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Changes on the Western Frontier
Chapter 5
Cultures Clash on the Prairie
Section 1
Democratic
Physically fit
Religion built around myths and stories about gods and great people
Competitive
Make beautiful pottery
Philosophical
Brilliant story tellers with long oral traditions
Brave warriors
Greeks
Democratic
Physically fit
Religion built around myths and stories about gods and great people
Competitive
Make beautiful pottery
Philosophical
Brilliant story tellers with long oral traditions
Brave warriors
Native Americans
Democracy
Religion
Pottery
Warriors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL9whwwTK6I&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active
How Americans viewed the Greeks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSu4hOLYrXk&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active
How Americans viewed the Natives
Assimilation
“Instead of killing them all, let’s just force them to act like us.”
They must give up their traditions, language, culture, clothing style, way of life… everything (but don’t worry because it is for their own good).
Dawes Act
Passed by Congress in 1887
Focused on trying to “Americanize” the natives
Breaks up reservations and redistributes the land to individuals.
Treatment of Natives
About 65 million in 1800
Way of life foundation for many tribes
Food, clothing, fuel, sport, homes…
Slaughtered by settlers, soldiers, tourists, fur traders…
By 1890 fewer than 1000 bison left.
What happens to those that depended on the bison?
Bison
Natives lived in small extended family groups
Young men trained to become hunters and warriors
Women helped butcher and prepare the hides
Some young women chose their spouses
Belief that spirits control events in the natural world
Children who show a sensitivity to these spirits are trained to be shamans
Children learn through myths, games, stories and good examples
No individual is allowed to dominate the others
Leaders rule by counsel, not force and land is held for all to use
Family Life
Even though the land West of the Mississippi was supposed to be for Native American use white settlers continued to push farther and farther West.
Why?
Gold, Adventure, Tabula Rasa (clean slate), Land, Grass is always greener…
Justification?
Racism
Different ideas about land claims
Property Claims
Santa Fe
Pull of the West
Mining Towns vs Cities
Dirty
Thrown together
Mostly Male
Full of bars and brothels
Temporary
What are mining towns like?
Cheyenne returned to Sand Creek for the winter (where they were supposed to be
Army commander in the West wants to make the Natives suffer so he orders colonel Chivington to attack Sand Creek
November 29, 1864 Sand Creek was attacked at dawn (there were 200 warriors and 500 women and children camped there)
At the end 150 Natives were killed (mostly women and children)
Massacre at Sand Creek
Trail runs through Sioux hunting grounds
Sioux asked government to prevent white settlement along the trail and were rejected
Crazy Horse and his warriors attack soldiers stationed at a fort and kill 80 of them
Violence between the two sides continues until the government closes the Bozeman Trail
Treaty of Fort Laramie forces the Sioux to live on a reservation along the Missouri River although Sitting Bull never signed it (although other Sioux leaders did with the expectation that they would be allowed to continue to use their hunting grounds)
Death on the Bozeman Trail
1874-1875, with six years of tension leading up to it
Army rounded up all friendly tribes and put them on reservations
Then opened fire on all other tribes
They were instructed to kill all warriors and bring back all women and children
With these tactics the resistance was crushed on the Southern Plains
Red River War
Within four years of the Treaty of Fort Laramie miners begin searching the Black Hills for Gold
Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho protest, but get no where
When Colonel Custer announced the Black Hills was covered in gold the gold rush began in earnest
Once again chiefs asked the government to stop the rush on their land
Gold Rush
Colonel Custer marched on Little Big Horn the Natives were ready because of a vision
Crazy Horse, Gall and Sitting Bull led their warriors to outflank and crush Custer’s men. Within and hour Custer and his men were all dead.
Eventually the Sioux were defeated and a few of their leaders took refuge in Canada.
Later, Sitting Bull was forced to surrender himself or let all his people starve
Custer’s Last Stand
Passed in 1887 meant to “Americanize” the Natives (force them to act like whites, they needed to give up their language, culture, traditions, hunting, schools, tribal councils and way of life)
Broke up the reservations and gave the land to individual Natives and sold the rest to settlers
The money from the sell was supposed to be used by the Natives to buy farm equipment. Eventually 2/3 of the reservation land was sold and Natives received no money from the sell.
Dawes Act
December 28, 1890 the Seventh Cavalry rounded up 350 starving Sioux and marched them to a camp at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.
The next day the soldiers demanded that the Natives give up all their weapons.
Most of them did, but at one point a shot was fired (who knows which side)
Minutes later 300 mostly unarmed Natives were dead (some of them children)
The soldiers left the corpses to freeze on the ground instead of burying them with respect
Wounded Knee
American cowboys copied almost everything from Spanish vaqueros in Mexico
Chaparreras=chaps
Bronco caballo=bronco
Mestenos=mustangs
Rancho=ranch
The entire way of life that we think is so “American” was borrowed from somewhere else.
Vaqueros and Cowboys
Use cows to make dairy products like butter and cheese
Want fenced ranges and fields to keep their animals where they belong and out of their crops
Long hours
Herd cattle to railroad stations to be shipped all over the country
Want wide open ranges for their cattle to graze on and be herded across
Long hours
Died down because of overgrazing, extended bad weather, invention of barbed wire…
Turned to large fenced in ranches.
Cowboys vs Farmers
With the growth of the railroads the demand for beef increased at the end of the Civil War
A route from Sedalia, Texas to Chicago was beneficial until farmers started fencing off their land because they were sick of trampled crops
Some herds then had to be sold at ridiculous prices and other herd were left to starve
Growing Demand for Beef
A more convenient route then had to be found
Chisholm Trail (from San Antonio through Oklahoma and Kansas)
Abilene became the biggest Cow Town and ranchers began to hire cowboys to drive their cattle to Abilene where 75,000 cattle where sold every year
Cow Town
10-14 hours
Aged 15-40
Gun usually used to protect herd from wild or diseased animals
Beginning of the cowboys season in the Spring
Round them up into a huge corral, let them starve until the would rather eat instead of run away, then they separate them using brands
The long drive lasted 3 months, 1 cowboy/300 cows, a cook, a wrangler and trail boss who earned $100/month to supervise and negotiate with settlers and Natives, always had to be prepared for loss of cattle at the rivers and a stampede that could be started from lightning or even a sneeze
Day’s Work, Round up & The Long Drive
Wild Bill
Buffalo Bill
Calamity Jane
Annie Oakley
All became famous Legends of the West which is often more hype than reality.
Legends of the West
Overgrazing, bad weather, and the invention of barbed wire ended the Open Range
End of the Open Range
Settling on the Great Plains
Section 2
1850-1871 Federal gov. gave 170 million acres to railroads
1860’s two companies race to lay track, Central Pacific from San Francisco and the Union Pacific from Omaha
Laborers are made up of Civil War vets, Irish and Chinese Immigrants, Afican Americans and Mexican Americans
Incredibly dangerous work
May 1869, finally meet in Utah to complete the Transcontinental Railroad
Railroads open the West
Homestead Act offered 160 acres of free land to any citizen who was head of a household
Many who took advantage were exodusters (African-Americans who moved from post-Reconstruction South)
Abuses:
Cattlemen fenced opened land
Miners and woodcutters claimed natural resources
Only 10% actually settled by families that the land grants were intended for
160 acres in Iowa or Minnesota is worth more than 160 acres of plains where more land is needed to make farming worthwhile
Government Support for Settlement
Settling in the West was growing exponentially
Washburn convinced Washington to protect some of the land (like Yellowstone Park)
Because the railroads were not using the land grants as intended (selling the extra land to businessmen instead of families) the railroads were forced to give back enough land to make up New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.
By 1880 individuals had bought mare than 19 million acres of government land in the west.
Ten years later the frontier was considered dead because the frontier line was no longer stable, but ever changing
The Closing of the Frontier
Frontier settlers faced droughts, floods, fires, blizzards, locust plagues, and raids by outlaws and Natives.
Trees were scarce so they dug their homes out of the side of the hill (dugouts) or made houses from prairie turf (soddies)
Both were warm in the winter and cool in the summer
Soddies were small, dark, had little ventilation, were havens for snakes, insects and other pests and constantly leaked when it rained
Dugouts and Soddies
Work in the fields
Plowing, planting, harvesting
Sheered Sheep, carded wool
Dug wells, hauled water from the wells
Made soap and candles
Canned fruits and vegetables
Healed snakebites and crushed limbs
Women’s Work
1837 John Deere invented a steel plow that could slice through the prairie sod
1847 McCormick made a reaping machine
1869 spring-tooth harrow invented to prep the soil
1841 grain drill to plant seed
1874 barbed wire to fence the land
1878 corn binder
With all these what used to take 183 minutes, could now be done in 10
Technical Support for Farmers
Morrill Act of 1862 and 1890 gave federal land to states to help finance agricultural colleges
Hatch Act of 1887 established agricultural experiment stations to inform farmers of new developments
Researchers developed grains for arid soil and techniques for dry farming
Agricultural Education
Machinery was expensive so famers took out loans to buy them
This was fine until the price of wheat fell and farmers could not longer pay back their loans
Bonanza Farming was seen as the solution (enormous single-crop spreads of 15,000 to 50,000 acres)
Some farmers mortgaged their land to buy more property to farm on to make ends meet, drought came and bonanza farms could not compete because they had no flexibility so they went bankrupt
At the same time shipping rates were raising because of abuses committed by the railroads
Famers in Debt
Farmers and the Populist Movement
Section 3
During Civil War government issued greenbacks which could not be exchanged for gold or silver
Worth less than hard money of the same value
After war greenbacks were removed from circulation
Farmers then had to pay back loans in money worth more than they had borrowed and receive less money for their crops at the same time
A bushel of wheat went from 2 dollars to 68 cents
Economic Distress
High transport prices charged only to farmers
Higher rates for shorter hauls with no alternative
Railroads worked with grain brokers and merchants to control grain storage prices and the market price of crops
Debt increased as famers bought supplies on credit that they could not pay for due to the high interest rates
Problems with the Railroads
Oliver Hudson Kelley started the Patron of Husbandry which became known as the Grange
Meant to provide a social outlet and an educational forum for isolated farmers
Ended up spending most of their time fighting the railroads by organizing, setting up cooperatives and sponsoring state legislation to regulate railroads
4 million in South and West
The Farmers’ Alliances
Grange movement morphs into Populism
Goals: increase in money supply, graduated income tax, federal loan program, direct election of senators, single terms for president and vice-president, secret ballot, 8 hour work day, restrictions on immigration
Fades into the Democratic Party
The Populist Party Platform
Farmers in debt
Railroads grew faster than their markets and therefore went bankrupt
Government’s gold supply was depleting because the farmers had forced them to buy silver
Bank runs
Stock prices fell
Silver plunged and mines closed
Eventually 15,000 businesses close and 500 banks collapse
Panic of 1893
Silver Gold
Businessmen, bankers, Republicans
Gold Bugs
Want the Gold Standard, where gov. backs currency only with gold
Would make less currency available, deflation (prices fall, value increases)
Farmers, Laborers, Democrats
Silverites
Want bimetallism, where gov. would back currency with silver and gold
Would make more currency available, inflation (prices raise, value decreases)
Silver or Gold
William Jennings Bryan became the Democratic nominee for president
Bryan delivers a speech that claims the Republicans are trying to crucify the entire nation on their “Cross of Gold”
The Populist party backed Bryan as a presidential candidate, but nominated their own vice-presidential candidate
Bryan and the “Cross of Gold”
Bryan could not compete with McKinley (the Republican nominee for president) because he did not have as much money, lost the support of the city dwellers, and lost the support of Democrats who wanted to keep the “gold standard”
He campaigned hard, visited 27 states and made up to 20 speeches a day
McKinley campaigned from his front porch and sent his people into the country to speak on his behalf
Although the race was within ½ million votes, McKinley won and the Populism movement collapsed while the Democratic party absorbed most of their goals
The End of Populism
