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Chapter 26

The document discusses the colonization of the Great West in America from 1865 to 1896, highlighting the clash between white settlers and Native Americans. It describes the transformation of the landscape and the impact of white expansion on Native cultures, particularly through warfare and treaties that often led to the displacement of Indigenous peoples. The narrative includes accounts of violence, broken promises, and the struggles faced by Native Americans as they navigated the encroachment of settlers on their ancestral lands.

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Chapter 26

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Chapter 26

The Great West and the

Agricultural Revolution
r 1865–1896
Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history
of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free
land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American
settlement westward, explain American development.
Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893

The White Man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to
sea, who roams over it at pleasure, and lives where he likes, cannot
know the cramp we feel in this little spot, with the undying remembrance
of the fact, which you know as well as we, that every foot of what you
proudly call America, not very long ago belonged to the red man.
Washakie (Shoshone Indian), 1878

W hen the Civil War crashed to a close,

the frontier line was still wavering westward
toward the fabled “100th Meridian,” which defines
the eastern boundary of the West, America’s most
Territory,” or Oklahoma. Pioneers flung themselves
greedily on this enormous prize, as if to ravish it. Prob-
ably never before in human experience had so huge an
area been transformed so rapidly.
arid region (see Map 26.4). A long fringe of settlement,
bulging outward here and there, ran roughly north
through central Texas and on to the Canadian border.
Between this jagged line and the settled areas on the
The Clash of Cultures on the Plains
Pacific slope, there were virtually no white people. The Native Americans numbered about 360,000 in 1860,
few exceptions were the islands of Mormons in Utah, many of them scattered about the vast grasslands of
occasional trading posts and gold camps, and several the trans-Missouri West. But to their eternal misfor-
scattered Spanish Mexican settlements throughout the tune, the Indians stood in the path of the advancing
Southwest. white pioneers. An inevitable clash loomed between
Sprawling in expanse, the Great West was a rough an acquisitive, industrializing nation and the Indians’
square that measured about a thousand miles on each lifeways, highly evolved over centuries to adapt to the
side. Embracing mountains, plateaus, deserts, and demanding environment of the sparsely watered west-
plains, it was the largely parched habitat of the Indian, ern plains.
the buffalo, the wild horse, the prairie dog, and the Migration and conflict—and sometimes dramatic
coyote. Twenty-five years later—that is, by 1890—the cultural change—were no strangers in the arid West,
entire domain had been carved into states and the four even before the whites began to arrive. The Coman-
territories of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and “Indian ches had driven the Apaches off the central plains into

575
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576 • Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896

The Buffalo Hunt, by Frederic

Remington, 1890 A New
Yorker who first went west at

Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; Gift of William E. Weiss; 23.62
the age of nineteen as a
cowboy and ranch cook,
Remington (1861–1909) became
the foremost artist of the
vanishing way of life of the old
Far West. Once a common sight
on the high plains, the kind of
buffalo kill that Remington
records here was a great rarity
by the time he painted this
scene in 1890. The once-vast
herds of bison had long since
been reduced to a pitiful few by
the white man’s rifles and the
increasingly concentrated use
of the land by ever more
constricted Indians.

the upper Rio Grande valley in the eighteenth century. falo before my friends arrive so that when they come
Harried by the Mandans and Chippewas, the Chey- up, they can find no buffalo.”
enne had abandoned their villages along the upper The federal government tried to pacify the Plains
reaches of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the Indians by signing treaties with the “chiefs” of various
century before the Civil War. The Sioux, displaced from “tribes” at Fort Laramie in 1851 and at Fort Atkinson
the Great Lakes woodlands in the late eighteenth cen- in 1853. The treaties marked the beginnings of the
tury, emerged onto the plains to prey upon the Crows, reservation system in the West. They established
Kiowas, and Pawnees. Mounted on Spanish-introduced
horses, peoples like the Cheyenne and the Sioux trans-
formed themselves within just a few generations from
As early as the Coronado expedition in 1541, Spanish
foot-traveling, crop-growing villagers to wide-ranging
explorers marveled at the Plains Indians’ reliance on
nomadic traders and deadly efficient buffalo hunters—
the buffalo:
so deadly that they threatened to extinguish the vast
bison herds that had lured them onto the plains in the
first place.
When white soldiers and settlers edged onto the
“ With the skins [the Indians] build their
houses; with the skins they clothe and shoe
themselves; from the skins they make ropes
plains in the decades just before the Civil War, they and also obtain wool. From the sinews they
accelerated a fateful cycle that exacerbated already fierce
make thread, with which they sew their cloth-
enmities among the Indians and ultimately under-
ing and likewise their tents. From the bones
mined the foundations of Native American culture.
White intruders unwittingly spread cholera, typhoid, they shape awls, and the dung they use for
and smallpox among the native peoples of the plains, firewood, since there is no fuel in all that land.
with devastating results. Equally harmful, whites put The bladders serve as jugs and drinking ves-
further pressure on the steadily shrinking bison popu- sels. They sustain themselves on the flesh of
lation by hunting and by grazing their own livestock the animals, eating it slightly roasted and
on the prairie grasses. As the once-mammoth buffalo sometimes uncooked. Taking it in their teeth,
herds dwindled, warfare intensified among the Plains they pull with one hand; with the other they
tribes for ever-scarcer hunting grounds. “I am traveling hold a large flint knife and cut off mouthfuls,
all over this country, and am cutting the trees of my swallowing it half chewed, like birds. They eat
brothers,” an Arikara Indian told a U.S. Army officer
along the Platte River in 1835. “I am killing their buf-
raw fat, without warming it.
”

Washington that they would be left alone and pro-

One disheartened Indian complained to the white vided with food, clothing, and other supplies. Regret-
Sioux Commission created by Congress, tably, the federal Indian agents were often corrupt.

“ Tell your people that since the Great Father

promised that we should never be removed we
They palmed off moth-eaten blankets, spoiled beef,
and other defective provisions on the friendless Indi-
ans. One of these cheating officials, on an annual sal-
have been moved five times. . . . I think you
ary of $1,500, returned home after four years with an
had better put the Indians on wheels and you

”
estimated “savings” of $50,000.
can run them about wherever you wish. For more than a decade after the Civil War, fierce
warfare between Indians and the U.S. Army raged in
various parts of the West (see Map 26.1). Army troops,
boundaries for the territory of each tribe and attempted many of them recent immigrants who had, ironically,
to separate the Indians into two great “colonies” to fled Europe to avoid military service, met formidable
the north and south of a corridor of intended white adversaries in the Plains Indians, whose superb horse-
settlement. manship gave them baffling mobility. Fully one-fifth
But the white treaty makers misunderstood both of all U.S. Army personnel on the frontier were African
Indian government and Indian society. “Tribes” and American—dubbed “Buffalo Soldiers” by the Indians,
“chiefs” were often fictions of the white imagination, supposedly because of the resemblance of their hair to
which could not grasp the fact that many Native Amer- the bison’s furry coat.
icans, living in scattered bands, recognized only the
authority of their immediate families or perhaps a band
elder. And the nomadic culture of the Plains Indians
was utterly alien to the concept of living out one’s life
Receding Native Population
in the confinement of a defined territory. The Indian wars in the West were often savage clashes.
In the 1860s the federal government intensified Aggressive whites sometimes shot peaceful Indians on
this policy and herded the Indians into still-smaller sight, just to make sure they would give no trouble. At
confines, principally the “Great Sioux reservation” in Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, Colonel J. M. Chiving-
Dakota Territory and Indian Territory in present-day ton’s militia massacred in cold blood some four hun-
Oklahoma, into which dozens of southern Plains tribes dred Indians who apparently thought they had been
were forced. promised immunity. Women were shot praying for
The Indians surrendered their ancestral lands mercy, children had their brains dashed out, and braves
only when they had received solemn promises from were tortured, scalped, and unspeakably mutilated.
Courtesy Palace of the Governors (MNM/DCA) Neg.#58632

Pawnee Indians in Front of

Their Lodge, ca. 1868 The
Pawnees of central Nebraska
never made war on the United
States, which they regarded as an
ally in their own struggles against
the marauding Sioux.

Cruelty begot cruelty. In 1866 a Sioux war party

attempting to block construction of the Bozeman Trail A young lieutenant told Colonel Chivington that to
to the Montana goldfields ambushed Captain Wil- attack the Indians would be a violation of pledges:
liam J. Fetterman’s command of eighty-one soldiers
and civilians in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. The
Indians left not a single survivor and grotesquely muti-
“ His reply was, bringing his fist down close
to my face, ‘Damn any man who sympathizes
with Indians.’ I told him what pledges were
lated the corpses. One trooper’s face was spitted with
given the Indians. He replied that he ‘had
105 arrows. George Armstrong Custer, the buckskin-
clad “boy general” of Civil War fame, now demoted to
come to kill Indians, and believed it to be hon-
colonel and turned Indian fighter, wrote that Fetter- orable to kill Indians under any and all
man’s annihilation “awakened a bitter feeling toward
the savage perpetrators.” The cycle of ferocious warfare
circumstances.’
”
intensified.
The Fetterman massacre led to one of the few— reservation” was guaranteed to the Sioux tribes. But in
though short-lived—Indian triumphs in the plains wars, 1874 a new round of warfare with the Plains Indians
the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In another Treaty began when Custer led a “scientific” expedition into
of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, the government aban- the Black Hills of South Dakota (part of the Sioux res-
doned the Bozeman Trail. The sprawling “Great Sioux ervation) and announced that he had discovered gold.

Map 26.1 Indian Wars, 1860–1890 Surrendering in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce
declared, “Our chiefs are killed. . . . The old men are all dead. . . . The little children are
freezing to death. . . . I want to have time to look for my children. . . . Hear me, my chiefs.
My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”
© Cengage Learning

Ft. Townsend Ft. Colville CANADA

Battle of Bear Paw
Seattle Mountain 1877
WASHINGTON Ft. Ft. Berthold
Columbia R.
Lapwaj N. DAK.
MONTANA Bismarck
GES

Portland SIOUX Ft. Abercrombie

Ft. Yates
CK
RAN

NEZ PERCE Little Bighorn

OREGON 1876 S. DAK. MINN.

Ft. IDAHO Ft. Meade
WISCONSIN
Ft. Sully Ft. Ridgely MICH.
Klamath Ft. ak
Sn

eR
Ft. Reno 1862
Harney . B LAC K H I LLS
MODOC Ft. Hall WYOMING
BANNOCK Ft. Randall
COAST

CHEYENNE
MO

Ft. Ft.
SHOSHONE Wounded Ft. Niobrara
Ft. Laramie IOWA
Mis

Bidwell McDermit Ft. Knee

ARAPAHO 1890 NEBRASKA

s ou

Bridger
Cheyenne
r i R.
TA

Ft. Halleck . 40°N

Carson Salt Lake Platte R
Lincoln IND.
IN

Ft. Churchill
City City Ft. Kearney
M ILL.
S

Sonoma Austin is
Sacramento PAIUTE UTAH TERR. COLORADO Denver Sand Creek Ft. Riley
sis

Massacre KANSAS
sip

San Francisco Esmeralda Ft. Cameron Colorado

1864 Topeka
pi

City Ft. Larned MISSOURI

NEVADA
R.

San Jose Dodge

R. Ft. Crawford City KY.
Cedar City o Ft. Lyon Wichita
d

Las SOUTHERN CHEYENNE

CALIFORNIA NAVAJO Co
lo Ft. Garland ARAPAHO
Vegas
TENN.
Canyon de Chelly KIOWA INDIAN TERR.
1864 Santa Fe Ft. Reno Arkansas R.
Los
Angeles ARIZONA TERR. NEW MEXICO TERR. Amarillo Red River War ARKANSAS
Salt River 1874–1875
Canyon 1872 Ft. Sumner Red R.
Phoenix Ft. Craig ALA.
San Diego Gila COMANCHE MISS.
PACIFIC Camp Grant R. Jacksboro
Massacre 1871 Skeleton Canyon 1886
OCEAN Geronimo surrenders. Fort Worth
Ft. Crittenden LA.
120ºW TEXAS Waco
Bisbee N Ri Ft. Quitman
o 30°N
Chief Joseph’s route Austin
Gr

Canyon de los
an

Embudos 1886
de

Fort 90ºW
Geronimo escapes. San Antonio
0 150 300 Km.
Major Indian battle Gulf of
110ºW
M EXICO 100ºW
Mexico
0 150 300 Mi.

Battle of the Little Big Horn, by Amos Bad Heart Bull This depiction of the battle
by an Oglala Sioux tribal historian and artist shows Crazy Horse (in spotted war paint,
center) firing on a trooper of Custer’s 7th Cavalry. The ground is littered with the bodies
of dead soldiers.

Hordes of greedy gold-seekers swarmed into the Sioux sent to a dusty reservation in Kansas, where 40 percent
lands. The aggrieved Sioux, aided by the Cheyenne and of them perished from disease. The survivors were even-
Arapaho Indians, took to the warpath, inspired by the tually allowed to return to Idaho.
influential and wily Sitting Bull. Fierce Apache tribes of Arizona and New Mexico
Colonel Custer’s 7th Cavalry, nearly half of them were the most difficult to subdue. Led by Geronimo,
immigrants, set out to suppress the Indians and to whose eyes blazed hatred of the whites, they were
return them to the reservation. Attacking what turned pursued into Mexico by federal troops using the sun-
out to be a superior force of some 2,500 well-armed flashing heliograph, a communication device that
warriors camped along the Little Bighorn River in impressed the Indians as “big medicine.” Scattered rem-
present-day Montana, the “White Chief with Yellow nants of the warriors were finally persuaded to surren-
Hair” and about 250 officers and men were completely der after the Apache women had been exiled to Florida.
wiped out in 1876 when two supporting columns failed The Apaches ultimately became successful farmers in
to come to their rescue. The Indians’ victory was short- Oklahoma.
lived. In a series of battles across the northern plains in This relentless fire-and-sword policy of the whites
the ensuing months, the U.S. Army relentlessly hunted at last shattered the spirit of the Indians. The van-
down the Indians who had humiliated Custer. quished Native Americans were finally ghettoized on
One band of Nez Perce Indians in northeastern Ore- reservations, where they could theoretically preserve
gon were goaded into daring flight in 1877 when U.S. their cultural autonomy but were in fact compelled to
authorities tried to herd them onto a reservation. Chief eke out a sullen existence as wards of the government.
Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some Their white masters had at last discovered that the Indi-
seven hundred Indians after a tortuous, seventeen- ans were much cheaper to feed than to fight. Even so,
hundred-mile, three-month trek across the Continental for many decades they were almost ignored to death.
Divide toward Canada. There Joseph hoped to rendez- The “taming” of the Indians was engineered by a
vous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refuge north number of factors. Of cardinal importance was the fed-
of the border after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. eral government’s willingness to back its land claims
Betrayed into believing they would be returned to their with military force. Almost as critical was the railroad,
ancestral lands in Idaho, the Nez Perces instead were which shot an iron arrow through the heart of the

Bellowing Herds of Bison

Tens of millions of buffalo—described by early Span-
iards as “hunchback cows”—blackened the western
prairies when white Americans first arrived. These
shaggy, lumbering animals were the staff of life for
Native Americans (see “Makers of America: The Plains
Indians,” pp. 582–583). Their flesh provided food; their
dried dung provided fuel (“buffalo chips”); their hides
provided clothing, lariats, and harnesses.
When the Civil War closed, some 15 million of
these meaty beasts were still grazing on the western
plains. In 1868 a Kansas Pacific locomotive had to wait
eight hours for a herd to amble across the tracks. Much
of the food supply of the railroad construction gangs
came from leathery buffalo steaks. William “Buffalo
Bill” Cody—sinewy, telescope-eyed, and a crack shot—
killed over 4,000 animals in eighteen months while
employed by the Kansas Pacific.
With the building of the railroad, the massacre of
the herds began in deadly earnest. The creatures were
slain for their hides, for their tongues or a few other
choice cuts, or for sheer amusement. “Sportsmen” on
lurching railroad trains would lean out the windows
and blaze away at the animals to satisfy their lust for
slaughter or excitement. Such wholesale butchery left
fewer than a thousand buffalo alive by 1885, and the
once-numerous beasts were in danger of complete
extinction. The whole story is a shocking example of
the greed and waste that accompanied the conquest of
the continent.
© Bettmann/Corbis

The End of the Trail

Geronimo (ca. 1823–1909), Also Known by His Apache By the 1880s the national conscience began to stir
Name, Goyahkla (One Who Yawns) In 1851 Mexican uneasily over the plight of the Indians. Helen Hunt
troops killed Geronimo’s mother and wife and three of his Jackson, a Massachusetts writer of children’s litera-
children, initiating his lifelong hatred of Mexicans. ture, pricked the moral sense of Americans in 1881
Ironically, in later life, when he repeatedly fled the when she published A Century of Dishonor. The book
intolerable confinement of reservations in the United chronicled the sorry record of government ruthlessness
States, he sought refuge—and freedom—in Mexico. and chicanery in dealing with the Indians. Her later
Persuaded at last to surrender to American authorities in novel Ramona (1884), a love story about discrimination
1886, he spent the remainder of his life on reservations in against California Indians, sold some 600,000 copies
Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma.
and further inspired sympathy for the Indians.
Debate seesawed. Humanitarians wanted to treat
the Indians kindly and persuade them thereby to “walk
the white man’s road.” Yet hard-liners insisted on the
West. Locomotives could bring out unlimited numbers current policy of forced containment and brutal pun-
of troops, farmers, cattlemen, sheepherders, and set- ishment. Neither side showed much respect for Native
tlers. The Indians were also ravaged by the white peo- American culture. Christian reformers, who often
ple’s diseases, to which they showed little resistance, administered educational facilities on the reservations,
and by their firewater, which they could resist even sometimes withheld food to force the Indians to give
less. Above all, the virtual extermination of the buffalo up their tribal religions and assimilate to white society.
doomed the Plains Indians’ nomadic way of life. In 1884 these zealous white souls joined with military

Former reservation land not allotted to the Indians

Civil War veteran and long-time Indian fighter under the Dawes Act was to be sold to railroads and
General Philip Sheridan (1831–1888) reflected on the white settlers, with the proceeds used by the federal
wars against the Indians: government to educate and “civilize” the native peo-

“ We took away their country and their means

of support, broke up their mode of living, their
ples. In 1879 the government had already funded the
Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where Native
American children, separated from their tribes, were
habits of life, introduced disease and decay
taught English and inculcated with white values and
among them, and it was for this and against
customs. “Kill the Indian and save the man” was the
this they made war. Could anyone expect

”
school founder’s motto. In the 1890s the government
less? expanded its network of Indian boarding schools and
sent “field matrons” to the reservations to teach Native
American women the art of sewing and to preach the
virtues of chastity and hygiene.
The Dawes Act struck directly at tribal organiza-
men in successfully persuading the federal government
tion and tried to make rugged individualists out of the
to outlaw the sacred Sun Dance. When the “Ghost
Indians. This legislation ignored the inherent reliance
Dance” cult later spread to the Dakota Sioux, the army
of traditional Indian culture on tribally held land, lit-
bloodily stamped it out in 1890 at the so-called Battle
erally pulling the land out from under them. By 1900
of Wounded Knee. In the fighting thus provoked,
Indians had lost 50 percent of the 156 million acres
an estimated two hundred Indian men, women, and
children were killed, as well as twenty-nine invading
soldiers.
The misbegotten offspring of the movement to The Indian spokesman Plenty Coups (1848–1932) said
reform Indian policy was the Dawes Severalty Act in 1909,
of 1887. Reflecting the forced-civilization views of the
reformers, the act dissolved many tribes as legal enti-
ties, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up “ I see no longer the curling smoke rising from
our lodge poles. I hear no longer the songs of the
individual Indian family heads with 160 free acres. If women as they prepare the meal. The antelope
the Indians behaved themselves like “good white set- have gone; the buffalo wallows are empty. Only
tlers,” they would get full title to their holdings, as well the wail of the coyote is heard. The white man’s
as citizenship, in twenty-five years. The probationary medicine is stronger than ours. . . . We are like
period was later extended, but full citizenship was
granted to all Indians in 1924.
birds with a broken wing.
”
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.

Lakotas Receiving Rations at Standing Rock Reservation, ca. 1881 Once the
scourge of the plains, the Lakota (part of the Sioux tribes) were reduced by the 1890s to
the humiliation of living on government handouts.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY

A Comanche Village, by George Catlin, 1834

582
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Museum of the South Dakota State
Historical Society, Pierre SD

(above) A Sioux Carving

Horses were essential to the
culture of the Plains Indians,
and they often carved
likenesses of horses killed in
battle. Note the red-stained
holes depicting this horse’s
wounds. (right) A Cheyenne
Cradleboard for Carrying a
Baby © Smithsonian Institution/Corbis

Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska

Chan-Chä-Uiá-Teüin, Teton Sioux Woman, by Karl

Bodmer, ca. 1830s Bodmer, a German artist, painted this
woman’s portrait during an expedition to the Great Plains. Her
name means “Woman of the Crow Nation,” which seems to
suggest that she was taken captive from the Sioux’s mortal
enemies, the Crows.

Then in the sixteenth century, the mounted Span- The European invasion soon eclipsed the short-lived
ish conquistadores ventured into the New World. Their era of the horse. After many battles the Plains Indians
steeds—some of them escaping to become mustangs, found themselves crammed together on tiny reserva-
the wild horses of the American West, and others tions, clinging with tired but determined fingers to
acquired by the Indians in trade—quickly spread over their traditions. Although much of Plains Indian culture
the plains. The horse revolutionized Indian societies, persists to this day, the Indians’ free-ranging way of life
for a time turning the Plains tribes into efficient hunt- has passed into memory. As Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux,
ing machines that promised to banish hunger from the put it, “Once we were happy in our own country and
prairies. But horse-mounted hunters turned out to be we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and
too efficient: overhunting made buffalo ever harder the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there
to find. The plains pony also ignited a furious compe- was plenty for them and for us. But then the Wasichus
tition for grazing lands, for trade goods, and for ever [white people] came, and they made little islands for
more horses, so that wars of aggression and of revenge us . . . and always these islands are becoming smaller,
became increasingly bitter and frequent. for around them surges the gnawing flood of Wasichus.”

583
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
584 • Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896

1790 1860 1880

The Indian
Removal Act
of 1830
eliminated all
Indian land
rights east of
the Mississippi
River.

1890 2000
The Dawes Act in 1887 changed common tribal lands into
individual allotments. Nearly 90 million acres of tribal land
were lost before the act was repealed in 1932. Since then,
through court battles and federal recognition of old claims,
some Indian lands have been restored to the tribes.

Indian lands Present-day boundaries

White settlement

Map 26.2 Vanishing Lands Once masters of the continent, Native Americans have been squeezed into
just 2 percent of U.S. territory. (From The New York Times, June 25, 2000 © 2000 The New York Times. All rights
reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copy-
ing, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.)

they had held just twoMap

HMCo decades earlier (see Map 26.2). the silver deposits, others to extract nonmetallic wealth
No bleeds
The forced-assimilation
Kennedy, Thedoctrine
Americanof the Dawes
Pageant Act
14/e, ©2010 from the earth in the form of golden grain.
Vanishing Lands
remained the cornerstone of the government’s official “Fifty-niners” also poured feverishly into Nevada
Indian policy forKennedy_26_02
nearly half a century, until the Indian in 1859, after the fabulous Comstock Lode had been
PD - 42p6 x 18p6
Reorganization Act (the “Indian New Deal”) of 1934
Final proof 9/11/08
uncovered. A fantastic amount of gold and silver, worth
partially reversed the individualistic approach and more than $340 million, was mined by the “Kings of
belatedly tried to restore the tribal basis of Indian life the Comstock” from 1860 to 1890. The scantily pop-
(see p. 765). ulated state of Nevada, “child of the Comstock Lode,”
Under these new federal policies, defective though was prematurely railroaded into the Union in 1864,
they were, the Indian population started to mount partly to provide three electoral votes for President
slowly. The total number had been reduced by 1887 to Lincoln.
about 243,000—the result of bullets, bottles, and bac- Smaller “lucky strikes” drew frantic gold- and silver-
teria—but the census of 2000 counted more than 1.5 seekers into Montana, Idaho, and other western states.
million Native Americans, urban and rural. Boomtowns, known as “Helldorados,” sprouted from
the desert sands like magic. Every third cabin was a
saloon, where sweat-stained miners drank adulterated
Mtoining: From Dishpan
Ore Breaker
liquor (“rotgut”) in the company of accommodating
women. Lynch law and hempen vigilante justice, as in
early California, preserved a crude semblance of order
The conquest of the Indians and the coming of the in the towns. And when the “diggings” petered out,
railroad were life-giving boons to the mining frontier. the gold-seekers decamped, leaving eerily picturesque
The golden gravel of California continued to yield “pay “ghost towns,” such as Virginia City, Nevada, silhou-
dirt,” and in 1858 an electrifying discovery convulsed etted in the desert. Begun with a boom, these towns
Colorado. Avid “fifty-niners” or “Pikes Peakers” rushed ended with a whimper.
west to rip at the ramparts of the Rockies. But there were Once the loose surface gold was gobbled up, ore-
more miners than minerals, and many gold-grubbers, breaking machinery was imported to smash the gold-
with “Pikes Peak or Bust” inscribed on the canvas of bearing quartz. This operation was so expensive that
their covered wagons, creaked wearily back with the it could ordinarily be undertaken only by corporations
added inscription, “Busted, by Gosh.” Yet countless pooling the wealth of stockholders. Gradually the age
bearded fortune-seekers stayed on, some to strip away of big business came to the mining industry. Dusty,

Hydraulic Mining, Nevada,

1866 Once miners had panned
and dredged the most accessible
gold from streambeds, they
ripped open the earth itself in
search of other deposits. High-
pressure streams of water,
delivered through huge nozzles
called “monitors,” washed away
Library of Congress

entire hillsides and created the

nightmarish, debris-strewn
landscapes that still scar western
mountains and foothills.

bewhiskered miners, dishpans in hand, were replaced These scrawny beasts, whose horn spreads sometimes
by impersonal corporations, with their costly machin- reached eight feet, were killed primarily for their hides.
ery and trained engineers. The once-independent gold- There was no way of getting their meat profitably to
washer became just another day laborer. market.
Yet the mining frontier had played a vital role in The problem of marketing was neatly solved when
conquering the continent. Magnetlike, it attracted pop- the transcontinental railroads thrust their iron fingers
ulation and wealth, while advertising the wonders of into the West. Cattle could now be shipped alive to
the Wild West. Women as well as men found opportu- the stockyards, and under “beef barons” like the Swifts
nity, running boardinghouses or working as prostitutes. and Armours, the highly industrialized meatpacking
They won a kind of equality on the rough frontier that
earned them the vote in Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870),
Colorado (1893), and Idaho (1896) long before their sis-
ters in the East could cast a ballot.
The amassing of precious metals helped finance
the Civil War, facilitated the building of railroads, and
intensified the already bitter conflict between whites
and Indians. The outpouring of silver and gold enabled
the Treasury to resume specie payments in 1879 and
injected the silver issue into American politics. “Silver
Senators,” representing the thinly peopled “acreage
states” of the West, used their disproportionate influ-
ence to promote the interests of the silver miners.
Finally, the mining frontier added to American folklore
© Bettmann/Corbis

and literature, as the writings of Bret Harte and Mark

Twain so colorfully attest.

Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive Dressed to Kill Cowboys came in all varieties and sizes
in the wild and woolly frontier West—and in all kinds of
When the Civil War ended, the grassy plains of Texas
garb as well.
supported several million tough, long-horned cattle.

The steer was king in a Cattle Kingdom richly car-

Missou
WYOMING
N.
Pla ri peted with grass. As long as lush grass was available,
t te NEBRASKA IOWA
the Long Drive proved profitable—that is, to the luck-

R.
R .
Omaha
Union Pacific R.R. ier cattlemen who escaped Indians, stampedes, cattle
ROCKY

Cheyenne
Kansas City 40°N fever, and other hazards. From 1866 to 1888, bellowing
De n COLORADO herds, totaling over 4 million steers, were driven north-
Denver KANSAS
ward from the beef bowl of Texas. The steer was king in
ver

Ellsworth Abilene
an
K

Sedalia
MTS

sa
Ri Pacific R.R.
&

oG s
ran
de a Cattle Kingdom richly carpeted with grass.
R. R Arkansas R. Dodge
.
What the Lord giveth, the Lord also can taketh
.

City . Newton Baxter

Atchison Top
eka & R Wichita Springs MO. away. The railroad made the Long Drive, and the rail-
R.
Santa Fe
nde

OKLA. TERR. road unmade the Long Drive, primarily because the
Gra

Weste

locomotives ran both ways. The same rails that bore

Rio

Chisholm Trail
.
R.R

ht– Loving Trail

the cattle from the open range to the kitchen range

ta Fe
INDIAN
Trail

& San
TERR. ARK. brought out the homesteader and the sheepherder.
opeka

NEW Both of these intruders, sometimes amid flying bullets,

Atchison T

MEXICO
Goodnig

Red R.
TERR. built barbed-wire fences that were too numerous to be
il
Tra

cut down by the cowboys. Furthermore, the terrible

TEXAS N
and Baxter Sprin

San winter of 1886–1887, with blinding blizzards reaching

Pe
co
So u
the
sR
.
Angelo 68 degrees below zero, left thousands of dazed cattle
r
Pa starving and freezing. Overexpansion and overgrazing
n

c ific
lia

R.R.
likewise took their toll, as the cowboys slowly gave way
da

30°N
Se

Bandera
to plowboys.
San Antonio Gu lf of The only escape for the stockmen was to make cat-
M exico
tle-raising a big business and avoid the perils of over-
Ri

0 150 300 Km.

o
Gr

production. Breeders learned to fence their ranches,

0 150 300 Mi.

lay in winter feed, import blooded bulls, and produce

Cattle trail fewer and meatier animals. They also learned to orga-
Railroad M E X I CO nize. The Wyoming Stock-Growers’ Association, espe-
Eastern boundary cially in the 1880s, virtually controlled the state and its
of open range
100°W legislature.
This was the heyday of the cowboy. The equip-
ment of the cowhand—from “shooting irons” and ten-
Map 26.3 Cattle Trails © Cengage Learning
gallon hat to chaps and spurs—served a useful, not an
ornamental, function. A “genuwine” gun-toting cow-
puncher, riding where men were men and smelled like
HMCo
businessMap sprang into existence as a main pillar of the
No bleeds horses, could justifiably boast of his toughness.
Kennedy, The American Pageant 14/e ©2010
economy.
Cattle Trails Drawing upon the gigantic stockyards at These bowlegged Knights of the Saddle, with their
Kansas 26_03_Ms00400
kennedy_ City and Chicago, the meatpackers could ship colorful trappings and cattle-lulling songs, became part
Trim
their20p6 x 31p0
fresh products to the East Coast in the newly per- of American folklore. Many of them, perhaps five thou-
Final proof 9/11/08
fected refrigerator cars. sand, were blacks, who especially enjoyed the new-
A spectacular feeder of the new slaughterhouses found freedom of the open range.
was the “Long Drive” (see Map 26.3). Texas cowboys—
black, white, and Mexican—drove herds numbering
from one thousand to ten thousand head slowly over
the unfenced and unpeopled plains until they reached
The Farmers’ Frontier
a railroad terminal. The bawling beasts grazed en route Miners and cattlemen created the romantic legend of
on the free government grass. Favorite terminal points the West, but it was the sober sodbuster who wrote the
were flyspecked “cow towns” like Dodge City—“the final chapter of frontier history. A fresh day dawned for
Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier”—and Abilene (Kan- western farmers with the Homestead Act of 1862. The
sas), Ogallala (Nebraska), and Cheyenne (Wyoming). new law allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160 acres
At Abilene order was maintained by Marshal James B. of land (a quarter-section) by living on it for five years,
(“Wild Bill”) Hickok, a fabulous gunman who reput- improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30.
edly killed only in self-defense or in the line of duty The Homestead Act marked a drastic departure from
and who was fatally shot in the back in 1876 while previous policy. Before the act, public land had been sold
playing poker. primarily for revenue; now it was to be given away to

Acres
11,000,000

10,000,000

9,000,000

8,000,000

7,000,000

6,000,000

5,000,000

4,000,000 FRONTIER LINE ENDS

3,000,000

2,000,000

1,000,000 Figure 26.1 Homesteads from the Public Lands

0 (acreage legally transferred to private owner-
1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 ship) See related Map 26.5 on p. 590.

encourage a rapid filling of empty spaces and to provide marketing of crops. Some railroad companies induced
a stimulus to the family farm—“the backbone of democ- Americans and European immigrants to buy the cheap
racy.” The new law was a godsend to a host of farmers land earlier granted to the railroads by the government.
who could not afford to buy large holdings. During the The Northern Pacific Railroad at one time had nearly
forty years after its passage, about half a million families a thousand paid agents in Europe distributing roseate
took advantage of the Homestead Act to carve out new leaflets in various languages.
homes in the vast open stretches. Yet five times that Shattering the myth of the Great American Des-
many families purchased their land from the railroads, ert opened the gateways to the agricultural West even
the land companies, or the states (see Figure 26.1). wider. The windswept prairies were for the most part
The Homestead Act often turned out to be a cruel treeless, and the tough sod had been pounded solid by
hoax. The standard 160 acres, quite adequate in the millions of buffalo hooves. Pioneer explorers and trap-
well-watered Mississippi basin, frequently proved piti- pers had assumed that the soil must be sterile, simply
fully inadequate on the rain-scarce Great Plains. Thou- because it was not heavily watered and did not support
sands of homesteaders, perhaps two out of three, were immense forests. But once the prairie sod was broken
forced to give up the one-sided struggle against drought. with heavy iron plows pulled by four yokes of oxen—
Uncle Sam, it was said, bet 160 acres against ten dollars the “plow that broke the plains”—the earth proved
that the settlers could not live on their homesteads for astonishingly fruitful. “Sodbusters” poured onto the
five years. One of these unsuccessful gambles in Greer prairies. Lacking trees for lumber and fuel, they built
County, western Oklahoma, inspired a folk song:
Hurrah for Greer County! The land of the free,
The land of the bedbug, grasshopper, and flea; In making the arduous journey across the western
I’ll sing of its praises, I’ll tell of its fame, prairies, many women settlers discovered new
While starving to death on my government claim. confidence in their abilities. Early on in her trek, Mary
Richardson Walker (1811–1897) confided in her diary
Naked fraud was spawned by the Homestead Act that
and similar laws. Perhaps ten times more of the pub-
lic domain wound up in the clutches of land-grabbing
promoters than in the hands of bona fide farmers.
“ my circumstances are rather trying. So much
danger attends me on every hand. A long jour-
Unscrupulous corporations would use “dummy” home- ney before me, going I know not whither, without
steaders—often their employees or aliens bribed with mother or sister to attend me, can I expect to
cash or a bottle of beer—to grab the best properties
containing timber, minerals, and oil. Settlers would
later swear that they had “improved” the property by
survive it all?
”
Only a month later, she recorded that
erecting a “twelve by fourteen” dwelling, which turned
out to measure twelve by fourteen inches. “ in the afternoon we rode thirty-five miles
without stopping. Pretty well tired out, all of us.
The railways also played a major role in develop-
ing the agricultural West, largely through the profitable
Stood it pretty well myself.
”
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
588 • Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896

homes from the very sod they dug from the ground Other adaptations to the western environment
and burned corncobs for warmth. were more successful. Tough strains of wheat, resistant
Lured by higher wheat prices resulting from crop to cold and drought, were imported from Russia and
failures elsewhere in the world, settlers in the 1870s blossomed into billowing yellow carpets. Wise farm-
rashly pushed still farther west, onto the poor, marginal ers abandoned corn in favor of sorghum and other
lands beyond the 100th meridian. That imaginary line, drought-resistant grains. Barbed wire, perfected by
running north to south from the Dakotas through west Joseph F. Glidden in 1874, solved the problem of how
Texas, separated two climatological regions—a well- to build fences on the treeless prairies.
watered area to the east, and a semiarid area to the west Eventually federally financed irrigation projects—
(see Map 26.4). Bewhiskered and one-armed geologist on a colossal scale, beyond even what John Wesley Pow-
John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River’s ell had dreamed—caused the Great American Desert
Grand Canyon and director of the U.S. Geological Sur- to bloom. A century after Powell’s predictions, arching
vey, warned in 1874 that beyond the 100th meridian so dams had tamed the Missouri and Columbia Rivers and
little rain fell that agriculture was impossible without had so penned up and diverted the canyon-gnawing
massive irrigation. Colorado that its mouth in the Gulf of California was
Ignoring Powell’s advice, farmers heedlessly dry. More than 45 million acres were irrigated in seven-
chewed up the crusty earth in western Kansas, eastern teen western states. In the long run, the hydraulic engi-
Colorado, and Montana. They quickly went broke as neers had more to do with shaping the modern West
a six-year drought in the 1880s further desiccated the than all the trappers, miners, cavalrymen, and cowboys
already dusty region. Western Kansas lost half its popu- ever did (see Map 26.5). As one engineer boasted, “We
lation between 1888 and 1892. “There is no God west enjoy pushing rivers around.”
of Salina,” one hapless homesteader declared.
In the wake of the devastating drought, the new
technique of “dry farming” took root on the plains. Its
methods of frequent shallow cultivation supposedly
The Far West Comes of Age
were adapted to the arid western environment, but over The Great West experienced a fantastic surge in migra-
time “dry farming” created a finely pulverized surface tion from the 1870s to the 1890s. A parade of new
soil that contributed to the notorious “Dust Bowl” sev- western states proudly joined the Union. Boomtown
eral decades later (see p. 764). Colorado, offspring of the Pikes Peak gold rush, was

The South Dakota Art Museum

The Homesteader’s Wife, by

Harvey Dunn Women as well
as men toiled without shade or
respite on the sun-scorched and
wind-parched Great Plains.

C A N A D A

R
GE

Dairy

O
RAN

Wheat Wheat Wheat

G R E
C
Hay
Sheep Dairy
Wheat

K Y
Beef Wheat
L

N
cattle Wheat 40°
S TA

A T
Dairy
COA

Hogs Hay Corn

M O
Corn Wheat
Corn Wheat

P L A I
Wheat Beef
G R E AT BASI N Wheat cattle Corn Corn N
Wheat Corn
Wine U N Hogs Wheat
Beef
Beef cattle Corn
cattle Beef
cattle Wheat Tobacco Tobacco

N S
Wheat Tobacco
Fruit Beef
T A I

Tobacco
cattle Wheat
Wheat
Corn Rice AT L A N T I C

100th meridian
Cotton
Beef
OCEAN
Wine
N S

cattle Cotton

Corn
PAC I F IC Beef
Beef Cotton Cotton 30°N
cattle cattle Corn
OCEAN
Sugar
Cotton cane
Mean annual rainfall (inches) Beef Sheep Rice
cattle
Over 80 10–20 Rice
60–80 Under 10 Gulf of Mexico
40–60 20 inch rainfall line 0 200 400 Km.
M E X I C O
20–40 Corn Major agricultural product
0 200 400 Mi.

Map 26.4 Average Annual Precipitation, with Major Agricultural Products, 1900
Northern Hemisphere storms typically circle the globe in a west-to-east direction. Much
of the life-nourishing water in these storms is dumped as rainfall on the western slopes
of the Pacific coastal ranges and the Rocky Mountains, casting huge “rain shadows” in
Cengage Learning
the
Average Annual Great Basin
Precipitation, and
with in the
Major western
Agricultural Great as
Products Plains, up to the line of the 100th meridian.
of 1900
Ms00407a Westward-faring pioneers had to learn new agricultural techniques when they pushed
Trim 51p0 x 30p0
settlement into the drought-prone regions west of the 100th meridian, as reflected in the
Final 6/29/11
patterns of crop distribution by 1900. © Cengage Learning

greeted in 1876 as “the Centennial State.” In 1889–1890 shoot the intruders’ horses. On April 22, 1889, all was
a Republican Congress, eagerly seeking more Repub- in readiness for the legal opening, and some 50,000
lican electoral and congressional votes, admitted in “boomers” were poised expectantly on the boundary
a wholesale lot six new states: North Dakota, South line. At high noon the bugle shrilled, and a horde of
Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. “eighty-niners” poured in on lathered horses or careen-
The Mormon Church formally—and belatedly, in ing vehicles. That night a lonely spot on the prairie
many Americans’ eyes—banned polygamy in 1890, but had mushroomed into the tent city of Guthrie, with
not until 1896 was Utah deemed worthy of admission. over 10,000 people. By the end of the year, Oklahoma
Only Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona remained boasted 60,000 inhabitants, and Congress made it a
to be lifted into statehood from contiguous territory on territory. In 1907 it became the “Sooner State.”
the mainland of North America.
In a last gaudy fling, the federal government made
available to settlers vast stretches of fertile plains for-
merly occupied by the Indians in the district of Okla-
The Fading Frontier
homa (“the Beautiful Land”). Scores of overeager and In 1890—a watershed date—the superintendent of the
well-armed “sooners,” illegally jumping the gun, had census announced that for the first time in America’s
entered Oklahoma Territory. They had to be evicted experience, a frontier line was no longer discernible. All
repeatedly by federal troops, who on occasion would the unsettled areas were now broken into by isolated

589
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
590 • Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896

WA NH ME
30.3%
MT ND VT 13.4% 1.1%
29.9% 2.7% 7.5%
Map 26.5 Myth and Reality in OR
MN
5.6%
the West: Percentage of Fed- 53.1%
ID SD WI NY
MA
MI 1.9%
eral Lands Within Each State, 50.2%
WY
6.2% 5.6%
10.0% 0.8% RI
2004 American folklore pic- 42.3%
IA PA CT
0.4%
NJ 0.4%
tures the western United States NV NE
0.8%
IL IN OH
2.5%
3.1%
1.7%
as a land of rugged individual- 84.5%
UT 1.4% 1.8% 2.0% DE
CA 57.4% CO. MO VA 2.0%
ists who tamed the wild region 45.3% 36.6% KS
1.2% 5.0% KY
WV
7.4%
9.9% MD
2.8%
with grit and brawn. The reality 5.4%
NC
is that the federal government TN 11.8%
AZ AR 3.2%
has long been by far the West’s 48.1% NM OK
3.6%
7.2% SC
41.8% GA
largest landowner—and that MS AL
1.6% 3.8%
2.9%
7.3%
federal projects, especially dam TX LA
1.9%
building, have done more to 5.1%

shape the region than all the

cowboys and sodbusters there FL
8.2%
ever were. (Source: Bill Lane AK
69.1%
Center for the American West,
Total area of each state
Stanford University.) HI
19.4% Proportion of federal lands
© Cengage Learning
within each state

Cengage Learning Positioning guide

Ms00648 TYPErelatively
BLOCK MAP
bodies of American settlement. The “closing” of the
Federal Land Ownership In truth, few city dwellers, at least in the
No bleeds
frontier inspired one of the most influential essays ever
trim - 30p x 21p6 populous eastern centers, migrated to the frontier dur-
written about American history—Frederick Jackson
Final 4/8/11 ing depressions. Most of them did not know how to
Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American farm; few of them could raise enough money to trans-
History” in 1893 (see “Thinking Globally: The Great port themselves west and then pay for livestock and
Frontier,” pp. 592–593). expensive machinery.
As the nineteenth century neared its sunset, the But the safety-valve theory does have some valid-
westward-tramping American people were disturbed ity. Free acreage did lure to the West a host of immi-
to find that their fabled free land was going or had grant farmers who otherwise might have remained in
gone. The secretary of war had prophesied in 1827 that the eastern cities to clog the job markets and to crowd
five hundred years would be needed to fill the West. the festering and already overpopulated slums. And
But as the nation finally recognized that its land was the very possibility of westward migration may have
not inexhaustible, seeds were planted to preserve the induced urban employers to maintain wage rates high
vanishing resource. The government set aside land for enough to discourage workers from leaving. But the
national parks—first Yellowstone in 1872, followed by real safety valve by the late nineteenth century was in
Yosemite and Sequoia in 1890. western cities like Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco,
But the frontier was more than a place; it was also a where failed farmers, busted miners, and displaced
state of mind and a symbol of opportunity. Its passing easterners found ways to seek their fortunes. Indeed,
ended a romantic phase of the nation’s internal devel- after about 1880 the area from the Rocky Mountains
opment and created new economic and psychological to the Pacific Coast was the most urbanized region in
problems. America, measured by the percentage of people living
Traditionally footloose, Americans have been noto- in cities.
rious for their mobility. The nation’s farmers, unlike U.S. history cannot be properly understood unless
the peasants of Europe, have seldom remained rooted it is viewed in light of the westward-moving experi-
to their soil. The land, sold for a profit as settlement ence. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “American
closed in, was often the settler’s most profitable crop. history has been in a large degree the history of the
Much has been said about the frontier as a “safety colonization of the Great West.” The story of settling
valve.” The theory is that when hard times came, the and taming the trans-Mississippi West in the late nine-
unemployed who cluttered the city pavements merely teenth century was but the last chapter in the saga of
moved west, took up farming, and prospered. colonizing various American “wests” since Columbus’s

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA

. . . We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska. . . . It was a
world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway
stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain
ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. . . . [G]razing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees
of distance and diminution; and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad
which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then
dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their surroundings, and we were once
more alone upon the billiard-board. The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one
thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our regard. . . .
[That] evening we left Laramie [Wyoming]. . . . And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the
same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river.
Only down the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo. That train was
the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in
this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this
unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some £12 from
the Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities,
full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside sta-
tions in the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with
border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths,
gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all
America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the ‘bad medicine waggon’ charioting his foes;
and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock
coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris,
it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live,
as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and
offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an endur-
ing literary work. . . .

591
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Thinking Globally The Great Frontier
T he American pioneers who surged
westward in the nineteenth century
dominion over parts of the planet once
considered too remote or rugged to be
Destiny,” and like the Americans they
often cloaked them in the language of
were part of a great global land grab habitable. racial superiority.
that changed lives and landscapes on The American frontier soon became The world’s various frontiers also
several continents. From the Australian the stuff of legend, and even the sub- reflected the particularities of geogra-
Outback to the Canadian prairies, from ject of a scholarly explanation of Amer- phy and history. Australians soon
the Argentine pampas to the Russian ican uniqueness—Frederick Jackson conceded that much of their conti-
steppes and the African savannas, Turner’s fabled “frontier thesis,” which nent—the world’s driest—was too arid
millions of mostly white settlers poured hailed the gumption and moxie of the for traditional farming. Most of the
into vast new territories and claimed pioneers and commended them as the Outback proved suitable only for enor-
them as their own. agents of civilization and democracy. mous “sheep stations,” sometimes
Everywhere, the settlers encoun- Yet far from being unique, those measuring tens of thousands of acres.
tered indigenous peoples who had westering Americans had much in Consequently, small-farm homestead-
lived on those lands since time imme- common with settlers in sister societies ing of the American and Canadian
morial. With their superiority in weap- abroad. Argentina had its cowboys type never took root, nor did cities of
onry, transportation, and political (gauchos), and Australia had its colorful any consequence emerge in the
organization, everywhere the newcom- backcountry outlaws, such as Ned Kelly, parched Australian interior.
ers prevailed. By the century’s close, whose exploits rivaled those of Billy the Canada’s westward movement came
they had displaced or destroyed count- Kid. The Russians and South Africans later than that in the United States and
less native peoples and extended their had their own versions of “Manifest proceeded more peaceably. Only after

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

North-West Mounted Police, ca. 1890 Empowered by an act of Parliament in 1873 to

establish Canadian authority and order in the Northwest Territories, this force made
frontier settlement somewhat more peaceful in Canada than in the United States. In 1920
the North-West Mounted Police absorbed the Dominion Police and became the famed
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or “Mounties.”

592
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Library of Congress

Russian Peasants in Siberia, 1910

the Ottawa government promised in also retained the venerable custom, proved essential to the growth of the
1871 to build a transcontinental rail- handed down from Spanish colonial tsarist empire, especially after the
road connecting eastern Canada to its times, of apportioning the land in government began construction of the
western provinces did settlement gigantic estancias (ranches) to a few Trans-Siberian line in 1891.
begin in earnest. And unlike in Amer- favored fellow soldiers and friends. The Dutch-descended Afrikaners, or
ica, where restless pioneers typically These lordly landowners then employed Boers, in southern Africa found their
struck out on their own and made wage workers, mostly Italian immi- frontier to the north, and unlike their
much mischief among themselves and grants, who turned the fertile Argentine American counterparts, they made
with the Indians they encountered, in interior into a beef bowl and breadbas- scant claim to be spreading democracy.
Canada settlers were generally pre- ket to the world. The immigrants them- Rather, they sought to escape British
ceded by government authorities— selves, however, had little hope of ever rule in the Cape Colony—in particular,
usually the red-jacketed North-West possessing land of their own. to escape from the threat of racial
Mounted Police, or “Mounties”—who Russia’s frontier lay to the east and equality for blacks after Britain abol-
established at least a semblance of long felt the heavy hand of the tsar. For ished slavery in the 1830s. The Afrikan-
order before large numbers of pioneers centuries autocratic rulers had strong- ers’ “Great Trek” took them into the land
appeared on the scene. As a result, armed landowning nobles to move of the Zulus, who ferociously resisted
Canada’s frontier was markedly less their serfs onto the “virgin lands” the oncoming Boers but eventually, like
violent than America’s. Canada, then beyond the settled edge of European indigenous peoples everywhere, were
and now a more law-abiding society Russia. By the nineteenth century, forced to submit to white rule.
than the United States, never had a imperial Russia had pushed its frontier In the Americas, Australia, Asia, and
“Wild West” like that of its southern onto the rolling steppes of central Asia, Africa, the great frontier of the nine-
neighbor. home to Tartars, Kalmyks, Kazakhs, and teenth century was the companion of
In Argentina and Russia, inherited myriad other indigenous peoples. Only conquest. The frontier brought oppor-
patterns of landholding and politics military conquest and a strengthened tunity to some and oppression to oth-
shaped their nineteenth-century fron- state bureaucracy made possible Euro- ers. In many places it nurtured
tiers. When Argentina’s General Julio pean settlement in those regions. democracy; elsewhere it invigorated
Roca vanquished the native Araucani- Between 1867 and 1897, more than a autocracy. And everywhere it
ans in 1879, he flung open the horizon- million of the tsar’s subjects left for the expanded the domains of European
less pampas to white settlement. But he hinterland. As elsewhere, the railroad civilization—for better or worse.

593
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594 • Chapter 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896

day—from the West Indies to the Chesapeake shore, tied to banking, railroading, and manufacturing. They
from the valleys of the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers had to buy expensive machinery in order to plant and
to the valleys of the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers. harvest their crops. A powerful steam engine could drag
And yet the trans-Mississippi West formed a dis- behind it simultaneously the plow, seeder, and har-
tinct chapter in that saga and retains even to this day row. The speed of harvesting wheat was dramatically
much of its uniqueness. There the Native American increased in the 1870s by the invention of the twine
peoples waged their last and most desperate struggle binder and then in the 1880s by the “combine”—the
against colonization, and there most Native Americans combined reaper-thresher, which was drawn by twenty
live today. There “Anglo” culture collided most directly to forty horses and which both reaped and bagged the
with Hispanic culture—the historic rival of the Anglo- grain. Widespread use of such costly equipment natu-
Americans for dominance in the New World—and rally called for first-class management. But the farm-
the Southwest remains the most Hispanicized region ers, often unskilled as businesspeople, were inclined to
in America. There America faced across the Pacific to blame the banks and railroads or the volatility of the
Asia, and there most Asian Americans dwell today. global marketplace, rather than their own shortcom-
There the scale and severity of the environment posed ings, for their losses.
their largest challenges to human ambitions, and there This amazing mechanization of agriculture in
the environment, with its aridity and still-magical the postwar years was almost as striking as the mecha-
emptiness, continues to mold social and political life, nization of industry. In fact, agricultural modernization
and the American imagination, as in no other part drove many marginal farmers off the land, thus swell-
of the nation. And in no other region has the federal ing the ranks of the new industrial work force. As the
government, with its vast landholdings, its subsidies
to the railroads, and its massive irrigation projects,
played so conspicuous a role in economic and social
development.
The westward-moving pioneers and the country
they confronted have assumed mythic proportions in
the American mind. They have been immortalized by
such writers as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Helen Hunt
Jackson, and Francis Parkman, and by such painters
as George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Albert Bier-
stadt. For better or worse, those pioneers planted the
seeds of American civilization in the immense western
wilderness. The life we live, they dreamed of; the life
they lived, we can only dream.

The Farm Becomes a Factory

The situation of American farmers, once jacks-and-
jills-of-all-trades, was rapidly changing. They had
raised their own food, fashioned their own clothing,
and bartered for other necessities with neighbors. Now
high prices persuaded farmers to concentrate on grow-
Picture Research Consultants & Archives

ing single “cash” crops, such as wheat or corn, and use

their profits to buy foodstuffs at the general store and
manufactured goods in town or by mail order. The
Chicago firm of Aaron Montgomery Ward sent out its
first catalogue—a single sheet—in 1872. Farmers were
becoming both consumers and producers in the world
economy, as their crops journeyed by rail and ship to
distant parts of the globe.
Large-scale farmers, especially in the immense
Grain Harvesting in Washington State Humans,
grain-producing areas of the Mississippi Valley, were
horses, and machines join forces in this turn-of-the-
now both specialists and businesspeople. As cogs in the
century scene.
vast industrial machine, these farmers were intimately

rural population steadily decreased, those farmers who

remained achieved miracles of production, making A contemporary farm protest song, “The Kansas Fool,”
America the world’s breadbasket and butcher shop. The ran,
farm was attaining the status of a factory—an outdoor
grain factory. Bonanza wheat farms of the Minnesota–
North Dakota area, for example, were enormous. By 1890
“ The bankers followed us out west;
And did in mortgages invest;
They looked ahead and shrewdly planned,

”
at least a half-dozen of them were larger than fifteen
And soon they’ll have our Kansas land.
thousand acres, with communication by telephone from
one part to another. These bonanza farms foreshadowed
the gigantic agribusinesses of the next century.
Agriculture was a big business from its earliest days enough dollars to go around, and as a result, prices
in California’s phenomenally productive (and phe- were forced down. In 1870 the currency in circulation
nomenally irrigated) Central Valley. California farms, for each person was $19.42; in 1890 it was only $22.67.
carved out of giant Spanish Mexican land grants and Yet during these twenty years, business and indus-
the railroads’ huge holdings, were from the outset trial activity, increasing manyfold, had intensified the
more than three times larger than the national aver- scramble for available currency.
age. The reformer Henry George in 1871 described the The forgotten farmers were caught on a treadmill.
Golden State as “not a country of farms but a country Despite unremitting toil, they operated year after year
of plantations and estates.” With the advent of the rail- at a loss and lived off their fat as best they could. In
road refrigerator car in the 1880s, California fruit and a vicious circle, their farm machinery increased their
vegetable crops, raised on sprawling tracts by ill-paid output of grain, lowered the price, and drove them even
migrant Mexican and Chinese farmhands, sold at a deeper into debt. Mortgages engulfed homesteads at an
handsome profit in the rich urban markets of the East. alarming rate; by 1890 Nebraska alone reported more
than 100,000 farms blanketed with mortgages. The
repeated crash of the sheriff-auctioneer’s hammer kept
Deflation Dooms the Debtor announcing to the world that another sturdy American
farmer had become landless in a landed nation.
Once the farmers became chained to a one-crop econ- Ruinous rates of interest, running from 8 to 40
omy—wheat or corn—they were in the same leaky boat percent, were charged on mortgages, largely by agents
with the southern cotton growers. As long as prices of eastern loan companies. The windburned sons and
stayed high, all went well. But when they skidded in the daughters of the sod, who felt that they deserved praise
1880s, bankruptcy fell like a blight on the farm belts. for developing the country, cried out in despair against
The grain farmers were no longer the masters of the loan sharks and the Wall Street octopus.
their own destinies. They were engaged in one of the Farm tenancy rather than farm ownership was
most fiercely competitive of businesses, for the price spreading like stinkweed. The trend was especially
of their product was determined in a world market by marked in the sharecropping South, where cotton
the world output. If the wheat fields of Argentina, Rus- prices also sank dismayingly. By 1880 one-fourth of all
sia, and other foreign countries flourished, the price of American farms were operated by tenants. The United
the farmers’ grain would fall and American sodbusters States was ready to feed the world, but under the new
would face ruin, as they did in the 1880s and 1890s. industrial feudalism, the farmers were about to sink
Low prices and a deflated currency were the chief into a status suggesting Old World serfdom.
worries of the frustrated farmers—North, South, and
West. If a family had borrowed $1,000 in 1855, when
wheat was worth about a dollar a bushel, they expected
to pay back the equivalent of one thousand bushels,
Unhappy Farmers
plus interest, when the mortgage fell due. But if they let Even Mother Nature ceased smiling, as her powerful
their debt run to 1890, when wheat had fallen to about forces conspired against agriculture. Mile-wide clouds
fifty cents a bushel, they would have to pay back the of grasshoppers, leaving “nothing but the mortgage,”
price of two thousand bushels for the $1,000 they had periodically ravaged prairie farms. The terrible cotton-
borrowed, plus interest. This unexpected burden struck boll weevil was also wreaking havoc in the South by
them as unjust, though their steely-eyed creditors often the early 1890s.
branded the complaining farmers as slippery and dis- The good earth was going sour. Floods added to the
honest rascals. waste of erosion, which had already washed the top-
The deflationary pinch on the debtor flowed partly soil off millions of once-lush southern acres. Expensive
from the static money supply. There were simply not fertilizers were urgently needed. A long succession of

Nebraska State Historical Society

their families had escaped to
Canada from the slave South
during the Civil War. Returning to
the United States in the 1880s,
they took advantage of the
Homestead Act to stake out
farms in Custer County, Nebraska.

droughts seared the trans-Mississippi West, beginning Farmers still made up nearly one-half the popula-
in the summer of 1887. Whole towns were abandoned. tion in 1890, but they were hopelessly disorganized.
“Going home to the wife’s folks” and “In God we The manufacturers and the railroad barons knew how
trusted, in Kansas we busted” were typical laments of to combine to promote their interests, and so, increas-
many impoverished farmers, as they fled their weather- ingly, did industrial workers. But the farmers were by
beaten shacks and sun-baked sod houses. One irate nature independent and individualistic—dead set
“poet” snarled, against consolidation or regimentation. No really effec-
tive Carnegie or Gompers arose among them to preach
Fifty miles to water,
the gospel of economic integration and concentration.
A hundred miles to wood,
They never did organize successfully to restrict produc-
To hell with this damned country,
tion until forced to by the federal government nearly
I’m going home for good.
half a century later, in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
To add to their miseries, the soil-tillers were gouged days. What they did manage to organize was a monu-
by their government—local, state, and national. Their mental political uprising.
land was overassessed, and they paid painful local taxes,
whereas wealthy easterners could conceal their stocks
and bonds in safe-deposit boxes. High protective tariffs
in these years poured profits into the pockets of man-
The Farmers Take Their Stand
ufacturers. Farmers, on the other hand, had no choice Agrarian unrest had flared forth earlier, in the Green-
but to sell their low-priced products in a fiercely com- back movement shortly after the Civil War. Prices
petitive, unprotected world market, while buying high- sagged in 1868, and a host of farmers unsuccessfully
priced manufactured goods in a protected home market. sought relief from low prices and high indebtedness
The farmers were also “farmed” by the corporations by demanding an inflation of the currency with paper
and processors. They were at the mercy of the harvester money.
trust, the barbed-wire trust, and the fertilizer trust, The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry—
all of which could control output and raise prices to better known as the Grange—was organized in 1867.
extortionate levels. Middlemen took a juicy “cut” from Its leading spirit was Oliver H. Kelley, a shrewd and
the selling price of the goods that the farmers bought, energetic Minnesota farmer then working as a clerk in
while operators pushed storage rates to the ceiling at Washington. Kelley’s first objective was to enhance the
grain warehouses and elevators. lives of isolated farmers through social, educational,
In addition, the railroad octopus had the grain and fraternal activities. Farm men and women, cursed
growers in its grip. Freight rates could be so high that with loneliness in widely separated farmhouses, found
the farmers sometimes lost less if they burned their the Grange’s picnics, concerts, and lectures a god-
corn for fuel than if they shipped it. If they raised their send. Kelley, a Mason, even found farmers receptive to
voices in protest, the ruthless railroad operators might his mumbo-jumbo of passwords and secret rituals, as
let their grain spoil in damp places or refuse to provide well as his four-ply hierarchy, ranging (for men) from
them with cars when needed. Laborer to Husbandman and (for women) from Maid to

596
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Persuasive Populists • 597

Matron. The Grange spread like an old-time prairie fire state legislation, they strove to regulate railway rates
and by 1875 claimed 800,000 members, chiefly in the and the storage fees charged by railroads and by the
Midwest and South. Buzzing with gossip, these calicoed operators of warehouses and grain elevators. Many
and callous folk often met in red schoolhouses around of the state courts, notably in Illinois, were disposed
potbellied stoves. to recognize the principle of public control of private
The Grangers gradually raised their goals from business for the general welfare. A number of the so-
individual self-improvement to improvement of the called Granger Laws, however, were badly drawn, and
farmers’ collective plight. In a determined effort to they were bitterly fought through the high courts by
escape the clutches of the trusts, they established coop- the well-paid lawyers of the “interests.” Following judi-
eratively owned stores for consumers and cooperatively cial reverses, most severely at the hands of the Supreme
owned grain elevators and warehouses for producers. Court in the famous Wabash decision of 1886 (see p.
Their most ambitious experiment was an attempt to 519), the Grangers’ influence faded. But their organiza-
manufacture harvesting machinery, but this venture, tion has lived on as a vocal champion of farm interests,
partly as a result of mismanagement, ended in finan- while brightening rural life with social activities.
cial disaster. Farmers’ grievances likewise found a vent in the
Embattled Grangers also went into politics, enjoy- Greenback Labor party, which combined the inflation-
ing their most gratifying success in the grain-growing ary appeal of the earlier Greenbackers with a program
regions of the upper Mississippi Valley, chiefly in Illi- for improving the lot of labor. In 1878, the high-water
nois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. There, through mark of the movement, the Greenback Laborites polled
Granger Collection

The Farmers’ Grievances This poster from 1875 expresses one of the agrarian
radicals’ fundamental premises: that all other walks of life were dependent—or even
parasitic—on the indispensable work of farmers. In his famous “Cross of Gold” speech in
1896 (see p. 601), Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan put it this way:
“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by
magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the
country.”

over a million votes and elected fourteen members was the Alliance’s exclusion of blacks, who counted for
of Congress. In the presidential election of 1880, the nearly half the agricultural population of the South. In
Greenbackers ran General James B. Weaver, an old the 1880s a separate Colored Farmers’ National Alliance
Granger who was a favorite of Civil War veterans and emerged to attract black farmers, and by 1890 member-
who possessed a remarkable voice and bearing. He ship numbered more than 250,000. The long history
spoke to perhaps half a million citizens in a hundred of racial division in the South, however, made it diffi-
or so speeches but polled only 3 percent of the total cult for white and black farmers to work together in the
popular vote. same organization.
Out of the Farmers’ Alliances a new political party
emerged in the early 1890s—the People’s party. Bet-
Prelude to Populism ter known as the Populists, these frustrated farmers
attacked Wall Street and the “money trust.” They called
A striking manifestation of rural discontent came for nationalizing the railroads, telephone, and tele-
through the Farmers’ Alliance, founded in Texas in the graph; instituting a graduated income tax; and creating
late 1870s (see p. 505). Farmers came together in the a new federal “subtreasury”—a scheme to provide farm-
Alliance to socialize, but more importantly to break ers with loans for crops stored in government-owned
the strangling grip of the railroads and manufacturers warehouses, where they could be held until market
through cooperative buying and selling. Local chapters prices rose. They also wanted the free and unlimited
spread throughout the South and the Great Plains dur- coinage of silver—yet another of the debtors’ demands
ing the 1880s, until by 1890 members numbered more for inflation that echoed continuously throughout the
than a million hard-bitten souls. Gilded Age.
Unfortunately, the Alliance weakened itself by Numerous fiery prophets leapt forward to trum-
ignoring the plight of landless tenant farmers, share- pet the Populist cause. The free coinage of silver struck
croppers, and farmworkers. Even more debilitating many Populists as a cure-all, especially after the circu-
lation of an enormously popular pamphlet titled Coin’s
Financial School (1894). Written by William Hope Har-
vey, it was illustrated by clever woodcuts, one of which
depicted the gold ogre beheading the beautiful silver
maiden. In fiction parading as fact, the booklet showed
how the “little professor”—“Coin” Harvey—over-
whelmed the bankers and professors of economics with
his brilliant arguments on behalf of free silver. Another
notorious spellbinder was red-haired Ignatius Don-
nelly of Minnesota, three times elected to Congress.
The queen of the Populist “calamity howlers” was Mary
Elizabeth (“Mary Yellin’”) Lease, a tall, athletic woman
known as the “Kansas Pythoness.” She reportedly
demanded that Kansans should raise “less corn and
more hell.” The big-city New York Evening Post snarled,
“We don’t want any more states until we can civilize
Kansas.” To many easterners, complaint, not corn, was
rural America’s staple crop.
Yet the Populists, despite their oddities, were not
to be laughed away. They were leading a deadly ear-
nest and impassioned campaign to relieve the farmers’
many miseries. Smiles faded from Republican and Dem-
Kansas State Historical Society

ocratic faces alike as countless thousands of Populists

began to sing “Good-bye, My Party, Good-bye.” In 1892
the Populists had jolted the traditional parties by win-
ning several congressional seats and polling more than
1 million votes for their presidential candidate, James
B. Weaver. Racial divisions continued to hobble the
Populists in the South, but in the West their ranks were
Mary E. Lease (1853–1933) She was so eloquent as to
swelling. Could the People’s party now reach beyond
be called the “Patrick Henry in Petticoats.”
its regional bases in agrarian America, join hands with

urban workers, and mount a successful attack on the

northeastern citadels of power? After the Pullman strike collapsed, Eugene Debs
(1855–1926) said,

Ctheoxey’s Army and

Pullman Strike
“ No strike has ever been lost.
In 1897 he declared,
”
The panic of 1893 and the severe ensuing depression
strengthened the Populists’ argument that farmers and
“ The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I
am for Socialism because I am for humanity.
”
laborers alike were being victimized by an oppressive
economic and political system. Ragged armies of the
unemployed began marching to protest their plight. In Square anarchists the year before (see p. 533). But U.S.
the growing hordes of displaced industrial toilers, the attorney general Richard Olney, an archconservative
Populists saw potential political allies. and an ex–railroad attorney, urged the dispatch of fed-
The most famous marcher was “General” Jacob S. eral troops. His legal grounds were that the strikers
Coxey, a wealthy Ohio quarry owner. He set out for were interfering with the transit of the U.S. mail. Presi-
Washington in 1894 with a few score of supporters and dent Cleveland supported Olney with the ringing dec-
a swarm of newspaper reporters. His platform included laration, “If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver
a demand that the government relieve unemployment a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered.”
by an inflationary public works program, supported by To the delight of conservatives, federal troops,
some $500 million in legal tender notes to be issued by bayonets fixed, crushed the Pullman strike. Debs was
the Treasury. Coxey himself rode in a carriage with his sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for contempt
wife and infant son, appropriately named Legal Tender
Coxey, while his tiny “army” tramped along behind,
singing,
We’re coming, Grover Cleveland,
500,000 strong,
We’re marching on to Washington
to right the nation’s wrong.
The “Commonweal Army” of Coxeyites finally
straggled into the nation’s capital, but the invasion
took on the aspects of a comic opera when “General”
William B. Becker Collection/American Museum of Photography

Coxey and his “lieutenants” were arrested for walking

on the grass.
Elsewhere, violent flare-ups accompanied labor
protests, notably in Chicago. Most dramatic was the
crippling Pullman strike of 1894. Eugene V. Debs,
a charismatic labor leader, had helped organize the
American Railway Union of about 150,000 members.
The Pullman Palace Car Company, which maintained
a model town near Chicago for its employees, was hit
hard by the depression and cut wages by about one-
third, while holding the line on rent for the company
houses. The workers finally struck—in some places
overturning Pullman cars—and paralyzed railway traf-
fic from Chicago to the Pacific coast. The American Coxey’s Army on the March, 1894 This photograph
Federation of Labor conspicuously declined to support shows two of the banners that Coxey’s Army carried. The
the Pullman strikers, thus enhancing the AF of L’s repu- one in the foreground says “Death to Interest on Bonds,”
tation for “respectability” even while weakening labor’s the usual debtors’ protest against creditors. The larger one
cause by driving a large wedge into the workers’ ranks. in the background reads “Pittsburg & Allegheny. Work for
The turmoil in Chicago was serious but not yet Americans. More Money, Less Misery, Good Roads,” a
reference to Coxey’s plan to end the depression by
completely out of hand. At least this was the judgment
employing the jobless to build public works and paying
of Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, a friend of
them with greenbacks.
the downtrodden, who had pardoned the Haymarket

The Pullman Strike, 1894

Illinois National Guardsmen
fire on Pullman Company
strikers on July 7, 1894.
Police clubs and U.S. Army
rifles and bayonets finally

Granger Collection
broke the back of the strike,
which halted railroads
throughout the country.

of court because he had defied a federal court injunc- standard or inflate the currency by monetizing silver—
tion to cease striking. Ironically, the lean labor agitator loomed as the issue on which the election would turn.
spent much of his enforced leisure reading radical lit- The leading candidate for the Republican presiden-
erature, which led to his later leadership of the socialist tial nomination in 1896 was former congressman Wil-
movement in America. liam McKinley of Ohio, sponsor of the ill-starred tariff
Embittered cries of “government by injunction” bill of 1890 (see p. 601). He had established a creditable
now burst from organized labor. This was the first time Civil War record, having risen to the rank of major; he
that such a legal weapon had been used conspicuously hailed from the electorally potent state of Ohio; and he
by Washington to break a strike, and it was all the more could point to long years of honorable service in Con-
distasteful because defiant workers who were held in gress, where he had made many friends with his kindly
contempt could be imprisoned without a jury trial. and conciliatory manner.
Signs multiplied that employers were striving to smash As a presidential candidate, McKinley was largely
labor unions by court action. Nonlabor elements of the creature of a fellow Ohioan, Marcus Alonzo Hanna,
the country, including the Populists and other debtors, who had made his fortune in the iron business and now
were likewise incensed. They saw in the brutal Pullman coveted the role of president maker. “I love McKinley,”
episode further proof of an unholy alliance between he once said. As a wholehearted Hamiltonian, Hanna
business and the courts. believed that a prime function of government was to
aid business. Honest, earnest, tough, and direct, he
became the personification of big industry in politics.
Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan He was often caricatured in cartoons, quite unfairly, as
a bloated bully in a loud checkered suit with a dollar
The smoldering grievances of the long-suffering farm- sign in each square. He believed that in some measure
ers and the depression-plagued laborers gave ominous prosperity “trickled down” to the laborer, whose dinner
significance to the election of 1896. Conservatives pail was full when business flourished. Critics assailed
of all stripes feared an impending upheaval, while this idea as equivalent to feeding the horses in order to
down-and-out husbandmen and discontented workers feed the sparrows.
cast about desperately for political salvation. Increas- The hardheaded Hanna, although something
ingly, monetary policy—whether to maintain the gold of a novice in politics, organized his preconvention

campaign for McKinley with consummate skill and

with a liberal outpouring of his own money. The con-
vention steamroller, well lubricated with Hanna’s dol-
lars, nominated McKinley on the first ballot in St.
Louis in June 1896. The Republican platform cleverly
straddled the money question but leaned toward hard-
money policies. It declared for the gold standard, even
though McKinley’s voting record in Congress had been
embarrassingly friendly to silver. The platform also
condemned hard times and Democratic incapacity,
while pouring praise on the protective tariff.
Dissension riddled the Democratic camp. Cleve-
land no longer led his party. The depression had driven
the last nail into his political coffin. Dubbed “the
Stuffed Prophet,” he was undeniably the most unpop-
ular man in the country. Labor-debtor groups remem-
bered too vividly his intervention in the Pullman
strike, the backstairs Morgan bond deal, and especially
his stubborn hard-money policies. Ultraconservative in

Granger Collection
finance, Cleveland now looked more like a Republican
than a Democrat on the money issue.
Rudderless, the Democratic convention met in Chi-
cago in July 1896, with the silverites lusting for victory.
Crying for Protection, 1896 Uncle Sam is called on in
this cartoon to nurse so-called infant industries—some of
which had in fact long since grown into vigorous
adulthood.

Shouting insults at the absent Cleveland, the delegates

refused, by a suicidal vote of 564 to 357, to endorse
their own administration. They had the enthusiasm
and the numbers; all they lacked was a leader.
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Behring Center

A new Moses suddenly appeared in the person of

William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Then only thirty-
six years of age and known as “the Boy Orator of the
Platte,”* he stepped confidently onto the platform
before fifteen thousand people. His masterful presence
was set off by a peninsular jaw and raven-black hair. He
radiated honesty, sincerity, and energy.
The convention-hall setting was made to order for
a magnificent oratorical effort. A hush fell over the del-
egates as Bryan stood before them. With an organlike
voice that rolled into the outer corners of the huge hall,
he delivered a fervent plea for silver. Rising to supreme
heights of eloquence, he thundered, “We will answer
their demands for a gold standard by saying to them:
‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this
crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a
cross of gold.’”
McKinley Campaign Headquarters, Chicago, 1896
Those few black Americans who could exercise their right
to vote in the 1890s still remained faithful to “the party of *One contemporary sneered that Bryan, like the Platte River in his
Lincoln.” home state of Nebraska, was “six inches deep and six miles wide at
the mouth.”

The Cross of Gold speech was a sensation. Swept of debt. They sang, “We’ll All Have Our Pockets Lined
off its feet in a tumultuous scene, the Democratic con- with Silver” and “No Crown of Thorns, No Cross of
vention nominated Bryan the next day on the fifth Gold.”
ballot. The platform demanded inflation through the Bryan created panic among eastern conservatives
unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 ounces of with his threat of converting their holdings overnight
silver to 1 of gold, though the market ratio was about into fifty-cent dollars. The “Gold Bugs” responded with
32 to 1. This meant that the silver in a dollar would be their own free and unlimited coinage of verbiage. They
worth about fifty cents. vented their alarm in abusive epithets, ranging from
Democratic “Gold Bugs,” unable to swallow Bryan, “fanatic” and “madman” to “traitor” and “murderer.”
bolted their party over the silver issue. A conservative “In God We Trust, with Bryan We Bust,” the Republi-
senator from New York, when asked if he was a Dem- cans sneered, while one eastern clergyman cried, “That
ocrat still, reportedly replied, “Yes, I am a Democrat platform was made in Hell.” Widespread fear of Bryan
still—very still.” The Democratic minority, including and the “silver lunacy” enabled “Dollar Mark” Hanna,
Cleveland, charged that the Populist-silverites had sto- now chairman of the Republican National Committee,
len both the name and the clothes of their party. They to shine as a money-raiser. He “shook down” the trusts
nominated a lost-cause ticket of their own, and many and plutocrats and piled up an enormous “slush fund”
of them, including Cleveland, not too secretly hoped for a “campaign of education”—or of propaganda,
for a McKinley victory. depending on one’s point of view. Reminding the vot-
The Populists now faced a dilemma, because the ers of Cleveland’s “Democratic panic,” Republicans
Democratic majority had appropriated their main appealed to the “belly vote” with their prize slogan,
plank—“16 to 1,” that “heaven-born ratio.” The bulk of “McKinley and the Full Dinner Pail.” The McKinleyites
the Populists, fearing a hard-money McKinley victory, amassed the most formidable political campaign chest
endorsed both “fusion” with the Democrats and Bryan thus far in American history. At all levels—national,
for president, sacrificing their identity in the mix. Sing- state, and local—it amounted to about $16 million, as
ing “The Jolly Silver Dollar of the Dads,” they became contrasted with about $1 million for the poorer Demo-
in effect the “Demo-Pop” party, though a handful of crats (roughly “16 to 1”). With some justification, the
the original Populists refused to support Bryan and Bryanites accused Hanna of buying the election and
went down with their colors nailed to the mast. of floating McKinley into the White House on a tidal
wave of mud and money.
Bryan’s cyclonic campaign began to lose steam as
CVersus
lass Conflict: Plowholders
Bondholders
the weeks passed. Fear was probably Hanna’s stron-
gest ally, as it was Bryan’s worst enemy. Republican
businesspeople placed contracts with manufacturers,
contingent on the election of McKinley. A few factory
Mark Hanna smugly assumed that he could make the
owners, with thinly veiled intimidation, paid off their
tariff the focus of the campaign. But Bryan, a dynamo
workers and told them not to come to work on Wednes-
of energy, forced the free-trade issue into the backseat
day morning if Bryan won. Reports also circulated that
when he took to the stump in behalf of free silver.
employers were threatening to pay their employees
Sweeping through 27 states and traveling 18,000 miles,
in fifty-cent pieces, instead of in dollars, if Bryan tri-
he made nearly 600 speeches—36 in one day—and
umphed. Such were some of the “dirty tricks” of the
even invaded the East, “the enemy’s country.” Vachel
“Stop Bryan, Save America” crusade.
Lindsay caught the spirit of his oratorical orgy:
Hanna’s campaign methods paid off. On elec-
Prairie avenger, mountain lion, tion day McKinley triumphed decisively. The vote
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, was 271 to 176 in the Electoral College and 7,102,246
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun, to 6,492,559 in the popular election. Driven by fear
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders and excitement, an unprecedented outpouring of vot-
from the West.* ers flocked to the polls. McKinley ran strongly in the
populous East, where he carried every county of New
Free silver became almost as much a religious as a
England, and in the upper Mississippi Valley. Bryan’s
financial issue. Hordes of fanatical free-silverites hailed
states, concentrated in the debt-burdened South and
Bryan as the messiah to lead them out of the wilderness
the trans-Mississippi West, boasted more acreage than
McKinley’s but less population (see Map 26.6).
The free-silver election of 1896 was perhaps the
*Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc., from The Collected Poems of Vachel Lindsay, Revised Edi- most significant political turning point since Lincoln’s
tion by Vachel Lindsay, New York: Macmillan, 1948. victories in 1860 and 1864. Despite Bryan’s strength in

1896
WASH. N.H.
D-4
MONT. VT. R-4 ME.
D-3 N. DAK. R-4 R-6
R-3
OREGON MINN.
R-4
R-9 MASS.
IDAHO S. DAK. R-15
D-3 WISC. N.Y.
D-4 R-12 R-36 R.I.
WYO. MICH.
D-3 R-14 R-4
PA. CONN.
IOWA N.J. R-6
NEB. R-13 R-32
NEV. D-8 OHIO R-10
D-3 ILL. IND. R-23 DEL.
UTAH R-24 R-15
CALIF. D-3 COLO. [Link]. R-3
R-8/D-1 D-4 R-6 VA. MD.
KANSAS MO. D-12 R-8
D-10 D-17 KY.
R-12/D-1
N.C.
OKLA. TENN. D-11
ARIZONA TERR. D-21
IND. ARK. S.C.
TERR. NEW MEXICO
TERR. D-8 D-9
TERR.
ALA. GA.
MISS. D-11 D-13
D-9

TEXAS LA.
D-15 D-8
FLA.
D-4

Candidate (Party) Electoral Vote Popular Vote

McKinley (Republican) 271 61% 7,102,246 51.1% Territories, Indian
reservations, unsettled, etc.
Bryan (Democrat) 176 39% 6,492,559 47.7%

Map 26.6 Presidential Election of 1896 (with electoral vote by state) This election
tolled the death knell of the Gilded Age political party system, with its razor-close elec-
tions, strong party loyalties, and high voter turnouts. Bryan’s sweep of the southern states
and strong
HMCoshowing
Map MSin00411
the West gave him only 176 electoral votes to McKinley’s 271 from
No bleeds
the more populous
The North
Election of 1896and East. For years after 1896, Republicans predominated, and
citizenskennedy_26_06_Ms00411
showed a declining interest in joining parties and voting. © Cengage Learning
trim - 35p x 25p
Final proof 9/9/08

the South and West, the results vividly demonstrated The Bryan-McKinley battle heralded the advent
his lack of appeal to the unmortgaged farmer and espe- of a new era in American politics. At first glance the
cially to the eastern urban laborer. Many wage earners election seemed to be the age-old story of the under-
in the East voted for their jobs and full dinner pails, privileged many against the privileged few, of the
threatened as they were by free silver, free trade, and indebted backcountry against the wealthier seaboard,
fireless factories. Living precariously on a fixed wage, of the country against the city, of the agrarians against
the factory workers had no reason to favor inflation, the industrialists, of Main Street against Wall Street, of
which was the heart of the Bryanites’ program. the nobodies against the somebodies. Yet when Bryan
made his evangelical appeal to all those supposed foes
of the existing social order, not enough of them banded
together to form a political majority.
In gold-standard Britain, there was much relief over
The outcome was instead a resounding victory for
McKinley’s victory. The London Standard
big business, the big cities, middle-class values, and
commented,
financial conservatism. Bryan’s defeat marked the last

“ The hopelessly ignorant and savagely cov-

etous waifs and strays of American civilization
serious effort to win the White House with mostly
agrarian votes. The future of presidential politics lay
not on the farms, with their dwindling population, but
voted for Bryan, but the bulk of the solid sense,
business integrity, and social stability sided in the mushrooming cities, with their growing hordes
with McKinley. The nation is to be heartily of freshly arriving immigrants.
congratulated.
” The Grand Old Party’s smashing victory of 1896
also heralded a Republican grip on the White House

for sixteen consecutive years—indeed, for all but eight

of the next thirty-six years. McKinley’s election thus
imparted a new character to the American political sys-
tem. The long reign of Republican political dominance
that it ushered in was accompanied by diminishing
voter participation in elections, the weakening of party
organizations, and the fading away of issues like the
money question and civil-service reform, which came
to be replaced by concern for industrial regulation and
the welfare of labor. Scholars have dubbed this new
political era the period of the fourth party system,
signaling a break with the previous “third party sys-
tem,” in place since 1860 and characterized by remark-
ably high voter turnouts and close contests between
Democrats and Republicans.

Library of Congress
REnthroned
epublican Stand-pattism

An eminently “safe” McKinley took the inaugural oath

in 1897. With his impeccable white vest, he seemed
never to perspire, even in oppressively muggy Wash-
The Sacrilegious Candidate A hostile cartoonist makes
ington. Though a man of considerable ability, he was
sport of Bryan’s notorious Cross of Gold speech in 1896.
an ear-to-the-ground politician who seldom got far out

Campaign Gimcracks, 1896 These mechanical cards

predicted Republican prosperity with McKinley and
economic ruin with Bryan. Collection of Janice L. and David J. Frent

of line with majority opinion. His cautious, conser- Prosperity, long lurking around the corner, began
vative nature caused him to shy away from the flam- to return with a rush in 1897, the first year of McKin-
ing banner of reform. Business was given a free rein, ley’s term. The depression of 1893 had run its course,
and the trusts, which had trusted him in 1896, were and farm prices rose. Paint-thirsty midwestern barns
allowed to develop more mighty muscles without seri- blossomed in new colors, and the wheels of industry
ous restraints. resumed their hum. Republican politicians, like crow-
Almost as soon as McKinley took office, the tariff ing roosters believing they caused the sun to rise,
issue, which had played second fiddle to silver in the claimed credit for attracting the sunlight of prosperity.
“Battle of ‘96,” quickly forced itself to the fore. The With the return of prosperity, the money issue that
current Wilson-Gorman law was not raising enough had overshadowed politics since the Civil War gradu-
revenue to cover the annual Treasury deficits, and the ally faded away. The Gold Standard Act of 1900,
Republican trusts thought that they had purchased passed over last-ditch silverite opposition, provided
the right to additional tariff protection by their lush that the paper currency be redeemed freely in gold.
contributions to Hanna’s war chest. In due course the Nature and science gradually provided an inflation
Dingley Tariff Bill was jammed through the House that the “Gold Bug” East had fought so frantically to
in 1897, under the pounding gavel of the rethroned prevent. Electrifying discoveries of new gold deposits
“Czar” Reed. The proposed new rates were high, but in Canada’s fabled Klondike, as well as in Alaska, South
not high enough to satisfy the paunchy lobbyists, Africa, and Australia, brought huge quantities of gold
who once again descended upon the Senate. Over 850 onto world markets, as did the perfecting of the cheap
amendments were tacked onto the overburdened bill. cyanide process for extracting gold from low-grade
The resulting piece of patchwork finally established the ore. Moderate inflation thus took care of the currency
average rates at 46.5 percent, substantially higher than needs of an explosively expanding nation, as its circu-
the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Act of 1894 and in latory system greatly improved. The tide of “silver her-
some categories even higher than the McKinley Act of esy” rapidly receded, and the “Popocratic” fish were
1890. (See the chart in the Appendix.) left gasping high and dry on a golden-sanded beach.

Varying Viewpoints
Was the West Really “Won”?
F or more than half a century, the Turner thesis dominated
historical writing about the West. In his famous essay of
1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,”
ences on the nation’s development. But as the frontier era
recedes ever further into the past, scholars are less persuaded
that Turner’s thesis adequately explains the national character.
historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier American society is still conspicuously different from Euro-
experience molded both region and nation. Not only the West, pean and other cultures, even though Turner’s frontier disap-
Turner insisted, but the national character had been uniquely peared more than a century ago.
shaped by the westward movement. Pioneers had brought Modern scholars charge that Turner based his thesis on
the raw West into the embrace of civilization. And the struggle several questionable assumptions. Historian David J. Weber,
to overcome the hazards of the western wilderness—includ- for example, suggests that the line of the frontier did not
ing distance, deserts, drought, and Indians—had transformed define the quavering edge of “civilization,” but marked the
Europeans into tough, inventive, and self-reliant Americans. boundary between diverse cultures, each with its own claims
Turner’s thesis raised a question that Americans found to legitimacy and, indeed, to legitimate possession of the
especially intriguing in 1893. Just three years earlier, the land. The frontier should therefore be understood not as the
superintendent of the census declared that the frontier, place where “civilization” triumphed over “savagery,” but as the
defined as the boundary of a zone with little or no settled principal site of interaction between those cultures.
population, had closed forever. What new forces, Turner asked, Several so-called New Western historians take this argu-
would shape a distinctive American national character, now ment still further. Scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick,
that the testing ground of the frontier had been plowed and Richard White, and Donald Worster suggest that the cultural
tamed? and ecological damage inflicted by advancing “civilization”
Turner’s hypothesis that the American character was must be reckoned with in any final accounting of what the
forged in the western wilderness is surely among the most pioneers accomplished. These same scholars insist that the
provocative statements ever made about the formative influ- West did not lose its regional identity after the frontier line

was no longer recognizable in 1890. The West, they argue, is Hispanic peoples who had preceded them into the region.
still a unique part of the national mosaic, a region whose But those conquests were less than complete, so the argu-
history, culture, and identity remain every bit as distinctive as ment goes, and the West therefore remains, uniquely among
those of New England or the Old South. American regions, an unsettled arena of commingling and
But where Turner saw the frontier as the principal shaper competition among those groups. Moreover, in these
of the region’s character, the New Western historians empha- accounts the West’s distinctively challenging climate and
size the effects of ethnic and racial confrontation, topogra- geography yielded to human habitation not through the
phy, climate, and the roles of government and big business efforts of heroic individual pioneers, but only through mas-
as the factors that have made the modern West. The New sive corporate—and especially federal government—invest-
Western historians thus reject Turner’s emphasis on the tri- ments in transportation systems (like the transcontinental
umphal civilizing of the wilderness. As they see the matter, railroad) and irrigation projects (like the watering of Califor-
European and American settlers did not tame the West, but nia’s Central Valley). Such developments still give western life
rather conquered it, by suppressing the Native American and its special character today.

Chapter Review
KEY TERMS PEOPLE TO KNOW
reservation system (576) Homestead Act (586) Frederick Jackson Turner
Little Bighorn, Battle mechanization of Jacob S. Coxey
of the (578) agriculture (594) William McKinley
Wounded Knee, Battle Populists (598) Marcus Alonzo Hanna
of (581) Pullman strike (599)
Dawes Severalty Act (581) fourth party system (604)
mining industry (584) Gold Standard Act (605)

To Learn More
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and
History of the American West (1970) the Wild West Show (2006)
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and
West (1991) the Rush to Colorado (1998)
Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”:
American Landscape (2008) A New History of the American West (1991)
Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and
Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, the Remarkable Election of 1896 (2010)
1850–1890 (1983)
Robert V. Hine, The American West: A New Interpretive A complete, annotated bibliography for this
History (2nd ed., 1984) chapter—along with brief descriptions of the
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken People to Know—may be found on the American
Past of the American West (1987) Pageant website. The Key Terms are defined in a
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (2007) Glossary at the end of the text.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History” (1893)

CHRONOLOGY
ca. 1700–1800 New Indian peoples move onto Great 1889–1890 North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana,
Plains Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming
admitted to Union
1858 Pikes Peak gold rush
1890 Census Bureau declares frontier line
1859 Nevada Comstock Lode discovered ended
Emergence of People’s party (Populists)
1862 Homestead Act
1891 Battle of Wounded Knee
1864 Sand Creek massacre Construction of Trans-Siberian Railroad
Nevada admitted to Union begins

1867 National Grange organized 1892 Populist party candidate James B.

Weaver polls more than 1 million
1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn votes in presidential election
Colorado admitted to Union
1893 Frederick Jackson Turner publishes “The
1877 Nez Perce war Significance of the Frontier in Ameri-
can History”
1881 Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A Century
of Dishonor 1894 “Coxey’s Army” marches on Washing-
ton Pullman strike
1884 Federal government outlaws Indian Sun
Dance 1896 Utah admitted to Union
McKinley defeats Bryan for presidency
1885 Canadian Pacific Railway, first transcon-
tinental rail line, completed across 1897 Dingley Tariff Act
Canada
1900 Gold Standard Act
1885–1890 Local chapters of Farmers’ Alliance
formed 1907 Oklahoma admitted to Union

1887 Dawes Severalty Act 1924 Indians granted U.S. citizenship

1889 Oklahoma opened to U.S. citizen 1934 Indian Reorganization Act

settlement

Go to the CourseMate website at

[Link] for
additional study tools and review
materials—including audio and
video clips—for this chapter.

Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
AP* Review Questions for Chapter 26
1. In post–Civil War America, what was the only reason 5. What was the most important role played by the min-
Indians voluntarily surrendered their ancestral lands? ing frontier?
(A) Indians chose to migrate further west from their (A) Bringing law and order to the West
ancestral lands for superior farming. (B) Reducing the intensity of conflict between whites
(B) Indians received solemn promises from the federal and Indians
government that they would be left alone and pro- (C) Enabling the government to go off the gold
vided with food, clothing, and supplies on their standard
remaining lands. (D) Ensuring that the mining industry would remain
(C) Indians lost mobility when white Americans killed in the hands of independent, small businessmen
their horses. (E) Attracting a substantial white population and
(D) Indians were permitted to control the supply of wealth to the West
food, buffalo, and other staples within the
reservations. 6. Which of the following was NOT a serious obstacle or
difficulty encountered by families seeking to farm in
(E) Indians traded land to whites for rifles, blankets,
the frontier West?
food, and medicine.
(A) Insufficient quantities of acreage for productive
2. What sparked a new round of warfare between the farming in the rain-scarce Great Plains offered for
Sioux tribe and the U.S. Army in 1874? sale through the Homestead Act
(A) The massacre of U.S. Army captain William Fetter- (B) Land-grabbing promoters and speculators obtain-
man and his soldiers by a Sioux war party near the ing the most attractive land for farming
Bozeman Trail (C) Inhospitable soil and inadequate available tech-
(B) The start of an effort by Sioux chief Crazy Horse to nology for farming the prairie sod of the Great
drive all whites from Montana and the Dakotas Plains
(C) An expedition by U.S. Army colonel George Custer (D) Financial setbacks brought on by periodic severe
to Little Big Horn, Montana droughts in the prairie West
(D) The discovery of gold by Colonel George Custer (E) Unscrupulous corporations using dummy home-
on Sioux land in the Black Hills steaders to obtain the best land
(E) The announcement of the federal government
7. Among the following, which group was least likely to
that it was opening all Sioux lands to settlement
migrate to the cattle and farming frontier of the West?
3. All of the following factors contributed to ultimate (A) Eastern city dwellers
surrender of the Plains Indians by the 1880s EXCEPT (B) Eastern farmers
the (C) Recent northern European immigrants
(A) coming of the railroads. (D) African Americans
(B) successive waves of army troops, farmers, cattle- (E) Midwestern farmers
men, sheepherders, and settlers competing for and
seizing Plains Indian lands, food and other staples, 8. Why were Americans disturbed when the superinten-
and natural resources. dent of the census announced in 1890 that a stable
(C) virtual extermination of the buffalo. frontier line was no longer discernible?
(D) ravaging of the Indian population by white peo- (A) Americans now knew the Homestead Act would
ple’s diseases. no longer provide them with adequate amounts of
(E) failure of Plains Indians to display courage, cun- cheap, hospitable western lands to farm.
ning, and cruelty in warfare. (B) Americans believed that this declaration meant a
renewal of the Indian wars.
4. In an effort to assimilate Indians into American soci- (C) The promise of an endlessly open and vacant
ety, the Dawes Act did all of the following EXCEPT West, an element of America’s mythological his-
(A) dissolve many tribes as legal entities. tory from its beginnings, was now over.
(B) attempt to make rugged individualists of the (D) Americans feared this development would
Indians. strengthen the political power of the Populists and
(C) abolish tribal ownership of land. radical political parties.
(D) promise Indians U.S. citizenship in twenty-five (E) It meant that a renewal of political tensions and
years. warfare with Mexico was inevitable.
(E) outlaw the Indian Sun (Ghost) Dance.

607A
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
AP* Review Questions for Chapter 26 • 607B

9. How does the safety valve theory of frontier America 13. All of the following characterized the election of 1896
explain the role of the West in dampening class con- EXCEPT that
flict in the United States? (A) the major political issue of the election was free
(A) Free western land attracted many immigrants to and unlimited coinage of silver.
the West who might otherwise have clogged urban (B) William Jennings Bryan gained the presidential
eastern job markets and depressed the wages of nomination of the Democratic and Populist parties
eastern city dwellers. mainly because he eloquently supported farmers’
(B) Western farmers tended to be more politically con- demand for the unlimited coinage of silver.
servative than those in the East and, thus, less apt (C) it was the last time in American history that a seri-
to support populist or radical appeals to their eco- ous effort to win the White House would be made
nomic conditions. by mostly agrarian votes.
(C) Wealthy western farmers hired many unemployed (D) millions of dollars were raised from trusts and big
laborers from eastern cities to reduce unemploy- businessmen by Republican National Committee
ment in the East. chairman Mark Hanna to ensure the election of
(D) Eastern city dwellers headed to the West for free William McKinley and protect big-business
homesteads during depressions. interests.
(E) Western cities had less class conflict than those in (E) it ushered in an extended period of increased voter
the East. participation, the strengthening of party organiza-
tions, and the continued presence of the money
10. Which of the following did late-nineteenth-century
question and civil-service reform in the national
farmers believe to be most responsible for their diffi-
political discourse.
cult economic circumstances?
(A) Low tariff rates 14. What was the primary cause of the monetary inflation
(B) Overproduction that eventually relieved, but did not end, the social
(C) A deflated currency and economic hardships of the late nineteenth
(D) An inflated currency century?
(E) Excessive government regulation of the economy (A) The Gold Standard Act
(B) McKinley’s adoption of the bimetallic standard
11. The Populist party sought to win farmers’ and labor’s (C) An increase in the international gold supply
political support by endorsing all of the following (D) Populist fusion with the Democratic party
EXCEPT
(E) The creation of the Federal Reserve Bank
(A) nationalizing the railroads, telephone, and
telegraph. 15. Which of the following was a result of the other four?
(B) a prohibition on court injunctions against labor (A) Increase in rural dissent
strikes. (B) High local, state, and national taxes
(C) free coinage of silver. (C) Erratic railroad rates
(D) low tariff rates. (D) Creation of the Populist party
(E) a graduated income tax. (E) Failure of the Farmers’ Alliance
12. What was the primary lesson drawn by labor unions, 16. All of the following groups populated the American
Populists, and debtors from the violent and legal end West EXCEPT
of the Pullman railway strike? (A) Native Americans.
(A) Proof of an alliance among big business, the fed- (B) “Pikes Peakers.”
eral government, and the courts against working (C) women.
people (D) farmers.
(B) A strategy by which united working-class action (E) industrialists.
could succeed
(C) The need for a Socialist party in the United States
(D) The potential for the federal government to act as
an effective counterweight to big business
(E) That the courts could be relied upon to uphold the
rights of workers to strike for better wages and
working conditions

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Chapter 26

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Chapter 26

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Chapter 26

The Great West and the

W hen the Civil War crashed to a close,

The Buffalo Hunt, by Frederic

Washington that they would be left alone and pro-

“ Tell your people that since the Great Father

Pawnee Indians in Front of

Cruelty begot cruelty. In 1866 a Sioux war party

Ft. Townsend Ft. Colville CANADA

Portland SIOUX Ft. Abercrombie

NEZ PERCE Little Bighorn

OREGON 1876 S. DAK. MINN.

Bidwell McDermit Ft. Knee

ARAPAHO 1890 NEBRASKA

Ft. Halleck . 40°N

San Francisco Esmeralda Ft. Cameron Colorado

City Ft. Larned MISSOURI

San Jose Dodge

Las SOUTHERN CHEYENNE

Bellowing Herds of Bison

The End of the Trail

Former reservation land not allotted to the Indians

“ We took away their country and their means

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY

A Comanche Village, by George Catlin, 1834

(above) A Sioux Carving

Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska

Chan-Chä-Uiá-Teüin, Teton Sioux Woman, by Karl

1790 1860 1880

Indian lands Present-day boundaries

they had held just twoMap

Hydraulic Mining, Nevada,

entire hillsides and created the

and literature, as the writings of Bret Harte and Mark

The steer was king in a Cattle Kingdom richly car-

City . Newton Baxter

locomotives ran both ways. The same rails that bore

ht– Loving Trail

the cattle from the open range to the kitchen range

NEW Both of these intruders, sometimes amid flying bullets,

cut down by the cowboys. Furthermore, the terrible

San winter of 1886–1887, with blinding blizzards reaching

0 150 300 Km.

production. Breeders learned to fence their ranches,

0 150 300 Mi.

lay in winter feed, import blooded bulls, and produce

4,000,000 FRONTIER LINE ENDS

1,000,000 Figure 26.1 Homesteads from the Public Lands

The South Dakota Art Museum

The Homesteader’s Wife, by

Wheat Wheat Wheat

Hogs Hay Corn

shape the region than all the

Cengage Learning Positioning guide

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

North-West Mounted Police, ca. 1890 Empowered by an act of Parliament in 1873 to

Russian Peasants in Siberia, 1910

The Farm Becomes a Factory

ing single “cash” crops, such as wheat or corn, and use

rural population steadily decreased, those farmers who

Nebraska State Historical Society

ocratic faces alike as countless thousands of Populists

urban workers, and mount a successful attack on the

Ctheoxey’s Army and

Coxey and his “lieutenants” were arrested for walking

The Pullman Strike, 1894

campaign for McKinley with consummate skill and

Shouting insults at the absent Cleveland, the delegates

A new Moses suddenly appeared in the person of

Candidate (Party) Electoral Vote Popular Vote

“ The hopelessly ignorant and savagely cov-

for sixteen consecutive years—indeed, for all but eight

An eminently “safe” McKinley took the inaugural oath

Campaign Gimcracks, 1896 These mechanical cards

1867 National Grange organized 1892 Populist party candidate James B.

Bellowing Herds of Bison

The End of the Trail

The Farm Becomes a Factory

Ctheoxey’s Army and