dakotas. This "solution" worked little better than previous ones for Indians. Part of the problem was the corrupt or incompetent agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who administered the reservations. But the problem was also exacerbated by the relentless slaughter of buffalo herds by whites that destroyed the tribes' way of life.After the Civil War, professional and amateur hunters—even casual visitors shooting from passing trains—swarmed over the plains, slaughtering the huge animals. Some Indian tribes (notably the Blackfeet) also began killing large numbers of buffalo to sell in the booming new market for their hides and meat. In 1865, there had been at least 15 million buffalo; two decades later, fewer than 1,000 of the great beasts survived.

What role did the federal government play in shaping the development of the west?

The west was heavily supported by the federal government through military protection and land grants, so that the Anglo-Americans could successfully transform the west into having a capitalist economy.

What was the romantic image of the west, and how was this image expressed in art, literature, and popular culture?

The western landscape and way of living was romanticized. The frontier was mostly rugged terrain much different from that of the eastern cities, and "cowboys" lived free-spirited lives. Rocky Mountain School painters focused their paintings on western landscape, cowboys were portrayed in magazines, movies, songs, TV, and novels as a powerful, strong, independent individual.

The Agrarian Malaise

These economic difficulties helped produce social and cultural resentments. Among them was the isolation of farm life. Farm families in some parts of the country were virtually cut off from the outside world. Many farmers lacked access to adequate education for their children. They had few or no proper medical facilities. There were few organized recreational or cultural activities. This sense of isolation and obsolescence led to a growing malaise among many farmers, a discontent that helped create a great national political movement in the 1890s. It found reflection, too, in some of the literature that emerged from rural America. Writers in the late nineteenth century might romanticize the rugged life of the cowboy and the western miner. For the farmers, however, the image of the agricultural world was different. Hamlin Garland, for example, reflected the growing disillusionment in a series of novels and short stories. In the introduction to his novel Jason Edwards (1891), he wrote that in the past, the agrarian frontier had seemed to be "the Golden West, the land of wealth and freedom and happiness." Now, however, the bright promise had faded. The trials of rural life were crushing the human spirit. Once, sturdy yeoman farmers had viewed themselves as the backbone of American life. Now they were becoming painfully aware that their position was declining in relation to the rising urban-industrial society to the east.

1869

Transcontinental Railroad completed

1893

Turner thesis

1885

Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"

George A. Cluster

US Army officer and Cavalry of American Civil War and the Indian Wars. Lost battle of Little Big Horn

Mark Twain

United States writer and humorist best known for his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1835-1910)

The Indian Wars

Whites and Indians fought incessantly from the 1850s to the 1880s, as Indians struggled against the growing threats to their civilizations. During the Civil War, the eastern Sioux in Minnesota, cramped on a small reservation and exploited by corrupt white agents, suddenly rebelled. Led by Little Crow, they killed more than 700 whites before being subdued. Fighting flared up in eastern Colorado, where the Arapaho and Cheyenne were coming into conflict with white miners settling in the region. Bands of Indians attacked stagecoach lines and settlements in an effort to regain territory they had lost. In response to these incidents, whites called up a large territorial militia. The governor urged all friendly Indians to congregate at army posts for protection before the army began its campaign. Colonel J. M. Chivington led a volunteer militia force to the unsuspecting camp and massacred 133 people, 105 of them women and children. Black Kettle himself escaped the Sand Creek massacre. But four years later, in 1868, he and Cheyenne soldiers went to war with the whites. The Indians were caught on the Washita River, near the Texas border, by Colonel George A. Custer. White troops killed the chief and his people. The most serious and sustained conflict was in Montana, where the army was attempting to build a road, the Bozeman Trail, to connect Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to the new mining centers. The western Sioux resented this intrusion into the heart of their buffalo range. Led by one of their great chiefs, Red Cloud, they so harried the soldiers and the construction party that the road could not be used. it was not only the United States military that harassed the tribes. It was also unofficial violence by white vigilantes who engaged in what became known as "Indian hunting." Sometimes the killing was in response to Indian raids on white communities. But considerable numbers of whites were committed to the goal of literal "elimination" of the tribes whatever their behavior, a goal that rested on the belief in the essential inhumanity of Indians and the impossibility of white coexistence with them. The treaties negotiated in 1867 brought a temporary lull to many of the conflicts. But new forces soon shattered the peace again. In the early 1870s, more waves of white settlers, mostly miners, began to penetrate the lands in Dakota Territory supposedly guaranteed to the tribes in 1867. the Sioux rose up in 1875 and left their reservation. When white officials ordered them to return, bands of warriors gathered in Montana and united under two great leaders: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Three army columns set out to round them up and force them back onto the reservation. With the expedition, as colonel of the famous Seventh Cavalry, was the colorful and controversial George A. Custer. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876, an unprecedentedly large army, perhaps 2,500 tribal warriors, surprised Custer and part of his regiment, surrounded them, and killed every soldier. The Indians did not have the political organization or the supplies to keep their troops united. Soon the warriors drifted off in bands to elude pursuit or search for food, and the army ran them down and returned them to Dakota. The power of the Sioux quickly collapsed. One of the most dramatic episodes in Indian history occurred in Idaho in 1877. The Nez Percé were a small and relatively peaceful tribe. Under pressure from white settlers, the U.S. government forced them to move onto a reservation. With no realistic prospect of resisting, the Indians began the journey to the reservation; but on the way, several younger Indians, drunk and angry, killed four white settlers. The leader of the band, Chief Joseph, persuaded his followers to flee from the inevitable retribution. American troops pursued and attacked them, only to be driven off in a battle at White Bird Canyon. After that, the Nez Percé scattered in several directions and became part of a remarkable chase. Pursued by four columns of American soldiers, the Indians covered 1,321 miles in seventy-five days, repelling or evading the army time and again. They were finally caught just short of the Canadian boundary. Some escaped and slipped across the border; but Joseph and most of his followers finally gave up. The last Indians to maintain organized resistance against the whites were the Chiricahua Apache. The two ablest chiefs of this fierce tribe were Mangas Colorados and Cochise. In 1872 Cochise agreed to peace in exchange for a reservation that included some of the tribe's traditional land. But Cochise died in 1874, and his successor, Geronimo, fought on for more than a decade longer, establishing bases in the mountains of Arizona and Mexico and leading warriors in intermittent raids against white outposts. With each raid, however, the number of warring Apache dwindled. By 1886, Geronimo's band consisted of only about 30 people, including women and children, while his white pursuers numbered perhaps 10,000. Geronimo recognized the odds and surrendered. The Apache Wars, the most violent of all the Indian conflicts, produced brutality on both sides. But it was the whites who committed the most flagrant atrocities. That did not end with the conclusion of the Apache Wars. Another tragic encounter occurred in 1890 as a result of a religious revival among the Sioux. This time the prophet was Wovoka, a Paiute who inspired a fervent spiritual awakening that began in Nevada and spread quickly to the plains. Wovoka predicted the imminent coming of a messiah. The new revival's most conspicuous feature was a mass, emotional "Ghost Dance," which inspired ecstatic, mystical visions—including images of the retreat of white people from the plains and a restoration of the great buffalo herds. White agents on the Sioux reservation, bewildered and fearful, warned the army that dances might be the prelude to hostilities. On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry tried to round up a group of about 350 cold and starving Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Fighting broke out. An Indian may have fired the first shot, but the battle soon turned into a one-sided massacre, as the white soldiers turned their new machine guns on the Indians and mowed them down in the snow.

concentration policy

strategy that would provide white settlers with the most productive lands and relocated Indians to areas north and south of white settlements. Settlers were not satisfied, the wanted to restrict Indians to even smaller areas through relocation.