The West: Exploiting an Empire,
1849-1902
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Cheyenne Chief, Lean Bear visited New York &
Washington DC in 1863. He met w/ President
Lincoln. Lincoln assured him that the
government wanted a peaceful and orderly
migration into the West, but warned that many
of the pioneers could not be restrained. A year
later, US soldiers killed Lean Bear in cold
blood.
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“The Great American Desert”, was long
thought to be uninhabitable by anyone but
aborigines. By 1840 white settlement had
paused at the edge of timber country in
Missouri. Beyond that was the Great Plains.
There was rich soil & good rainfall in the Easter
Plains, but the rough High Plains were
semiarid. The Rockies & other mountain ranges
held back rainfall, barely 15 in. a year.
Traditional farming was ineffective so early
settlers headed directly to the temperate Pacific
Coast.
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AS folks began moving west of the Mississippi,
they encountered new conditions including
vast treeless plains and towering mountain
ranges. Most of all they left behind water and
timber and had to devise ways of dealing w/
new challenges.
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By 1867, nearly 25 million Indians inhabited the
western half of the US. The tribes originally
from the East kept moving west b/c of the
waves of settlers. Others were native to the
region, w/ cultures suited to their
environments. Within 12 yrs those many white
settler confrontations forced the Indians onto
small reservations, and diseases introduced by
whites had decimated the California Indians.
By the end of the 1890s, the Indian cultures had
crumbled. So within that 30 yr span the Indians
and they’re culture had been crushed.
The Indians had developed a complex culture.
The US government & white settlers employed
methods – political, military, legal/illegal and
cultural – to oust the tribes from their lands,
‘civilize’ them, and contain and control them.
The horse aided the Plains Indians in the
abandonment of farming to a nomadic lifestyle
following the buffalo.
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When gold was discovered in California, the
Great Plains became a highway to the Pacific &
the government began to confine the Indians to
specific areas causing wars & massacres. The
Sioux War (1865-1867), Congress adopted a
‘small reservation’ approach, designed to keep
the Indians out of the white mans way.
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The final series of wars began with the short
lived Sioux victory @ Little Bighorn in 1876.
Others took place as well; Wounded Knee
(1890), when the army became determined to
stop the ‘Ghost Dances.’
The final step was the ‘assimilation’ plan to use
education, land policy and federal law to
eradicate tribal authority and culture.
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Congress pass the Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
which destroyed communal ownership of land
and gave small farms to each head of a family.
Those Indians who left the tribe became US
citizens. The final blow to tribal life came when
the buffalo were exterminated by professional
& amateur white hunters.
Only 250,000 Indians still inhabited the United
States by 1900, and most lived in poverty.
From 1870-1900 the rush for land settlement
was intense, and so was the demand for
livestock, agricultural, mineral, & lumber
products.
In 1849 with the California Gold Rush, settlers
left St. Louis in April in order to get through
the Rocky Mts. Before snow closed the passes.
The 6 month trip was arduous.
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The Homestead Act (1862) distributed 48
million acres of western land. A settler would
receive 160 acres for $10 and the promise to
stay and work the land for 5 years.
For the next 40 years the federal government
‘distributed’ ½ billion acres; mostly to states,
private corporations, and individuals. 128
million acres were granted to railroad
companies.
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Timber Culture Act (1873) granted larger tracts
to settlers if they agreed to plant trees.
Desert Land Act (1877) granted larger pieces to
settlers who would install irrigation systems,
but this lead to fraudulent buyers &
contractors.
Newlands Act (1902) help transform the West
with federal money for irrigation projects.
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Mining, cattle, and land led to boom or bust
economic cycles.
The California Gold Rush brought individual
prospectors who used placer mining to remove
the surface gold. Corporations brought in
heavy machinery to remove the metal from the
deep lodes. The Black Hills rush of North
Dakota (1874-76) brought miners into the Sioux
hunting grounds and destroyed it.
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With each new strike brought a town and
problems including hostility & racism.
The Foreign Miners Tax in California drove
foreigners out.
Chinese Exclusion Act suspended Chinese
immigration for 10 years.
Mining led to early statehood for Nevada,
Idaho, & Montana.
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Cattle ranching became prosperous on the
plains. Cattle grazed on the prairies and were
driven by cowboys to the railheads and then
shipped to Chicago for slaughter.
Farmers started fencing their lands and by 1900
30% of the country’s population lived in the Far
West. Joseph Glidden expedited fencing with
the invention of barbed wire. The migration of
African Americans from the south helped fuel
the transformation of the Plains. Exodusters
moved to Kansas or Oklahoma.
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Settlers became disenchanted with the harsh
conditions and other problems abandoned
their homesteads and moved home or further
west. They complained about declining crop
prices, rising rail rates, & heavy mortgages. The
Grange became a lobbying group for the plains
farmer in the state & federal governments.
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In 1889, Indian Territory that had been
reserved for the Indians was opened for white
settlement. At noon April 22, thousands rushed
in to grab land. By November 1907, Oklahoma
was established as a state.