Chapter 26: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution (1865-1896) PDF

Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution r 1865–1896...

Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution r 1865–1896 Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893 The White Man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at pleasure, and lives where he likes, cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot, with the undying remembrance of the fact, which you know as well as we, that every foot of what you proudly call America, not very long ago belonged to the red man. Washakie (Shoshone Indian), 1878 W hen the Civil War crashed to a close, the frontier line was still wavering westward toward the fabled “100th Meridian,” which defines the eastern boundary of the West, America’s most Territory,” or Oklahoma. Pioneers flung themselves greedily on this enormous prize, as if to ravish it. Prob- ably never before in human experience had so huge an area been transformed so rapidly. arid region (see Map 26.4). A long fringe of settlement, bulging outward here and there, ran roughly north through central Texas and on to the Canadian border. Between this jagged line and the settled areas on the The Clash of Cultures on the Plains Pacific slope, there were virtually no white people. The Native Americans numbered about 360,000 in 1860, few exceptions were the islands of Mormons in Utah, many of them scattered about the vast grasslands of occasional trading posts and gold camps, and several the trans-Missouri West. But to their eternal misfor- scattered Spanish Mexican settlements throughout the tune, the Indians stood in the path of the advancing Southwest. white pioneers. An inevitable clash loomed between Sprawling in expanse, the Great West was a rough an acquisitive, industrializing nation and the Indians’ square that measured about a thousand miles on each lifeways, highly evolved over centuries to adapt to the side. Embracing mountains, plateaus, deserts, and demanding environment of the sparsely watered west- plains, it was the largely parched habitat of the Indian, ern plains. the buffalo, the wild horse, the prairie dog, and the Migration and conflict—and sometimes dramatic coyote. Twenty-five years later—that is, by 1890—the cultural change—were no strangers in the arid West, entire domain had been carved into states and the four even before the whites began to arrive. The Coman- territories of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and “Indian ches had driven the Apaches off the central plains into 575 Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 576 Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896 The Buffalo Hunt, by Frederic Remington, 1890 A New Yorker who first went west at Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; Gift of William E. Weiss; 23.62 the age of nineteen as a cowboy and ranch cook, Remington (1861–1909) became the foremost artist of the vanishing way of life of the old Far West. Once a common sight on the high plains, the kind of buffalo kill that Remington records here was a great rarity by the time he painted this scene in 1890. The once-vast herds of bison had long since been reduced to a pitiful few by the white man’s rifles and the increasingly concentrated use of the land by ever more constricted Indians. the upper Rio Grande valley in the eighteenth century. falo before my friends arrive so that when they come Harried by the Mandans and Chippewas, the Chey- up, they can find no buffalo.” enne had abandoned their villages along the upper The federal government tried to pacify the Plains reaches of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the Indians by signing treaties with the “chiefs” of various century before the Civil War. The Sioux, displaced from “tribes” at Fort Laramie in 1851 and at Fort Atkinson the Great Lakes woodlands in the late eighteenth cen- in 1853. The treaties marked the beginnings of the tury, emerged onto the plains to prey upon the Crows, reservation system in the West. They established Kiowas, and Pawnees. Mounted on Spanish-introduced horses, peoples like the Cheyenne and the Sioux trans- formed themselves within just a few generations from As early as the Coronado expedition in 1541, Spanish foot-traveling, crop-growing villagers to wide-ranging explorers marveled at the Plains Indians’ reliance on nomadic traders and deadly efficient buffalo hunters— the buffalo: so deadly that they threatened to extinguish the vast bison herds that had lured them onto the plains in the first place. When white soldiers and settlers edged onto the “ With the skins [the Indians] build their houses; with the skins they clothe and shoe themselves; from the skins they make ropes plains in the decades just before the Civil War, they and also obtain wool. From the sinews they accelerated a fateful cycle that exacerbated already fierce make thread, with which they sew their cloth- enmities among the Indians and ultimately under- ing and likewise their tents. From the bones mined the foundations of Native American culture. White intruders unwittingly spread cholera, typhoid, they shape awls, and the dung they use for and smallpox among the native peoples of the plains, firewood, since there is no fuel in all that land. with devastating results. Equally harmful, whites put The bladders serve as jugs and drinking ves- further pressure on the steadily shrinking bison popu- sels. They sustain themselves on the flesh of lation by hunting and by grazing their own livestock the animals, eating it slightly roasted and on the prairie grasses. As the once-mammoth buffalo sometimes uncooked. Taking it in their teeth, herds dwindled, warfare intensified among the Plains they pull with one hand; with the other they tribes for ever-scarcer hunting grounds. “I am traveling hold a large flint knife and cut off mouthfuls, all over this country, and am cutting the trees of my swallowing it half chewed, like birds. They eat brothers,” an Arikara Indian told a U.S. Army officer along the Platte River in 1835. “I am killing their buf- raw fat, without warming it. ” Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Indians in the West 577 Washington that they would be left alone and pro- One disheartened Indian complained to the white vided with food, clothing, and other supplies. Regret- Sioux Commission created by Congress, tably, the federal Indian agents were often corrupt. “ Tell your people that since the Great Father promised that we should never be removed we They palmed off moth-eaten blankets, spoiled beef, and other defective provisions on the friendless Indi- ans. One of these cheating officials, on an annual sal- have been moved five times.... I think you ary of $1,500, returned home after four years with an had better put the Indians on wheels and you ” estimated “savings” of $50,000. can run them about wherever you wish. For more than a decade after the Civil War, fierce warfare between Indians and the U.S. Army raged in various parts of the West (see Map 26.1). Army troops, boundaries for the territory of each tribe and attempted many of them recent immigrants who had, ironically, to separate the Indians into two great “colonies” to fled Europe to avoid military service, met formidable the north and south of a corridor of intended white adversaries in the Plains Indians, whose superb horse- settlement. manship gave them baffling mobility. Fully one-fifth But the white treaty makers misunderstood both of all U.S. Army personnel on the frontier were African Indian government and Indian society. “Tribes” and American—dubbed “Buffalo Soldiers” by the Indians, “chiefs” were often fictions of the white imagination, supposedly because of the resemblance of their hair to which could not grasp the fact that many Native Amer- the bison’s furry coat. icans, living in scattered bands, recognized only the authority of their immediate families or perhaps a band elder. And the nomadic culture of the Plains Indians was utterly alien to the concept of living out one’s life Receding Native Population in the confinement of a defined territory. The Indian wars in the West were often savage clashes. In the 1860s the federal government intensified Aggressive whites sometimes shot peaceful Indians on this policy and herded the Indians into still-smaller sight, just to make sure they would give no trouble. At confines, principally the “Great Sioux reservation” in Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, Colonel J. M. Chiving- Dakota Territory and Indian Territory in present-day ton’s militia massacred in cold blood some four hun- Oklahoma, into which dozens of southern Plains tribes dred Indians who apparently thought they had been were forced. promised immunity. Women were shot praying for The Indians surrendered their ancestral lands mercy, children had their brains dashed out, and braves only when they had received solemn promises from were tortured, scalped, and unspeakably mutilated. Courtesy Palace of the Governors (MNM/DCA) Neg.#58632 Pawnee Indians in Front of Their Lodge, ca. 1868 The Pawnees of central Nebraska never made war on the United States, which they regarded as an ally in their own struggles against the marauding Sioux. Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 578 Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896 Cruelty begot cruelty. In 1866 a Sioux war party attempting to block construction of the Bozeman Trail A young lieutenant told Colonel Chivington that to to the Montana goldfields ambushed Captain Wil- attack the Indians would be a violation of pledges: liam J. Fetterman’s command of eighty-one soldiers and civilians in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. The Indians left not a single survivor and grotesquely muti- “ His reply was, bringing his fist down close to my face, ‘Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians.’ I told him what pledges were lated the corpses. One trooper’s face was spitted with given the Indians. He replied that he ‘had 105 arrows. George Armstrong Custer, the buckskin- clad “boy general” of Civil War fame, now demoted to come to kill Indians, and believed it to be hon- colonel and turned Indian fighter, wrote that Fetter- orable to kill Indians under any and all man’s annihilation “awakened a bitter feeling toward the savage perpetrators.” The cycle of ferocious warfare circumstances.’ ” intensified. The Fetterman massacre led to one of the few— reservation” was guaranteed to the Sioux tribes. But in though short-lived—Indian triumphs in the plains wars, 1874 a new round of warfare with the Plains Indians the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In another Treaty began when Custer led a “scientific” expedition into of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, the government aban- the Black Hills of South Dakota (part of the Sioux res- doned the Bozeman Trail. The sprawling “Great Sioux ervation) and announced that he had discovered gold. Map 26.1 Indian Wars, 1860–1890 Surrendering in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce declared, “Our chiefs are killed.... The old men are all dead.... The little children are freezing to death.... I want to have time to look for my children.... Hear me, my chiefs. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” © Cengage Learning Ft. Townsend Ft. Colville CANADA Battle of Bear Paw Seattle Mountain 1877 WASHINGTON Ft. Ft. Berthold Columbia R. Lapwaj N. DAK. MONTANA Bismarck GES RO Portland SIOUX Ft. Abercrombie Ft. Yates CK RAN NEZ PERCE Little Bighorn Y OREGON 1876 S. DAK. MINN. Ft. IDAHO Ft. Meade WISCONSIN Ft. Sully Ft. Ridgely MICH. Klamath Ft. ak Sn eR Ft. Reno 1862 Harney. B LAC K H I LLS MODOC Ft. Hall WYOMING BANNOCK Ft. Randall COAST CHEYENNE MO Ft. Ft. SHOSHONE Wounded Ft. Niobrara Ft. Laramie IOWA Mis Bidwell McDermit Ft. Knee UN ARAPAHO 1890 NEBRASKA s ou Bridger Cheyenne r i R. TA Ft. Halleck. 40°N Carson Salt Lake Platte R Lincoln IND. IN Ft. Churchill City City Ft. Kearney M ILL. S Sonoma Austin is Sacramento PAIUTE UTAH TERR. COLORADO Denver Sand Creek Ft. Riley sis Massacre KANSAS sip San Francisco Esmeralda Ft. Cameron Colorado 1864 Topeka pi City Ft. Larned MISSOURI NEVADA R. San Jose Dodge R. Ft. Crawford City KY. Cedar City o Ft. Lyon Wichita d Las SOUTHERN CHEYENNE ra CALIFORNIA NAVAJO Co lo Ft. Garland ARAPAHO Vegas TENN. Canyon de Chelly KIOWA INDIAN TERR. 1864 Santa Fe Ft. Reno Arkansas R. Los Angeles ARIZONA TERR. NEW MEXICO TERR. Amarillo Red River War ARKANSAS Salt River 1874–1875 Canyon 1872 Ft. Sumner Red R. Phoenix Ft. Craig ALA. San Diego Gila COMANCHE MISS. PACIFIC Camp Grant R. Jacksboro Massacre 1871 Skeleton Canyon 1886 OCEAN Geronimo surrenders. Fort Worth Ft. Crittenden LA. 120ºW TEXAS Waco Bisbee N Ri Ft. Quitman o 30°N Chief Joseph’s route Austin Gr Canyon de los an Embudos 1886 de Fort 90ºW Geronimo escapes. San Antonio 0 150 300 Km. Major Indian battle Gulf of 110ºW M EXICO 100ºW Mexico 0 150 300 Mi. Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  The Indian Wars 579 © Stapleton Collection/Corbis Battle of the Little Big Horn, by Amos Bad Heart Bull This depiction of the battle by an Oglala Sioux tribal historian and artist shows Crazy Horse (in spotted war paint, center) firing on a trooper of Custer’s 7th Cavalry. The ground is littered with the bodies of dead soldiers. Hordes of greedy gold-seekers swarmed into the Sioux sent to a dusty reservation in Kansas, where 40 percent lands. The aggrieved Sioux, aided by the Cheyenne and of them perished from disease. The survivors were even- Arapaho Indians, took to the warpath, inspired by the tually allowed to return to Idaho. influential and wily Sitting Bull. Fierce Apache tribes of Arizona and New Mexico Colonel Custer’s 7th Cavalry, nearly half of them were the most difficult to subdue. Led by Geronimo, immigrants, set out to suppress the Indians and to whose eyes blazed hatred of the whites, they were return them to the reservation. Attacking what turned pursued into Mexico by federal troops using the sun- out to be a superior force of some 2,500 well-armed flashing heliograph, a communication device that warriors camped along the Little Bighorn River in impressed the Indians as “big medicine.” Scattered rem- present-day Montana, the “White Chief with Yellow nants of the warriors were finally persuaded to surren- Hair” and about 250 officers and men were completely der after the Apache women had been exiled to Florida. wiped out in 1876 when two supporting columns failed The Apaches ultimately became successful farmers in to come to their rescue. The Indians’ victory was short- Oklahoma. lived. In a series of battles across the northern plains in This relentless fire-and-sword policy of the whites the ensuing months, the U.S. Army relentlessly hunted at last shattered the spirit of the Indians. The van- down the Indians who had humiliated Custer. quished Native Americans were finally ghettoized on One band of Nez Perce Indians in northeastern Ore- reservations, where they could theoretically preserve gon were goaded into daring flight in 1877 when U.S. their cultural autonomy but were in fact compelled to authorities tried to herd them onto a reservation. Chief eke out a sullen existence as wards of the government. Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some Their white masters had at last discovered that the Indi- seven hundred Indians after a tortuous, seventeen- ans were much cheaper to feed than to fight. Even so, hundred-mile, three-month trek across the Continental for many decades they were almost ignored to death. Divide toward Canada. There Joseph hoped to rendez- The “taming” of the Indians was engineered by a vous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refuge north number of factors. Of cardinal importance was the fed- of the border after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. eral government’s willingness to back its land claims Betrayed into believing they would be returned to their with military force. Almost as critical was the railroad, ancestral lands in Idaho, the Nez Perces instead were which shot an iron arrow through the heart of the Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 580 Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896 Bellowing Herds of Bison Tens of millions of buffalo—described by early Span- iards as “hunchback cows”—blackened the western prairies when white Americans first arrived. These shaggy, lumbering animals were the staff of life for Native Americans (see “Makers of America: The Plains Indians,” pp. 582–583). Their flesh provided food; their dried dung provided fuel (“buffalo chips”); their hides provided clothing, lariats, and harnesses. When the Civil War closed, some 15 million of these meaty beasts were still grazing on the western plains. 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. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—sinewy, telescope-eyed, and a crack shot— killed over 4,000 animals in eighteen months while employed by the Kansas Pacific. 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. The whole story is a shocking example of the greed and waste that accompanied the conquest of the continent. © Bettmann/Corbis The End of the Trail Geronimo (ca. 1823–1909), Also Known by His Apache By the 1880s the national conscience began to stir Name, Goyahkla (One Who Yawns) In 1851 Mexican uneasily over the plight of the Indians. Helen Hunt troops killed Geronimo’s mother and wife and three of his Jackson, a Massachusetts writer of children’s litera- children, initiating his lifelong hatred of Mexicans. ture, pricked the moral sense of Americans in 1881 Ironically, in later life, when he repeatedly fled the when she published A Century of Dishonor. The book intolerable confinement of reservations in the United chronicled the sorry record of government ruthlessness States, he sought refuge—and freedom—in Mexico. and chicanery in dealing with the Indians. Her later Persuaded at last to surrender to American authorities in novel Ramona (1884), a love story about discrimination 1886, he spent the remainder of his life on reservations in against California Indians, sold some 600,000 copies Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. and further inspired sympathy for the Indians. Debate seesawed. Humanitarians wanted to treat the Indians kindly and persuade them thereby to “walk the white man’s road.” Yet hard-liners insisted on the West. Locomotives could bring out unlimited numbers current policy of forced containment and brutal pun- of troops, farmers, cattlemen, sheepherders, and set- ishment. Neither side showed much respect for Native tlers. The Indians were also ravaged by the white peo- American culture. Christian reformers, who often ple’s diseases, to which they showed little resistance, administered educational facilities on the reservations, and by their firewater, which they could resist even sometimes withheld food to force the Indians to give less. Above all, the virtual extermination of the buffalo up their tribal religions and assimilate to white society. doomed the Plains Indians’ nomadic way of life. In 1884 these zealous white souls joined with military Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Federal Indian Policy 581 Former reservation land not allotted to the Indians Civil War veteran and long-time Indian fighter under the Dawes Act was to be sold to railroads and General Philip Sheridan (1831–1888) reflected on the white settlers, with the proceeds used by the federal wars against the Indians: government to educate and “civilize” the native peo- “ We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their ples. In 1879 the government had already funded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where Native American children, separated from their tribes, were habits of life, introduced disease and decay taught English and inculcated with white values and among them, and it was for this and against customs. “Kill the Indian and save the man” was the this they made war. Could anyone expect ” school founder’s motto. In the 1890s the government less? 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. The Dawes Act struck directly at tribal organiza- men in successfully persuading the federal government tion and tried to make rugged individualists out of the to outlaw the sacred Sun Dance. When the “Ghost Indians. This legislation ignored the inherent reliance Dance” cult later spread to the Dakota Sioux, the army of traditional Indian culture on tribally held land, lit- bloodily stamped it out in 1890 at the so-called Battle erally pulling the land out from under them. By 1900 of Wounded Knee. In the fighting thus provoked, Indians had lost 50 percent of the 156 million acres an estimated two hundred Indian men, women, and children were killed, as well as twenty-nine invading soldiers. The misbegotten offspring of the movement to The Indian spokesman Plenty Coups (1848–1932) said reform Indian policy was the Dawes Severalty Act in 1909, of 1887. Reflecting the forced-civilization views of the reformers, the act dissolved many tribes as legal enti- ties, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up “ I see no longer the curling smoke rising from our lodge poles. I hear no longer the songs of the individual Indian family heads with 160 free acres. If women as they prepare the meal. The antelope the Indians behaved themselves like “good white set- have gone; the buffalo wallows are empty. Only tlers,” they would get full title to their holdings, as well the wail of the coyote is heard. The white man’s as citizenship, in twenty-five years. The probationary medicine is stronger than ours.... We are like period was later extended, but full citizenship was granted to all Indians in 1924. birds with a broken wing. ” National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Lakotas Receiving Rations at Standing Rock Reservation, ca. 1881 Once the scourge of the plains, the Lakota (part of the Sioux tribes) were reduced by the 1890s to the humiliation of living on government handouts. Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Makers of America The Plains Indians T he last of the native peoples of North America to bow before the military might of the whites, the Indians of the northern Great Plains long defended buffalo—all important sources of protein. But these early peoples of the plains were not exclusively hunt- ers: the women were expert farmers, coaxing lush gar- their lands and their ways of life against the American dens of pumpkins, squash, corn, and beans from the cavalry. After the end of the Indian wars, toward the dry but fertile soil. Still, the shaggy pelt and heavy close of the nineteenth century, the Plains tribes strug- flesh of the buffalo constituted the staff of life on the gled on, jealously guarding their communities against plains. Hunted by men, the great bison were butch- white encroachment. Crowded onto reservations, sub- ered by women, who used every part of the beast. They ject to ever-changing federal Indian policies, assailed fashioned horns and hooves into spoons, and intes- by corrupt settlers and Indian agents, the Plains Indi- tines into containers. They stretched sinews into strong ans have nonetheless preserved much of their ancestral bowstrings and wove buffalo hair into ropes. Meat not culture to this day. immediately eaten was pounded into pemmican—thin Before Europeans first appeared in North America strips of smoked or sun-dried buffalo flesh mixed with in the sixteenth century, the vast plains from northern berries and stuffed into rawhide bags. Texas to Saskatchewan were home to some thirty dif- The nomadic Plains Indians sought what shel- ferent tribes. There was no typical Plains Indian; each ter they could in small bands throughout the winter, tribe spoke a distinct language, practiced its own reli- gathering together in summer for religious ceremonies, gion, and formed its own government. When members socializing, and communal buffalo hunts. At first these of different bands met on the prairies, communication seasonal migrations required arduous loading and cart- depended on a special sign language. ing. The Indians carried all their possessions or heaped Indians had first trod the arid plains to pur- them on wheelless carts called travois, which were sue sprawling herds of antelope, elk, and especially dragged by dogs—their only beasts of burden. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY A Comanche Village, by George Catlin, 1834 582 Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre SD (above) A Sioux Carving Horses were essential to the culture of the Plains Indians, and they often carved likenesses of horses killed in battle. Note the red-stained holes depicting this horse’s wounds. (right) A Cheyenne Cradleboard for Carrying a Baby © Smithsonian Institution/Corbis Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska Chan-Chä-Uiá-Teüin, Teton Sioux Woman, by Karl Bodmer, ca. 1830s Bodmer, a German artist, painted this woman’s portrait during an expedition to the Great Plains. Her name means “Woman of the Crow Nation,” which seems to suggest that she was taken captive from the Sioux’s mortal enemies, the Crows. Then in the sixteenth century, the mounted Span- The European invasion soon eclipsed the short-lived ish conquistadores ventured into the New World. Their era of the horse. After many battles the Plains Indians steeds—some of them escaping to become mustangs, found themselves crammed together on tiny reserva- the wild horses of the American West, and others tions, clinging with tired but determined fingers to acquired by the Indians in trade—quickly spread over their traditions. Although much of Plains Indian culture the plains. The horse revolutionized Indian societies, persists to this day, the Indians’ free-ranging way of life for a time turning the Plains tribes into efficient hunt- has passed into memory. As Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux, ing machines that promised to banish hunger from the put it, “Once we were happy in our own country and prairies. But horse-mounted hunters turned out to be we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and too efficient: overhunting made buffalo ever harder the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there to find. The plains pony also ignited a furious compe- was plenty for them and for us. But then the Wasichus tition for grazing lands, for trade goods, and for ever [white people] came, and they made little islands for more horses, so that wars of aggression and of revenge us... and always these islands are becoming smaller, became increasingly bitter and frequent. for around them surges the gnawing flood of Wasichus.” 583 Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 584 Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896 1790 1860 1880 The Indian Removal Act of 1830 eliminated all Indian land rights east of the Mississippi River. 1890 2000 The Dawes Act in 1887 changed common tribal lands into individual allotments. Nearly 90 million acres of tribal land were lost before the act was repealed in 1932. Since then, through court battles and federal recognition of old claims, some Indian lands have been restored to the tribes. Indian lands Present-day boundaries White settlement Map 26.2 Vanishing Lands Once masters of the continent, Native Americans have been squeezed into just 2 percent of U.S. territory. (From The New York Times, June 25, 2000 © 2000 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copy- ing, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.) they had held just twoMap HMCo decades earlier (see Map 26.2). the silver deposits, others to extract nonmetallic wealth No bleeds The forced-assimilation Kennedy, Thedoctrine Americanof the Dawes Pageant Act 14/e, ©2010 from the earth in the form of golden grain. Vanishing Lands remained the cornerstone of the government’s official “Fifty-niners” also poured feverishly into Nevada Indian policy forKennedy_26_02 nearly half a century, until the Indian in 1859, after the fabulous Comstock Lode had been PD - 42p6 x 18p6 Reorganization Act (the “Indian New Deal”) of 1934 Final proof 9/11/08 uncovered. A fantastic amount of gold and silver, worth partially reversed the individualistic approach and more than $340 million, was mined by the “Kings of belatedly tried to restore the tribal basis of Indian life the Comstock” from 1860 to 1890. The scantily pop- (see p. 765). ulated state of Nevada, “child of the Comstock Lode,” Under these new federal policies, defective though was prematurely railroaded into the Union in 1864, they were, the Indian population started to mount partly to provide three electoral votes for President slowly. The total number had been reduced by 1887 to Lincoln. about 243,000—the result of bullets, bottles, and bac- Smaller “lucky strikes” drew frantic gold- and silver- teria—but the census of 2000 counted more than 1.5 seekers into Montana, Idaho, and other western states. million Native Americans, urban and rural. Boomtowns, known as “Helldorados,” sprouted from the desert sands like magic. Every third cabin was a saloon, where sweat-stained miners drank adulterated Mtoining: From Dishpan Ore Breaker liquor (“rotgut”) in the company of accommodating women. Lynch law and hempen vigilante justice, as in early California, preserved a crude semblance of order The conquest of the Indians and the coming of the in the towns. And when the “diggings” petered out, railroad were life-giving boons to the mining frontier. the gold-seekers decamped, leaving eerily picturesque The golden gravel of California continued to yield “pay “ghost towns,” such as Virginia City, Nevada, silhou- dirt,” and in 1858 an electrifying discovery convulsed etted in the desert. Begun with a boom, these towns Colorado. Avid “fifty-niners” or “Pikes Peakers” rushed ended with a whimper. west to rip at the ramparts of the Rockies. But there were Once the loose surface gold was gobbled up, ore- more miners than minerals, and many gold-grubbers, breaking machinery was imported to smash the gold- with “Pikes Peak or Bust” inscribed on the canvas of bearing quartz. This operation was so expensive that their covered wagons, creaked wearily back with the it could ordinarily be undertaken only by corporations added inscription, “Busted, by Gosh.” Yet countless pooling the wealth of stockholders. Gradually the age bearded fortune-seekers stayed on, some to strip away of big business came to the mining industry. Dusty, Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  The Mining and Cattle Frontiers 585 Hydraulic Mining, Nevada, 1866 Once miners had panned and dredged the most accessible gold from streambeds, they ripped open the earth itself in search of other deposits. High- pressure streams of water, delivered through huge nozzles called “monitors,” washed away Library of Congress entire hillsides and created the nightmarish, debris-strewn landscapes that still scar western mountains and foothills. bewhiskered miners, dishpans in hand, were replaced These scrawny beasts, whose horn spreads sometimes by impersonal corporations, with their costly machin- reached eight feet, were killed primarily for their hides. ery and trained engineers. The once-independent gold- There was no way of getting their meat profitably to washer became just another day laborer. market. Yet the mining frontier had played a vital role in The problem of marketing was neatly solved when conquering the continent. Magnetlike, it attracted pop- the transcontinental railroads thrust their iron fingers ulation and wealth, while advertising the wonders of into the West. Cattle could now be shipped alive to the Wild West. Women as well as men found opportu- the stockyards, and under “beef barons” like the Swifts nity, running boardinghouses or working as prostitutes. and Armours, the highly industrialized meatpacking They won a kind of equality on the rough frontier that earned them the vote in Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893), and Idaho (1896) long before their sis- ters in the East could cast a ballot. The amassing of precious metals helped finance the Civil War, facilitated the building of railroads, and intensified the already bitter conflict between whites and Indians. The outpouring of silver and gold enabled the Treasury to resume specie payments in 1879 and injected the silver issue into American politics. “Silver Senators,” representing the thinly peopled “acreage states” of the West, used their disproportionate influ- ence to promote the interests of the silver miners. Finally, the mining frontier added to American folklore © Bettmann/Corbis and literature, as the writings of Bret Harte and Mark Twain so colorfully attest. Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive Dressed to Kill Cowboys came in all varieties and sizes in the wild and woolly frontier West—and in all kinds of When the Civil War ended, the grassy plains of Texas garb as well. supported several million tough, long-horned cattle. Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 586 Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896 The steer was king in a Cattle Kingdom richly car- Missou WYOMING N. Pla ri peted with grass. As long as lush grass was available, t te NEBRASKA IOWA th