I. Native Americans and the Trans-Mississippi West
The Plains Indians
Three major sub regions:
The northern Plains: Lakota, Flatheads, Blackfeet, Assiniboins, northern Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Crows
The Central region: Five Civilized Tribes, agricultural life, before horses
South: western Kansas, Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and Texas: the Comanches, Kiowas, southern Arapahos, and Kiowa Apaches
Extended family ties and tribal cooperation; families joined clans to help make decisions
Sioux bands focused on religious and harvest celebrations and was complex; life was a series of circles; self torture; sacrificing; -Indians dispersed across the landscape to minimize damage to the lands;
The Destruction of Nomadic Indian Life
declining bison, intruding miners, the Federal Gov’t introduced tribal reservations
expected to change to an agricultural way of life-force
the Pueblos, Crows, and Hidatsas peacefully accepted
the Dakota Sioux and Navajos opposed to no avail
faced U.S. army in a series of final battles
unfulfilled promises, misunderstandings, butchery, and brutality marked the conflice; Indians facing starvation near Sand Creek snuck away to hunt bison and steal livestock
Governor made proclamation to seek out and kill all hostile Indians on sight and activated a regiment of troops under Colonel John Chivington who massacred a peaceful band of Indians at Sand Creek
Results: Congress sent a peace commission to end fighting and set aside two large districts, one north of Nebraska, and the other south of Kansas, where tribes might convert to Christianity
the Medicine Lodge Treaty: pledged to live on land in present-day Oklahoma
Fort Laramie Treaty: agreed to move to reservations on the so-called Great Sioux Reserve in return for money and provisions
Indians rebelled with violence; Congress established a Board of Indian Commissioners to reform the reservation system-failed
c. Custer’s Last Stand, 1876
Chief Red Cloud’s Oglala band and Chief Spotted Tail’s Brulé and won the concession of staying on their traditional lands; non-treaty Sioux found a powerful leader in Sitting Bull
William Tecumseh Sherman sent George Custer into the Black Hills of South Dakota to find a location to keep an eye on renegade Indians (really to confirm rumors of gold in the Black Hills)
Custer mobilized troops to Little Bighorn River and recklessly advanced against a large company of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors led by Sitting Bull-his army was wiped out
Defeat made army more determined; Sitting Bull surrendered from lack of provisions and joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show
d. “Saving” the Indians
the Women’s National Indian Rights Association
the Dawes Severalty Act: reform Indians and the treatment of Indians as individuals and gave 160 acres of land for farming or 320 acres for grazing to the head of any family complying with the law
eventually became a boon to speculators who commonly obtained the Indians’ most arable tracts of land e. The Ghost Dance and the End of Indian Resistance on the Great Plains, 1890
Wovoka, a prophet, promised to restore the Sioux to their original dominance on the Great Plains if they performed the Ghost Dance
Ghost shirts decorated to ward off evil, moved in a circle until a trance-like state
military authorities grew alarmed, tried to arrest Sitting Bull-killed
Wounded Knee: 300 Indians slaughtered, the end of conflict
II. Settling the West
The First Transcontinental Railroad
the Pacific Railroad Act: authorized the construction of a new transcontinental link, provided grants of land to railroads making them the largest landholders in the West
The Central Pacific: Chinese workers because of low wages, non-drinkers, and furnished their own food and tents-nearly 12,000
Union Pacific meets Central Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah
Proved helpful in fighting the Indians
Settlers and the Railroad
railroads attracted settlers by glorifying the West as a new Garden of Eden, offered long-term loans and free transportation; advised young men to bring their wives and emigrate as families -unintended consequence: made land available to single women or “girl homesteaders”
also helped bring foreign-born migrants to the West, influenced agriculture urging new immigrants to specialize in cash crops
Homesteading on the Great Plains
Еhe Homestead Act: 160 acres of land to any individual who would pay a ten-dollar registration fee, live on the land for five years, and cultivate and improve it-attractive to European immigrants
Unintended: unscrupulous agents filed false claims for the choicest locations, and railroads and state gov’ts acquired huge landholdings-only 1 acre in 9 went to pioneers second problem: 160 acres not enough ample land in the arid west- the Timber Culture Act gave homesteaders an additional 160 acres if they planted trees on 40 acres, the Desert Land Act made 640 acres available at $1.25 on condition that the owner irrigate part of it within three years; also abused by speculators
Settlement hard: build a house, plow the fields, plant crops, drill a well, etc. especially difficult for women, took pride in their accomplishments
New Farms, New Markets
production boosted: steel plows, spring tooth harrows, improved grain binders, threshers, and windmills increased yield tenfold; also barbed wire
“dry farming” plowing deeply to stimulate the capillary action of the soils and harrowing lightly to raise a covering of dirt that would retain precious moisture after a rainfall; grasshopper infestations
Building a Society and Achieving Statehood
Churches and Sunday Schools; community cooperation, libraries, temperance clubs, and social associations, hotels, and opera houses
To become a state: establish the territory’s boundaries, authorizing an election to select delegates for a state constitutional convention, ratified constitution, approval by Congress
new state gov’ts supported women’s suffrage encouraged by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Wyoming the first
III. Exploiting the Western Landscape
The Mining Frontier
Henry Comstock discovers Comstock Load along Carson River; prospectors swarmed into the Rocky Mountains
“placer” gold, panned from streams, attracted young male population thirsting for wealth and reinforced the myth of mining country as a “poor man’s paradise” ; western mining camps became ethnic melting pots
extracting gold and silver required huge investments in workers and expensive equipment
boom-and-bust cycles; growth of settlement in Alaska-the discovery of gold in the Canadian Klondike brought thousands enabling Alaska to establish gov’t
the production of millions of ounces of gold and silver stimulated the economy, lured new foreign investors, and helped usher the U.S. into the mainstream of world economy
long-term costs: scarring of the land
Cowboys and the Cattle Frontier
cattle herding promoted as the new route to fame and fortune; the cowboy now glorified as a man of rough-hewn integrity and self-reliant strength
Joseph G. McCoy turned the cattle industry into a money-maker; raised steers cheaply in Texas and brought them north for shipment to eastern urban markets
organized the first Wild West show, where roping and riding exhibitions attracted exuberant crownds-35,000 steers sold in Abilene and double his second year; five dollar “kick backs”
many were blacks and Mexicans barred from any other trades;
Nat Love chief brander,, won roping and shooting contests, “Deadwood Dick”
close relationships between white and black cowboys were created; Charles Goodnight (white) and Bose Ikard (Black)
dime novels glorified the cowboy;
Deadwood Dick novels by Edward Wheeler
range wars and “cattle kings” thought that the open range existed for them alone to exploit against farmers; ranchers spread barbed wire fencing, small
scale shooting incidents
Bonanza Farms
wheat boom in the Dakota Territory started the nation’s first agribusiness, began during the Panic of 1873
Railroad bonds plummeted and speculators bought thousands of acres of fertile land on the Red River valley
factory like ten-thousand-acre farms each run by a hired manager and invested heavily in labor and equipment; the Cass-Cheney-Dalrymple farm
profits soon evaporated leaving Red River valley farmers destitute; collapsed because : overproduction, high investment costs, rain, international grain prices undercut earnings
large-scale farms most successful in California’s Central Valley: cherries, apricots, grapes, and oranges; California Citrus Growers’ Association, “Sunkist”, refrigerated rail cars
The Oklahoma Land Rush, 1889
Indian Territory that had been reserved for the Five Civilized Tribes since they sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War
1889 Congress transferred nearly 2 million acres to the public domain and thousands of men, women, and children stampeded into the territory
demonstrated the continuing power of the frontier myth, which tied “free” land to the ideal of economic opportunity
occurred too late to plant a full crop and drought parched the land; poor land management would turn the area into the Dustbowl in the 1930s
IV. The West of Life and Legend
The American Adam and the Dime-Novel Hero
frontiersmen presented as simple, virtuous, innocent, and uncorrupted by social order
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn rejects constraints of settled society; the West is a place of adventure, romance, or contemplation where one can escape from pressure
another myth: frontiersman as masculine ideal, the tough guy who fights for truth and honor
inspired “Buffalo Bill” Cody to start his Wild West shows; presented mock battles, reinforced image of the west where virtues always triumphed
Revitalizing the Frontier Legend
Three Eastern men spent time in the West, each affected; Roosevelt The Winning of the West: a stark physical and moral environment that stripped away all social artifice and tested each individual’s character; Own Wister’s The Virginian: the West produces honest, strong, and compassionate men, quick to help the weak and fight the wicket; the myth glossed over the darker side of frontier expansion
Indian warfare, racist discrimination, risks of commercial agriculture, and boom-and-bust mentality; obscured the complex links between the settlement of the frontier and the emergence of the U.S. as a major industrialized nation increasingly tied to a global economy. Without the railroad, the west would have developed much slower
Beginning a Conservation Movement
Major John Wesley Powell charted the Colorado River, Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States argued that settlers needed to change their pattern of settlement and readjust their expectations about the use of water in the dry terrain west of the hundredth meridian.
Washburn and adventurers visited Yellowstone River and petitioned Congress to protect it from settlement upon seeing its beauty; Congress created Yellowstone National Park
Man and Nature George Perkins March attacked the view that nature existed to be tamed and conquered, warned the public to change its ways-support from John Muir, a Scottish immigrant, who became the late nineteenth century’s most articulate publicist for wilderness protection.
contributed to the establishment of Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club
Casey Malone
Share
Cite this page
The Transformation of the Trans-Mississippi West. (2016, Oct 18). Retrieved from http://studymoose.com/the-transformation-of-the-trans-mississippi-west-essay
