The American
Pageant
Chapter 26
The Great West and
the Agricultural
Revolution,
1865-1896
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
The Clash of Cultures on the Plains
• Post Civil War, the Great West =
– relatively untamed, wild, full of Indians, bison, and
wildlife
– sparsely populated by a few Mormons and
Mexicans.
• White settlers begin to populate the Great West
– Indians = caught in the middle
• turned against each other
• were infected with White man’s diseases,
• stuck battling to hunt the few remaining bison
The Clash of Cultures on the Plains
• Sioux
– become great riders, hunters, & fighters
• Spanish introduced the horse to them
• federal govt tried to pacify the Indians by signing
treaties
– Fort Laramie (1851) & Fort Atkinson (1853)
• U.S. failed to understand:
– that such “tribes” & “chiefs” didn’t
necessarily represent groups of people in
Indian culture
– in most cases, Native Americans didn’t
recognize authorities outside of their families.
The Clash of Cultures on the Plains
• 1860s- U.S. govt intensified its efforts
– herded Indians into still smaller & smaller
reservations (like the Dakota Territory)
• Indians were often promised that they wouldn’t be
bothered further after moving out of their ancestral
lands
– often, Indian agents were corrupt & pawned off
shoddy food & products to their own fellow
Indians
– White men often disregarded treaties, though
• frequently swindled the Indians.
The Clash of Cultures on the Plains
• many Native American tribes fought back
– Indian vs. White skirmishes emerged between
roughly 1864 to 1890 in the
so-called “Indian Wars.”
– Post-Civil War, the U.S. Army’s new mission
became—
• clear Indians out of West for White settlers
– sometimes Indians were better equipped than the
federal troops
• arrows could be fired more rapidly than a
muzzle-loaded rifle
• Invention of the Colt .45 revolver (six-shooter)
& Winchester repeating rifle changed this
Receding Native Population
• Sand Creek, Colorado: (1864)
– Colonel J.M. Chivington’s militia massacred ~400
Indians in cold blood—
• Indians who had thought they had been
promised immunity & Indians who were
peaceful & harmless
• 1866:
– Sioux war party ambushed Captain William J.
Fetterman’s command of 81 soldiers & civilians
who were constructing the Bozeman Trail to the
Montana goldfields, leaving no survivors
• one of the few Indian victorie
The Fate of the Indians
• A crisis came on the northern plains (1875)
– Indian Office ordered Sioux to vacate their
Powder River hunting grounds & withdraw
to the reservation.
• On June 25, 1876:
– George A. Custer & his troops were
surrounded & annihilated by Chief Crazy
Horse’s Sioux & Cheyenne warriors at Little
Big Horn.
• Pursued relentlessly by the army
– Sioux bands gradually gave up & moved
onto the reservation
– (1877): Part of both the Dakota &
Oklahoma Territories were taken away,
because whites were looking for gold & still
more farmland.
Receding Native Population
• Nez Percé Indians also revolted:
– gold seekers made the govt shrink their
reservation by 90%
– Tortuous battle
• Chief Joseph finally surrendered his
band after a long trek across the
Continental Divide toward Canada
–buried his hatchet and gave his
famous speech saying, “From where
the sun now stands I will fight no
more forever.”
Receding Native Population
• Apache =
– most difficult to subdue
– led by Geronimo
– they finally surrendered after being pushed
to Mexico
– afterwards, they became successful
farmers
Receding Native Population
• The Indians were subdued due to:
– (1) the railroad, which cut through
the heart of the West
– (2) the White man’s diseases
– (3) the extermination of the buffalo
– (4) wars
– (5) the loss of their land to White
settlement.
Bellowing Herds of Bison
• In the early days, tens of millions of bison dotted the
American prairie
– by the end of the Civil War, there were still 15 million
buffalo grazing
– the eruption of the railroad really started the buffalo
massacre
• Many people killed buffalo for
–
–
–
–
Meat
Skins
Tongues
sport
• They took only one small part of their bodies (like the
tongue) and just left the rest of the carcass to rot
Bellowing Herds of Bison
•
•
•
•
By 1885:
fewer than 1,000 buffalo were left
in danger of extinction
Those left were mostly in Yellowstone
National Park.
The End of the Trail
• Helen Hunt Jackson
– Wrote A Century of Dishonor & Ramona
– Creates sympathy for the Indians in the
1880s
• Humanitarians
– wanted to kindly help Indians “walk the
White man’s road”
• hard-liners stuck to their “kill ‘em all” beliefs,
• no one cared much for the traditional Indian
heritage & culture
The Fate of the Indians
• The Indians:
– Had lost their ancestral lands
– Faced an alien future of farming
– Were confronted by a winter of starvation
– At the same time, news of “salvation” came from a
holy man called Wovoka
• predicted the disappearance of the whites
• Encouraged the Ghost Dance as a ritual to
prepare for the regeneration.
The Fate of the Indians
• Frenzy of Wovoka’s Ghost Dance swept through the
Sioux encampments in 1890,
– alarmed whites called for army intervention.
• The bloody battle at Wounded Knee:
– Erupted when soldiers attempted to disarm a group of
Wovoka’s followers;
– final episode in the long war of suppression of the
Plains Indians.
– Thereafter, the division of tribal lands proceeded
without hindrance.
• As whites flooded the newly acquired land, Indians
became the minority.
The Dead at Wounded Knee (p. 472)
• In December 1890 US soldiers massacred 146 Sioux men, women, and
children in the Battle of Wounded Knee in south Dakota. It was the last big
fight on the northern plains between the Indians and the whites. Black Elk,
a Sioux holy man, related that “after the soldiers marched away from their
dirty work, a heavy snow began to fall…and it grew very cold.” The body of
Yellow Bird lay frozen where it had fallen.
The End of the Trail
• The Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
– dissolved the legal entities of all tribes
– if the Indians behaved the way Whites
wanted them to behave (become farmers
on reservations), they could receive full
U.S. citizenship in 25 years (full citizenship
to all Indians was granted in
1924)
– Irony? an immigrant from a foreign nation
could become a citizen much, much faster
than a native-born Native American.
The End of the Trail
• Reservation land not allotted to Indians under the act
was sold to railroads.
• In 1879, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania
was founded:
– To teach Native American children how to behave
like Whites (erasing their culture)
• Dawes Act
– by 1900 they Native Americans lost ½ their land
that they had held 20 yrs before
– plan would outline U.S. policy toward Indians until
1934
• Indian Reorganization Act would help Indian
population rebound & grow.
Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker
• Gold discovered in CA in late 1840s
• 1858, same happened at Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
– “Fifty-Niners” flocked out there, but w/in a month
or two, the gold runs out
• Comstock Lode in Nevada
– discovered in 1859
– more than $340 million of gold & silver = mined
• Smaller “lucky strikes” drew money-lovers to
Montana, Idaho, and other western states
– Anarchy in these outposts seemed to rule
– most turned to ghost towns
Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker
• After the surface gold was found
– Then ore-breaking machinery was brought in to
break the gold-bearing quartz (very expensive to
do)
• Women
– found new rights in these Western lands however
– gained suffrage in Wyoming (1869) (the first place
for women to vote), Utah
(1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896)
• Mining adds to folklore & American literature (Bret
Harte & Mark Twain).
Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive
• As cities in east grew (late 19C)
– demand for food & meat increased sharply
• transcontinental railroads
– Provided means to market meat to East
profitably
– Cattle could now be shipped to the
stockyards under “beef barons” like the
Swifts and Armours
• meat-packaging industry thus sprang up
Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive
• “Long Drive”
– Texas cowboys herded cattle across
desolate land to railroad terminals in
Kansas
– becomes the feeder of the slaughterhouses
– Dodge City, Abilene, Ogallala, & Cheyenne
became favorite stopovers.
• At Dodge City Wyatt Earp & in Abilene,
Marshal James B. Hickok maintained
order
Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive
• railroads
– made the cattle herding business prosper
– Also destroyed it, how?
• brought sheepherders & homesteaders
– built barbed-wire, invented by Samuel
Glidden, fences that erased the open-range
days of the long cattle drives.
• Blizzards (winter of 1886-87) left cattle starving &
freezing
• Breeders began to fence their ranches & to organize
(i.e. the Wyoming Stock-Growers’ Association)
• legends of the cowboys were made here, but live on
in American lore
The Farmers’ Frontier
• Homestead Act of 1862
– Settlers get 160 acres of land
• Must live on it for 5 years, improve it, &
paying a nominal fee of ~$30.00
• Or they could get land after only 6 month’s residence for
$1.25 an acre
• led ½ million families to buy land & settle out West
• often turned out to be a cruel
– the dry Great Plains, 160 acres was rarely enough for a
family to earn a living & survive
– often, families were forced to give up their homesteads
before the 5 years were up
• droughts, bad land, & lack of necessities forced them out
The Farmers’ Frontier
• Homestead Act (continued):
– fraud grew:
• almost 10X as much land ended up in
the hands of land-grabbing promoters
than in the hands of real farmers
• Sometimes cheats would not even live
on the land
–They would say that they’d erected a
“twelve by fourteen” dwelling—which
later turned out to be 12X14 inches
The Farmers’ Frontier
• Taming Western Deserts
– Railroads such as the Northern Pacific helped
develop the agricultural West
• after the tough, horse-trodden lands had been
plowed & watered, proved to be surprisingly
fertile
– Settlers push further west past the 100th meridian
(which = the magic 20-inch per year rainfall line =
more difficult to grow crops), why?
• higher wheat prices
– resulting from crop failures around the world
The Farmers’ Frontier
• How did the solve this problem?
– Background: geologist John Wesley Powell, said
that little rain fell meant that successful farming
needed massive irrigation
– To counteract the lack of water (& a 6 year drought
in the 1880s)
• farmers developed “dry farming”
– shallow cultivation methods to plant & farm
– SPOILER ALERT: over time it created a finely
pulverized surface soil that contributed to the
notorious “Dust Bowl” several decades later
The Farmers’ Frontier
• A Russian species of wheat—tough and
resistant to drought—
– brought in & grown all over the Great Plains
– other plants were chosen in favor of corn
• Huge federally financed irrigation projects
soon caused the “Great American Desert” to
bloom
– dams that tamed the Missouri and Columbia
Rivers helped water the land
The Far West Comes of Age
• Great West experienced a population surge,
– people moved onto the frontier
• New states like Colorado, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho,
& Wyoming were admitted into the Union
• Not until 1896 was Utah allowed into the
Union, by the 20C
– only Oklahoma, New Mexico, & Arizona
remained as territories.
The Far West Comes of Age
• Oklahoma:
– U.S. govt made available land that had
formerly belonged to the Native Americans
– 1000s of “Sooners” jumped the boundary
line & illegally went into Oklahoma, often
forcing U.S. troops to evict them.
– April 22, 1889:
• was legally opened
• 1907, Oklahoma became the “Sooner
State.”
The Far West Comes of Age
• 1890:
– for the first time, the U.S. census announced that
a frontier was no longer discernible
• Turner Thesis
– inspired by the closing of the frontier
– stated that America needed a frontier
• public didn’t seem to notice that there was no longer
a frontier
– later, they began to realize that the land was
not infinite,
– concern led to the first national park being opened,
Yellowstone, founded in 1872, followed by
Yosemite and Sequoia (1890)
The Fading Frontier
• frontier =
– a state of mind
– symbol of opportunity
• “safety valve theory”
– frontier =a safety valve for folks who, when it
became too crowded in their area, could simply
pack up & leave, moving West.
• few city-dwellers left the cities for the West (they
didn’t know how to farm)
• West increasingly became less & less a land of
opportunity for farms
– was good for hard laborers & ranchers.
The Fading Frontier
• free acreage did lure some immigrant farmers
to the West—
– Esp. farmers that probably wouldn’t have
come to West if land not = cheap—
– lure of West may have led to city
employers raising wages (keep workers in
the cities)
• cities, not the West, may = the safety valves
– busted farmers & fortune seekers made
Chicago & San Francisco into large cities
The Fading Frontier
• Americans expanded west over 100s of years
– trans-Mississippi west is where the Indians
made their last stand
– Anglo culture collided with Hispanic culture
– America faced Asia
The Farm Becomes a Factory
• Farmers
– now increasingly producing single “cash”
crops
• they could then concentrate their
efforts, make profits, & buy
manufactured goods from mail order
companies such as:
– the Aaron Montgomery Ward
catalogue (first sent in 1872)
–or from Sears.
The Farm Becomes a Factory
• Large-scale farmers takeover:
– new inventions in farming lowered the # of
people needed to farm
• a steam engine that could pull a plow,
seeder, or harrow,
• new twine binder
• the combined reaper-thresher sped up
harvesting
– Farmers tended to blame banks & railroads
for their losses rather than their own
shortcomings.
The Farm Becomes a Factory
• Mechanization of agriculture led to enormous
farms, such as:
– those in the Minnesota-North Dakota area
& the Central Valley of CA
– Henry George described the state as a
country of plantations and estates.
• California vegetables & fruits
– raised by ill-paid Mexican workers
– made handsome profits when sold East
Deflation Dooms the Debtor
• In the 1880s, American farmers found ruin:
– world markets rebounded, produced more
crops, & forced prices down
– Paying back debts = especially difficult in
this deflation-filled time
– not enough money to go around for
everyone
– Less money in circulation was called
“contraction”
Deflation Dooms the Debtor
• Farmers faced annual losses
– lived off their fat as best they could
– 1000s of homesteads fell to mortgages &
foreclosures
– farm tenancy rather than farm ownership =
increasing.
• ***fall of the farmers in the late 1800s was similar to
the fall of the South & its “King Cotton” during the
Civil War:
– depending solely on one crop was good in good
times
– disastrous during less prosperous times
Unhappy Farmers
• late 1880s to early 1890s = hard time to
farm:
– Droughts
– grasshopper plagues
– searing heat waves
– Taxes:
• City, state, & federal governments
gouged the farmers, ripping them off by
making them pay painful taxes when
they could least afford to do so.
Unhappy Farmers
• More harassment:
– railroads (by fixing freight prices)
– the middlemen (by taking huge cuts in
profits)
• 1890- ½ of the U.S. population still consisted
of farmers
– but they were hopelessly disorganized.
The Farmers Take Their Stand
• National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (1867)
– Better known as The Grange
– founded by Oliver H. Kelley
– Purpose = to improve the lives of isolated farmers
through social, educational, & fraternal activities
– Claimed over 800,000 members in 1875
• the Grange changed its goals:
– improvement of the collective plight of the
farmer
– found most success in the upper Mississippi Valley,
– eventually, managed to get Congress to pass a set
of regulations known as the Granger Laws, but
afterwards, their influence faded.
The Farmers Take Their Stand
• The Greenback Labor Party
– also attracted farmers
– 1878, the Greenback Laborites earned over
a million votes & elected 14 members
of Congress
– In 1880, they ran General James B.
Weaver, a Civil War general, but he only
polled 3% of the popular vote.
Prelude to Populism
• The Farmers’ Alliance, (late 1870s) = coalition of
farmers
– sought to overthrow the chains from the banks
and railroads that bound them
– programs only aimed at those who owned their
own land
– ignored tenant farmers
– it purposely excluded Blacks.
– members agreed on the
• (1) nationalization of railroads
• (2) the abolition of national banks
• (3) a graduated income tax
• (4) a new federal sub-treasury for farmers.
Prelude to Populism
• Populists were led by
– Ignatius Donnelly from Minnesota
– Mary Elizabeth Lease
– both spoke eloquently & attacked those
that hurt farmers (banks, railroads, etc.).
• The Alliance was still not to be brushed aside,
and in the coming decade:
– they would combine into a new People’s
Party (AKA, the Populist Party) to launch a
new attack on the northeastern citadels of
power.
Coxey’s Army & the Pullman Strike
• The Panic of 1893:
– fueled the passion of the Populists
– Many disgruntled unemployed fled to D.C. calling for
change
– Most famous of these people = “General” Jacob Coxey.
• “Coxey’s Army” marched on Washington with
followers & many newspaper reporters. They called
for:
– Relieving unemployment by an inflationary
government public works program.
– an issuance of $500 million in legal tender notes
• March fizzled out when they were arrested for walking on
the grass
Coxey’s Army & the Pullman Strike
• Pullman Strike in Chicago
– led by Eugene Debs=dramatic
• helped organize the workers of the Pullman Palace Car
Company.
– company was hit hard by the depression & cut wages by
about 1/3.
– Workers struck, sometimes violently.
– U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney called in federal troops
to break up the strike
• His rationale: the strike was interfering with the transit
of U.S. mail (which was attached to Pullman Cars)
• Debs went to prison for 6 months and turned into the leading
Socialist in America.
Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan
• McKinley
– leading Republican candidate in 1896
– respectable & friendly former Civil War
– had served many years in Congress
representing his native Ohio.
– the making of another Ohioan, Marcus
Alonzo Hanna, who financially & politically
supported the candidate through his
political years
Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan
• McKinley (continued)
– conservative in business
– preferring to leave things alone
– platform was for the gold standard, even
though he personally was not
– called for a gold-silver bimetallism—
provided that all the other nations in the
world did the same
• Not likely to happen
Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan
• Democrats were in disarray
– unable to come up with a candidate, until
William Jennings Bryan, the “Boy Orator of
the Platte,” came to their rescue.
• 1896 Democratic Convention(Chicago)
– Bryan delivered a movingly passionate
speech in favor of free silver. In this “Cross
of Gold Speech” he created a sensation
and won the nomination for the
Democratic ticket the next day.
Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan
• Democratic ticket called for unlimited coinage
of silver with the ratio of 16 silver ounces
worth as much as one ounce of gold
– Democrats who would not stand for this
left the party
– Some Democrats charged that they’d
stolen the Populist ideas, and during the
Election of 1896, it was essentially the
“Demo-Pop” party.
Class Conflict: Plowholders Versus Bondholders
• Election of 1896:
– McKinley won decisively (271 electoral votes)
– mostly from the populous East and upper Midwest
– Bryan’s 176, mostly from the South and the West.
• This election = perhaps the most important since the
elections involving Abraham Lincoln
– was the first to seemingly pit the privileged
against the underprivileged
– it =a victory for big business and big cities
Class Conflict: Plowholders Versus Bondholders
• Election of 1896 (cont)
– could be called the “gold vs. silver” election
– it was clear then that Americans were
going w/gold
– Middle Class preserved their comfortable
way of life
– Republicans seized control of the White
House of 16 more years
Republican Standpattism Enthroned
• McKinley took office in 1897
– was calm & conservative
– worked well with his party
– avoided major confrontations
• The Dingley Tariff Bill
– raise more revenue
– raising the tariff level to whopping 46.5%