Chapter 26
Describe the Oklahoma Land Rush
-A parade of new western states proudly joined the Union. Boomtown Colorado, offspring of the Pike's Peak gold rush, was greeted in 1876 as "the Centennial State." In 1889-1890 a Republican Congress, eagerly seeking more Republican electoral and congressional votes, admitted in a wholesale lot six new states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. -The Mormon Church formally and belatedly banned polygamy in 1890, but not until 1896 was Utah deemed worthy of admission. Only Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona remained to be lifted into statehood from contiguous territory on the mainland of North America. - Scores of overeager and well-armed "sooners," illegally jumping the gun, had entered Oklahoma Territory. They had to be evicted repeatedly by federal troops, who on occasion would shoot the intruders' horses. On April 22, 1889, all was in readiness for the legal opening, and some 50,000 "boomers" were poised expectantly on the boundary line. At high noon the bugle shrilled, and a horde of "eighty-niners" poured in on lathered horses or careening vehicles. That night a lonely spot on the prairie had mushroomed into the tent city of Guthrie, with over 10,000 people. By the end of the year, Oklahoma boasted 60,000 inhabitants, and Congress made it
What was the Long Drive? What made it Profitable?
-A spectacular feeder of the new slaughterhouses was the "Long Drive." -Texas cowboys— black, white, and Mexican—drove herds numbering from one thousand to ten thousand head slowly over the unfenced and unpeopled plains until they reached a railroad terminal. The bawling beasts grazed en route on the free government grass. Favorite terminal points were flyspecked "cow towns" like Dodge City -As long as lush grass was available, the Long Drive proved profitable—that is, to the luckier cattlemen who escaped Indians, stampedes, cattle fever, and other hazards. The steer was king in a Cattle Kingdom richly carpeted with grass.
How has agriculture always been in california? How was this different fro farming in other regions?
-Agriculture was a big business from its earliest days in California's phenomenally productive (and phenomenally irrigated) Central Valley. -California farms, carved out of giant Spanish-Mexican land grants and the railroads' huge holdings, were from the outset more than three times larger than the national average. -Henry George in 1871 described the Golden State as "not a country of farms but a country of plantations and estates." -California fruit and vegetable crops, raised on sprawling tracts by ill-paid migrant Mexican and Chinese farmlands, sold at a handsome profit in the rich urban markets of the East.
Describe the nature of the Indian Wars in the west?
-Army troops, many of them recent immigrants who had, ironically, fled Europe to avoid military service, met formidable adversaries in the Plains Indians, whose superb horsemanship gave them baffling mobility. - Fully one-fifth of all U.S. Army personnel on the frontier were African-American—dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by the Indians, supposedly because of the resemblance of their hair to the bison's furry coat -The Indian wars in the West were often savage clashes. Aggressive whites sometimes shot peaceful Indians on sight, just to make sure they would give no trouble. -Women were shot praying for mercy, children had their brains dashed out, and braves were tortured, scalped, and unspeakably mutilated.
How did the cattlemen ensure their profit?
-Both of these intruders, sometimes amid flying bullets, built barbed-wire fences that were too numerous to be cut down by the cowboys -The only escape for the stockmen was to make cattle-raising a big business and avoid the perils of overproduction. -Breeders learned to fence their ranches, lay in winter feed, import blooded bulls, and produce fewer and meatier animals. - They also learned to organize.
Sitting Bull
-Colonel Custer's Seventh Cavalry, nearly half of them immigrants, set out to suppress the Indians and to return them to the reservation. -Attacking what turned out to be a superior force of some 2,500 well-armed warriors camped along the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana, the "White Chief with Yellow Hair" and his officers and men were completely wiped out in 1876 when two supporting columns failed to come to their rescue.* - But in a series of battles across the northern plains in the ensuing months, the U.S. Army relentlessly hunted down the Indians who had humiliated Custer.
Nature-
-Even Mother Nature ceased smiling, as her powerful forces conspired against agriculture. Mile-wide clouds of grasshoppers, leaving "nothing but the mortgage," periodically ravaged prairie farms. The terrible cotton-boll weevil was also wreaking havoc in the South by the early 1890s. -The good earth was going sour. Floods added to the waste of erosion, which had already washed the topsoil off millions of once-lush southern acres. Expensive fertilizers were urgently needed. A long succession of droughts seared the trans-Mississippi West, beginning in the summer of 1887. Whole towns were abandoned. -
What were the concern of the farmer's alliance
-Farmers came together in the Alliance to socialize, but more importantly to break the strangling grip of the railroads and manufacturers through cooperative buying and selling. -Unfortunately, the Alliance weakened itself by ignoring the plight of landless tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and farmworkers. Even more debilitating was the Alliance's exclusion of blacks, who counted for nearly half the agricultural population of the South.
What were the concerns of the Green Labor Party
-Farmers' grievances likewise found a vent in the Greenback Labor party, which combined the inflationary appeal of the earlier Greenbackers with a program for improving the lot of labor -
What were the arguments in the whites American Culture regarding the Indians
-Humanitarians wanted to treat the Indians kindly and persuade them thereby to "walk the white man's road." Yet hard-liners insisted on the current policy of forced containment and brutal punishment. -Neither side showed much respect for Native American culture. Christian reformers, who often administered educational facilities on the reservations, sometimes withheld food to force the Indians to give up their tribal religion and assimilate to white society.
What was the interaction between bufflo and railroads?
-In 1868 a Kansas Pacific locomotive had to wait eight hours for a herd to amble across the tracks -Much of the food supply of the railroad construction gangs came from leathery buffalo steaks. -With the building of the railroad, the massacre of the herds began in deadly earnest. The creatures were slain for their hides, for their tongues or a few other choice cuts, or for sheer amusement. - "Sportsmen" on lurching railroad trains would lean out the windows and blaze away at the animals to satisfy their lust for slaughter or excitement. Such wholesale butchery left fewer than a thousand buffalo alive by 1885, and the once-numerous beasts were in danger of complete extinction.
What was the promised in the treaty of Fort Laramine? How did the breaking of these promises lead to the battle of Little Big Horn
-In another Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, the government abandoned the Bozeman Trail. -The sprawling "Great Sioux reservation" was guaranteed to the Sioux tribes. But in 1874 a new round of warfare with the Plains Indians began when Custer led a "scientific" expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota (part of the Sioux reservation) and announced that he had discovered gold. -Hordes of greedy gold-seekers swarmed into the Sioux lands. The aggrieved Sioux took to the warpath, inspired by the influential and wily Sitting Bull.
How did the mechanism of agriculture change farming life?
-In fact, agricultural modernization drove many marginal farmers off the land, thus swelling the ranks of the new industrial work force. -As the rural population steadily decreased, those farmers who remained achieved miracles of production, making America the world's breadbasket and butcher shop. -The farm was attaining the status of a factory— an outdoor grain factory
How did the Nez Perce Indians try to avoid conflicts? What happened to the truibe?
-One band of Nez Percé Indians in northeastern Oregon were goaded into daring flight in 1877, when U.S. authorities tried to herd them onto a reservation. -Chief Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some seven hundred Indians after a tortuous, seventeen hundred-mile, threemonth trek across the Continental Divide toward Canada. - There Joseph hoped to rendezvous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refuge north of the border after the Battle of Little Bighorn. -Betrayed into believing they would be returned to their ancestral lands in Idaho, the Nez Percés instead were sent to a dusty reservation in Kansas, where 40 percent of them perished from disease. The survivors were eventually allowed to return to Idaho.
What were the goals of the populist?
-Out of the Farmers' Alliances a new political party emerged in the early 1890s—the People's party. Better known as the Populists -these frustrated farmers attacked Wall Street and the "money trust." They called for nationalizing the railroads, telephones, and telegraph; instituting a graduated income tax; and creating a new federal "subtreasury"— a scheme to provide farmers with loans for crops stored in government-owned warehouses, where they could be held until market prices rose. -They also wanted the free and unlimited coinage of silver—yet another of the debtors' demands for inflation that echoed continuously throughout the Gilded Age.
Who were the sodbusters and how fif they shape the West?
-Sodbusters" poured onto the prairies. Lacking trees for lumber and fuel, they built homes from the very sod they dug from the ground, and burned corncobs for warmth. Tehy shattered the myth about the Great American Deserta nd opened gateways to the agricultural west even wider -settlers in the 1870s rashly pushed still farther west, onto the poor, marginal lands beyond the 100th meridian
In what ways had migration and conflict shaped the Great Plains before the arrivals of the whites?
-The Comanches had driven the Apaches off the central plains into the upper Rio Grande valley in the eighteenth century. Harried by the Mandans and Chippewas, the Cheyenne had abandoned their villages along the upper reaches of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the century before the Civil War. -The Sioux, displaced from the Great Lakes woodlands in the late eighteenth century, emerged onto the plains to prey upon the Crows, Kiowas, and Pawnees. -Mounted on Spanish-introduced horses, peoples like the Cheyenne and the Sioux transformed themselves within just a few generations from foot-traveling, crop-growing villagers to wideranging nomadic traders and deadly efficient buffalo hunters—so deadly that they threatened to extinguish the vast bison herds that had lured them onto the plains in the first place. -
What did the Dawes miss(or ignore) about the Indian Culture?
-The Dawes Act struck directly at tribal organization and tried to make rugged individualists out of the Indians -This legislation ignored the inherent reliance of traditional Indian culture on tribally held land, literally pulling the land out from under them.
How did the Granger's concern play out in the political system/?
-The Grangers gradually raised their goals from individual self-improvement to improvement of the farmers' collective plight. In a determined effort to escape the clutches of the trusts, they established cooperatively owned stores for consumers and cooperatively owned grain elevators and warehouses for producers. -Embattled Grangers also went into politics, enjoying their most gratifying success in the graingrowing regions of the upper Mississippi Valley, chiefly in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. There, through state legislation, they strove to regulate railway rates and the storage fees charged by railroads and by the operators of warehouses and grain elevators. -Many of the state courts, notably in Illinois, were disposed to recognize the principle of public control of private business for the general welfare. -Granger Laws, however, were badly drawn, and they were bitterly fought through the high courts by the well-paid lawyers of the "interests." Following judicial reverses, most severely at the hands of the Supreme Court in the famous Wabash decision of 1886 , the Grangers' influence faded.
What was promised to the indians in exchange for movement to the reservation? To what extent were these promises kept?
-The Indians surrendered their ancestral lands only when they had received solemn promises from Washington that they would be left alone and provided with food, clothing, and other supplies. Regrettably, the federal Indian agents were often corrupt. -They palmed off moth-eaten blankets, spoiled beef, and other defective provisions on the friendless Indians. One of these cheating officials, on an annual salary of $1,500, returned home after four years with an estimated "savings" of $50,000.
What was the Grange and why was it founded?
-The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry— better known as the Grange—was organized in 1867. Its leading spirit was Oliver H. Kelley -Kelley's first objective was to enhance the lives of isolated farmers through social, educational, and fraternal activities. Farm men and women, cursed with loneliness in widely separated farmhouses, found the Grange's picnics, concerts, and lectures a godsend.
What factors allowed for explosion of Western Mining?
-The conquest of the Indians and the coming of the railroad were life-giving boons to the mining frontier. -The golden gravel of California continued to yield "pay dirt," and in 1858 an electrifying discovery convulsed Colorado. Avid "fifty niners" or "Pike's Peakers" rushed west to rip at the ramparts of the Rockies. -"Fifty-niners" also poured feverishly into Nevada in 1859, after the fabulous Comstock Lode had been uncovered. A fantastic amount of gold and silver, worth more than $340 million, was mined by the "Kings of the Comstock" from 1860 to 1890. -Smaller "lucky strikes" drew frantic gold- and silver-seekers into Montana, Idaho, and other western states. Boomtowns, known as "Helldorados," sprouted from the desert sands like magic. Every third cabin was a saloon, where sweat-stained miners drank adulterated liquor ("rotgut") in the company of accommodating women. Lynch law and hempen vigilante justice, as in early California, preserved a crude semblance of order in the towns. -Once the loose surface gold was gobbled up, ore-breaking machinery was imported to smash the gold-bearing quartz. This operation was so expensive that it could ordinarily be undertaken only by corporations pooling the wealth of stockholders. -Magnetlike, it attracted population and wealth, while advertising the wonders of the Wild West. Women as well as men found opportunity, running boardinghouses or working as prostitutes
How did the federal government attempt to structure the reservation system? How did this show a fundamental misunderstanding of the Indian's culture?
-The federal government tried to pacify the Plains Indians by signing treaties with the "chiefs" of various "tribes" at Fort Laramie in 1851 and at Fort Atkinson in 1853 -The treaties marked the beginnings of the reservation system in the West. They established boundaries for the territory of each tribe and attempted to separate the Indians into two great "colonies" to the north and south of a corridor of intended white settlement. -But the white treaty makers misunderstood both Indian government and Indian society. "Tribes" and "chiefs" were often fictions of the white imagination, which could not grasp the fact that Native Americans, living in scattered bands, usually recognized no authority outside their immediate family, or perhaps a village elder. And the nomadic culture of the Plains Indians was utterly alien to the concept of living out one's life in the confinement of a defined territory.
How did deflation harm farmers?
-The grain farmers were no longer the masters of their own destinies. They were engaged in one of the Settling the West 609 American Agriculture in 1900 most fiercely competitive of businesses, for the price of their product was determined in a world market by the world output. -Once the farmers became chained to a one-crop economy—wheat or corn—they were in the same leaky boat with the southern cotton growers -If a family had borrowed $1,000 in 1855, when wheat was worth about a dollar a bushel, they expected to pay back the equivalent of one thousand bushels, plus interest, when the mortgage fell due. But if they let their debt run to 1890, when wheat had fallen to about fifty cents a bushel, they would have to pay back the price of two thousand bushels for the $1,000 they had borrowed, plus interest. -There were simply not enough dollars to go around, and as a result, prices were forced down. -This unexpected burden struck them as unjust, though their steely-eyed creditors often branded the complaining farmers as slippery and dishonest rascals. -Operated on year long a loss, their montage was extremely high, ruinous rates of interest,
Who were John Coxey and why did he have an army?
-The most famous marcher was "General" Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Ohio quarry owner. He set out for Washington in 1894 with a few score of supporters and a swarm of newspaper reporters. His platform included a demand that the government relieve unemployment by an inflationary public works program, supported by some $500 million in legal tender notes to be issued by the Treasury. Coxey himself rode in a carriage with his wife and infant son, appropriately named Legal Tender Coxey, while his tiny "army" tramped along behind, singing,
What was the structure created by the Homestead Act
-The new law allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160 acres of land (a quartersection) by living on it for five years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30. -The Homestead Act marked a drastic departure from previous policy. Before the act, public land had been sold primarily for revenue; now it was to be given away to encourage a rapid filling of empty spaces and to provide a stimulus to the family farm—"the backbone of democracy. -The new law was a godsend to a host of farmers who could not afford to buy large holdings. During the forty years after its passage, about half a million families took advantage of the Homestead Act to carve out new homes in the vast open stretches. -Yet five times that many families purchased their land from the railroads, the land companies, or the states.
Problem with Long Horn Cattle
-The problem of marketing was neatly solved when the transcontinental railroads thrust their iron fingers into the West. Cattle could now be shipped bodily to the stockyards, and under "beef barons" like the Swifts and Armours, the highly industrialized meatpacking business sprang into existence as a main pillar of the economy. Drawing upon the gigantic stockyards at Kansas City and Chicago, the meatpackers could ship their fresh products to the East Coast in the newly perfected refrigerator cars.
What was Homestead Act a "Crux Hoax"
-The standard 160 acres, quite adequate in the well-watered Mississippi basin, frequently proved pitifully inadequate on the rain-scarce Great Plains. Thousands of homesteaders, perhaps two out of three, were forced to give up the one-sided struggle against drought. -Unscrupulous corporations would use "dummy" homesteaders—often their employees or aliens bribed with cash or a bottle of beer—to grab the best properties containing timber, minerals, and oil. Settlers would later swear that they had "improved" the property by erecting a "twelve by fourteen" dwelling, which turned out to measure twelve by fourteen inches.
In what way was the transmissippi expansion distinct from other similiar movements?
-There the Native American peoples made their last and most desperate struggle against colonization, and there most Native Americans live today. There "Anglo" culture collided most directly with Hispanic culture—the historic rival of the Anglo-Americans for dominance in the New World—and the Southwest remains the most Hispanicized region in America. -There America faced across the Pacific to Asia, and there most Asian-Americans dwell today. There the scale and severity of the environment posed their largest challenges to human ambitions, and there the environment, with its aridity and still-magical emptiness, continues to mold social and political life, and the American imagination, as in no other part of the nation. And in no other region has the federal government, with its vast landholdings, its subsidies to the railroads, and its massive irrigation projects, played so conspicuous a role in economic and social development -For better or worse, those pioneers planted the seeds of civilization in the immense western wilderness. The life we live, they dreamed of; the life they lived, we can only dream.
What was "Dry Farming" and what were it's pitfalls
-They quickly went broke as a six-year drought in the 1880s further desiccated the already dusty region. Western Kansas lost half its population between 1888 and 1892. "There is no God west of Salina," one hapless homesteader declared. -technique of "dry farming" took root on the plains. Its methods of frequent shallow cultivation supposedly were adapted to the arid western environment, but over time "dry farming" created a finely pulverized surface soil
What factors led to the destruction of the Indian Tribes? (taming)
-This relentless fire-and-sword policy of the whites at last shattered the spirit of the Indians. The vanquished Native Americans were finally ghettoized on reservations where they could theoretically preserve their cultural autonomy but were in fact compelled to eke out a sullen existence as wards of the government. -Their white masters had at last discovered that the Indians were much cheaper to feed than to fight. Even so, for many decades they were almost ignored to death. -Of cardinal importance was the railroad, which shot an iron arrow through the heart of the West. -Locomotives could bring out unlimited numbers of troops, farmers, cattlemen, sheepherders, and settlers. - The Indians were also ravaged by the white people's diseases, to which they showed little resistance, and by their firewater, to which they showed almost no resistance. -Above all, the virtual extermination of the buffalo doomed the Plains Indians' nomadic way of life.
What other factors allowed for the development of the "Great American Desert"
-Tough strains of wheat, resistant to cold and drought, were imported from Russia and blossomed into billowing yellow carpets. -Wise farmers abandoned corn in favor of sorghum and other drought-resistant grains. -Barbed wire, perfected by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874, solved the problem of how to build fences on the treeless prairies. -Eventually federally financed irrigation projects —on a colossal scale, beyond even what John Wesley Powell had dreamed—caused the Great American Desert to bloom. -
What Trends did Whites exacerbate on the Plains?
-White Solider accelerated a fateful cycle that exacerbated already fierce enmities among the Indians and ultimately undermined the foundations of Native American culture. White intruders unwittingly spread cholera, typhoid, and smallpox among the native peoples of the plains, with devastating results. -Equally harmful, whites put further pressure on the steadily shrinking bison population by hunting and by grazing their own livestock on the prairie grasses. As the once-mammoth buffalo herds dwindled, warfare intensified among the plains tribes for ever-scarcer hunting grounds. -
What is the safety valve theory of the frontier
-state of mind and a symbol of opportunity -Traditionally footloose, Americans have been notorious for their mobility. The nation's farmers, unlike the peasants of Europe, have seldom remained rooted to their soil. The land, sold for a profit as settlement closed in, was often the settler's most profitable crop. -The theory is that when hard times came, the unemployed who cluttered the city pavements merely moved west, took up farming, and prospered. -In truth, relatively few city dwellers, at least in the populous eastern centers, migrated to the frontier during depressions. Most of them did not know how to farm; few of them could raise enough money to transport themselves west and then pay for livestock and expensive machinery. -
Describe the Massacre at Wounded Knee.
In 1884 these zealous white souls joined with military men in successfully persuading the federal government to outlaw the sacred Sun Dance. When the "Ghost Dance" cult later spread to the Dakota Sioux, the army bloodily stamped it out in 1890 at the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee. In the fighting thus provoked, an estimated two hundred Indian men, women, and children were killed, as well as twenty-nine invading soldiers.
How were farmers feeling injured by:
Nature. Government and the Enviorment
A Century of Dishonor
The book chronicled the sorry record of government ruthlessness and chicanery in dealing with the Indians. Her later novel Ramona (1884), a love story of injustice to the California Indians, sold some 600,000 copies and further inspired sympathy for the Indians.
Corperations
The farmers were also "farmed" by the corporations and processors. They were at the mercy of the harvester trust, the barbed-wire trust, and the fertilizer trust, all of which could control output and raise prices to extortionate levels. -Middlemen took a juicy "cut" from the selling price of the goods that the farmers bought, while operators pushed storage rates to the ceiling at grain warehouses and elevators. -In addition, the railroad octopus had the grain growers in its grip. Freight rates could be so high that the farmers sometimes lost less if they burned their corn for fuel than if they shipped it. If they raised their voices in protest, the ruthless railroad operators might let their grain spoil in damp places or refuse to provide them with cars when needed.
What was the structure created by the Dawes Severalty Act
The misbegotten offspring of the movement to reform Indian policy was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. -Reflecting the forced-civilization views of the reformers, the act dissolved many tribes as legal entities, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up individual Indian family heads with 160 free acres. -If the Indians behaved themselves like "good white settlers," they would get full title to their holdings, as well as citizenship, in twenty-five years. -Reservation land not allotted to the Indians under the Dawes Act was to be sold to railroads and white settlers, with the proceeds used by the federal government to educate and "civilize" the native peoples -Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where Native American children, separated from their tribes, were taught English and inculcated with white values and customs. "Kill the Indian and save the man" was the school founder's motto. -In the 1890s the government expanded its network of Indian boarding schools and sent "field matrons" to the reservations to teach Native American women the art of sewing and to preach the virtues of chastity and hygiene.
Government-
Their land was overassessed, and they paid painful local taxes, whereas wealthy easterners could conceal their stocks and bonds in safe-deposit boxes. High protective tariffs in these years poured profits into the pockets of manufacturers. Farmers, on the other hand, had no choice but to sell their low-priced products in a fiercely competitive, unprotected world market, while buying high-priced manufactured goods in a protected home market.
Bufflo soliders
frontier were African-American—dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by the Indians, supposedly because of the resemblance of their hair to the bison's furry coat