Hist 111
American Civilization II
Instructor: Dr. Donald R. Shaffer
Upper Iowa University
Lecture 1
Westward Expansion: Significance of the Frontier
 The West exerted a powerful influence
on the U.S. during the 19th century
 Manifest Destiny: the idea that
Americans spreading from the
Atlantic to the Pacific was divinely
foreordained
 End of the Frontier
 1890 Census found no frontier line,
only pockets of unsettled land
 Announcement caused Americans to
reassess the frontier’s meaning
 “Significance of the Frontier in American
History” (1893)
 Prompted the Census Bureau’s 1890
report
 Frontier had acted as a social safety
valve
 Frontier had promoted
individualism, pragmatism,
egalitarianism, equality, and
democracy
Frederick Jackson Turner
Author of the “Significance of the
Frontier in American History”
Lecture 1
Westward Expansion: The New Western History
 Turner and his followers helped create a
romantic view of the West that made its
way into popular culture
 Epitomized by Hollywood western
in which settlers and the U.S. army
bring civilization to the wild West
 The New Western History refers to a
group of scholars that reject Turner’s
positive, rosy view of westward
settlement
 They even rejects the concept of
“frontier” itself since human societies
had long existed in the American West
 Speak of “borderlands” where U.S.
citizens encroached on and disrupted
established societies, and wastefully
exploited nature often causing serious
environmental damage in the process
 Critics have charged this view is too
negative and contend that the effect of
American settlers on the West was on
balance positive
Although lacking a significant effect on
popular culture, 1990’s Dances with
Wolves is arguably a New Western
History Hollywood Western – why?
Lecture 1
Westward Expansion: The Mining Frontier
 Americans moved west to pursue
economic opportunity
 Nowhere was this fact more dramatically
illustrated than among the miners
 Nothing like a gold or silver strike could
bring Anglo-Americans faster into a new
area
 Characteristics of the Mining Frontier:
 Overwhelmingly male: mining was
hard manual labor, which
discouraged the presence of women
 Transient: miners only stayed in a
location as long as it was producing
 Miners generally lacked concern
about the natural environment
 Hence to obtain minerals they
sometimes used environmentally
disastrous practices like hydraulic
mining
Hydraulic Mining
Utilized high powered water
hoses, literally eroding hillsides to
get at the minerals beneath
Lecture 1
Westward Expansion: The Ranching Frontier
 Texas Cattle Frontier
 Appeared before the Civil War
 The Long Drive: longhorn cattle
fattened on government rangeland
and then driven to Kansas railheads
 Ranching highly profitable in its
early decades: $5 calf raised and
fattened on free government grass
could sell for $25 or more
 As frontier moved west so did the center
of the ranching frontier: from Texas to
Colorado, into Wyoming, Montana and
the western Dakotas
 Open-range ranching ended, causes:
 Overgrazing
 Winters of 1885-1887
 Cowboys: Myths vs. Reality
 Became a historical icon
 Tough work for low wages
Cowboys gathered around
a chuck wagon out on
the open range
Lecture 1
Westward Expansion: The Farming Frontier
 “The Great American Desert”: before
Civil War the far west was commonly
considered unsuitable for agriculture
 New farming techniques opened up this
region to American farmers
 Irrigation (not so new)
 “Dry Farming”: farming to maximize
moisture conservation
 Homestead Act (1862)
 Helped spur agricultural settlement
of the West
 Free land for small filing fee, fiveyears residence, and improvement of
the property
 Railroads also spurred settlement by
transporting settlers and packaging land
for sale on affordable terms
 Lonely, isolated, often primitive life in
early years
Prairie sod house in
North Dakota
Why did early settlers build
their houses from earth?
Lecture 1
Westward Expansion: Native Americans
 U.S. expansion came at expense of Native
Americans, who lost much of their land
as well as their way of life
 Buffalo exterminated, Indians cleared
from plains
 Indian Wars: 1865-1890
 Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876):
rare Indian victory
 What to do with the Native Americans of
the plains?
 Even Indians’ friends believed they
must be assimilated into larger
American society
 Dawes Severalty Act (1887):
encouraged assimilation by
distributing tribal lands to
individual Indian families
 Ghost Dance movement: evidence of
Indian cultural trauma
 Wounded Knee (1890): U.S. army
crushed the last armed Indian resistance
in what amounted to a massacre
“Before” and “After” pictures of a
Navajo boy at the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School, c. 1880s
Boarding schools were tools of
assimilating Indian children to
Victorian American culture