Frontiers of Change, 1865 1898

FRONTIERS OF CHANGE, 1865-1898

CHAPTER 1

John O’Sullivan, an advocate for expansion, coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to discuss the widely held belief that American settlers were destined to expand across the

continent.

AGENCIES OF WESTWARD EXPANSION

• In 1862, Congress enacted the Homestead Act, which is considered to be one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States.

• Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act offered any citizen (white American) or future citizen (black American) a parcel of land, typically called a homestead, at little to no cost.

• 270 million acres, or ten percent of the area of the United States was claimed and settled under this act.

• From 1862 to 1900, upwards of 600,000 families took advantage of the government’s offer and settled the western portion of America.


• One of the main channels of postwar growth was the railroad.

• Five transcontinental railroads went into service between 1869 and 1893.

• At the end of the Civil War, only 3,272 miles of rail ran west of the Mississippi River but by 1890, the total was 72,473 miles.

• Railroad access and mobility urged settlement and economic development on the high plains and in the mountain valleys.

• No longer did this region appear on maps as the Great American Desert.

• The term “Great American Desert” was used in the nineteenth century to describe the western portion of the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains in North America to about the 100th meridian.


• This was the age of the “sodbuster,” who adapted to the treeless prairies and plains by fencing with barbed wire and building the first house out of the sod that he broke with his steel plow.

• A soddy was small, offered little light or air, and were havens for snakes, insects, and other pests.

• It was also the era of “bonanza farms” – huge wheat farms cultivated with heavy machinery and hired labor – in the Red River Valley of Dakota Territory and the Central Valley of California.

The prairie lacked standard building materials such as wood or stone; however, sod from thickly-rooted prairie grass was abundant and made for a well-insulated, inexpensive house.

This historic photograph of the High plains in Haskell County, Kansas, shows a treeless semi-arid grassland and a “buffalo wallow” or circular depression in the level surface.

JOSEPH F.GLIDDEN

INTERESTING FACTS• Glidden’s wire ended the

open range and the freedom of the rancher and cowboy – an event lamented in Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.”

• By the time of his death in 1906, Glidden was one of the wealthiest men in America, valued at over one million dollars.

• The “barbed wire salesman” in Back to the Future Part III is based on Glidden.

The term “bonanza,” which is derived from the Spanish and means literally “good weather,” was coined in the mid-1800s; it is used to refer any source of great and sudden wealth or

luck.


• Perhaps even more important to the growth of the West were the mining and ranching frontiers.

• This was the West of prospectors and boom towns, of cowboys and cattle drives, of gold rushes and mother lodes, and of stagecoach robbers and rustlers.

• It is a West so celebrated on stage, screen, radio, and television that it is hard to separate the myths from reality.

THE MINING FRONTIER

• Gold discoveries had boosted the first waves of western settlement but by the 1870s, silver eclipsed gold in volume and some years even in value.

• Other minerals also increased in value – rich copper mines opened in Montana in connection with the demand for thousands of tons of copper wire brought on by:

• Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone (1876).

• Thomas A. Edison’s invention of the incandescent lightbulb (1879).

• The construction of a successful electrical generator (1881).

The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold deposits were found by James W. Marshall

at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California.

THE RANCHING FRONTIER

• Of course, the dominant symbol of the Old West is not the prospector or the hard-rock miner: it is the cowboy.

• The postwar boom in the range cattle industry had its beginnings in southern Texas.

• The Spaniards had introduced longhorn cattle there in the eighteenth century.

• This hardy breed multiplied rapidly and by the 1850s, millions of them roamed freely on the Texas plains.

• The postwar explosion of population and railroads westward brought markets and railheads ever closer to western cattle that were free to anyone who rounded them up and branded them.

The Texas longhorns are the direct descendants of the first cattle in the New World – ancestral cattle first brought over by Christopher Columbus in 1493 to the Caribbean island of

Hispaniola.


• Clever Texans quickly saw that the longhorns represented a fortune on the hoof – if they could be driven northward the 800 miles to the railroad at Sedalia, Missouri.

• In spring 1866, cowboys hit the trail with 260,000 cattle in the first of the great drives.

• Their experiences almost put an end to the range cattle industry before it was born:

• Disease, stampedes, bad weather, Indians, and irate farmers in Missouri (who were afraid that the Texas fever carried by some of the longhorns would infect their own stock) killed or ran off most of the cattle.


• By 1867, the rails of the Kansas Pacific had reached Abilene, Kansas, 150 miles closer to Texas, making it possible to drive the herds through a lightly occupied portion of Indian Territory.

• About 35,000 longhorns reached Abilene that summer, where they were loaded onto cattle cars for the trip to Kansas City or Chicago.

• This success resulted in the interlocking institutions of the cattle drive and the Chicago stockyards.

• More than a million longhorns thundered their way north on the Chisholm Trail to Abilene over the next four years while the railroad crept westward to other Kansas towns.

• Dodge City became the most wide-open and famous of the cow towns.

Joseph G. McCoy promoted the transport of longhorn cattle from Texas to the eastern United States by establishing Abilene, one of the first “cow towns.”

Dodge city was such a menacing place that it serves as the source of the idiom “get out of Dodge,” which

means to leave a dangerous area.

The Chisholm Trail , named for Jesse Chisholm, was a late nineteenth century trail used to drive cattle overland from the ranches in southern Texas to the railhead of the Kansas

Pacific Railway.


• By this time, however, the classic form of open-range grazing was already in decline.

• The boom years of the early 1880s had overstocked the range and driven down prices.

• Then came record cold and blizzards on the southern range in winter 1884-1885, followed by even worse weather on the northern plains two years later.

• Hundreds of thousands of cattle froze or starved to death.

• These catastrophes spurred reforms that brought an end to open-range grazing.


• Although cowboys no longer rode the open range after the 1880s, the classic cowboys image became a staple of American popular culture.

• Cheap novels of the period created the myth of a proud and rugged white individual who overcame the West’s hostile environment as easily as he overcame hostile Indians.

• Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show presented thousands of Eastern urban Americans with a spectacle of cowboys conquering the West.

• The entertainment presented a strong message to Easterners:

• White conquest of the West was necessary to protect the nation from aggressive Indians.

WILLIAM CODYINTERESTING FACTS• Cody was awarded the

Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, but when Congress revised it’s standards in 1917, Cody’s medal was revoked (reinstated in 1989).

• Cody was baptized into the Catholic Church the day before his death.

• The NFL’s Buffalo Bills were named in his honor even though Cody had no special connection with New York.

The Wild West show was a traveling vaudeville performance, which introduced many western performers and personalities

and a romanticized version of the American Old West.


• Cheap novels and Western shows paid little attention to the realities of cowboy life:

• Thousands of cowboys were in fact black or Hispanic.

• They were laborers paid for a difficult and grueling job.

• Few of them carried pistols tied to their legs.

• In fact, all myths ignored perhaps the greatest reality of all:

• Neither individualistic cowboys nor community-oriented pioneers subdued the West.

• The U.S. Army conquered the Indians who lived there while the federal government claimed and administered most of the land beyond the Mississippi River.

THE LAST INDIAN FRONTIER

• The westward expansion of the ranching and farming frontiers after 1865 doomed the free range of the Plains Indians and the bison.

• In the 1830s, eastern tribes had been moved to preserves west of the Mississippi to end strife by separating whites and Indians.

• In the 1850s, when the Kansas and Nebraska territories opened to white settlement, the government forced a dozen tribes living there to cede fifteen million acres, leaving them on reservations totaling less than 1.5 million acres.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, authorized him to negotiate for the Native

Americans’ removal to federal territories west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their homelands.


• In the aftermath of the Civil War, the process of concentrating Indian tribes on reservations accelerated.

• Chiefs of the five “civilized tribes” – Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles – had signaled treaties of alliance with the Confederacy.

• At that time, they were living in Indian Territory (most of present-day Oklahoma), where their economy was linked to the South.

• Bitter toward the United States, the leaders of the “civilized tribes,” on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” cast their lot with the Confederacy.


• Siding with the Confederacy proved to be a costly mistake for the “civilized tribes.”

• The U.S. government “reconstructed” Indian Territory more quickly and with less conflict than it reconstructed the former Confederate states.

• Treaties with the five tribes in 1866 required them to grant tribal citizenship to their freed slaves and reduced tribal lands by half.

• There would be no shortage of dispossessed Indians in the West.

CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX

• The Civil War had set in motion a generation of Indian warfare that was more violent and widespread than anything since the seventeenth century.

• During the war, the Union army was forced to pull units from the frontier posts to fight the Confederacy.

• In addition, the drain on the Union treasury to finance the war delayed annuity payments to tribes that had sold their land to the government.

• Herded onto reservations along the Minnesota River by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851, the Santee Sioux grew agitated in the summer of 1862 as starvation threatened the tribe.

• Angry braves began to speak openly of reclaiming ancestral hunting grounds.


• On August 17, a robbery in which five white settlers were murdered, launched the Dakota War of 1862.

• The braves persuaded Chief Little Crow to take them on the warpath and over the next few weeks at least 500 white Minnesotans were massacred.

• Hastily mobilized militia and army units finally suppressed the uprising by September.

• A military court convicted 319 Indians of murder and atrocities and sentenced 303 of them to death.


• President Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts and reduced the number of executions to thirty-eight – the largest act of executive clemency in American history.

• Even so, the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux on December 26, 1862, was the largest mass execution the country has ever witnessed.

• The government evicted the remaining Sioux from Minnesota to Dakota Territory.

• By 1864 and for a decade afterward, fighting flared between the army and the Sioux across the northern plains.

The mass execution was performed publicly on a single scaffold platform in Mankato, Minnesota; afterward the

prisoner’s bodies were buried en masse in the sands of the riverbank.


• It reached a climax in 1874 and 1875 after gold-seekers poured into the Black Hills of western Dakota, a sacred place to the Sioux.

• At the battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory on June 25, 1876, Sioux warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, along with their Cheyenne allies, wiped out George A. Custer and the 225 men with him in the Seventh Cavalry.

• In retaliation, General Philip Sheridan carried out a winter campaign in which the Sioux and Cheyenne were crushed.

SITTING BULLINTERESTING FACTS• In 1885, Sitting Bull left his

reservation and joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show where he earned $50 a week.

• While touring he met Annie Oakley, whom he later symbolically adopted as his daughter – “Little Sure Shot.”

• In 1890, authorities attempted to arrest Sitting Bull; however, a struggle ensued and Sitting Bull was shot in the head.

CRAZY HORSEINTERESTING FACTS• Crazy Horse ranks among

the most notable and iconic of Native American tribal members and was honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a 13ȼ Great Americans series postage stamp.

• While in custody, Crazy Horse struggled with the guard and attempted to escape; however, he was stabbed with a bayonet by a nearby guard and died later that evening.

GEORGE A. CUSTER

INTERESTING FACTS• Custer was admitted to

West Point Military Academy in 1858, where he graduated last in his class.

• Custer was present at Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court Horse.

• After more than 100 years of silence, the Northern Cheyenne announced that Buffalo Calf Road Woman struck the final blow against Custer, which knocked him off his horse.


• Largest and most warlike of the Plains tribes, the Sioux were confined to a reservation in Dakota Territory where poverty, disease, apathy, and alcoholism reduced this once-proud people to desperation.

• In 1890, a current of hope arrived at the Sioux reservation in the form of a Ghost Dance, which had first appeared among the Paiutes of Nevada and spread quickly to other Indian nations.

• The Ghost Dance expressed the belief that the Indians’ god would destroy the whites and return their land.

The ghost dance invoked the Great Spirit to restore the bison and drive away the whites, thereby revitalizing traditional

Sioux culture; however, it provoked the U.S. Army into confrontation.


• Alarmed by the frenzy of the dance, federal authorities sent soldiers to the Sioux reservation.

• A confrontation at Wounded Knee in the Dakota badlands led to a shootout that left twenty-five soldiers and at least 150 Sioux dead.

• Wounded Knee symbolized the death of nineteenth century Plains Indian culture.

• In addition to trying to defeat the Indians in battle, the army encouraged the extermination of the bison.

Originally referred to as a battle, Wounded Knee was in reality was a tragic and avoidable massacre – nearly

half of the Sioux were women and children.

SUPPRESSION OF OTHER PLAINS INDIANS

• Professional hunters slaughtered the large, clumsy animals by the millions for their hides, depriving Plain Indians of both physical and spiritual nourishment.

• The Indians understood that the huge animals were disappearing but they believed the bison were retreating underground to avoid the mistreatment by the whites.

• They believed the bison would reappear only after whites learned to respect them as the Indians did.

• But when the bison became nearly extinct in 1883, the Plains Indians understood that the old ways were gone forever.

By the 1880s, the once thirty million bison that roamed the grasslands in North America were almost extinct,

leaving behind millions of bones.

THE “PEACE POLICY”

• Many Eastern reformers condemned America’s violent repression of the Indians.

• One of the most prominent reformers was Helen Hunt Jackson, whose 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, summed up their accusations of anti-Indian violence, exploitation, and broken treaties.

• Jackson also romanticized the Indian culture, especially in her best-selling novel, Ramona (1884), which also helped to humanize the Indians.

• Nevertheless, most reformers wished to rebuild the Indian culture into the

white man’s way by means of schools and Christian missions.

• This was to be the first step toward being assimilated into the American polity as citizens.


• President Ulysses S. Grant, in his inaugural address in 1869, announced his new Peace Policy toward Indians, urging “their civilization and ultimate citizenship.”

• “Civilization” meant acceptance of white culture, including the English language, Christianity, and individual ownership of property.

• It also meant allegiance to the United States rather than a tribe.

• In 1871, the century-long policy of negotiating treaties with Indian “nations” came to an end.

• With their military power broken and the buffalo gone, most Indians had agreed in the “reconstruction” that offered them citizenship by the 1880s.


• Also in the 1880s, land-hungry westerners began to greedily eye the 155 million acres of land tied up in reservations.

• If part of that land could be assigned directly to individual ownership by Indian families, the remainder would become available for purchase by whites.

• The Dawes Severalty Act did just that in 1887:

• It called for the dissolution of Indian tribes as legal units.

• It offered Indians the opportunity to become citizens.

• It allotted each head of family 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of grazing land.

• Eventually, whites gained title to 108 million acres of former reservation land.

Education

Frontiers of Change, 1865 1898