The Conquest of the Far West

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The Conquest of the Far West

• Chapter 16

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Societies of the Far West

• The Western Tribes
• Pacific coast (Chumash, Pomo, Serrano, Maidu,
  Yurok, Chinook, Ohlone) wiped out by Spanish
  disease
• Pueblos of SW form alliance with Spaniards, but
  subordinate
• Plains, Sioux Indians
• strongest, most fierce and brave
• strict reverence to nature
• dependent on buffalo
• lack of unity early but later formed alliance
  with Arapaho and Cheyenne

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• Hispanic New Mexico
• most stayed in American territory after US/Mexico
  war
• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
• Transformed by arrival of Anglo-Americans and
  capitalist society
• Stephen Kearney tries to establish a govt in NM
  with 1,000 whites that excludes the 50,000
  Hispanics
• territorial rings spread Anglo influence,
  territory and wealth
• US Army breaks the power of the Navajo and Apache
• Railroad brings more people
• Anglo and Mexicans seeking different
  opportunities
• Mexicans restricted to the lowest-paying and
  least stable jobs

4

• Hispanic California and Texas
• Missionaries influence
• self-sustaining communities
• Spanish presence
• Oppression of natives
• Californios lose land (Benicia, Vallejo)
• excluded from Gold Rush
• corrupt business deals
• corrupt courts
• squatters
• Rancheros struggle
• survive due to booming cattle industry
• 1860s drought devastating
• by 1880s Hispanic aristocracy ceases to exist in
  California
• Texas follows similar post war pattern to CA
  despite the fact that they consisted of ¾ the
  pop.
• Anglo treatment of Mexicans v. Natives

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• The Chinese Migration
• by 1880 200,000 Chinese in the US, mostly in CA,
  large numbers in SF
• CA gov. in 1852 one of the most worthy classes
  of our newly adopted citizens
• Jobs
• industrious and hardworking threat to white
  society
• foreign miners tax excluded them from the mines
  during gold rush
• transcontinental railroad, Chinese 90 of
  workforce (Central Pacific)
• work through winter
• strike suppressed by force/starvation

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• The Chinese Migration Contd
• Urban Life Chinatowns
• railroad completion increase in Chinese urban
  population
• Six Companies
• Tongs
• 2/3 of laundry workers were Chinese cheap to
  start, little language requirement
• 50 of Chinese women in California were
  prostitutes

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• Anti-Chinese Sentiments
• Anti-Coolie clubs, Democrat Party, Workingmens
  Party violence and oppression of Chinese
• Chinese Exclusion Acts in US Congress 1882, 1892,
  1902

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• Migration from the East
• post war migration much larger than previous
  decades
• Homestead Act of 1862 permitted settlers to buy
  plots of 160 acres for a small fee if the
  occupied the land they purchased for five years
  and improved it easier said than done
• 10 states join the Union from 1864 1896

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The Changing Western Economy

• Labor in the West
• unstable and shifting labor market
• 10 of population was single
• multi-racial working classbut white workers
  dominated upper tiers of employment
• areas of work mining, ranching and commercial
  farming

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• The Arrival of Miners
• mining boom was a brief period 1860-1890
  (California, 1849)
• gold in Pikes Peak, CO (1858) Denver
  established
• silver in Nevada (1858) Comstock Lode
• gold in Black Hills of Dakota Territory
• Process
• Individual surface, placer, mining
• Corporate quartz mining
• Ranchers establish permanent economy or desertion
• Bonanza Kings lucky miners who did become
  enormously wealthy off a strike
• Rise in outlaws or bad men increase in
  vigilante activity
• Dangers of working in mines (1 worker in 30 died)

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• The Cattle Kingdom
• railroads gave birth to range cattle industry
  because it allowed access to larger markets
• long before US citizens invaded the SW, Mexican
  ranchers had developed the techniques and
  equipment that the cattlemen and cowboys of the
  great Plains later employed branding, roundups,
  roping, leather chaps and spurs very important
  to note that Texas Cowboys followed the Mexican
  Gaucho or Ranchero model
• huge price offerings in the East for steers for
  people who could bring steers to railroad centers

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• The Cattle Kingdom Contd
• drive from south Texas to Sedalia, Missouri
• caused cattle to gain weight
• risk factors outlaws, Indians, farmers, Texas
  fever
• success lead to cattle kingdom
• Most cowboys in early years were Confederate Army
  veteranssecond largest group was African
  Americans
• ranches permanent settlements for employers and
  employees
• sheep vs. cows
• Corporate Cowboys
• harsh seasons wiped out the cattle run, replaced
  it with trains
• 250,000 female ranch owners, Wyoming first
  state to grant women suffrage

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The Romance of the West

• The Western Landscape
• New, natural painting landscapes lured many west
• Rocky Mountain School
• early tourist industry, wilderness hotels

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• The Cowboy Culture
• rugged, free-spirited lifestyle romanticized
  contrast structured world of the East
• promotion of the natural man
• Owen Wisters The Virginian a semi-educated
  man whose natural, decency, courage, and
  compassion made him a powerful symbol of frontier
  virtues
• Wild West Shows

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• The Idea of the Frontier
• Mark Twain writer
• Frederic Remington painter
• Theodore Roosevelt Winning the West writer
• Frederick Jackson Turner -
• four centuries from the discovery of America, at
  the end of a hundred years of life under the
  Constitution, the frontier has gone and with its
  going has closed the first period of American
  history. Debatable
• Loss of Utopia or myth of the garden

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Dispersal of the Tribes

• White Tribal Policy
• Bad history
• prior to 1860, tribes were considered wards of
  the President
• treaties ratified by Senate
• desire to establish permanent frontier between
  whites and natives
• as whites moved west, strength of treaties rarely
  held from pressure of settlers
• concentration of Indian tribes in Indian
  territory w. treaty chiefs
• divided tribes, thus easier to control
• allowed whites to move Indians off desirable lands

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• White Tribal Policy Contd
• Indian Peace Commission established to come up
  with a different plan than concentration move
  all Indians into one of two reservations Dakotas
  or Indian Territory (Oklahoma)
• White management of Indian matters was run by
  Bureau of Indian Affairs horrible track record
• Buffalo was essential to Indian way of life
  slaughtered by whites
• demand for hides from the East
• railroad shootings
• killing was condoned and encouraged by Bureau of
  Indian Affairs
• 1865 15 million buffalo / 1875 less than a
  thousand

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• The Indian Wars
• Retaliation originally on encroachers, later on
  soldiers
• Little Crow (Sioux) in Minnesota 700 whites dead
  / 38 Natives hanged
• Miners encroachment in Colorado
• governor urged friendly Indians to congregate at
  army posts for protection
• Black Kettle leads Cheyenne and Arapaho to camp
• Colonel J.M Chivington orders an attack with
  drunk militia soldiers
• 133 people dead /105 women and children
• Black Kettle escapes, slaughtered with his people
  later in Texas by Colonel George A. Custer

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• The Indian Wars Contd
• Montana and Bozeman trail
• white effort to connect Wyoming to mining centers
  in Dakotas
• Indian harassment prevents trail from being used
• California and Indian Hunters
• bounty for scalps or skulls
• goal of elimination
• disease, poverty and vigilantes reduced CA Indian
  population from 150,000 before 1860 to 30,000 in
  1870
• 1867 Peace, but 1870s tensions rise again
• Gold in the Black Hills
• Federal govt stops negotiations with tribal
  chiefs two goals
• civilization through assimilation
• annihilation of Native cultures
• 1875 bands of warriors left reservations and were
  ordered to return
• gathered in Montana under two great leaders Crazy
  Horse and Sitting Bull
• George Custer and Seventh Calvary sent to round
  up renegade Indians
• Battle of Little Bighorn 2,500 Natives kill
  Custer and all 264 men
• Native organization weak, group breaks up into
  bands
• Crazy Horse killed on reservation (Sitting Bull?)

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• The Indian Wars Contd
• Nez Perce and Chief Joseph 1877
• a few members sign a treaty all are forced onto a
  reservation
• 4 settlers killed
• Chief Joseph leads his group in an effort to
  escape punishment
• White Bird Canyon/ Blue Hen River
• Leads 200 men and 350 women in an effort to reach
  Canada 1,321 miles in 75 days
• Some make it across the border, most are caught
  just before
• Chief Joseph I will fight no more forever
• General Nelson Miles makes a deal with Joseph,
  but Federal gov. refuses to honor it
• Nez Perce shipped from reservation to reservation
  facing disease and malnutrition

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Chief Joseph of Nez Perce
Geronimo
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• The Indian Wars Contd
• Apaches and Geronimo
• one of the last tribes to resist
• Arizona and Mexico
• 1871 white atrocities on Apache
• women and children killed / sold into slavery
• offering peace conference, and then killing them
  poisoned food
• Geronimo fights efforts to assimilate
• Geronimos troops and tribe down to 30 Geronimo
  surrenders

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• The Indian Wars Contd
• Ghost Dance
• many tribes recognized their traditions were
  fading
• turned to spirituality
• Wavoka Paiute who emphasized
• coming of a messiah
• retreat of white forces
• return of the buffalo
• ecstatic visions and dances
• white agents feared Ghost Dance as a
  preliminary to hostilities
• Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890)
• effort to round up Sioux and put down the Ghost
  Dance
• 350 cold and starving Sioux
• machine gun factor 200 Sioux (women and
  children) 40 white soldiers dead

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• The Dawes Act (1877)
• The Dawes Severalty Act provided for the gradual
  elimination of tribal ownership of land and the
  allotment of tracts to individual owners
• concept of a vanishing race in need of rescue
  from white society
• desire to turn tribes into farming communities
• took Indian children away from families and
  forced them into boarding schools
• children were educated to abandon tribal ways and
  rituals
• encouraged spread of Christianity
• Harsh change from concept of collective society
  to capitalist individualism
• Plan abandoned due to inept and corrupt
  leadership
• What must be understood
• The success of white settlement into the American
• West came at great expense of the regions
  indigenous
• peoples

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The Rise and Decline of the Western Farmer

• Farming on the Plains
• Significance of the railroad
• Irish built from the East, Chinese built from the
  west
• Met at Promontory Point, Utah in the Spring of
  1869
• prior to Civil War, only way west was via wagon /
  railroad made white settlement easier
• although operated by private corporations,
  railroads were essentially public projects
  because the government gave corporations loans
  and land for the track and land as incentive
• railroad companies wanted settlers to settle the
  West
• customers for railroad
• they owned the lands the settlers would buy
• railroad fares were cheap

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• Farming on the Plains Contd
• Problems
• Grazing Cattlemen herds (barbed wire)
• Falling prices due to decrease in demand
• Shortage of water (illusion that water was
  plentiful in 1870s due to unordinary amount of
  rainfall)
• irrigation projects
• dry land farming
• drought resistant crops
• lack of government infrastructure for funding
• land bought at a good rate on credit but dry
  years sent tens of thousands of farmers into
  abandonment of their farms

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• Commercial Agriculture
• independent farmer, self sustaining farmer,
  replaced with commercial farmer similar to what
  industrialists were doing in the manufacturing
  economy
• dependent upon
• bankers and interest rates
• railroads and freight rates
• national and European markets
• significance of communication and transportation
• global increase in farm output but lead to a
  drop in prices
• 1890s 27 of the farms in country were mortgaged
  by 1910 33
• In 1880 25 of all farmers were tenets, but 1910
  37
• Some people became very rich, most suffered

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• Farmers Grievances (Grangers ? Farmers
  Alliances ? Populist Party )
• farmers generally had little understanding of
  world markets, thus concentrated their anger on
  immediate areas
• inequitable train freight rates cost more in the
  South and West than in the NE, some charged
  arbitrary storage rates
• high interest rates 10 to 25 loans having to be
  paid during a time when prices were dropping and
  currency was becoming scarce. Increasing the
  volume of currency would eventually become an
  important agrarian demand
• prices a farmer could plant a crop at a moment
  when prices were high and find that by harvest
  the price had declined. The most significant
  reason was the unsteadiness of the world market,
  however farmers had their own theories that
  werent entirely without reason
• middlemen (bankers, speculators, etc.) were
  conspiring to fix prices so as to benefit
  themselves at the growers expense
• Eastern manufacturers were conspiring to keep the
  prices of farm goods low and the prices of
  industrial goods high

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• Agrarian Malaise
• Isolation of farm life
• limited medical facilities
• harsh winters
• lack of access to education for children
• hayseed ridicule
• West used to be romanticized, now the position of
  the western farmer declined in relation to
  urbanized, industrial society of the East
• Anger would lead to a powerful political movement
  in the 1890s called Populist Movement.