Early 19th Century Families Namef Hunt in Mew York

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I. Introduction
Two. Post-Civil State of war W Migration
III. The Indian Wars and Federal Peace Policies
IV. Beyond the Plains
V. Western Economic Expansion: Railroads and Cattle
Half-dozen. The Resource allotment Era and Resistance in the Native Due west
7. Rodeos, Wild Westward Shows, and the Mythic American W
VIII. The Due west as History: the Turner Thesis
IX. Primary Sources
X. Reference Material

I. Introduction

Native Americans long dominated the vastness of the American Westward. Linked culturally and geographically by trade, travel, and warfare, diverse Indigenous groups controlled nearly of the continent west of the Mississippi River deep into the nineteenth century. Spanish, French, British, and afterward American traders had integrated themselves into many regional economies, and American emigrants pushed ever due west, but no imperial ability had yet achieved anything approximating political or military command over the great majority of the continent. But and so the Ceremonious War came and went and decoupled the West from the question of slavery merely as the United states of america industrialized and laid down rails and pushed its always-expanding population ever farther west.

Indigenous Americans have lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, peradventure equally many as 250,000 Native people withal inhabited the American West.^one Simply then unending waves of American settlers, the American war machine, and the unstoppable onrush of American capital conquered all. Frequently in violation of its own treaties, the United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the Westward kickoff equally territories and then as states, and, for the commencement time in its history, controlled the enormity of land betwixt the 2 oceans.

The history of the belatedly-nineteenth-century Westward is not a simple story. What some touted every bit a triumph—the due west expansion of American say-so—was for others a tragedy. The W contained many peoples and many places, and their intertwined histories marked a pivotal transformation in the history of the The states.

II. Postal service-Civil War Westward Migration

In the decades after the Civil War, American settlers poured across the Mississippi River in record numbers. No longer simply crossing over the continent for new imagined Edens in California or Oregon, they settled at present in the vast heart of the continent.

Many of the get-go American migrants had come up to the West in search of quick profits during the midcentury gold and argent rushes. As in the California blitz of 1848–1849, droves of prospectors poured in subsequently precious-metal strikes in Colorado in 1858, Nevada in 1859, Idaho in 1860, Montana in 1863, and the Black Hills in 1874. While women often performed housework that allowed mining families to subsist in often difficult weather condition, a significant portion of the mining workforce were unmarried men without families dependent on service industries in nearby towns and cities. In that location, working-form women worked in shops, saloons, boardinghouses, and brothels. Many of these coincident operations profited from the mining boom: as failed prospectors found, the rush itself often generated more wealth than the mines. The gold that left Colorado in the first seven years afterward the Pikes Top gilded strike—estimated at $25.5 million—was, for instance, less than half of what outside parties had invested in the fever. The 100,000-plus migrants who settled in the Rocky Mountains were ultimately more valuable to the region's development than the gold they came to discover.ⁱⁱ

Others came to the Plains to extract the hides of the neat bison herds. Millions of animals had roamed the Plains, just their tough leather supplied industrial belting in eastern factories and raw material for the booming clothing industry. Specialized teams took downwardly and skinned the herds. The infamous American bison slaughter peaked in the early 1870s. The number of American bison plummeted from over ten million at midcentury to simply a few hundred by the early on 1880s. The expansion of the railroads allowed ranching to replace the bison with cattle on the American grasslands.³

While bison supplied leather for America'south booming article of clothing industry, the skulls of the animals as well provided a fundamental ingredient in fertilizer. This 1870s photo illustrates the massive number of bison killed for these and other reasons (including sport) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Photo of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to exist basis for fertilizer, 1870s. Wikimedia.

The nearly seventy thousand members of the Church building of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more than commonly called Mormons) who migrated w between 1846 and 1868 were similar to other Americans traveling westward on the overland trails. They faced many of the same problems, but dissimilar most other American migrants, Mormons were fleeing from religious persecution.

Many historians view Mormonism as a "uniquely American faith," not just because it was founded by Joseph Smith in New York in the 1830s, only because of its optimistic and futurity-oriented tenets. Mormons believed that Americans were exceptional—chosen past God to spread truth beyond the globe and to build utopia, a New Jerusalem in Northward America. However, many Americans were suspicious of the Latter-Solar day Saint movement and its unusual rituals, especially the practice of polygamy, and most Mormons found information technology difficult to practice their faith in the eastern United states. Thus began a serial of migrations in the midnineteenth century, first to Illinois, then Missouri and Nebraska, and finally into Utah Territory.

Once in the west, Mormon settlements served as important supply points for other emigrants heading on to California and Oregon. Brigham Young, the leader of the Church afterward the death of Joseph Smith, was appointed governor of the Utah Territory by the federal government in 1850. He encouraged Mormon residents of the territory to engage in agricultural pursuits and exist cautious of the outsiders who arrived as the mining and railroad industries developed in the region.⁴

It was land, ultimately, that drew the most migrants to the West. Family farms were the backbone of the agronomical economy that expanded in the Due west after the Civil State of war. In 1862, northerners in Congress passed the Homestead Act, which allowed male person citizens (or those who declared their intent to go citizens) to claim federally owned lands in the Due west. Settlers could head due west, choose a 160-acre surveyed section of state, file a merits, and brainstorm "improving" the state past plowing fields, building houses and barns, or earthworks wells, and, later on 5 years of living on the state, could utilize for the official title deed to the land. Hundreds of thousands of Americans used the Homestead Act to acquire land. The treeless plains that had been considered unfit for settlement became the new agricultural mecca for land-hungry Americans.^five

The Homestead Act excluded married women from filing claims considering they were considered the legal dependents of their husbands. Some unmarried women filed claims on their own, but single farmers (male or female) were difficult-pressed to run a farm and they were a small minority. Most farm households adopted traditional divisions of labor: men worked in the fields and women managed the domicile and kept the family fed. Both were essential.⁶

Migrants sometimes plant in homesteads a self-sufficiency denied at habitation. 2d or tertiary sons who did not inherit state in Scandinavia, for instance, founded subcontract communities in Minnesota, Dakota, and other Midwestern territories in the 1860s. Boosters encouraged emigration by advertisement the semiarid Plains every bit, for case, "a flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses, and watered by numerous streams."⁷ Western populations exploded. The Plains were transformed. In 1860, for example, Kansas had nigh ten,000 farms; in 1880 it had 239,000. Texas saw enormous population growth. The federal government counted 200,000 people in Texas in 1850, 1,600,000 in 1880, and three,000,000 in 1900, making it the sixth nigh populous state in the nation.

3. The Indian Wars and Federal Peace Policies

The "Indian wars," and then mythologized in western folklore, were a series of seemingly sporadic, localized, and often brief engagements between U.S. war machine forces and various Native American groups. More than sustained and equally impactful conflicts were economical and cultural. New patterns of American settlement, railroad construction, and fabric extraction clashed with the vast and cyclical movement beyond the Cracking Plains to chase buffalo, raid enemies, and trade goods. Thomas Jefferson's erstwhile dream that Indigenous nations might alive isolated in the Westward was, in the face of American expansion, no longer a viable reality. Political, economic, and even humanitarian concerns intensified American efforts to isolate Indians on reservations. Although Indian removal had long been a function of federal Indian policy, post-obit the Ceremonious State of war the U.S. government redoubled its efforts. If treaties and other forms of persistent coercion would not work, federal officials pushed for more drastic measures: after the Civil State of war, coordinated armed forces action by glory Civil State of war generals such equally William Sherman and William Sheridan exploited and exacerbated local conflicts sparked by illegal business ventures and settler incursions. Against the threat of confinement and the extinction of traditional ways of life, Native Americans battled the American army and the encroaching lines of American settlement.

In one of the primeval western engagements, in 1862, while the Civil War withal consumed the The states, tensions erupted between Dakota Nation and white settlers in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. The 1850 U.S. demography recorded a white population of nigh 6,000 in Minnesota; eight years afterward, when information technology became a state, it was more than 150,000.⁸ The illegal influx of American farmers pushed the Dakota to the breaking point. Hunting became unsustainable and those Dakota who had taken upward farming constitute just poverty. The federal Indian agent refused to disburse promised food. Many starved. Andrew Myrick, a trader at the agency, refused to sell food on credit. "If they are hungry," he is alleged to have said, "let them eat grass or their own dung." Then, on August 17, 1862, four immature men of the Santees, a Dakota band, killed five white settlers nigh the Redwood Bureau, an American authoritative office. In the face up of an inevitable American retaliation, and over the protests of many members, the tribe chose war. On the post-obit day, Dakota warriors attacked settlements about the Bureau. They killed thirty-one men, women, and children (including Myrick, whose rima oris was found filled with grass). They then ambushed a U.South. military detachment at Redwood Ferry, killing twenty-three. The governor of Minnesota called up militia and several g Americans waged war against the Sioux insurgents. Fighting broke out at New Ulm, Fort Ridgely, and Birch Coulee, but the Americans bankrupt the Indian resistance at the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23, ending the so-called Dakota War.⁹

Buffalo Soldiers, the nickname given to African-American cavalrymen by the native Americans they fought, were the first peacetime all-black regiments in the regular United States ground forces. These soldiers regularly confronted racial prejudice from other Ground forces members and civilians but were an essential part of American victories during the Indian Wars of the belatedly nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "[Buffalo soldiers of the 25th Infantry, some wearing buffalo robes, Ft. Keogh, Montana] / Chr. Barthelmess, photographer, Fort Keogh, Montana," 1890. Library of Congress.

More two thousand Dakota had been taken prisoner during the fighting. Many were tried at federal forts for murder, rape, and other atrocities, in a kind of legalistic choreography that conveyed American ideas of Native guilt and white innocence. Military tribunals convicted 303 Dakota and sentenced them to hang. At the last minute, President Lincoln commuted all merely thirty-viii of the sentences. Minnesota settlers and government officials insisted not merely that the Dakota lose much of their reservation lands and be removed further west, only that those who had fled be hunted down and placed on reservations as well. The American armed forces gave chase and, on September iii, 1863, later a yr of attrition, American military units surrounded a large encampment of Dakota. American troops killed an estimated 3 hundred men, women, and children. Dozens more were taken prisoner. Troops spent the next two days burning winter food and supply stores to starve out the Dakota resistance, which continued to insist on Dakota sovereignty and treaty rights.

Further south, settlers inflamed tensions in Colorado. In 1851, the commencement Treaty of Fort Laramie had secured right-of-mode access for Americans passing through on their style to California and Oregon. But a gold rush in 1858 drew approximately 100,000 white gilt seekers, and they demanded new treaties be made with local Indian groups to secure land rights in the newly created Colorado Territory. Cheyenne bands splintered over the possibility of signing a new treaty that would confine them to a reservation. Settlers, already wary of raids by powerful groups of Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Comanches, meanwhile read in their local newspapers sensationalist accounts of the insurgence in Minnesota. Militia leader John M. Chivington warned settlers in the summertime of 1864 that the Cheyenne were unsafe, urged war, and promised a swift military machine victory. Settlers sparked conflict and sporadic fighting broke out. The anile Cheyenne principal Blackness Kettle, believing that a peace treaty would exist all-time for his people, traveled to Denver to suit for peace talks. He and his followers traveled toward Fort Lyon in accord with government instructions, but on November 29, 1864, Chivington ordered his 7 hundred militiamen to move on the Cheyenne camp nigh Fort Lyon at Sand Creek. The Cheyenne tried to declare their peaceful intentions merely Chivington's militia cut them downward. Information technology was a slaughter. Chivington's men killed two hundred men, women, and children.¹⁰ The Sand Creek Massacre was a national scandal, alternately condemned and applauded.

Every bit settler incursions continued to provoke conflict, Americans pushed for a new "peace policy." Congress, confronted with these tragedies and further violence, authorized in 1868 the creation of an Indian Peace Commission. The commission'due south report of American Indians decried prior American policy and galvanized back up for reformers. After the inauguration of Ulysses Southward. Grant the following spring, Congress allied with prominent philanthropists to create the Board of Indian Commissioners, a permanent advisory body to oversee Indian affairs and prevent the farther outbreak of violence. The board effectively Christianized American Indian policy. Much of the reservation system was handed over to Protestant churches, which were tasked with finding agents and missionaries to manage reservation life. Congress hoped that religiously minded men might fare better at creating just assimilation policies and persuading Indians to accept them. Historian Francis Paul Prucha believed that this try at a new "peace policy . . . might merely take properly been labelled the 'religious policy.'"^xi

Tom Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, entered the Carlisle Indian School, a Native American boarding school founded by the Usa government in 1879, on October 21, 1882 and departed on August 28, 1886. Torlino'southward student file independent photographs from 1882 and 1885. Carlisle Indian Schoolhouse Digital Resources Middle.

Many female Christian missionaries played a cardinal role in cultural reeducation programs that attempted to not only instill Protestant religion but also impose traditional American gender roles and family structures. They endeavored to replace Indians' tribal social units with small, patriarchal households. Women'south labor became a contentious consequence considering few tribes divided labor according to the gender norms of middle- and upper-class Americans. Fieldwork, the traditional domain of white males, was primarily performed by Native women, who also commonly controlled the products of their labor, if not the state that was worked, giving them status in society every bit laborers and food providers. For missionaries, the goal was to go Native women to go out the fields and engage in more than proper "women's" piece of work—housework. Christian missionaries performed much as secular federal agents had. Few American agents could meet Native Americans on their own terms. Most viewed reservation Indians as lazy and thought of Native cultures every bit inferior to their own. The views of J. L. Broaddus, appointed to oversee several small Indian tribes on the Hoopa Valley reservation in California, are illustrative: in his annual report to the Commissioner of Indian Diplomacy for 1875, he wrote, "The bully majority of them are idle, listless, careless, and improvident. They seem to take no idea about provision for the future, and many of them would not work at all if they were not compelled to do so. They would rather live upon the roots and acorns gathered by their women than to work for flour and beefiness."¹²

If the Indians could not exist forced through kindness to alter their ways, well-nigh agreed that it was acceptable to employ force, which Native groups resisted. In Texas and the Southern Plains, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and their allies had wielded enormous influence. The Comanche in particular controlled huge swaths of territory and raided vast areas, inspiring terror from the Rocky Mountains to the interior of northern United mexican states to the Texas Gulf Coast. But after the Civil War, the U.South. military machine refocused its attending on the Southern Plains.

The American military first sent messengers to the Plains to detect the elusive Comanche bands and ask them to come to peace negotiations at Medicine Lodge Creek in the fall of 1867. But terms were muddled: American officials believed that Comanche bands had accepted reservation life, while Comanche leaders believed they were guaranteed vast lands for buffalo hunting. Comanche bands used designated reservation lands as a base of operations from which to collect supplies and federal annuity goods while continuing to hunt, trade, and raid American settlements in Texas.

Confronted with renewed Comanche raiding, specially past the famed war leader Quanah Parker, the U.Southward. military finally proclaimed that all Indians who were not settled on the reservation past the fall of 1874 would exist considered "hostile." The Red River War began when many Comanche bands refused to resettle and the American military launched expeditions into the Plains to subdue them, culminating in the defeat of the remaining roaming bands in the canyonlands of the Texas Panhandle. Common cold and hungry, with their way of life already decimated by soldiers, settlers, cattlemen, and railroads, the last gratuitous Comanche bands were moved to the reservation at Fort Sill, in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.¹³

On the northern Plains, the Sioux people had all the same to fully surrender. Following the armed forces defeats of 1862, many bands had signed treaties with the United States and drifted into the Ruby-red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies to collect rations and annuities, but many connected to resist American encroachment, especially during Carmine Cloud's War, a rare victory for the Plains people that resulted in the Treaty of 1868 and created the Great Sioux Reservation. So, in 1874, an American trek to the Black Hills of S Dakota discovered gilt. White prospectors flooded the territory. Caring very lilliputian about Indian rights and very much about getting rich, they brought the Sioux state of affairs again to its breaking point. Enlightened that U.Due south. citizens were violating treaty provisions, but unwilling to prevent them from searching for gold, federal officials pressured the western Sioux to sign a new treaty that would transfer control of the Black Hills to the U.s. while Full general Philip Sheridan quietly moved U.Due south. troops into the region. Initial clashes between U.S. troops and Sioux warriors resulted in several Sioux victories that, combined with the visions of Sitting Bull, who had dreamed of an fifty-fifty more than triumphant victory, attracted Sioux bands who had already signed treaties simply now joined to fight.^xiv

In late June 1876, a division of the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was sent upwards a trail into the Black Hills as an advance guard for a larger strength. Custer's men approached a military camp along a river known to the Sioux every bit Greasy Grass merely marked on Custer'due south map as Little Bighorn, and they found that the influx of "treaty" Sioux equally well as aggrieved Cheyenne and other allies had swelled the population of the hamlet far beyond Custer's estimation. Custer's 7th Cavalry was vastly outnumbered, and he and 268 of his men were killed.^fifteen

Custer'south fall shocked the nation. Cries for a swift American response filled the public sphere, and military expeditions were sent out to crush Native resistance. The Sioux splintered off into the wilderness and began a campaign of intermittent resistance but, outnumbered and suffering later a long, hungry winter, Crazy Equus caballus led a band of Oglala Sioux to surrender in May 1877. Other bands gradually followed until finally, in July 1881, Sitting Balderdash and his followers at last laid down their weapons and came to the reservation. Indigenous powers had been defeated. The Plains, it seemed, had been pacified.

Four. Beyond the Plains

Plains peoples were non the only ones who suffered every bit a upshot of American expansion. Groups like the Utes and Paiutes were pushed out of the Rocky Mountains past U.S. expansion into Colorado and away from the northern Great Basin by the expanding Mormon population in Utah Territory in the 1850s and 1860s. Faced with a shrinking territorial base, members of these two groups often joined the U.S. military in its campaigns in the southwest confronting other powerful Native groups like the Hopi, the Zuni, the Jicarilla Apache, and especially the Navajo, whose population of at to the lowest degree ten yard engaged in both farming and sheep herding on some of the almost valuable lands acquired by the United States after the Mexican State of war.

Conflicts between the U.S. military, American settlers, and Native nations increased throughout the 1850s. By 1862, General James Carleton began searching for a reservation where he could remove the Navajo and terminate their threat to U.S. expansion in the Southwest. Carleton selected a dry, near treeless site in the Bosque Redondo Valley, three hundred miles from the Navajo homeland.

In April 1863, Carleton gave orders to Colonel Kit Carson to round up the entire Navajo population and escort them to Bosque Redondo. Those who resisted would be shot. Thus began a menses of Navajo history called the Long Walk, which remains deeply of import to Navajo people today. The Long Walk was not a unmarried issue but a series of forced marches to the reservation at Bosque Redondo between August 1863 and December 1866. Weather at Bosque Redondo were horrible. Provisions provided by the U.S. Army were not simply inadequate only often spoiled; illness was rampant, and thousands of Navajos died.

By 1868, information technology had become clear that life at the reservation was unsustainable. General William Tecumseh Sherman visited the reservation and wrote of the inhumane situation in which the Navajo were essentially kept as prisoners, but lack of cost-effectiveness was the principal reason Sherman recommended that the Navajo exist returned to their homeland in the West. On June 1, 1868, the Navajo signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, an unprecedented treaty in the history of U.Due south.-Indian relations in which the Navajo were able to return from the reservation to their homeland.

The attacks on Native nations in California and the Pacific Northwest received significantly less attention than the dramatic conquest of the Plains, but Native peoples in these regions too experienced violence, population decline, and territorial loss. For example, in 1872, the California/Oregon border erupted in violence when the Modoc people left the reservation of the Klamath Nation, onto which they had been forced, and returned to their homelands in an area known as Lost River. Americans had settled the region after Modoc removal several years before, and they complained bitterly of the Natives' render. The U.South. military machine arrived when fifty-two remaining Modoc warriors, led by Kintpuash, known to settlers as Captain Jack, refused to return to the reservation and holed up in defensive positions along the state border. They fought a guerrilla war for eleven months in which at to the lowest degree two hundred U.S. troops were killed before they were finally forced to surrender. Despite appeals from settlers acquainted with the Modoc, the federal government hanged Kintpuash and iii others leaders in a highly choreographed and publicized public execution.¹⁶

Four years later, in the Pacific Northwest, a branch of the Nez Perce (who, generations earlier, had aided Lewis and Clark in their famous journey to the Pacific Ocean) refused to exist moved to a reservation and, under the leadership of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known to settlers and American readers as Chief Joseph, attempted to flee to Canada just were pursued by the U.S. Cavalry. The outnumbered Nez Perce battled across a thousand miles and were attacked nearly two dozen times before they succumbed to hunger and exhaustion, surrendered, were imprisoned, and removed to a reservation in Indian Territory. The flying of the Nez Perce captured the attention of the United states, and a transcript of Chief Joseph'due south give up, equally allegedly recorded by a U.Due south. Army officeholder, became a landmark of American rhetoric. "Hear me, my chiefs," Joseph was supposed to take said, "I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sunday now stands, I will fight no more than forever." Chief Joseph used his celebrity, and, after several years, negotiated his people's relocation to a reservation nearer to their celebrated home.¹⁷

The treaties that had been signed with numerous Native nations in California in the 1850s were never ratified by the Senate. Over ane hundred singled-out Native groups had lived in California before the Spanish and American conquests, only by 1880, the Native population of California had collapsed from nigh 150,000 on the eve of the gold rush to a petty less than 20,000. A few reservation areas were somewhen set up by the U.South. government to collect what remained of the Native population, only about were dispersed throughout California. This was partly the result of state laws from the 1850s that allowed white Californians to obtain both Native children and adults as "apprentice" laborers by merely bringing the desired laborer before a judge and promising to feed, clothe, and eventually release them afterwards a menstruation of "service" that ranged from x to twenty years. Thousands of California'southward Natives were thus pressed into a course of slave labor that supported the growing mining, agricultural, railroad, and cattle industries.

V. Western Economic Expansion: Railroads and Cattle

Bated from agronomics and the extraction of natural resources—such as timber and precious metals—two major industries fueled the new western economy: ranching and railroads. Both developed in connection with each other, accelerated the inrush of settlers displacing Native peoples out, and shaped the collective American memory of the mail–Civil State of war "Wild West."

Equally one booster put it, "the Westward is purely a railroad enterprise." No economic enterprise rivaled the railroads in scale, scope, or sheer touch. No other businesses had attracted such enormous sums of capital, and no other ventures ever received such lavish authorities subsidies (business concern historian Alfred Chandler chosen the railroads the "first modernistic business enterprise").¹⁸ By "annihilating time and space"—by connecting the vastness of the continent—the railroads transformed the Usa and made the American Due west.

Railroads fabricated the settlement and growth of the W possible. By the late nineteenth century, maps of the Midwest were filled with advertisements touting how apace a traveler could traverse the state. The Environment and Club Portal, a digital projection from the Rachel Carson Centre for Environs and Society, a joint initiative of LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum.

No railroad enterprise so captured the American imagination—or federal support—as the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rails networks of the eastern United States. Constructed from the westward by the Key Pacific and from the east by the Marriage Pacific, the two roads were linked in Utah in 1869 to groovy national fanfare. But such a herculean task was non piece of cake, and national legislators threw enormous subsidies at railroad companies, a function of the Republican Party platform since 1856. The 1862 Pacific Railroad Act gave bonds of between $sixteen,000 and $48,000 for each mile of construction and provided vast land grants to railroad companies. Between 1850 and 1871 alone, railroad companies received more than than 175,000,000 acres of public land, an area larger than the state of Texas. Investors reaped enormous profits. As one congressional opponent put information technology in the 1870s, "If there be profit, the corporations may accept it; if at that place be loss, the Government must bear information technology."¹⁹

If railroads attracted unparalleled subsidies and investments, they besides created enormous labor demands. Past 1880, approximately four hundred thousand men—or near 2.5 percentage of the nation's entire workforce—labored in the railroad industry. Much of the work was dangerous and low-paying, and companies relied heavily on immigrant labor to build tracks. Companies employed Irish gaelic workers in the early on nineteenth century and Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century. By 1880, over two hundred thousand Chinese migrants lived in the United States. Once the track were laid, companies still needed a large workforce to go on the trains running. Much railroad piece of work was dangerous, but perhaps the most chancy piece of work was done past brakemen. Before the advent of automatic braking, an engineer would blow the "down brake" whistle and brakemen would scramble to the top of the moving railroad train, regardless of the atmospheric condition atmospheric condition, and run from motorcar to car manually turning brakes. Speed was necessary, and whatever slip could be fatal. Brakemen were also responsible for coupling the cars, attaching them together with a large pin. It was easy to lose a manus or finger and even a slight error could crusade cars to collide.²⁰

The railroads boomed. In 1850, there were 9,000 miles of railroads in the United States. In 1900 there were 190,000, including several transcontinental lines.²¹ To manage these vast networks of freight and passenger lines, companies converged runway at hub cities. Of all the Midwestern and western cities that blossomed from the bridging of western resources and eastern capital in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the near spectacular. It grew from 2 hundred inhabitants in 1833 to over a million by 1890. Past 1893 it and the region from which it drew were completely transformed. The World's Columbian Exposition that year trumpeted the urban center'south progress and broader technological progress, with typical Gilded Age ostentation. A huge, gleaming (just temporary) "White Metropolis" was built in neoclassical manner to house all the features of the fair and cater to the needs of the visitors who arrived from all over the world. Highlighted in the championship of this world's fair were the changes that had overtaken North America since Columbus made landfall four centuries earlier. Chicago became the most important western hub and served as the gateway betwixt the farm and ranch land of the Cracking Plains and eastern markets. Railroads brought cattle from Texas to Chicago for slaughter, where they were then processed into packaged meats and shipped by refrigerated rail to New York Metropolis and other eastern cities. Such hubs became the key nodes in a rapid-transit economy that increasingly spread across the unabridged continent linking goods and people together in a new national network.

This national network created the fabled cattle drives of the 1860s and 1870s. The first cattle drives across the central Plains began soon after the Ceremonious War. Railroads created the marketplace for ranching, and for the few years later on the war that railroads continued eastern markets with important market hubs such every bit Chicago, only had yet to reach Texas ranchlands, ranchers began driving cattle north, out of the Lone Star state, to major railroad terminuses in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. Ranchers used well-worn trails, such equally the Chisholm Trail, for drives, but conflicts arose with Native Americans in the Indian Territory and farmers in Kansas who disliked the intrusion of large and environmentally destructive herds onto their ain hunting, ranching, and farming lands. Other trails, such every bit the Western Trail, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and the Shawnee Trail, were therefore blazed.

This photochrom print (a new technology in the late nineteenth century that colorized images from a black-and-white negative) depicts a cattle circular-upwards in Cimarron, a crossroads of the late nineteenth-century cattle drives. Detroit Photographic Co., "Colorado. 'Round up' on the Cimarron," c. 1898. Library of Congress.

Cattle drives were difficult tasks for the crews of men who managed the herds. Historians estimate the number of men who worked as cowboys in the belatedly-nineteenth century to be between twelve one thousand and forty thou. Perhaps a fourth were African American, and more than were likely Mexican or Mexican American. Much about the American cowboys evolved from Mexican vaqueros: cowboys adopted Mexican practices, gear, and terms such as rodeo, bronco, and lasso."

While most cattle drivers were men, there are at to the lowest degree xvi verifiable accounts of women participating in the drives. Some, similar Molly Dyer Goodnight, accompanied their husbands. Others, like Lizzie Johnson Williams, helped drive their own herds. Williams made at to the lowest degree iii known trips with her herds upward the Chisholm Trail.

Many cowboys hoped one mean solar day to become ranch owners themselves, only employment was insecure and wages were low. Beginners could wait to earn around $20–$25 per month, and those with years of experience might earn $40–$45. Trail bosses could earn over $50 per month. And it was tough work. On a cattle bulldoze, cowboys worked long hours and faced extremes of rut and cold and intense blowing grit. They subsisted on limited diets with irregular supplies.²²

Cowboys like the 1 pictured here worked the drives that supplied Chicago and other mid-western cities with the necessary cattle to supply and help grow the meat-packing manufacture. Their work was obsolete by the turn of the century, yet their image lived on through vaudeville shows and films that romanticized life in the West. John C.H. Grabill, "The Cow Boy," c. 1888. Library of Congress.

But if workers of cattle earned low wages, owners and investors could receive riches. At the end of the Civil War, a steer worth $4 in Texas could fetch $forty in Kansas. Although profits slowly leveled off, big profits could still exist made. And yet, past the 1880s, the neat cattle drives were largely washed. The railroads had created them, and the railroads ended them: railroad lines pushed into Texas and made the great drives obsolete. But ranching still brought profits and the Plains were better suited for grazing than for agriculture, and western ranchers connected supplying beef for national markets.

Ranching was only i of many western industries that depended on the railroads. By linking the Plains with national markets and rapidly moving people and appurtenances, the railroads made the modernistic American West.

VI. The Allotment Era and Resistance in the Native West

As the rails moved into the Westward, and more than and more than Americans followed, the state of affairs for Native groups deteriorated even farther. Treaties negotiated between the Usa and Native groups had typically promised that if tribes agreed to movement to specific reservation lands, they would hold those lands collectively. Simply as American westward migration mounted and open lands closed, white settlers began to fence that Native people had more their fair share of land, that the reservations were also big, that Native people were using the land "inefficiently," and that they nevertheless preferred nomadic hunting instead of intensive farming and ranching.

By the 1880s, Americans increasingly championed legislation to let the transfer of indigienous lands to farmers and ranchers, while many argued that allotting land to individual Native Americans, rather than to tribes, would encourage American-mode agriculture and finally put Indians who had previously resisted the efforts of missionaries and federal officials on the path to "civilization."

Passed by Congress on February eight, 1887, the Dawes Full general Allotment Act splintered Native American reservations into private family unit homesteads. Each head of a Native family was to exist allotted 160 acres, the typical size of a claim that any settler could establish on federal lands nether the provisions of the Homestead Act. Single individuals over age 18 would receive an eighty-acre allotment, and orphaned children received forty acres. A four-year timeline was established for Indian peoples to make their allotment selections. If at the cease of that fourth dimension no selection had been fabricated, the act authorized the secretary of the interior to appoint an amanuensis to brand selections for the remaining tribal members. Allegedly to protect Indians from being swindled by unscrupulous land speculators, all allotments were to be held in trust—they could not exist sold by allottees—for xx-five years. Lands that remained unclaimed by tribal members after allotment would revert to federal command and exist sold to American settlers.²³

Red Cloud and American Horse – two of the most renowned Ogala chiefs – are seen clasping hands in front of a tipi on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Both men served as delegates to Washington, D.C., after years of actively fighting the American government. John C. Grabill,

Red Cloud and American Horse – two of the nearly renowned Ogala chiefs – are seen clasping easily in front of a tipi on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Southward Dakota. Both men served equally delegates to Washington, D.C., after years of actively fighting the American authorities. John C. Grabill, "'Blood-red Cloud and American Horse.' The two most noted chiefs now living," 1891. Library of Congress.

Americans touted the Dawes Act every bit an uplifting humanitarian reform, merely information technology upended Native lifestyles and left Native nations without sovereignty over their lands. The human action claimed that to protect Native holding rights, it was necessary to extend "the protection of the laws of the United States . . . over the Indians." Tribal governments and legal principles could exist superseded, or dissolved and replaced, by U.S. laws. Under the terms of the Dawes Act, Native nations struggled to hold on to some measure of tribal sovereignty.

The stresses of conquest unsettled generations of Native Americans. Many took comfort from the words of prophets and holy men. In Nevada, on Jan i, 1889, Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka experienced a great revelation. He had traveled, he said, from his earthly home in western Nevada to heaven and returned during a solar eclipse to prophesy to his people. "You must non injure everyone or do damage to anyone. You must non fight. Do right ever," he allegedly exhorted. And they must, he said, participate in a religious ceremony that came to be known as the Ghost Trip the light fantastic toe. If the people lived justly and danced the Ghost Dance, Wovoka said, their ancestors would ascension from the expressionless, droughts would misemploy, the whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would once again roam the Plains.²⁴

Native American prophets had often confronted American imperial power. Some prophets, including Wovoka, incorporated Christian elements similar sky and a Messiah figure into Indigenous spiritual traditions. And then, though it was far from unique, Wovoka's prophecy even so caught on speedily and spread beyond the Paiutes. From across the W, members of the Arapaho, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Shoshone nations, among others, adopted the Ghost Trip the light fantastic religion. Perhaps the nigh avid Ghost Dancers—and certainly the most famous—were the Lakota Sioux.

The Lakota were in dire straits. South Dakota, formed out of state that belonged by treaty to the Lakota, became a land in 1889. White homesteaders had poured in, reservations were carved up and diminished, starvation set in, corrupt federal agents cut food rations, and drought hit the Plains. Many Lakota feared a future every bit the landless subjects of a growing American empire when a delegation of 11 men, led by Kick Bear, joined Ghost Dance pilgrims on the rails westward to Nevada and returned to spread the revival in the Dakotas.

The energy and message of the revivals frightened settlers and Indian agents. Newly arrived Pine Ridge agent Daniel Royer sent fearful dispatches to Washington and the press urging a military crackdown. Newspapers, meanwhile, sensationalized the Ghost Dance.²⁵ Agents began arresting Lakota leaders. Chief Sitting Bull and several others were killed in Dec 1890 during a botched abort, convincing many bands to flee the reservations to join fugitive bands farther west, where Lakota adherents of the Ghost Dance preached that the Ghost Dancers would be allowed to bullets.

Two weeks later, an American cavalry unit of measurement intercepted a band of 350 Lakotas, including over 100 women and children, under Chief Spotted Elk (after known as Bigfoot) seeking refuge at the Pine Ridge Bureau. They were escorted to Wounded Articulatio genus Creek, where they camped for the night. The post-obit morn, December 29, the American cavalrymen entered the camp to disarm Spotted Elk'southward band. Tensions flared, a shot was fired, and a skirmish became a massacre. The Americans fired their heavy weaponry indiscriminately into the camp. Two dozen cavalrymen had been killed by the Lakotas' concealed weapons or by friendly burn down, simply when the guns went silent, betwixt 150 and 300 Native men, women, and children were dead.²⁶

Burial of the dead afterward the massacre of Wounded Knee. U.S. Soldiers putting Indians in common grave; some corpses are frozen in different positions. South Dakota. 1891. Library of Congress.

Wounded Articulatio genus marked the stop of sustained, armed Native American resistance on the Plains. Individuals continued to resist the pressures of assimilation and preserve traditional cultural practices, but sustained war machine defeats, the loss of sovereignty over state and resources, and the onset of crippling poverty on the reservations marked the final decades of the nineteenth century equally a especially dark era for America's western tribes. Just for Americans, it became mythical.

VII. Rodeos, Wild Westward Shows, and the Mythic American West

"The American Due west" conjures visions of tipis, cabins, cowboys, Indians, farm wives in sunbonnets, and outlaws with vi-shooters. Such images pervade American culture, simply they are as old every bit the West itself: novels, rodeos, and Wild Westward shows mythologized the American W throughout the post–Civil War era.

Photograph of Calamity Jane, full-length portrait, seated with rifle.

American frontierswoman and professional scout Martha Jane Canary was amend known to America as Calamity Jane. A figure in western sociology during her life and later on, Calamity Jane was a central character in many of the increasingly popular novels and films that romanticized western life in the twentieth century. "[Martha Canary, 1852-1903, ("Calamity Jane"), full-length portrait, seated with burglarize as General Crook's scout]," c. 1895. Library of Congress.

In the 1860s, Americans devoured dime novels that embellished the lives of real-life individuals such every bit Cataclysm Jane and Billy the Kid. Owen Wister's novels, especially The Virginian, established the character of the cowboy as a gritty stoic with a crude exterior but the courage and heroism needed to rescue people from train robbers, Indians, and cattle rustlers. Such images were later on reinforced when the emergence of rodeo added to pop conceptions of the American West. Rodeos began equally modest roping and riding contests among cowboys in towns nigh ranches or at camps at the end of the cattle trails. In Pecos, Texas, on July 4, 1883, cowboys from two ranches, the Hash Pocketknife and the W Ranch, competed in roping and riding contests as a style to settle an argument; this event is recognized by historians of the Due west equally the first existent rodeo. Casual contests evolved into planned celebrations. Many were scheduled around national holidays, such as Independence Twenty-four hour period, or during traditional roundup times in the leap and fall. Early on rodeos took place in open up grassy areas—not arenas—and included calf and steer roping and roughstock events such as bronc riding. They gained popularity and soon defended rodeo circuits developed. Although about 90 percent of rodeo contestants were men, women helped popularize the rodeo and several pop female bronc riders, such as Bertha Kaepernick, entered men's events, until around 1916 when women'southward competitive participation was curtailed. Americans also experienced the "Wild Due west"—the mythical West imagined in so many dime novels—by attending traveling Wild West shows, arguably the unofficial national amusement of the U.s.a. from the 1880s to the 1910s. Wildly popular across the state, the shows traveled throughout the eastern United States and even beyond Europe and showcased what was already a mythic frontier life. William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody was the offset to recognize the broad national appeal of the stock "characters" of the American West—cowboys, Indians, sharpshooters, cavalrymen, and rangers—and put them all together into a single massive traveling caricature. Operating out of Omaha, Nebraska, Buffalo Bill launched his touring evidence in 1883. Cody himself shunned the word show, fearing that information technology implied an exaggeration or misrepresentation of the Westward. He instead called his production "Buffalo Bill's Wild West." He employed real cowboys and Indians in his productions. Simply information technology was still, of grade, a show. It was entertainment, lilliputian different in its broad outlines from contemporary theater. Storylines depicted westward migration, life on the Plains, and Indian attacks, all punctuated by "cowboy fun": bucking broncos, roping cattle, and sharpshooting contests.²⁷

William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody helped commercialize the cowboy lifestyle, edifice a mythology around life in the Old W that produced big bucks for men similar Cody. Courier Lithography Company, "'Buffalo Bill' Cody," 1900. Wikimedia.

Buffalo Bill, joined past shrewd concern partners skilled in marketing, turned his shows into a awareness. But he was non alone. Gordon William "Pawnee Neb" Lillie, another pop Wild West showman, got his start in 1886 when Cody employed him every bit an interpreter for Pawnee members of the show. Lillie went on to create his own production in 1888, "Pawnee Neb'southward Historic Wild West." He was Cody's only real competitor in the business organization until 1908, when the two men combined their shows to create a new extravaganza, "Buffalo Neb'southward Wild Due west and Pawnee Bill's Great Far East" (nigh people called it the "Ii Bills Bear witness"). It was an unparalleled spectacle. The cast included American cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, Native Americans, Russian Cossacks, Japanese acrobats, and an Australian aboriginal.

Cody and Lillie knew that Native Americans fascinated audiences in the United states and Europe, and both featured them prominently in their Wild W shows. Most Americans believed that Native cultures were disappearing or had already, and felt a sense of urgency to see their dances, hear their song, and be captivated by their bareback riding skills and their elaborate buckskin and feather attire. The shows certainly veiled the true cultural and historic value of so many Native demonstrations, and the Indian performers were curiosities to white Americans, but the shows were one of the few ways for many Native Americans to make a living in the belatedly nineteenth century.

In an try to appeal to women, Cody recruited Annie Oakley, a female sharpshooter who thrilled onlookers with her many stunts. Billed as "Little Sure Shot," she shot apples off her poodle's caput and the ash from her husband'due south cigar, clenched trustingly between his teeth. Gordon Lillie'southward wife, May Manning Lillie, also became a skilled shot and performed every bit "World's Greatest Lady Horseback Shot." Female person sharpshooters were Wild West show staples. Equally many every bit fourscore toured the state at the shows' top. Merely if such acts challenged expected Victorian gender roles, female person performers were typically careful to edgeless criticism by maintaining their feminine identity—for instance, past riding sidesaddle and wearing total skirts and corsets—during their acts.

The western "cowboys and Indians" mystique, perpetuated in novels, rodeos, and Wild West shows, was rooted in romantic nostalgia and, perchance, in the anxieties that many felt in the late nineteenth century'due south new seemingly "soft" industrial world of mill and function work. The mythical cowboy'southward "aggressive masculinity" was the seemingly perfect antidote for middle- and upper-class, city-habitation Americans who feared they "had become over-civilized" and longed for what Theodore Roosevelt called the "strenuous life." Roosevelt himself, a scion of a wealthy New York family and later a popular American president, turned a brief tenure equally a failed Dakota ranch owner into a strong function of his political prototype. Americans looked longingly to the West, whose romance would continue to pull at generations of Americans.

8. The West as History: the Turner Thesis

American anthropologist and ethnographer Frances Densmore records the Blackfoot chief Mount Main in 1916 for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Library of Congress.

In 1893, the American Historical Association met during that yr's Globe'southward Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his "frontier thesis," one of the most influential theories of American history, in his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."

Turner looked dorsum at the historical changes in the West and saw, instead of a seismic sea wave of war and plunder and industry, waves of "civilization" that washed beyond the continent. A borderland line "between savagery and civilization" had moved west from the primeval English language settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon. Turner invited his audience to "stand at Cumberland Gap [the famous laissez passer through the Appalachian Mountains], and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by."²⁸

Americans, Turner said, had been forced by necessity to build a crude-hewn civilization out of the borderland, giving the nation its exceptional hustle and its democratic spirit and distinguishing North America from the stale monarchies of Europe. Moreover, the style of history Turner chosen for was democratic as well, arguing that the work of ordinary people (in this case, pioneers) deserved the same study as that of great statesmen. Such was a novel approach in 1893.

But Turner looked ominously to the future. The Census Bureau in 1890 had declared the frontier closed. In that location was no longer a discernible line running north to due south that, Turner said, any longer divided civilization from savagery. Turner worried for the United States' hereafter: what would become of the nation without the safe valve of the frontier? It was a mutual sentiment. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Turner that his essay "put into shape a good deal of idea that has been floating around rather loosely."²⁹

The history of the W was made by many persons and peoples. Turner'southward thesis was rife with faults, non only in its baldheaded Anglo-Saxon chauvinism—in which nonwhites fell before the march of "civilization" and Chinese and Mexican immigrants were invisible—but in its utter disability to appreciate the bear on of engineering science and regime subsidies and large-scale economic enterprises alongside the work of hardy pioneers. Yet, Turner's thesis held an almost approved position amidst historians for much of the twentieth century and, more importantly, captured Americans' enduring romanticization of the West and the simplification of a long and complicated story into a march of progress.

9. Master Sources

one. Chief Joseph on Indian Diplomacy (1877, 1879)

A co-operative of the Nez Percé tribe, from the Pacific Northwest, refused to be moved to a reservation and attempted to flee to Canada but were pursued by the U.S. Cavalry, attacked, and forced to return. The following is a transcript of Master Joseph's surrender, as recorded by Lieutenant Woods, 20-first Infantry, acting aide-de-camp and acting adjutant-general to Full general Oliver O. Howard, in 1877.

ii. William T. Hornady on the Extermination of the American Bison (1889)

William T. Hornady, Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, wrote a detailed business relationship of the near-extinction of the American bison in the late-nineteenth century.

3. Chester A. Arthur on American Indian Policy (1881)

The following is extracted from President Chester A. Arthur's First Almanac Message to Congress, delivered Dec half dozen, 1881.

4. Frederick Jackson Turner, "Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893)

Perhaps the most influential essay past an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner's accost to the American Historical Clan on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American civilization and contemplated what might follow "the endmost of the frontier."

5. Turning Hawk and American Horse on the Wounded Human knee Massacre (1890/1891)

On Feb 11, 1891, a Sioux delegation met with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. and gave their account of the Wounded Articulatio genus Massacre six weeks prior.

6. Laura C. Kellogg on Indian Education (1913)

The United states used education to culturally assimilate Native Americans. Laura Cornelius Kellogg, an Oneida author, performer, and activist who helped found the Society of American Indians (SAI) in 1913, criticized the cultural chauvinism of American policy. Speaking to the SAI, she challenged her Indian audition to cover modern American commonwealth while maintaining their own identity.

7. Helen Hunt Jackson on a Century of Dishonor (1881)

In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, a history of the injustices visited upon Native Americans. Exposing the many wrongs perpetrated by her country, she hoped "to redeem the proper name of the United States from the stain of a century of dishonor."

8. Tom Torlino (1882, 1885)

Tom Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, entered the Carlisle Indian Schoolhouse, a Native American boarding schoolhouse founded past the The states government in 1879, on Oct 21, 1882 and departed on August 28, 1886. Torlino's pupil file contained photographs from 1882 and 1885.

nine. Frances Densmore and Mount Chief (1916)

American anthropologist and ethnographer Frances Densmore records the Blackfoot main Mountain Main in 1916 for the Bureau of American Ethnology.

10. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Lauren Brand, with content contributions past Lauren Brand, Carole Butcher, Josh Garrett-Davis, Tracey Hanshew, Lindsay Stallones Marshall, Nick Roland, David Schley, Emma Teitelman, and Alyce Webb.

Recommended commendation: Lauren Brand et al., "Conquering the Due west," Lauren Brand, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Early 19th Century Families Namef Hunt in Mew York

I. Introduction

II. Postal service-Civil War Westward Migration

3. The Indian Wars and Federal Peace Policies

Four. Beyond the Plains

V. Western Economic Expansion: Railroads and Cattle

VI. The Allotment Era and Resistance in the Native West

VII. Rodeos, Wild Westward Shows, and the Mythic American West

8. The West as History: the Turner Thesis

9. Master Sources

10. Reference Material

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