Forging a Transcontinental Nation (1877-1900) PDF

## CHAPTER 16 ### Forging a Transcontinental Nation ### 1877-1900 #### STUDY PLAN ##### Meeting Ground of Many Peoples - What did the word "frontier" mean to Americans in the 1800s? - For what reasons did white westerners and white Americans exclude and discriminate against Chinese immigrants? #...

## CHAPTER 16 ### Forging a Transcontinental Nation ### 1877-1900 #### STUDY PLAN ##### Meeting Ground of Many Peoples - What did the word "frontier" mean to Americans in the 1800s? - For what reasons did white westerners and white Americans exclude and discriminate against Chinese immigrants? ##### Mapping the West - Why did government-sponsored surveys and land acts encourage migration to the West? - How does the history of collective western violence differ from the myth of the gunfight in the street? ##### Extractive Economies and Global Commodities - What global trends shaped the development of the extractive economy of the West? - How did the myth of the cowboy contrast with the life of cattle workers? ##### Clearing the Land and Cleansing the Wilderness - How did environmental factors contribute to U.S. Indian policy? - What did Indian policy reformers intend to accomplish through their policies? To what degree did they succeed? How did Native Americans respond? At 7:00 AM on April 28, 1869, a team of eight Irish and thousands of Chinese immigrant workers frantically unloaded tons of steel rails and wooden ties. Teams of laborers carried the raw materials by hand rushing toward the seemingly impossible goal of laying ten miles of railroad track in one 12-hour day. Central Pacific Railroad founder Charles Crocker organized the feat in response to a challenge issued by the Union Pacific's Thomas Durant in the waning days of the race to finish the Transcontinental Railroad, which was set to conclude 12 days later with the driving of a symbolic golden spike around Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. Over the course of the day, the mostly Chinese laborers laid track at a pace of almost a mile an hour. When they stopped at 7:00 PM, they stood at the end of 10 miles and 56 feet of new railroad, with the challenge of their bosses met. Most of the workers had covered at least that distance through the day, and some considerably more. Over 12 hours, the workers moved 25,800 timber ties, along with 3,520 steel rails weighing over 500 pounds each; drove 55,000 spikes; and hammered 14,000 bolts as they negotiated curves and steep grades. One hundred and fifty years later, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the completion of the railroad in 2019, modern hikers struggled to even walk the distance navigated by the heavily laden workers that day. All eight of the Irish immigrants who participated were recorded by name in the Central Pacific time books and hailed by the press then and later for their superhuman achievement. The legions of Chinese immigrants were recognized only as "John Chinaman," or "Crocker's Chinese pets," remaining individually nameless as they had throughout the history of the transcontinental enterprise-despite making up 90 percent of the workforce. Many of the Chinese "consignees" furiously laying down the 10 miles of track that day came to the United States from the Guangdong Province of China, a densely populated agricultural region that sent tens of thousands of young men across the globe to transform places, economies, and cultures. American businesses like the Central Pacific negotiated transnational exchanges of labor, goods, and services well ahead of official diplomacy and national policy and played an important role in documenting the histories of the people they helped move. By naming some immigrants while leaving others unidentified hashmarks in their ledger books, the railroad companies and later chroniclers erased the accomplishments of tens of thousands and obscured the richer story of the American West as an extraordinary meeting ground of global peoples. ### MEETING GROUND OF MANY PEOPLES Born on March 31, 1878, on the sandy barrier island town of Galveston, Texas, Jack Johnson, nicknamed the “Galveston Giant,” became the first Black heavyweight champion of the world and one of the most famous men of his time Galveston was one of the busiest U.S. ports of entry between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s. Raised in one of Galveston's toughest neighborhoods, Johnson was witness to, and a product of, the whirlwind of immigration, cultural change, and the racial and ethnic conflicts of his age. The story of Johnson and his hometown of Galveston, like that of the Chinese workers of the Transcontinental Railroad, captures many critical issues involved in forging a transcontinental nation between the end of Reconstruction and the turn of the 19th century. Powered by the globalization of markets, international political and ethnic tensions, emerging economic opportunities, and advertisement by government and industry, Galveston was another gateway for the world's people, goods, and ideas streaming in and out of the American West. Those who landed in Galveston and entered the American West from the South encountered similar racial and ethnic challenges to those traveling east to the U.S. West from Asia. But regardless of direction of travel or point of entry, the "West" was a contested region of the nation in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Racial prejudice governed the social structure of Johnson's birthplace, but Galveston's vibrant African American community wielded influence through the Negro Longshoremen's Association. Its members interacted with Polish Jews, German Lutherans, Catholic Italians, and the thousands of other immigrants from around the world who flowed through the island. Accustomed to multicultural life, Johnson flouted racial conventions by having open relationships with white women, and he triggered national race riots when he won the "fight of the century" in 1908 against the white heavyweight champion of the world, Tommy Burns. Johnson's tumultuous career mirrored the contest of old racial ideals, new multicultural opportunities, and lingering prejudice that characterized the American West between 1877 and 1900. Prewar racial hierarchies of Black and white grew complicated during the settling of the West. Foreshadowing America's multicultural future, Indigenous peoples, Europeans, Hispanics, Asians, Mormons, and African Americans in the West competed and cooperated with one another. ### Changing Patterns of Migration According to historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the 1890 census indicated the western frontier had "closed.” Census data analyzed by Turner showed that all the land west of the Mississippi was "settled” by virtue of having people listed as residents in most counties. For Turner, this census demonstrated the end period of centuries of conquest, and he used this information as the basis for his influential thesis that described the settlement of the West as a "frontier process” in which immigrants became Americans by confronting and conquering a “virgin land.” For those like future president Theodore Roosevelt, who viewed the process of western settlement as the experience that made America exceptional and superior to other nations, the notion of a closed frontier caused great anxiety. Where next, Roosevelt and others wondered, would Americans recreate themselves through the conquest of new lands if there was no frontier? Despite the census evidence, people could still find plenty of open western spaces in the post-Civil War decades. Significant sections of the West remained virtually empty well into the 20th century. Others were clearly occupied by or promised to Indigenous people but assumed or presented as open for other claims. Between 1877 and 1900, millions of people from all points of the globe and every region of the United States moved into the West. And within the West, internal migrations reshaped the region's character, depopulating some areas and resettling others. But many of those who sought frontier opportunity in the West ended up in cities regardless. By 1890, the vast majority of western migrants had settled in cities such as Galveston (30,000), Denver (133,000), San Francisco (380,000), Los Angeles (124,000), Salt Lake City (53,000), and hundreds of towns scattered like islands in an ocean of sparsely inhabited land. Contrary to popular perception, the West was the most urban region in America, and it remains so today. The lure of open land, farming, and remote mines scattered people throughout the West, but environmental and economic forces drew them together again in cities. Denver and San Francisco were instant cities that grew from tiny outposts to booming metropolitan areas in less than a decade and boasted all the luxuries of eastern society. These cities grew so quickly because of changing post-Civil War migration patterns. After the Civil War , migration patterns changed for several reasons. Railroads made foreign and internal immigration to the West far easier. Likewise, internal migration within the West increased with rapidly expanding regional railway networks. Economic downturns, environmental disasters, and an influx of new immigrants, who lowered wages pushed hopeful internal and foreign migrants to seek new areas of the West. In 1877, tens of thousands of African American "Exodusters" fleeing rising racial violence at the end of military Reconstruction migrated from the South to the West, founding new towns and joining other workers and entrepreneurs hoping for a new start. All were pulled by the lure of new opportunities and moved frequently to take advantage of emerging markets and employment. Women moved with their families and on their own and contributed a disproportionate amount of the daily labor required to establish businesses, homes, towns, and communities across the West. Women's diaries of migrations reveal much of what historians know about daily life and the history of settlement. European and Euro-American women responsible for inhabiting a little-understood region faced environmental challenges that Indian women had known for thousands of years. Stories of generations of intermarriage revealed by women's diaries and family histories show the deep intertwining of culture, race, and ethnicity characteristic of the region and going all the way back to the earliest interactions between Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonizers. European racial and ethnic identities were privileged in the West, so it was not uncommon for people of mixed heritage to choose to emphasize one aspect of their genetics while hiding another. The more intimate historical sources left by western women and the oral traditions of Indigenous women often reveal the deep entanglements of race, class, ethnicity, and culture hidden by official documents. Women of all backgrounds moved extensively throughout the West. Their mobility was often constrained more than men's, however, because they needed to maintain homes, businesses, ranches, and farms, while men moved in search of gold and jobs. Immigrant women suffered the hardscrabble realities of making a home in the West but also gained greater autonomy and power than their counterparts in more settled regions of the United States. This access and independence were reflected in western states' early voting rights acts for women and the prominence of women in western businesses and industries. The concept of the "frontier" was different for immigrant women just as it was different for men depending on their race and ethnic background. ### THE IDEALIZED WEST "The Heart of the Continent," 1882, booster brochure of the idealized West captures the utopian vision that drew millions to the region. Look closely and you will notice all the icons of settlement. The book told potential settlers they would find "an empire grander in its resources than any emperor or czar... ever swayed over." Mobility was a key characteristic of the global economy in the 19th century. The American frontier experience was not unique. So-called settler societies in South America, Australia, and Canada also depended on significant internal and external migrations to solidify control of vast territories and negotiate with or displace Indigenous peoples ahead of state-sponsored efforts. No destination, however, could compare with the United States in the astounding diversity of immigrants pouring into a region already remarkably multicultural. There were many melting pots around the globe, but they melted two or three predominant immigrant groups. In the United States, and in the West in particular, immigrants from virtually everywhere lived together with thousands of Native Americans, freed slaves, Hispanics of many origins, Asians, and Euro-Americans of all types. ### Mexican Borders Much of what Americans think of as the "West" was long the Spanish and then the Mexican north. This "Far North" was a vast region only loosely controlled by distant Mexico City. Violent wars with powerful Indian tribes strained Spain's and then Mexico's control of northern provinces and paved the way for U.S. seizure of vast Mexican territories after the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848). Politics, economics, and an unstoppable tide of migrants conspired against Hispanic control in much of what became the American West. The U.S. Southwest and the Mexican north were seamlessly linked by nature and divided only by politics. These regions shared a contiguous desert ecosystem that stretched through what are now Arizona and California and north into Utah and Nevada. Spaniards, Native Americans and Anglos in search of mineral wealth and rangelands moved throughout the region and fought over control of its resources for centuries. U.S. and Mexican entrepreneurs shared a desire to capitalize on the movement of labor, capital, and commodities across political borders. On the fuzzy U.S.-Mexican borderlands of the late 19th century, Mexicans moved back and forth across La Linea with relative freedom. Migrant laborers moved north to the "West” along centuries-old migration corridors. The El Camino Real corridor running south to north linked Mexico City to Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. The web of trails that comprised the Sonoran corridor funneled workers throughout the copper and cotton corridors and linked copper labor routes to the seasonal cotton fields stretching from Yuma, Arizona, to California's San Joaquin valley near Los Angeles. By 1900, Mexicans made up 60 percent of all copper and seasonal farmworkers. But Mexicans who worked in the United States received less pay than Anglo workers, were barred from union participation, faced prejudice and segregation, and were “sent packing"-sometimes at the point of a gun-during economic downturns. Despite these hardships, Mexican laborers in the late 19th century fared better than Chinese. ### Chinese Exclusion Although the Chinese are remembered in American history primarily for their role in building the Transcontinental Railroad, their importance in the West extended far beyond that single event. Chinese immigrants who came to work on the railroads, mines, and fields were part of a global Chinese diaspora and the "coolie trade," which sold contract Chinese laborers and Chinese women as indentured laborers and sex workers who lived little better than slaves. From the 1840s to the 1870s, Chinese immigrants, free and contracted, moved to Australia, Southeast Asia, Peru, Cuba, and California. Those who migrated left sparse opportunities, a rigid class system, and grinding poverty in 19th-century southern China. No immigrant group faced more persistent racism and violence than the Chinese. Businesses sought out Chinese workers for their cheap and exploitable labor with the assumption that they would eventually return to China. The Chinese usually migrated as individuals and were overwhelmingly male in the first waves but were later joined by women and entire families, and during all phases of immigration, they quickly developed community-building strategies to fight against racism and segregation. The Chinese managed to build successful enclaves wherever they went. Anchored by temples such as the Bok Kai Temple of Marysville, California, or woven into instant cities such as Denver and San Francisco, "China towns" became a lasting characteristic of the western urban landscape. Legendary hard workers, the Chinese laborers were also "stickers": "If you can get them this year you can get them next year," wrote one observer. "They become attached to your place and they stay with you." The Chinese proved indispensable to western development. In California, they comprised half of all agricultural workers. In urban areas and on ranches, Chinese men occupied up to 90 percent of service industry jobs such as laundry and food preparation positions During the heyday of western expansion, the Chinese were tolerated and sometimes even given grudging respect. Starting in 1870, however, anti-Chinese sentiments increased as the western economy gained importance. In a pattern that repeated throughout the 20th century, communities and industries built by the cheapest foreign labor turned against those workers as soon as labor needs diminished. The Australians blazed the racist path that Americans followed by enacting Chinese exclusion acts as early as the 1850s. Urged by white labor organizers , anti-Chinese leagues, and community leaders, western states passed laws limiting Chinese opportunities and rights through the 1870s. State laws and political enthusiasm prompted the U.S. Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This act, which nominally suspended immigration, was renewed and tightened over the years until harsh immigration restrictions enacted in the early 1920s ended virtually all Asian immigration to the United States. In addition, several western states passed laws restricting Chinese,and later Japanese, landownership and barred them from several professions. As a consequence of these restrictions, immigration from Mexico rose to meet the need for cheap labor in the California fields. And Greeks, Poles, Russians, Japanese, and representatives of virtually every nation diversified the region during the critical period of western settlement. #### STUDY QUESTIONS FOR MEETING GROUND OF MANY PEOPLES 1. What did the word "frontier" mean to Americans in the 1800s? 2. For what reasons did white westerners and white Americans exclude and discriminate against Chinese immigrants? ### MAPPING THE WEST The vast arid region between the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and the Sierra Nevada in California was the last portion of the contiguous United States to be explored and resettled. This immense landscape became the focus of federal attention in 1853 and 1854 when teams of surveyors were dispatched throughout the region in search of routes for the Transcontinental Railroad. Prior to 1865, the U.S. Army conducted most expeditions, and private investors funded geologic investigations in hopes of discovering mineral wealth. Other explorers, such as John C. Fremont, guided pioneers along the Oregon Trail and crossed the Rockies and the expanse of the Great Basin to the Sierra Nevada several times; however, like the army before them, they gave little attention to formal surveying or mapping. Starting in 1869, one-armed Civil War veteran and geology professor John Wesley Powell led a team to explore the Grand Canyon and then to carefully chart a vast, arid region that would become known as Powell's “Arid Lands.” Teams of surveyors, armed with rudimentary theodolites, sextants, and barometers, covered thousands of miles of the Western United States during the 1870s and 1880s, providing a wealth of new information about arid landscapes. They also helped define the boundaries of the West, and their efforts laid groundwork for the creation of the world's first national park. During the "Indian Wars," the military was tasked with the mission of expelling Native Americans from the West, taking their land while simultaneously attempting to establish a new kind of empire. The U.S. Army fought numerous battles in the West, but their campaigns were less about the conquest of enemies and more about the eradication of a culture. They were less about winning battles and more about changing a way of life. #### STUDY QUESTIONS FOR MAPPING THE WEST 1. Why did government-sponsored surveys and land acts encourage migration to the West? 2. How does the history of collective western violence differ from the myth of the gunfight in the street? ### THE CULTURE OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE Dime novels, Wild West shows, and the 20th-century movies yet to come told stories of righteous individual violence. The “western” genre in all its forms had two basic narratives: the gunfight in the street between a good man and an outlaw, and brave pioneers versus murderous Indians. Foreign authors such as the German Karl May, who never traveled to the West, sold millions of copies of such stories around the globe. Buffalo Bill raised the appetite for them by re-enacting an idealized version of regional violence. Figures like the violent young criminal Billy the Kid gained international fame for exploits that bore little resemblance to their decidedly unromantic lives. Thousands died bloody deaths in the violent West, but rarely were they lone figures dueling heroically in the streets. Individual violence was most often criminal or reckless, with cheap alcohol as the fuel. The myth of individual violence conceals a more disturbing reality of group violence involving regular citizens and whole communities. Collective violence was disturbingly premeditated and often carried out by otherwise upstanding community members or soldiers. Groups such as the Texas Rangers systematically terrorized Mexicans after the Mexican War. Horrific organized violence against Native Americans, such as the profoundly disturbing Sand Creek and Wounded Knee massacres, was much more brutal and common than were gunfights. The idea that military action or group vigilantism provided a necessary corrective to the disorder of the frontier justified much of the violence in the West well into the 20th century. Prominent community and religious leaders joined "vigilance leagues" in San Francisco and Denver, and Western papers wrote favorably about vigilante lynching mobs that "saved county money" and time by executing criminals without delay or due process. Western corporations hired thugs to break strikes, remove unwanted workers, or impose order by threatening violence in company camps and towns. But whether corporate, state, or community driven, the culture of violence in the West established during the 19th century enabled force and extralegal coercion to become normal practices in the next century. ### WOUNDED KNEE AFTERMATH This disturbing image by G. Trager of a mass grave filled with 146 frozen bodies at Wounded Knee captures the shocking banality of violence in 19th-century America. The men in the grave and lining the pit don't appear celebratory or remorseful as they look at the Indians they killed. Photographs of the aftermath of battle challenged popular perceptions of the romantic character of violence in the contested West. Racial and ethnic violence were common in the 19th-century United States. Few non-Indian groups, however, suffered like the Chinese in the West. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Chinese immigrants were beaten and murdered with shocking regularity and with little consequence for the perpetrators. Like Black people in the South, individuals and small groups of Chinese workers faced violence and lynching from rival white workers and ethnic groups. In 1880, violence reached a new level when an enraged mob of 3,000, yelling, "Stamp out the yellow plague,” stormed into Denver's "Hop Alley," a Chinese enclave. The mob lynched one man in the street, injured hundreds, and burned or dismantled Chinese businesses and homes. Five years later, race riots left 51 Chinese miners dead in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Viewing the survivors of the riots, Chinese consul Huang Sih Chuen lamented, "Words fail to give an idea of their sufferings,and their appearance is a sad one to human eyes to witness." #### STUDY QUESTIONS FOR MAPPING THE WEST 1. Why did government-sponsored surveys and land acts encourage migration to the West? 2. How does the history of collective western violence differ from the myth of the gunfight in the street? ### RAILROADS, TIME, AND SPACE By 1900, 40 percent of westerners lived in urban centers linked to the world through vast transportation and communication networks of railroads, steamships, undersea telegraph cables, and overland telephone lines. Between 1877 and 1900, the United States had become dependent on new technologies that linked remote urban outposts to the rest of the nation and the world. The web of steel rails and copper wires that spread across the continental United States by the turn of the century made possible the phenomenal growth of the West and permanently bound the region to the national and the world economy. Generous federal land grants and subsidies pushed the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and there were efforts to construct other such transcontinentals in Mexico, Russia, India, and Canada, each built by different versions of publicly subsidized corporate enterprises plagued by graft and scandal. When the U.S. transcontinental was finished, it opened the Great Plains and connected the Pacific to Atlantic and Gulf ports, spurring rapid global exchange, but not always in the ways its builders hoped. In 1869, the driving of the golden spike linking the last rail from east to west ended the first phase of western railroad development, and between 1869 and 1900, regional railroad entrepreneurs such as "empire builder" James J. Hill stepped in when the "robber barons" of the transcontinental epoch moved on to greener pastures. A Canadian, Hill migrated to St. Paul, Minnesota, and saw opportunity for transportation development across the northern borderlands. Hill first linked the expansive Canadian prairie with the Great Plains and distant markets with lines between St. Paul and Winnipeg, Canada Throughout the 1880s, Hill connected his Great Northern Railway lines east to Chicago and finally, in 1893, west to Seattle and the Pacific. Regional rail development in the 1880s and 1890s used 25 percent of U.S. annual timber production, and it spawned the massive or "bonanza" wheat farms of the Dakotas and the fruit and vegetable economies of Arizona and California. Western coal mining grew from regional rail demands for cheaper energy. A combination of federal land grants and savvy land deals with boosters and politicians gave the railroads massive checkerboard tracts of land to sell to cash-poor migrants. Although land was cheap, transportation costs were not. Farmers and ranchers who bought land from the railroads or acquired homesteads depended on the railroad for access to the world markets that dictated the values of their crops and animals. The railroads even set the farmers' clocks when they established “time zones" in the 1880s. The large distances traversed by U.S. and Canadian railroads especially necessitated a closely regulated system of time to replace the confusion of the solar time that had shaped human lives for millennia. To this day, railroad land grants continue shaping life and economies in the West, where companies such as the Southern Pacific maintain large landholdings and control critical transportation corridors. Farmers suffered more than any other group from the unpredictability of international commodities markets. Migrant families who rode Jefferson's yeoman dream of self-sufficiency and independence into the heartlands opened by the rails often found themselves at the mercy of powerful distant forces. Many migrants were German-Russian driven across the globe by new restrictions on rights and privileges imposed by Czar Alexander II that forced them out of Russia. Railroad owners sent American agents loaded with German-language brochures to the steppes of Russia in order to sell the promise of Kansas and Nebraska to the persecuted Germans. Whole German villages arrived in Galveston bound for Oklahoma and the Plains. During the 1880s, when unusually high rainfalls produced bumper crops across the Plains, the populations of Kansas and Nebraska increased by 43 percent and 134 percent, respectively. The Dakotas increased their population by 278 percent. These population increases and development helped seven territories become states in the 1880s and 1890s. The possibilities seemed limitless: for a time, production soared and consistent rain seemed to confirm booster claims. Dry years and wildly fluctuating international commodities markets in the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, however, demonstrated the elusiveness of long-term success. Time revealed that devastating bust cycles were a normal part of western agriculture-if not the economy in general Droughts in the 1890s baked crops year after year and sparked a long series of agricultural depressions that fueled political unrest. The Populist movement rose from the ashes of the arid conditions in the 1890s, when farm economies collapsed. Geographically dispersed farmers seeking collective organization faced significant challenges, however. Farmers united first through social organizations such as the Grange and then political alliances that linked the South and the West. Encouraged by fiery leaders such as Mary Elizabeth Lease to "raise less corn and more hell," farmers formalized their Populist Party at an 1892 convention in Omaha, Nebraska. Lease herself was representative of the Populists. Born to Irish immigrant parents in Pennsylvania, she moved to Kansas in 1870 to teach, met her husband, and started a family. The couple lost everything in the crash of 1873 and moved to Texas, where Lease joined prohibition and women's suffrage groups, followed by a move back to Kansas, where she gave her energy and powerful voice to the growing Populist Party. Lease became one of the movement's most effective speakers. Critic William Allen White thought a woman's place was in the home and labeled her a "harpie" in his famous essay "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Undeterred, "Yellin' Mary Ellen" became a legendary stump speaker before moving to New York to work as a lawyer and lecturer The Populist Party "Omaha Platform" advocated socialization of the nation's railroads and other reforms aimed at empowering family farmers in the industrial age. But in the long run, agribusiness, industrial ranching, and federal subsidies provided the only consistently successful method for reaping the riches of the Plains. ### INDUSTRIAL RANCHING U.S. ranching practices evolved from global traditions. From the Iberian Peninsula by way of Mexico came ranching, which incorporated horse culture, open-range grazing, a tradition of competitive contests between workers, and much of the original cattle stock. From the British Isles by way of the Ohio River valley came ranching practices that valued beef and milk over hide and tallow, relying on haymaking to feed cattle in different seasons and highly trained dogs to move herds overland. In Texas and California, these two distinct traditions fused in unique ways, blending different aspects of Hispanic and Anglo practices and adopting innovative strategies to cope with the arid environment of the region. While the Texas ranching industry birthed the iconic figure of the cowboy and the accoutrements of western horse culture, the California beef industry evolved into the corporate agribusiness model of the 20th century. It was the Spanish who brought cattle to the New World As early as 1500, Spanish vaqueros (cowboys) tended large herds in the Caribbean with the help of African slaves, who contributed knowledge and lasting terminology to the bovine industry. The word "dogie," cowboy slang for a motherless calf, derives from the Bambara language brought to North America by West African slaves. As Spain's empire spread across the Caribbean and into North and South America, cattle played a central economic role. Some Indian tribes, such as Seminole and Choctaw in the Southeast, adopted cattle raising, and the "Five Civilized Tribes" (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) brought their herds on the Trail of Tears from the Southeast to the Oklahoma territory. In Texas, Black and Hispanic cowboys shared their expertise from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean with white cattle workers and European immigrants who took that knowledge into the expanding markets of the West Between 1866 and 1884, ranchers shipped over five million Texas cattle north to slaughterhouses. This style of ranching influenced the industry's development in the Southwest and throughout the northern Great Plains into Canada. As the industry expanded, eastern and foreign speculators in land and livestock invested millions of dollars in creating a system of absentee ownership that birthed the “beef bonanza" of the 1880s. But like bonanza farmers, ranchers went bust at the height of production during a cycle of drought and extreme winters. Ecological devastation caused by overgrazing, brutal winters, and encroachment of farms and the barbed wire fencing invented in 1868 ended the "open-range era.” Not everyone went bust, however. In 1858, San Francisco businessmen Henry Miller and Charles Lux formed Miller & Lux, a corporation that pioneered vertical integration-overseeing the cattle from birth to butcher shop-of the industry. Both men had been born into a family of butchers, and both had also immigrated to the United States in the 1840s from southwestern Germany, eventually arriving in San Francisco in the early 1850s following the gold rush. Similar to other industrial firms of the late 19th century, the Miller & Lux Corporation reduced investment risks, developed a segmented system of labor, and integrated all aspects of production into a tightly controlled business model. They employed a vast pool of low-wage immigrant workers divided by trade and race. Given their unique understanding of the California landscape and superior equestrian skills, Mexican vaqueros formed the backbone of the skilled labor force as they conducted roundups, brandings, pasturing, and culling of cattle herds. Chinese workers provided domestic labor services, especially as cooks, and southeastern Europeans provided field labor, constructing irrigation works and haying. The company contracted with Southern Pacific to provide transportation at a low rate and in exchange gave the railroad a transportation monopoly on its product. This corporate model of ranching allowed control over every aspect of beef production, manipulated the environment to increase production, and formed the model for modern agribusiness in California's Central Valley. The best-known character of the western story, the cowboy, was on the stage for only a short time and looked little like the image popularized by literature and later movies. And a more unlikely hero than the cowboy is hard to imagine Cowboys were laborers who worked long and hard and earned little They spent their days and nights in filthy, primitive conditions with dangerously unpredictable animals and often died unromantically on the job. Most cowboys were white laborers from Texas or Louisiana, but at least a third were African American, Mexican, or Native American. Cattle drives featured a potent brew of racial prejudice and rivalry that contributed to difficult working conditions and violence The cowboy period of long summer cattle drives on the open range lasted less than 20 years before the onslaught of migrants, barbed wire, cities, and government regulation and systematic distribution of land ended it. Frontier hardships were reimagined with the advent of the rodeo. Turn-of-the-century rodeos featured the skill and spectacle of the ranch hand, with real cowboys such as Bill Pickett, an African American ranch hand, entertaining thousands with their "bulldogging" feats. Hispanic vaqueros competed in the charreada, a highly costumed and stylized performance, whereas Indians developed their own version of the rodeo on reservations, incorporating their own spiritual beliefs. The struggles of the cattle business and its workers became part of the mythology of the West while the complicated history faded. #### STUDY QUESTIONS FOR EXTRACTIVE ECONOMIES AND GLOBAL COMMODITIES 1. What global trends shaped the development of the extractive economy of the West? 2. How did the myth of the cowboy contrast with the life of cattle workers? ### CLEARING THE LAND AND CLEANSING THE WILDERNESS After a five-day fight, the exhausted Indians agreed to surrender. There were only 430 left after a remarkable 1,500-mile running battle throughout Montana. The leader of the remaining Nez Perce , Chief Joseph, captured the tragic spirit of the moment. "I am tired of fighting," he told his captors. "It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children.... Maybe I shall find them among the dead. I will fight no more forever." Continental empire building in the West between 1877 and 1900 was more than the adventure of imagined cowboy heroes or a convenient final act for Wild West shows. Dreams of material wealth and the lure of "free" land pulled millions of immigrants from across the globe to the region. Environmental challenges demonstrated the perils of hasty government policies and dashed many settlers' dreams. And in the years to come, the shocking environmental consequences of the extractive economy spurred a conservation movement and led to the creation of the world's first national park. During the same period, new efforts to refashion Indian policy resulted in the greatest injustices of the age. The land in the West was not "virgin," nor was it empty It was not the tabula rasa that promoters led migrants to believe. Early explorers, trappers, and gold seekers traveled through extensive regions of Native American lands stretching from the Canadian border in the North to Mexico in the South. Set aside for hundreds of different Indian tribes removed from their ancestral lands in the East and the South, this swath of territory stood squarely in the path of national, corporate, and individual goals after the Civil War. By 1877, pioneer trails, settlements, and the Transcontinental Railroad had penetrated fragile tribal borders. New migrants encountered a cultural and environmental landscape created by cycles of violence and shifting alliances that challenged the simple borderlines on their maps. Transportation corridors tightly linked the West to the industrializing world. Changing perceptions of the “Great American Desert” of the Plains and Southwest combined with the Homestead and Desert Land acts and with discoveries of gold to make Indian lands, once thought worthless, now appealing. For Native Americans, dire consequences followed the ever-rising tide of people flowing into and through their lands. The "Indian Wars,” already well underway by the close of Reconstruction, expanded as the some military moved out of the South and reinforcements flowed quickly into the West. The military in the West was small and ethnically diverse—in essence, a police force imposing ethnic apartheid in the region. These wars rarely involved large battles but featured protracted guerrilla warfare as Indians fought with and against U.S. troops and rival tribes In June 1876, the Battle of Little Big Horn, where Custer and the 7th Cavalry fell to Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Sioux, was a rare victory for Indians pressured by accelerating U.S. expansion. In the decisive year of 1877 following Custer's instantly mythologized “last stand,” Crazy Horse surrendered and was executed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Later that same year, as already mentioned, Nez Perce resistance leader Chief Joseph surrendered to General Oliver Howard Finally, Congress, repealing the Fort Laramie Treaty, took the Black Hills from the Lakota and opened the region for gold seekers and land speculators. This quick series of military actions set the stage for a civilian invasion of Indian lands and a century-long reconsideration of the best use of this newly secured territory. ### CONFLICT AND RESISTANCE In the 1880s and 1890s, military action and federal legislation in tandem with cultural and economic forces erased established Indian territorial lines drawn under the Fort Laramie Treaty. This drastically reduced the amount of Native American-controlled land and isolated Indians against their will on small, scattered reservations. The visible boundaries of Indian lands could still be mapped in the late 1870s, but they remained contested regions. The lines on maps provided only an illusion of geographic organization during a time of shifting borders, tribal movements and alliances, and disastrous government policies. In 1869, newly elected president Ulysses S. Grant, concerned by public criticism of the corrupt Department of Indian Affairs, met with a coalition of Christian leaders who urged him to adopt a peaceful Indian policy based on Christianity. Weary of war, the president replied, "Gentlemen, your advice is good. Let us have