Chapter 17 - American YAWP

Introduction

• Indigenous groups controlled most of the continent west of the Mississippi River deep into the 19th century.
• Spanish, French, British, and later American traders had integrated themselves into many regional economies.
• American emigrants pushed westward.
• The Civil War prompted the US to industrialize, lay down rails, and expand further west.
• Native Americans had lived In North America for over 10 million years.
• In the late 19th-century approximately 250,000 Native people still inhabited the American West.
• The US violated their own treaties and removed Native groups to shrinking reservations.

Post-Civil War Westward Migration

• The first American migrants sought quick profits in the West during the midcentury gold and silver rushes.
• During the California Rush (1848-1849), prospectors poured in after precious metal strikes in Colorado in 1858, Nevada in 1859, Idaho in 1860, Montana in 1863, and the Black Hills in 1874.
• A significant portion of the mining workforce was single men.
• Working-class women worked in shops, saloons, boardinghouses, and brothels.
• Ancillary operations profited from the mining boom.
• The value of the gold that left Colorado in the first seven years after the Pikes Peak gold strike was an estimated 25.5 million--less than half of what outside parties had invested in the fever.
• The 100,000-plus migrants who settled in the Rocky Mountains had value.
• Others came to the Plains to take hides from the great bison herds.
• Millions of animals roamed the Plains.
• Tough leather supplied industrial belting in eastern factories and raw material for the booming clothing industry.
• Bison slaughter peaked in the early 1870s.
• Bison numbers went from over 10 million to only a few hundred.
• Railroad expansion allowed ranching to replace bison with cattle.
• Nearly 70,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) migrated between 1846-1868.
• Mormon migration was driven by fleeing religious persecution.
• Joseph Smith founded the Mormon religion in New York in the 1830s.
• Mormons were seen as optimistic and future-oriented.
• Mormons thought that Americans were exceptional and chosen by God to spread truth across the world to build a utopia.
• Many Americans were suspicious of Mormons.
• Polygamy was unacceptable to mainstream America.
• Mormons migrated to Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and Utah.
• Their settlements served as important supply points for other emigrants heading on to California and Oregon.
• Brigham Young became the leader of the church after Joseph Smith.
• Brigham Young was appointed governor of the Utah territory in 1850.
• He encouraged Mormon residents to engage in agricultural pursuits and be cautious of the outsiders.
• Land drew the migrants to the West.
• In 1862, northerners in Congress passed the Homestead Act.
• The Homestead Act allowed male citizens to claim federally owned lands in the West.
• Settlers could head West, choose a 160-acre surveyed section of land, file a claim, and begin “improving” the land by plowing fields, building houses and barns, or digging wells.
• After 5 years of living on the land, one could apply for the official title deed to the land.
• Married women were excluded from filing claims because they were legally considered legal dependents of their husbands.
• Unmarried women filed claims on their own, but single farmers (male or female) found it difficult to run a farm.
• Second or third sons who did not inherit land in Scandinavia founded farms in Minnesota, Dakota, and other Midwestern territories in the 1860s.
• Boosters encouraged emigration by advertising the Plains as a "flowery meadow of great fertility" with nutritious grasses and watered by numerous streams.
• In 1860 Kansas had approximately 10,000 farms.
• In 1880 Kansas had 239,000 farms.
• Texas counted 200,000 people in 1850, 1.6 million in 1880, and 3 million in 1900.

The Indian Wars and Federal Peace Policies

• In 1862 the Civil War was still happening.
• Tensions erupted between the Dakota Nation and white settlers in Minnesota and Dakota territory.
• The 1850 US census recorded a white population of about 6,000 in Minnesota.
• Eight years later that population was more than 150,000.
• The illegal influx of Dakota farmers pushed them to the breaking point.
• Hunting became unsustainable and poverty became a problem.
• The Federal Indian agent refused to disburse promised food.
• Andrew Myrick was a trader at the agency.
• He refused to sell food on credit.
• On August 17th, 1862, four men of the Santees killed five white settlers near the Redwood Agency, beginning war.
• The tribe killed 31 people.
• An ambush of a U.S. Military detachment at Redwood Ferry killed 23.
• The Governor of Minnesota called up militia and several thousand Americans waged war against the Indigenous.
• Americans broke Indigenous resistance at the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23.
• Military tribunals convicted 303 Dakota and sentenced them to hang.
• President Lincoln commuted all but 38 of the sentences.
• Minnesota settlers and government insisted not only that the Dakota lose much of their reservation lands and be removed further west, but also that those who fled be hunted down and placed on reservations as well.
• On September 3rd, 1863 American military units surrounded a large encampment of Dakota.
• American troops killed an estimated 300 people at a Dakota encampment.
• Dozens were taken prisoner.
• In 1851, the first Treaty of Fort Laramie secured right-of-way access for Americans passing through on their way to California and Oregon.
• a gold rush in 1858 drew 100,000 white gold seekers and they demanded new treaties be made with local Indigenous groups to secure land rights in the newly created Colorado Territory.
• Cheyenne bands splintered over the possibility of signing new treaties.
• Militia Leader John M. Chivington warned settlers in the summer of 1864 that the Cheyenne were dangerous, urged war, and promised a swift military victory.
• Cheyenne chief Black Kettle believed that a peace treaty would be best for his people, and traveled to Denver to arrange for peace talks.
• On November 29th, 1864, Chivington ordered his 700 militiamen to move on the Cheyenne camp near Fort Lyon, killing 200 Indigenous in the Sand Creek Massacre.
• The Indian Peace Commission took place in 1868.
• Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated.
• Congress allied with philanthropists to create the Board of Indian Commissioners.
• The commission was to become a permanent advisory body to oversee Indigenous affairs and prevent further outbreaks of violence.
• The board Christianized American Indian policy.
• The reservation system was handed over to the Protestant churches.
• The churches were tasked with finding agents and missionaries to manage reservation life.
• Francis Paul Prucha said peace policy "might just have properly been labeled the 'religious policy'.” Female Christian missionaries began to replace Indigenous peoples' tribal social units with small, patriarchal households.
• Women's labor became an issue because tribes didn't divide labor according to the gender norms of middle- and upper-class Americans.
• Fieldwork was performed by Native women.
• Indigenous were seen as lazy by many white people.
• J.L. Broaddus was appointed to oversee several small tribes on the Hoopa Valley reservation in California.
• According to the annual report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1875, the great majority of Native Americans were idle, listless, careless, and improvident.
• The report goes on to state that if they were not compelled to work, they would prefer to live upon the roots and acorns gathered by their women than to work for flour and beef.
• Texas and Southern Plains, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and their allies had wielded enormous influence.
• The Comanche controlled huge swaths of territory and raised vast areas.
• The Comanche inspired terror from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico.
• The American military focused on the Southern Plains.
• They sent messengers to the Plains to find the Comanche bands and ask them to come to peace negotiations at Medicine Lodge Creek in the fall of 1867.
• Terms were muddled at the Medicine Lodge Creek peace negotiations.
• American officials believed that Comanche bands had accepted reservation life, while Comanche leaders believed they were guaranteed vast lands for buffalo hunting.
• Quanah Parker was a famed war leader from the Comanche.
• The U.S. military proclaimed that all Indigenous people who were not settled on the reservation by the fall of 1874 would be considered “hostile”.
• The Red River War began when many Comanche bands refused to resettle and the American military launched expeditions into the Plains to subdue them.
• The war culminated in the defeat of the remaining roaming bands in the canyonlands of the Texas Panhandle.
• The last free Comanche bands were moved to the reservation at Fort Sill in southwestern Oklahoma.
• The Northern Plains Sioux people had yet to fully surrender.
• In 1862, many Sioux bands had signed treaties with the United States and drifted into the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies to collect rations and annuities.
• Many continued to resist American encroachment, particularly during Red Cloud's War, a rare victory for the Plains people.
• Red Cloud's War resulted in the Treaty of 1868.
• The Treaty of 1868 created the Great Sioux Reservation.
• An 1874 American expedition to the Black Hills of South Dakota discovered gold.
• White people had no respect for Indigenous people at the time.
• The gold discovery brought the Sioux situation to a breaking point.
• U.S. officials pressured the western Sioux to sign a new treaty that would transfer control of the Black Hills to the United States while General Philip Sheridan moved U.S. troops into the region.
• There were many Sioux victories.
• Sitting Bull had visions that inspired confidence.
• In late June 1876, a division of the 7th Calvary Regiment, led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, went up a trail into the Black Hills as an advanced guard for a larger force.
• Custer approached a camp along a river known to the Sioux as Greasy Grass but marked as Little Bighorn.
• At Little Bighorn Custer found “treaty” Sioux as well as Cheyenne.
• Custer and 268 of his men were killed.
• Crazy Horse led a band of Oglala Sioux to surrender in May 1877.
• Other bands followed until 1881.
• Those followers of Sitting Bull laid down their weapons and came to the reservation.

Beyond the Plains

• The Utes and Paiutes were pushed out of the Rocky Mountains by the U.S. expansion into Colorado and away from the northern Great Basin.
• Many Utes and Paiutes joined the U.S. military in its campaign in the southwest against powerful Native groups like the Hopi, Zuni, Jicarilla Apache, and the Navajo.
• A population of at least 10,000 were engaged in farming and sheep herding on some of the most valuable lands acquired by the United States after the Mexican war.
• Conflict increased in the 1850s.

General James Carleton began searching for a reservation where he could remove the Navajo and end their threat to the U.S. expansion in the Southwest.

• Carleton gave orders to Colonel Kit Carson to round up the entire Navajo population and escort them to Bosque Redondo.
• Those who resisted the round up were shot.
• The Long Walk remains deeply important to the Navajo people today.
• The Navajo were subject to series of forced marches to the reservation at Bosque Redondo between August 1863 and December 1866.
• Thousands of Navajo died.
• By 1868, the reservation was unsustainable at Bosque Redondo.
• General William Tecumseh Sherman visited Bosque Redondo and wrote of the inhumane situation in which the Navajo were kept as prisoners.
• On June 1st, 1868, the Navajo signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo.
• The treaty enabled the Navajo to return to their homeland.
• In 1872 the California/Oregon border erupted in violence.
• The Modoc people left the reservation of the Klamath Nation and returned to their homelands in an area known as Lost River.
• Americans had already settled the region of the Lost River. When the U.S. military arrived, 52 remaining warriors, led by Kintpuash, refused to return to the reservation and holed up in defense.
• They fought a guerilla war for 11 months.
• About 200 U.S. troops were killed before the Modoc surrendered.
• The Federal govt. hanged Kintpuash and three other Modoc leaders.
• Four years later violence erupted in the pacific northwest. A branch of Nez Perce refused to be moved to a reservation under the leadership of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph).
• The Nez Perce attempted to flee to Canada but failed.
• The U.S. cavalry outnumbered them and they battled across a thousand miles.
• Chief Joseph said, “Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
• By 1880, the Native population of California had collapsed from 150k to 20k.
• Reservations were set up to collect what remained of the Native population.
• In the 1850s, California laws allowed white Californians to obtain both Native children and adults as "apprentice” laborers by merely bringing the desired laborer before a judge and promising to feed, clothe, and eventually release them after a period of “service” that ranged from 10–20 years.

Western Economic Expansion: Railroads and Cattle

• Ranching and railroads fueled the new Western economy. “The West is purely a railroad enterprise.”
• Business historian Alfred Chandler called the railroads the "first modern business enterprise.”
• The transcontinental railroad crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rail networks of the eastern United States.
• It was constructed by the Central Pacific and by the Union Pacific.
• The 1862 Pacific Railroad Act gave bonds of between $16,000 and $48,000 for each mile of construction and provided vast land grants to railroad companies.
• The railroads were linked in Utah in 1869 to great national fanfare.
• Between the years 1850-1871 railroad companies received 175 mil+ acres of public land.
• “If there be profit, the corporations may take it; if there be a loss, the Government must bear it."
• Railroads attracted subsidies and investments and created significant labor demand.
• 1880-approx. 400,000 men in the railroad industry consisted of nearly 2.5% of the nation's workforce
• Work in the railroad industry was dangerous and low-paying.
• Companies employed Irish workers in the early 19th century and saw an influx of Chinese workers in the late 19th century.
• In 1880, over 200,000 Chinese migrants lived in the United States.
• Brakemen's work was very dangerous.
• Before automatic braking, an engineer would blow the “down brake" whistle and brakemen would scramble to the top of the moving train and run, car to car, manually turning brakes and be responsible for coupling cars.
• 1850- there were 9,000 miles of railroads in the United States.
• 1900- there were 190,000 railroads including several transcontinental lines. Companies converged rails at hub cities.
• Chicago grew from 200 inhabitants in 1833 to over a million by 1890.
• By 1893 Chicago was completely transformed by the railroad.
• The World's Columbian Exposition trumpeted the city's progress and broader technological progress. A "White City” was built in neoclassical style to house all the features of the fair and cater to the needs of the visitors who arrived from all over the world.
• Chicago served as the gateway between the farm and ranch country of the Great Plains and eastern markets.
• Railroads brought cattle from Texas to Chicago for slaughter and then shipped it to New York City.
• The railroad network created the fabled cattle drives of the 1860s and 1870s.
• The first cattle drives across the Central Plains began soon after the Civil War. Ranchers used the Chisholm Trail to transport cattle out of Texas to Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.
• Farmers in Kansas disliked the intrusion of large and environmentally destructive herds onto their hunting, ranching, and farming lands.
• Trails such as the Western Trail, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and the Shawnee Trail were blazed.
• Cattle drives were difficult tasks.
• Historians estimate the number of men who worked as cowboys in the late 19th century to be between 12k and 40k.
• A fourth of the Cowboys were African-American. More were of Mexican or Mexican-American descent. Vaqueros were cowboys that who adopted Mexican practices, gear, and terms such as rodeo, bronco, and lasso.
• Most cattle drivers were men, but at least 16 were verified as women, the most well known where Molly Dyer Goodnight and Lizzie Johnson Williams, who made three known trips with her herds up the Chisholm Trail.
• Many Cowboys hoped to become ranch owners.
• Employment was insecure and wages were low.
• Beginners expected to earn around $20-$25 a month. Experienced cowboys expected to earn around $40-$45.
• Trail bosses could earn over $50 per month.
• Following The End of the Civil War, steer worth $4 in Texas could fetch $40 in Kansas.
• By the 1880s, the great cattle drives were largely done

The Allotment Eras and Resistance in the Native West

• White settlers began to complain that Native Americans had too much land.
• They claimed the Natives were using their land inefficiently.
• By the 1880s Americans increasingly championed legislation to allow the transfer of Indigenous lands to farmers and ranchers.
• Many argued that allotting land to individual Native Americans would encourage American-style agriculture.
• February 8, 1887 marked the passage of the Dawes General Allotment Act that splintered Native American reservations into individual family homesteads.
• Each head of a Native family was to be allotted 160 acres
• Single individuals were allotted 80 acres.
• Orphaned children received 40 acres.
• A 4-year timeline was established for Indigenous peoples to make their allotment selections.
• If no selection was made, the act authorized the secretary of the interior to appoint an agent to make selections for the remaining tribal members.
• To protect Natives from being swindled by land speculators, all allotments was to be held in trust.
• Lands that remained unclaimed would revert to federal control and be sold to American settlers.
• Americans touted the Act as an uplifting humanitarian reform.
• In reality, it upended Native lifestyles and left Native nations without sovereignty over their lands.
• The Act claimed that to protect Native property rights, it was necessary to extend “the protection of the laws of the United States...over the Indians".
• January 1, 1889.
• Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka experienced a great revelation.
• He had traveled from his earthly home in western Nevada to heaven and returned during a solar eclipse to prophesy to his people.
• Wovoka said one “must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone, (or) fight. Do right always.”
• Wovoka also thought that Native Americans must participate in Ghost Dance.
• He said if the people lived justly and danced the Ghost Dance their ancestors would rise from the dead, droughts would dissipate, the whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would once again roam the Plains.
• Many Native American prophets had confronted American imperial power.
• Wovoka and some prophets incorporated Christian elements like Heaven and a Messiah figure into Indigenous spiritual traditions.
• Ghost Dance caught on quickly and spread beyond the Paiutes.
• Members of the Arapaho, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Shochone nations adopted the Ghost Dance religion as well as Lakota Sioux.
• The Lakota were in dire straits.
• South Dakota, formed out of land that belonged by treaty to the Lakota, became a state in 1889.
• White homesteaders poured in and reservations were carved up and diminished.
• A delegation of 11 men, led by Kicking Bear, joined the Ghost Dance pilgrims on the rails westward to Nevada and returned to spread the revival in the Dakotas.
• Newly arrived Pine Ridge agent Daniel Royer sent fearful dispatches to Washington and the press urging a military crackdown.
• Newspapers sensationalized the Ghost Dance.
• Agents began arresting Lakota leaders.
• Chief Sitting Bull and several others were killed in December 1890 during a botched arrest.
• The death of Sitting Bull convinced many bands to flee the reservations to join fugitive bands farther west. Two weeks after Sitting Bull's death an American cavalry unit intercepted a band of 350 Lakota, including 100 women and children.
• The Lakota were intercepted under Chief Spotted Elk (Bigfoot).
• They had been seeking refuge at the Pine Ridge Agency so were being escorted to Wounded Knee Creek.
• December 29th the American cavalrymen entered the camp to disarm Spotted Elk's band.
• A shot was fired and it became a massacre.
• Two dozen American soldiers were killed in the crossfire.
• There was an estimated 150-300 Lakota and other natives died; massacres were common in the American West.

Rodeos, Wild West Shows, and the Mythic American West

• 1860s - Americans devoured dime novels that embellished the lives of real-life individuals such as Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid.
• Owen Wister's novel "The Virginian” established the character of the cowboy as a gritty stoic with a rough exterior but with the needed courage and heroism needed to rescue people from train robbers, Native Americans, and cattle rustlers.
• Images were later reinforced when the emergence of rodeo added to popular conceptions of the American West.
• Rodeos began as small roping and riding contests among cowboys in towns near ranches or at camps at the end of the cattle trails.
• One of the first rodeos was on July 4, 1883, in Peco, Texas where cowboys from two ranches, the Hash Knife and the W Ranch competed in roping and riding contests, as a way to settle an argument.
• This event is recognized by historians of the West as the first real rodeo. Many rodeos were scheduled around national holidays, such as Independence Day, or during traditional roundup times in the spring and fall.
• Early Rodeos took place in open grassy areas and included calf and steer roping and rough stock events such as bronc riding.
• Approximately 90% of rodeo contestants were men; While women helped popularize the rodeo; several popular female bronc riders, such as Bertha Kaepernick, entered men's events, until around 1916 when women's competitive participation was curtailed.
• “Wild West" novels and shows became very popular.
• "Wild West" shows were unofficial national entertainment of the United States from the 1880s to the 1910s.
• The shows traveled throughout the eastern U.S. and even across Europe.
• They Showcased what Europeans and Americans wished was true on the Frontier, and the reality became less relevant.
• William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody first recognized the broad national appeal of the stock “characters” of the American West
• The stock characters were cowboys, Indians”, sharpshooters, cavalrymen, and rangers.
• He Operated out of Omaha, Nebraska. Launched his touring show in 1883 which was called "Buffalo Bill's Wild West".
• Buffalo Bill’s productions employed real cowboys and Native Americans. In theses Lives on the Plains and Indigenous life was all punctuated by "cowboy fun.”
• Cody’s business was joined by shrewd business partners skilled in marketing.
• Gordon William “Pawnee Bill" Lillie got his start in 1886 when Cody employed him as an interpreter for Pawnee members.
• He went on to create his own production in 1888, Pawnee Bill's Historic Wild West.
• Cody's only real competitor in the business until they combined shows in 1908.
• The merged Cody and Lillie production was known as "Two Bills Show" and included American Cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, Native Americans, Russian Cossacks, Japanese acrobats, and an Australian aboriginal.
• Cody and Lillie knew that Native Americans fascinated audiences in the U.S. and Europe.
• Most Americans believed that Native cultures were disappearing or had already, and felt a sense of urgency to see their dances, hear their song, and be captivated by their bareback riding skills and their elaborate buckskin and feather attire.
• In an attempt to appeal to women, Cody recruited Annie Oakley, a female sharpshooter who thrilled onlookers with her stunts.
• Oakley was Billed as "Little Sure Shot" for her incredible shots.
• Oakley also Shot apples off her poodle's head and the ash from her husband's cigar.
• Gordan Lillie's wife, May Manning Lillie, also became a skilled shot and performed as “World's Greatest Lady Horseback Shot”.

The West as History

• The Turner Thesis began in 1893.
• The American Historical Association met during that year's World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
• Young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his "frontier thesis” in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History".
• He looked back at the historical changes in the West and saw waves of "civilization" that washed across the continent.
• He claimed a frontier line “between savagery and civilization” had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon.
• Turner invited his audience to “stand at Cumberland Gap, and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file, the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, The Native American, the fur trader, the hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer - and the frontier has passed by”. The Census Bureau in 1890 declared the frontier closed.