Louis Pisha
AP US History
Chapter 17: The New West: Empire within a Nation
Subordination of the Indians
The Great Plains Environment
The Plains Indians
White Supremacy in the West
The Era of the Bonanzas
The Miner’s Bonanza
The Cattlemen’s Bonanza
The Farmer moves West
American Land Policy
The Advance of Settlement
New Farms and New Methods
▪ Americans focused their attention on the New West—America was a nation with
a built-in empire for the exploring, driven by the will to explore that was
captivating people all around the world
Subordination of the Indians
The Great Plains Environment
▪ Great Plains stopped earlier pioneers—strange flora and fauna, harsh, seemingly
uninhabitable
▪ Ways of life of the East were not adapted to it, and neither were some institutions
The Plains Indians
▪ Referred to as “wild Indians” for good reason—had been an effective barrier for
2.5 centuries
▪ Got horses from Spanish in 1500s, and made it easier for them to hunt buffalo
▪ Not all Indians were equally savage or the sole victims—both sides often savage
▪ Plains Indians had culture of Neolithic times
White Supremacy in the West
▪ Whites moved in and demanded the Indians be moved out –government adopted
concentration system, putting Indians in places they swore they would
never violate, and Indians learned never to trust the white man’s promises
▪ Government officials tried to take the Indians’ land they had granted a few years
before, and war broke out
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▪ Chief Black Kettle of Cheyenne escaped, but his group was massacred by
Chivington, and Indians ended up giving up more land
▪ Sioux War: Warriors ambushed and massacred Fetterman and his group
▪ Fed government reviewed its Indian policy and clash between W and S against E
who wanted philanthropy and peace, ended up prevailing and sent Peace
Commission of 1867, inaugurating policy of segregation and Whiteization
▪ Racist towards Indians even while Reconstructing blacks
▪ Many Indians refused to submit and fought, instead—Sheridan unleashed his
troops to subjugate them, and did, but after >200 battles and more white
deaths directly
▪ Coordination of “Grant’s Peace Policy” to indoctrinate Indians and U.S. Army to
force them put most Indians out of settlers’ way by 1874
▪ When fed government permitted speculators to come into Black Hills, Sioux war
and at Little Bighorn Custer & company wiped out –later Battle of
Wounded Knee where the opposite happened
▪ When buffalo were discovered to be profitable, the mechanized butchery was
on—wiped out so many that only 200 left
▪ Humanitarians condemned the physical mistreatment of Indians and instead
attacked their society and imposed that of the whites
▪ Partially realized by Dawes Act of 1887 which broke up and reduced tribal lands
to individuals and sold the rest
▪ Made some citizens but denied them rights and forced religion on them
▪ Other immigrants also came here, and racial discrimination among them,
especially towards Chinese “coolies,” and solution often to exclude them
The Era of the Bonanzas
▪ The frontier: The furs had been gathered, but there was still gold and grass
The Miner’s Bonanza
▪ 1804-1866 Appalachian yield was <$20 million, but 1848-58 California yield
was $555 million
▪ Frontier advanced east from California not west
▪ Type of mining was placer mining—washing pay dirt
▪ Started in Colorado and Nevada in 1858
▪ Meanwhile Comstock Lode—max output 1873—largest ever—near Virginia City
▪ People moved in and got statehood—then left and ghost towns left behind
▪ Assortment of people of all colors and evilness—developed own codes of law
and enforcement
▪ Deadwood Gulch grand finale in caricature of reputation
▪ Many ghost towns but cities did grow, like San Francisco
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The Cattlemen’s Bonanza
▪ Windfall almost as good as miners at first—Grass was there (free) for the taking,
and cows did
▪ Cowboys invaded from South
▪ Cattle grew so fast they became a pest
▪ 1866 first drive of cattle
▪ Cow towns founded for purpose of picking up cattle
▪ Not all the cattle sold for beef—some fed miners and railroaders
▪ Boom of 1880s—prices soaring and so were cowboys’ spirits—plenty of
investors
▪ Cowboy got romanticized—use of six-shooters exaggerated but needed a way to
keep order
▪ Cattle raising on the open range was uneconomical and contributed to its own
downfall
▪ 1855, beef prices fell, drought ruined the grass, and then winter froze the cattle
▪ Spelled the end of the beef bonanza
The Farmer moves West
▪ Farmers brought huge amounts of land under cultivation, and largely due to
homestead policy
American Land Policy
▪ Number of farms almost tripled, but not that many homesteads taken—lots of
homesteads were bought up by landholder speculators
▪ Homestead Act-ers instead hoped to defeat land monopoly—free land was really
a delusion because 2/3 of homestead claimants failed
▪ The law was not really applicable to west, since 160 acres was either too small or
too big
▪ Difficult to reconcile W and E policies—one plan was Timber Culture Act which
allowed another 160 acres if would plant trees on it
▪ More absurd was Desert Land Act which offered 640 acres of desert to anyone
who would irrigate it, since no water to be found, and 95% of proofs
were fraudulent
▪ Timber and Stone act permitted 160 acres of un-farmable land for timber and
stone cultivation—speculators bought 100 million acres from federal land
office, 100 million from Indian reservations, 140 million from state land
holdings
▪ Fed and state governments gave 200 million acres to railroads, but in alternating
sections so kept an even bigger chunk from settlement
The Advance of Settlement
▪ Railroads and states sold six times the land that farmers homesteaded
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▪ Plastered Europe with posters advertizing “Garden of the West”—provided
credit, special rates, and agricultural assistance, all the Homestead Act
forgot
▪ Peasants, especially Scandinavian, flocked, and although taken advantage of,
there was no way they could own land in Europe
▪ States just to the East furnished most of the settlers
▪ Three “Dakota Booms” to N that coincided with gold rushes, Bonanza Farms in
Red River Valley, Hill’s province in Dakota Territory
▪ In the South, Mexican-American settlers came in, but not that many till 20th C
▪ Between Texas and Kansas was Indian Territory, and settlers eyeing it eagerly—
Congress opened it up and thousands rushed in on the signal, staking
claims—later Congress created Oklahoma Territory, and strip after strip
was opened
▪ Turner argued in a paper that contact with frontier rejuvenated democracy
New Farms and New Methods
▪ Blizzards, heat, drought, grasshoppers, fires, dust storms
▪ At first, settlers lived in sod houses, later frame houses, fenced their land with
barbed wire, windmills to pump up water
▪ Adopted “dry farming” in low-rainfall areas, and new machinery, like plows,
harvesters
▪ Soft wheat replaced with hard winter wheat from N Europe
▪ Mechanization made one farmer be able to farm many times as many acres, and
made lives easier
▪ Illusions of W farmer part of great national illusion—W supposedly source of
national regeneration
▪ Turner and Garland saw through the illusion and tried to tell the public
▪ On the other hand, the W left a lasting impact on American mind—Folklore,
ballad, story, even in Europe
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