Transcript chapter 26 ppt

Essential Questions
1. What national issues emerged in
the process of closing the
western frontier?
2. Why does the West hold such an
important place in the American
imagination?
3. In what ways is the West
romanticized in American culture?
Major tensions
Native
Americans
Cattlemen
Ranchers
Buffalo Hunters
Railroads
U. S. Government
Sheep Herders
Farmers
Key Tensions
Ethnic
Minorities
Nativists
Environmentalists
Lawlessness of
the Frontier
Big Business Interests
[mining, timber]
Local Govt. Officials
Farmers
Buffalo Hunters
“Civilizing” Forces
[The “Romance” of the West]
THE GREAT WEST
• After the end of the Civil War,
the Great West was still mostly
unpopulated by white people.
Exceptions were the Mormons
in Utah, trading posts and gold
camps, and Spanish American
settlements in the Southwest.
• Great West was a rough
square measuring roughly
1,000 miles on each side, a
huge expanse waiting to be
carved up and developed
• By 1890, this huge territory will
be split into several states and
four territories of Utah,
Arizona, New Mexico, and
Indian Territory.
As noted by established railways, in
1870, the Great West was shockingly
underdeveloped. Look at 1890 below.
Plains Indians
• In 1860, the Native
Americans on the
Great Plains
numbered roughly
360,000.
• However, as
Americans moved
West, the Native
Americans stood in
their way. A clash
was inevitable.
The Buffalo Hunt, by Frederic Remington, 1890
A New Yorker who first went west
at 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.
Plains Indians
• Prior to American expansion to the western
Plains, the Native American tribes had already
transformed the vast area and
competitions/rivalries existed between the
various tribes as different tribes moved into the
area
• Most importantly, the introduction of the horse
forever changed the lifestyle of the Native
Americans, particularly, the Sioux and the
Cheyenne
Plains Indians
• As Americans settled the Plains, it further
exacerbated the competition between the Native
Americans.
– White diseases killed many natives
– Destruction of the bison destroyed the livelihood of
the Plains Indians
– Loss of land to American cattle and other livestock
• All this leads to more warfare between different
tribes for scarcer resources and hunting
grounds.
Treaty of Ft. Laramie (1851)
Treaty of Fort Atkinson (1853)
Both treaties marked the
beginning of the Indian
reservation system in the
West. Established
boundaries for the
territories for the tribes
and created two great
Indian colonies. But whites
misunderstood the Native
Americans who made these
treaties. Simply put, they
had never lived life bound to
the concept of territory.
Plains Indians
• Great Sioux reservation
and Indian territory in
present day Oklahoma
established in the 1860’s.
This intensified the
federal governments plan
to corral the Plains
Indians into reservations.
• Native Americans only
gave up their ancestral
lands when promised to
be left alone and given
food, clothing, and other
supplies.
Plains Indian War
• From 1860-1890, the
U.S. Army fought bitter
wars with the Plains
Indians.
– Many of the soldiers were
immigrants
– 1/5th of the soldiers were
African-Americans,
dubbed Buffalo Soldiers
by the Native Americans
Colonel John Chivington
Kill and scalp all, big and
little!
Sandy Creek, CO
Massacre
November 29, 1864
Cruelty begot Cruelty!
400 Native Americans
murdered gruesomely
Capt. William J. Fetterman
80 soldiers massacred by the Sioux,
December 21, 1866
“Awakened a bitter feeling towards the
savage perpetrators”- Custer
2nd Treaty of
Ft. Laramie (1868)Abandoned the
Bozeman Trail and
gave Great Sioux
Reservation to the
Sioux
Treaty of Medicine
Lodge Creek (1867)
Reservation
Policy
Gold Found in the
Black Hills of the
Dakota Territory!
1874
The Battle of Little Big Horn
1876
Gen. George
Armstrong
Custer
Chief Sitting Bull
Chief Joseph
I will fight no more forever!
Nez Percé tribal
retreat (1877)
Geronimo, Apache Chief: Hopeless Cause
Defeat of Plains Indians
• Plains Indians defeated by many factors:
– 1. Railroad
– 2. Disease
– 3. Alcohol
– 4. Extermination of the Buffalo
Buffalo
• Some 10 million buffalo roamed the Plains
when white Americans first arrived
• The lifeblood of the Native Americans
– Food
– Dung provided fuel
– Hides provided clothing, harnesses etc
– Bones provided tools
• By end of the Civil War, an estiamted 15
million Buffalo roamed the Plains
Buffalo
• To give perspective, a Kansas Pacific train
had to wait 8 hours for a herd to pass
• Buffalo Bill killed 4,000 buffalo in 18
months working for the train company
• As railroads advanced West, buffalo were
killed for food, their hides, and
amusement.
• By 1885, only an estimated thousand
Buffalo still survived
Helen Hunt Jackson
A Century of Dishonor (1881)
Assimilation Debate
• Humanitarians
– Wanted the Native Americans to “walk the
white man’s road.”
• Hard-Liners
– Wanted to use reservations and brutality
• Missionaries
– Hoped to get Native Americans to give up
their religions and adopt Christianity and
assimilate into society
Arapahoe “Ghost Dance”, 1890
Chief Big Foot’s Lifeless Body
Wounded Knee, SD, 1890
Marks the end of the Indian Wars and the adoption of forced assimilation
Dawes Severalty Act (1887):
Assimilation Policy
Carlisle Indian School, PA
Dawes Severalty Act (1887):
Assimilation Policy
•
•
•
•
Forced assimilation
Dissolved tribes as legal entities
Wiped out tribal ownership of tribal lands
Gave 160 acres of land to family leaders
– If behaved like good white settlers, they could keep
the land and get citizenship in 25 years
• Land not given to N. Americans was sold to
railroads and settlers, and proceeds were to be
used to educate and civilize the N. Americans
• “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
Susette La Flesche
Omaha Indian  lecture tour on
Native American issues in the 1870s
Indian Reservations Today
Crazy Horse Monument:
Black Hills, SD
Lakota Chief
Korczak Ziolkowski, Sculptor
Crazy Horse Monument
His vision of the finished
memorial.
Mt. Rushmore: Black Hills, SD
Vanishing Lands
• Once masters of the continent, Native
Americans have been squeezed into just
two percent of U.S. territory.
Source: Copyright © 2000 by The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
Cattle Trails
• The eventual expansion of
the railroad into the cattle
country of the American
West solved the problem of
how to get their meat
profitably to market.
However, driving the cattle
from their ranches in the
south to rail hubs further
north often brought cattle
ranchers and the cowboys
they employed into conflict
with the increasing numbers
of farmers on the Plains.
Copyright (c) Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
Homesteads from the Public Lands
(acreage legally transferred to private
ownership)
Copyright (c) Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
Average Annual Precipitation, with Major Agricultural
Products as of 1900
•
Northern Hemisphere storms typically circle the globe in a west-to-east direction. Much of the lifenourishing water in these storms is dumped as rainfall on the western slopes of the Pacific coastal
ranges and the Rocky Mountains, creating huge “rain shadows” in the Great Basin and in the
western Great Plains. Westward-faring pioneers had to learn new agricultural techniques when
they pushed settlement into the drought-prone regions west of the 100th meridian, as reflected in
the patterns of crop distribution by 1900.
Copyright (c) Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
1890 and the Closing of the
Frontier
• Superintendent of the Census claimed that
no discernable frontier line existed and
that all unsettled territories had some
pockets of settlement
• Famous essay published by Frederick
Jackson Turner
– “The Significance of the Frontier in American
History”
Frederick Jackson Turner and the
Frontier
• In 1827, Secretary of War claimed it would
take 500 years to settle the west, it took
less than 70
• As frontier closed and was settled,
Americans created national parks to
preserve the lands:
– Yellowstone (1872)
– Yosemite and Sequoia (1890)
Frederick Jackson Turner and the
Frontier
• But frontier was more than a place, it was a state
of mind and symbol of opportunity.
• The closing of the frontier had some
consequences:
– Safety Valve Theory
• Idea that when times got tough, city dwellers and workers
moved put west to farm and prospered
• Partly true, Why?
–
–
–
–
Most did not know how to farm
Not funds to leave
But, maybe kept wages high enough to discourage leaving
Immigrants did go and farm
• Real safety valve was western cities like Chicago, Denver,
and San Francisco
Frederick Jackson Turner and the
Frontier
• “ American History has been in a large
degree the history of the colonization of
the Great West.”
• According to Turner, cannot understand
U.S. History without understanding the
movement and drive to head West
Farming and Industrialization
• As prices increased for cash crops such as
wheat and corn, Farmers found themselves
investing greatly in the industrialization of
farming:
– Become both specialists and businesspeople
– Invest heavily in expensive machinery such as the
combine and twine binder
– Become more and more dependent on
manufacturing, bankers, railroads, and industry
– So, in a nutshell, farming becomes Big Business, but
farmers are not really businesspeople
– Farms got larger as the work force got smaller, hence
increasing urbanization
– When things went sour, farmers usually blamed
outside forces of railroads, bankers, manufacturing,
and global crop prices
Farming and Industrialization
• So, being tied to a one crop economy meant for many
booms and busts. Especially wheat and grain farmers,
as they sold a crop that was tied to the world market and
prices
• In 1880’s and 1890’s this is exactly what happened as
world prices dropped about 50% for a bushel of wheat
and deflation occurred
• Much of deflation a result of low money supply
• So farmers caught in vicious cycle of producing too
much grain, lowering the price, and not making enough
money to pay mortgages or loans on machinery.
Basically, they were screwed.
Farmer’s Plight
• In addition, farmers were stricken with natural
disaster:
–
–
–
–
Grasshoppers
Boll Weavil
Drought
Erosion and flooding
• Government also over assessed many
properties and charged enormous property
taxes. They also put protective tariffs on
manufacturing and none for agriculture
Farmer’s Plight
• They also were charged extortionate rates by
the barbed-wire trust, fertilizer trust, harvester
trust.
• Middlemen took huge cuts from profits and
storage rates crazy high
• Lastly, railroads had them firmly under control
and charged stupid rates too
• Farmers traditionally very individualistic, so they
did not know how to organize well for their
collective benefit.
• But what they did do was start a huge political
movement
The Farmers’ Grievances
•
This poster from 1875 expresses one of the agrarian radicals’ fundamental
premises: that all other walks of life were dependent--or even parasitic-- on
the indispensable work of farmers. In his famous “Cross of Gold” speech in
1896, Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan put it this
way: “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring
up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the
streets of every city in the country.”
The Granger Collection
The Grange
• Organized in 1867 by Oliver Kelley.
– At first, goal was to enhance life of the
isolated farmer through social, educational,
and fraternal activities.
– By 1875, had nearly 800,000 members
– Overtime, raised goal from individual
improvement to the improvement of the
farmers’ collective plight
• Cooperatively owned stores and grain storage
units
• Many Grangers also entered politics, especially in
mid west
Farmers Alliance
• Founded in Texas in late 1870’s.
– Allied together to break the control of the
trusts, and spread widely in West, Midwest,
and South. By 1890, had over million
members
• Out of this the People’s Party emerged,
better known as the Populists
Populist Party
• Agenda
– Attacked Wall Street and the trusts
– Nationalizing the railroad, telephone, and
telegraph
– Graduated income tax,
– Sub-treasury to provide loans to farmers and
store grain in government held warehouses
until prices rose
– Free and unlimited coinage of silver
Coxey’s Army
• As panic hit laborers hard, Populists tried
to join the two groups together.
• Many marched in protest, and most
important was Jacob Coxey
– Demanded 500 million in treasury notes and
also relive unemployment with a public works
program
– Marched to D.C., but arrested for walking on
the grass
Pullman Strike
• Pullman cut wages by a third, but rent had
to stay the same
• Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and
leader, lead Pullman laborers on a strike
• Attorney General Richard Olney had
federal troops squash the strike
• Federal government sided with capital and
caused a larger wedge between labor and
capital
McKinley
Campaign
Headquarters,
Chicago,
1896
•
Those few black Americans
who could exercise their right to
vote in the 1890s still remained
faithful to “the party of Lincoln.”
Smithsonian Institution
Crying for
Protection,
1896
• Vanderbilt established a
shipping-land transit line
across Nicaragua in
response to the California
gold rush. By the time of his
death, his New York Central
rail line ran from New York
to Chicago and operated
along more than forty-five
hundred miles of track.
The Granger Collection