Module 1: Building and Rebuilding the Nation
Throughout the 1800s, hundreds of thousands of Americans decided to follow the advice of men like Horace Greeley, who urged the young and ambitious to “Go West!” to seek their fortune. Before the Civil War, the number willing to make the difficult and dangerous journey was small, and most remained clustered along the eastern seaboard. Several forces combined during the mid- to late 1800s, however, to increase westward migration. The promise of land for homesteading attracted families of all races and nationalities to the prairies of the Midwest. The prospect of gold and other economic opportunities drew the adventurous to the Pacific coast, where cities were emerging. By the end of the century, the two primary obstacles to moving west—distance and danger—were well under control. A trip that had once taken more than six months by wagon train could be managed in a week once the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, and the forceful resettlement of Native populations by U.S. forces meant that Americans could travel without the danger of confronting the original owners of the land.
I. Moving West
To those along the eastern coast, anything on the other side of the Mississippi was the “West.” Some called it the “Great American Desert,” because water was scarce and the land was considered less arable than the areas along the eastern coast. To those in the increasingly crowded cities, the prospect of moving West promised both great risk and great reward.
One of the rewards was free land. In the middle of the Civil War, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862. The Act allowed farmers to claim up to 160 acres in the Great Plains, by staking their claim and occupying the land for five years. At the end of that time, the settler would be given full rights to the land or he could opt to purchase it for $1.25 per acre after only six months of occupancy. The Homestead Act was responsible for bringing over 700,000 families to the West between 1862 and the turn of the century, and an additional two million families purchased land from railroad companies and other investors during the same period. (Click on the thumbnail Multimedia: Little Houses on the Prairie? Scroll through the photos while listening to the music that accompanies this multimedia.)
Many discovered that the land wasn’t quite what they had hoped and they learned that the weather could be a brutal enemy, wiping out a year’s work in a matter of hours. The 160 acres that had sounded so immense in theory was often insufficient to support a family. Some families turned away from the idea of subsistence farming in favor of planting cash crops that could be transported more easily once the railroads began to spread. Others turned to ranching, as the land was more ideally suited for this purpose than for farming, but that also required larger tracts of land than the homesteads they had been allotted and ranchers had to buy up land from discouraged homesteaders and other owners in order to support their herds. Gradually, farmers learned to make a living from the land, but few found the riches that they had hoped for when they set out for the Plains.
Most of the homesteaders were whites, but several settlements of black farmers emerged in the 1870s. One such settlement was Nicodemus, Kansas. Benjamin “Pap” Singleton distributed flyers to former slaves throughout the South, urging them to move west. (Click on the thumbnail Multimedia: Exodusters in Kansas | Multimedia transcript.) Unable to obtain land in the South as the promise of Reconstruction faded, African-American families followed Singleton and other promoters to settlements like Nicodemus. These families, who adapted a biblical term and referred to themselves as “Exodusters,” found greater freedom in Kansas than they had known in the South, but the land was unfertile and isolated. White leaders in the South attempted to block their migration, as they wanted continued access to cheap and plentiful agricultural labor, but over 500,000 former slaves persevered and migrated west by the end of the century (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975).
In addition to settlers who hoped to cultivate the land, the West attracted individuals seeking quicker fortunes to be found in mining. This began with the famed Gold Rush of 1849, but other smaller gold rushes continued throughout the late 1800s. (Click on the thumbnail Multimedia: Gold in the Hills. Scroll through the photos while listening to the music that accompanies this multimedia.) Silver was important as well—one of the most significant discoveries was the Comstock Lode, near Virginia City, Nevada. Mining towns sprang up in these areas and many of our images of the Wild West are shaped by the stories—fact, fiction, and mergers of both—that happened in those towns. Fortunes were made by the miners, and also by enterprising men and women who realized that these workers would be looking to spend some of that fortune on the comforts of life, if those could be brought reasonably close to the mines. The need to transport people and supplies into these areas, and to transport ore back east, provided strong support for the expansion of the railroads. The railroads also made it easier to transport the military to trouble spots where the Natives were resisting being pushed (yet again) from their land.
II. Native American Resistance
Although the United States had considered most of North America its own territory since the early 1800s, agreements with the various Native groups allowed them to inhabit only certain areas. It was a strange situation from a legal standpoint—the tribes were, on the one hand, considered separate governments with which we negotiated treaties. On the other hand, they were often forced to abide by U.S. laws, especially when the tribes came into conflict with settlers. This occurred with increasing regularity after the Civil War, due to western migration. If Natives were occupying a piece of prime real estate, white settlers were rarely content to let them keep it. Some of the bloodiest confrontations occurred when gold was discovered in regions where Native tribes had been relocated.
No longer armed with bows and arrows, but equipped with modern rifles they had purchased or stolen, the tribes presented a considerable danger to white settlers when conflicts erupted, and the military was frequently called in to settle conflicts. After the Civil War, there were plenty of troops (both Northern and Southern) who were willing to fight in the “Indian Wars,” including a number of black veterans who fought as the Buffalo Regiment and became known as Buffalo Soldiers. (Click on the thumbnail Photo Viewer: Buffalo Soldiers.)
Many military clashes went beyond protecting white settlers, and troops were responsible for several attacks that can only be categorized as massacres. At Sandy Creek, Colorado, in 1864, miners clashed with members of the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes, who had been forced to relocate to the area just a few years before. They didn’t want to move again. (Click on the thumbnail Multimedia: Native Resistance | Multimedia transcript.) The leaders of the tribes believed that their agreement with the U.S. government would be upheld by the troops, but Colonel J. M. Chivington ordered his men to kill all of the Natives—over 400 men, women, and children (Marshall 1984, 38-9). The Sioux War, which ended with the famed Battle of Little Big Horn, began as the result of a similar conflict with miners in the Black Hills of Dakota. General Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn was merely a temporary victory for the Sioux, however, and Chief Sitting Bull eventually moved his people to Canada to ensure their safety.
One of the last tribes to resist, the Warm Springs Apache, was led by the famed chief, Geronimo. One of his lieutenants was a female named Lozen, who was one of several women warriors among the Apache. Her brother, Vittorio, who also fought with Geronimo, claimed her as his most trusted ally, “strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy” (Moore 2001, 93). The Apache held out against U.S. troops for nearly a decade, waging guerrilla warfare from the Rocky Mountains, but eventually surrendered in New Mexico in 1886.
Other groups found themselves decimated by disease. The Nez Perce tribe, originally from the Pacific Northwest, were driven onto a reservation in Kansas in 1877. Their chief, Young Joseph (usually referred to as “Chief Joseph”), had chosen not to resist in order to save his people, but the move proved fatal for many of his tribe as over one-third of the Nez Perce died when malaria broke out (Young Joseph 1879).
The final battle of the “Indian Wars” occurred in the winter of 1890. The Lakota Sioux had been on the run constantly since defeating Custer’s troops at Little Big Horn. They were tired and losing hope, and many turned to a new religious ritual, the Ghost Dance, to raise their spirits. Male and female dancers wore a special robe, which they claimed was impervious to bullets. Settlers became unnerved as the dance spread to other tribes and the military feared that the dance might be a sign of a new insurgency. On December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, a shot was accidentally fired, and both sides believed that a battle had started. Over 200 men, women, and children were killed by U.S. troops, who also suffered some casualties (Brown 2007).
The massacre angered Native Americans, but most realized that continued resistance was futile. By 1891, the last of the tribes were contained on government reservations, managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They were allowed to continue their own customs to some extent, but efforts to “civilize” the Natives increased. Children were forced into boarding schools, against the will of the parents and tribal leaders, where they were forbidden to have contact with their family or to dress or speak in their own fashion.
A well-intentioned, but misguided attempt at integrating Native Americans into white society was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which allocated plots of land to individual families. Tribes were used to farming as a community, so this allocation broke up their traditional community structure. Most Native groups considered land to be held by the women, usually communally, and the act granted the plots to individual men. Hopi women appealed to the Bureau in 1894, noting that this was unfair—if they decided to leave their husbands, they could not support themselves or their children. “The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable,” they argued, “because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her” (Hopi Indian Petition 1894). In choosing the reservations, the leaders of the Native tribes were able to save their people, but in doing so, were forced to sacrifice much of their distinct culture.
III. The Wild West
Charles Goodnight, rancher, inventor of the chuckwagon, and one of the individuals for whom the Goodnight-Loving Trail was named, saw more of the “real West” than just about anyone else in his era. In 1916, he set out to make a movie about the West he remembered. He had indeed lived through Indian raids and other experiences that were the mainstay of the Western film, but he insisted that those incidents were the exception, not the rule. No copies of the film remain, but reports noted there were no saloon brawls, no gunfights, and the relations with Native Americans were generally friendly. Few were interested in his version, preferring the myth of the West to the reality (Ward and Duncan 2001).
The ideas that are wrapped up in the “West” have long been a core part of our national identity. (Click on the thumbnail Multimedia: The Wild West.) In 1890, the Bureau of the Census announced that there was no longer a clear line marking a western frontier. That news alarmed some people, for several reasons. First, if there was no frontier, where would we urge young men to go when the cities became crowded and opportunities were scarce? Second, the frontier was part of our national identity—Americans (or at least white Americans of European descent) defined themselves in light of the pioneer spirit. A historical essay, written in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner, reflected this view. Turner argued that the existence of the frontier—wild, untamed lands waiting to be conquered—had shaped the American psyche since the Colonial era. He claimed that it had encouraged individualism and self-reliance, and had given us a distinct American culture that went beyond a mere copy of European customs (Turner 1893). Turner, and the many with whom this essay resonated, feared that the closing of the frontier put at risk the vitality and energy that made American culture distinct.
Historians then and now have noted that Turner’s thesis is biased, especially given that this “wide open” frontier we conquered was already inhabited and that we frequently violated our stated views about the centrality of individual freedom and liberty in the process of “taming the frontier.” Nevertheless, it is difficult to escape the fact that images of the West have been mainstays in American popular culture and they continue to shape our national culture. The cowboy, especially, has captured the imagination and many of us learned our “history” of the Wild West from the TV and movie depictions we see of the era. Those images of the West tell us more about the way we view ourselves and our history as a nation, however, than they do about the actual history of the West. Turner’s “closing of the frontier” and rapid growth in the cities along the coasts inspired some to take the idea of Manifest Destiny to a new level. Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest was used to argue that Anglo-Saxons, as a “superior race,” were destined to spread their culture, religion, and form of government to all corners of the globe, thus opening a new frontier of imperialism as we entered the twentieth century.
References
Brown, Dee. 2007. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian history of the American west. New York: Macmillan.
Hopi Indian Petition (1894). 1993. In Second to none: A documentary history of American women, ed. Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Cynthia Eagle Russett, and Laurie Crumpacker. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Marshall, S. L. A. 1984. Crimsoned prairie: The Indian wars. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Moore, Laura Jane. 2001. “Lozen: An Apache woman warrior.” In Sifters: Native American women’s lives, ed. Theda Perdue, 92–107. New York: Oxford University Press.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1893. The significance of the frontier in American history. The Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 199–227.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1975. Historical statistics of the United States, colonial times to 1970, bicentennial edition, parts 1 and 2. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Ward, Geoffrey C., and Dayton Duncan. 2001. “This isn’t history.” The West. Episode eight (1887–1914): One sky above us. http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/episodes/eight/thisisnthistory.htm (accessed October 15, 2008).
Young Joseph, Chief of the Nez Perce. 1879. An Indian’s views of Indian affairs. North American Review 128:412-33.
Image Credit
Carter, Charles W., photographer. “Mormon immigrants/ Echo Canyon, down & back” Photograph. Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Academic Library Consortium, 2002. [Photo taken Salt Lake City, ca. 1868-1880.] Courtesy Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Archives, Salt Lake City, UT. From Mountain West Digital Library. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/OTImages&CISOPTR=57 (Accessed December 1, 2008). Inset: Ritchie, A.H., engraver. “Horace Greeley.” Photographic print of an engraving. New York: Derby & Miller. [c1865 Feb. 8]. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b17073 (accessed December 1, 2008).
Report broken links or any other problems on this page. Copyright © by University of Maryland University College.